The abandoning of religion in the U.S. and many other countries is playing a part in declining birth rates, it was reported.
According to Pew's 2024 Religious Landscape Study, "religiously unaffiliated" people (atheists, agnostics, or "nothing in particular") accounted for 29% of the U.S. population. That's a 13% increase from 2007.
William B Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, told Newsweek that "there's no question that growing secularization is another factor in falling fertility, both here in the United States and across much of the globe."
The U.S. fertility rate, the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime, now is projected to be 1.6 over the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office's latest forecast released in January.
That average falls below the 2.1 births per woman required to maintain a stable population without immigration.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that the fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to an all-time low in 2024 with less than 1.6 kids per woman.
However, fertility rates among weekly-attending religious Americans never have dropped much below 2 children per woman, according to the Institute for Family Studies.
"One thing that faith communities do for their members is provide support systems that make it easier to raise children," economist Kasey Buckles, who examines the economics of families, told Newsweek. "When the number of nuns declined dramatically in Europe in the latter half of the 20th century, the hospitals, schools, and family support services that those nuns provided disappeared, and this led to a big decrease in fertility among European Catholics.
"If young people are less likely to be a part of faith communities for whatever reason, then they may also find it too costly to have children without that support — especially if other institutions like neighborhoods or public education are also weak."
Family sociologist Nicholas H. Wolfinger said people need to "walk the walk" for religion to affect birth rates in a positive way.
"Families and fertility are featured in the doctrine of all Abrahamic faiths [which include Christianity, Judaism and Islam]," Wolfinger told Newsweek. "But for religion to affect family behavior (finding a partner, having kids) you have to walk the walk: What matters is that you participate regularly in your faith by attending services. It matters less when people simply say they're religious.
"So religion has declined in the developed world, just as fertility has declined below replacement levels."
Demographer Lyman Stone, director of the Institute of Family Studies' Pronatalism Initiative, offered another way religion plays into the fertility rate.
"Religious people marry earlier and sort into relatively high-quality matches, because religion opts as a strong coordinating device for young people," Stone told Newsweek. "Marriage, in turn, generates higher odds of births. Beyond this, religious people also get a lot more help with their kids: from family, friends, coreligionists."
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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