Like most of the West, America has entered a fertility crisis. The U.S. fertility rate hit an all-time low in 2024, with a languid 53.8 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age (15 to 44), which works out to a mere 1.6 children per woman. It takes no math degree to recognize that this birth rate is significantly less than two, which means (native-born) American society is literally, numerically in decline. Worse, the birth rate has been plunging ever since 2007 (just before the Great Recession), and no cause for reversal is in view.

While Malthusians may celebrate, the more prudent will have reason to lament this decline. A falling population does not automatically mean more food for everyone. Rather, it means fewer workers producing, fewer researchers inventing, fewer households living. When the population shrinks, colleges close, neighborhoods empty out, businesses are bankrupt. The bonds holding society together begin to shrivel up, and a smaller population staggers under the infrastructure and social safety net designed for a larger one.

For a time, policymakers can evade the consequences of a below-replacement birth rate by encouraging immigration. But incoming immigrants — even if they could be assimilated — do not change the fact that the birth rate is too low, nor that it is still falling. People who emigrate from the most culturally similar countries (such as most of Europe) hail from places with their own birth rate problem.

Policymakers (at least conservative ones) have recognized falling fertility rates as a crisis for some time, and officials like Viktor Orban in Hungary or J.D. Vance in the United States have proposed ways to address it. Usually, government officials try to encourage family formation through pro-natalist policies with an economic aspect: tax credits or some similar incentive.

Unfortunately, such efforts to reshape economic incentives for families have not borne the hoped-for fruit. In Hungary, the country that has implemented the most aggressive pro-natalist measures, the total fertility rate did increase slightly, from 1.23 children per woman in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021. But now it is sliding again, plunging all the way to 1.39 by 2024.

Encouraging families to have more children is easier said than done, and a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) suggests the most important factors are cultural, not financial. “People talk a lot about affordability as a driver of family formation, and it is,” allowed Dr. Lyman Stone, IFS senior fellow and co-author of the report. “Kids are expensive. I’ve got four. They cost something.”

“But, if you look in New York City, the ultraorthodox Jewish population there has six kids each, and their hipster neighbors have 1.6 or less,” Stone said on “Washington Watch.” “That’s not because they’re living in a different economy. That is because of cultural differences.”

IFS and the Wheatley Institute surveyed 10,000 people from more than a dozen countries, seeking to test various cultural factors across a variety of cultural contexts.

One clear indicator of the important role culture played was the number of children celebrities had in different countries. “If they had bigger families, those people wanted bigger families.” Stone explained. “What all this adds up to is basically to say that advertising works. … If you advertise the good family … it trickles down to regular people debating whether now is the right time to have a kid.”

For example, in Israel and Egypt, “the typical admired celebrities have more than 2.5 children,” and the fertility rates are 2.86 and 2.33, respectively. In Japan and South Korea, the average admired celebrity has one child and 1.7 children, and the fertility rates are 1.14 and 0.99.

But culture includes far more than celebrities; religion is a major factor (hence the root “cult-”). Here, the IFS researchers met with a minor surprise. “We came into this thinking that religion would be a very important variable, and it was pretty important. We did find that religious people wanted more kids, had more kids, and tended more kids,” summarized Stone. “But the effect size wasn’t quite as big as we thought.” Indeed, “the top third of respondents in religiosity” only had an average fertility rate 9% higher than the other two-thirds.

Far more significant was the effect of community support — and specifically moral support rather than physical support. “We found that people were actually very sensitive to the opinions of their social peers,” Stone suggested. “People who thought that their friends were going to celebrate a new baby, if they had one, were about 20% likelier to say that they were intending to have another child. … In fact, a lot of material aid, things like meal trains or showing up to help babysit a child, are actually less important than that kind of moral support.”

When people thought their parents would celebrate a new grandchild, that statistic increased to 30%. One of the biggest factors was just parents who were willing to talk to their adult children to encourage them, ‘Hey, we hope … you give us grandkids. We’d love to share that part of life with you.’ That was associated with a significant difference in desired family size and intentions to have more beyond that.”

It was this moral support from friends and family that accounted for religious people having more kids, Stone concluded. “We found that religious communities create dense networks of people who care about each other’s families, and that’s what it is about religion that really boosts fertility,” he said. “Religious people had more friends. Their friends were more supportive of them having additional kids. Their friends were willing to do more to help them.”

By contrast, he said, how often a pastor talked about the importance of family was not a significant predictor of the number of children a person had. “It’s not about specific pastoral leadership, which I think is a bit of a surprise to us,” Stone said. “And, I’ll be honest, a bit of a disappointment — because that would have been easier to change. Whereas coming in and saying, ‘Well, everybody at church just needs to be a little bit better friends with each other,’ is much harder.”

Here, difficult does not mean impossible. Jesus not only commanded but expected the church to be a close-knit community of love and support. “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). And what Jesus commands, he empowers his followers to obey by the Holy Spirit. It may be messy; it may take work. But Christians who truly believe in Jesus’s words can see their church community grow.

“Policymakers often focus on the finances of fertility, but our work shows they may need to focus on the friends, the family, and the famous people just as much,” Stone told The Washington Stand. “People have the families their societies tell them are good to have.” The church should have the clearest and most positive message on the family.