The Supernatural Family

This book is not really about people who have seven or eight kids—although it is. It’s about why people would have even one or two children at all, because increasingly people aren’t having even one or two children. So keep your eye on the ball. That’s the story here.

America’s Population Collapse

You already know—I think you know—that America is in the midst of a population collapse. A complete and total collapse.

2023 marked the lowest fertility rate ever recorded in the United States: 1.63 expected lifetime births per woman. That number is not explained by COVID. It is the culmination of a decades-long implosion of birth rates.

A total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman is required for a population to replace itself. So, you know this already.

Here is the slide of the global TFRs—you can see this is a global problem. And we don’t really look very different from most of the rest of the globe. So, global convergence.

You’ll notice there’s really only a couple of places on the map that are anywhere above two at this point.

The United States TFR—the number of births per woman—has generally been below replacement, in fact, since 1971. You probably don’t know this. And it’s consistently been below replacement since 2008.

Below-replacement fertility is bad for a variety of reasons—you can probably guess them: a shrinking working population (we’re already there), economic and political catastrophes, and also just the human loss, right?

The Question That Inspired Hannah’s Children

This book is actually motivated by this question—so, a single insight inspired this book:

If you’re interested in childbearing in a world of falling birth rates, talk to people who have kids anyway. Don’t take the word of people who don’t—talk to people who have kids anyway.

I’m going to give you a nice visual on this. I found this Twitter thread, which I really liked, a while ago, and I thought, “This is exactly what I’m up to.”

There’s this guy who goes around Miami Beach, and he interviews people who are over the age of 40 and are still fit. He tries to figure out what they’re up to. I realized—that’s pretty much what I’m up to.

If you want to know about fitness, talk to people who have gotten in shape. Don’t take the word of people who are not in shape. If you want to know about healthy eating, talk to people who eat well.

Having kids is hard. So ask the outliers—what drives them, what they’re doing, and what they’ve learned.

We’re in luck. It turns out that 5% of American women are these outliers. They’re still having families as large as their early American sisters.

And it seemed to me it might be a good idea to go find out what the heck they’re doing, why they do it, what they think it means.

That’s the whole premise of this book.

Women who have Children Anyway

Hannah’s Children is a narrative account of the first qualitative study of American women who are—here’s how I put it—immune from low birth rates.

This global catastrophe—if you look around the world, where are there people who are not suffering low birth rates? These are the people who are not suffering low birth rates.

It’s small, but not insignificant—not as small as you would think.

Among women in their 40s alone, today in the United States—between 40 and 49—it’s about a million women. So 5% is not that small of a number.

These are women who I say are like the biblical Hannah—who see their children as blessings from God, expressions of divine goodness, and the purpose of their marriages.

But it turned out, after I talked to all these people and put the data together, it was also something more.

The women in my study gave witness to another sort of reply to the crisis of the West—not a plan or a policy—but a message:

That the salvation of the world is in the birth of a child.

And if you’re wondering what the policy relevance is here, I’m going to unpack that for you in a minute.

This quote on the slide is from an early reader of the book. She wrote to me and said:

“I’m only halfway through your book, but I’m going to have another baby—God willing—in part because of it. It’s like I’m reconverting,” she said. “Or like Chesterton—I need to travel around the world to get back to where I was.”

The book isn’t taking me around the world—it’s bringing me back.

She was referencing Chesterton’s masterwork, The Everlasting Man. I’m guessing a bunch of you know this book. If you don’t, you should read this book before you read my book. Then you should soon read my book after.

This is a book that changed my life when I read it in college. I actually hadn’t noticed the similarities between my work and this book before she mentioned it.

But like Chesterton, I aim to take what is the most ordinary thing in the world—a life-giving marriage—and present it as something new, alien, as something worthy of discovery.

Like you’re this explorer, and you go around the world and say: “Hey, look—I found life over there!” Right? “I found life on Mars. I found people still having children.” That was the idea.

What could be more alien, indeed?

Chesterton talked about a world in which Christianity was covered by names and memories, the familiarity of which becomes a falsification.

So what if the familiarity of having children hides or falsifies the most important truths?

Chesterton believed that Christianity was misunderstood in the West because it was taken for granted. It was hidden by ordinariness. Like, we all kind of know what it is, right?

People lived off of its bounty, he thought, without knowing that Christianity was an oasis. Only from afar, he said, could you see plainly that Christianity is the only green thing in a whole desert of death.

G.K. Chesterton’s Influence

Here’s a long quote from Chesterton, but it’s so good—it’s worth quoting in full. He said:

“The next best thing to be really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it.
Their criticism has taken on a curious tone—as of a random and illiterate heckling.”

We’re going to come back to the random and illiterate hecklers in a minute.

“It is well with the boy,” he said, “when he lives on his father’s land, and it’s well with him again when he’s far enough away to look back on it and see it as a whole.
But these people—these critics of Christianity—these people have gotten into an intermediate state.
They’ve fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind.
They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy.
They cannot be Christians, and they cannot leave off being anti-Christians.
Their whole atmosphere is an atmosphere of reaction, sulks, perversity, petty criticism.
They live in the shadow of the faith, but they’ve lost the light of faith. They live in the shadow of the faith, but they’ve lost the light of faith.”

The Exception in a Desert of Death

All right. So Hannah’s Children presents the exception—the 5%—as the exception that it is. The only green thing in a desert of death. To the unfamiliar, the life-giving family emerges in these pages as a strange, alien being: the outlier, the anomaly, as foreign as a remote Asiatic cult, to quote Chesterton. And my arrow landed.

One reviewer—up here, a reviewer at Slate Magazine—said reading about their lives is like reading about a bunch of Arctic explorers or professional athletes. Superhuman people who resign themselves to sacrificing everything else to a goal.

But she said, “As I made it through the book, I was surprised to finally feel as if I understood where these women are coming from.” So that’s high praise.

The Link Between Faith and the Life-Giving Family

The analogy with Chesterton’s masterwork holds up only insofar as the life-giving family rises and falls with true faith. By this, I mean an if-and-only-if statement: if, wherever we find true faith, we also find the life-giving family, and wherever we find the life-giving family, we also find participation in the true faith.

Like Chesterton, in these pages I try to show that when we really do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it on the inside. Chesterton wrote: “The minute we are impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it.” And what I mean is the relationship between giving life—having children—and true faith.

So when I was a kid, people used to say, “Are you Catholic or Mormon?” If they saw a big family, they’d say, “Catholic or Mormon,” right?

Today, you’re going to hear a lot of people say, “We don’t really need to have faith to sustain childbearing right now.” You’re going to hear this: “We don’t really need to confront this chasm of unbelief to fix the greatest crisis of the day.”

I don’t think you should fall for it. It’s not true.

It’s more correct to say that the moment we’re really impartial about the role of faith in the life-giving family, the more we know why children are absolutely and essentially an object of faith—what is traditionally said about children on the inside: blessings from God and expressions of divine goodness.

Hannah: From Autonomy to Infinity

Just to give you a flavor of what you’ll find in this book, I’m going to introduce you to two women.

The first is Hannah—Theonomous Hannah. Just when you read a little bit about Hannah, you’ll see why she opens the book.

I interviewed Hannah with her best friend Esther. Hannah had a 12-month-old with her, and Esther had a two-week-old baby—her ninth.

Esther had grown up in a big family. But Hannah had not. Hannah said, “I didn’t even want to get married. At one point in my life, I could not see myself married. I thought I would be like that aunt, you know, the medicine woman who doesn’t get married,” and she laughed.

She continued: “When I was in my early twenties, I was just doing my own thing—whatever I was doing at that point in my life.” Most people who are in their academic years or early careers are doing their own thing. So keep that in mind: doing their own thing. And having children was not something that, if you’re a somewhat level-headed person in the world, you’d say fits into that lifestyle. It doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense.

Remember—she has seven children. People think on rational levels, and I think maybe a little more superrational thinking has to infiltrate the masses—to know that things are possible. Like possibilities of expansion in your life.

She was from a Reform Jewish background, where she didn’t even want to get married. She said something like: “Well, you grow up and you do Jewish things. We don’t really believe anything.”

As a young woman in her 20s, her search led her to the idea that children are the meaning of everything.

She said: “We were searching. My husband and I were searching for us. We’d both been around the block. We’d explored, we dated in our public school secular life. We were very clear and very focused that one of our main goals of getting married was to begin a family right away and to have a large family.

“But on a deeper level, in my own kind of quest for meaning and purpose, I was very into this concept of infinity. I did a lot of meditation and Nirvana, things like that. The search for what’s the meaning of everything—and I feel like it came down to: the core of the answer was that children are this key to infinity.

“And especially being Jewish, how much more so. Because this is a link in a chain that we’ve had from Moses and from Abraham and from Noah and from Adam—this link continuing, this legacy. By having children is a way to be part of that chain of infinity. And to me that was it. There is nothing else that is going to do that.”

Superrational Reasons and Religious Seriousness

Such a conclusion might have been reached on human terms alone, but we pressed her.

She said her discernment was certainly nourished by devotion to God after her conversion. “Yes, it became something through my learning and through my meditation and through my wanting to serve God as a Jewish woman—that having children is the answer. That I was being called to do this as a servant of God.”

She traced out her reasons—reasons that had to do with higher things, ultimate ends. Like Pascal’s “reasons of the heart.” For Hannah, those “super-reasons” gave order to the reasoning about other life choices, directing them toward what is eternal.

She drew a contrast between two ways of life: her old self doing her own thing, and her new self.

It provides the best possible introduction to the women in my volume. My subjects in general describe their choice to have children as a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood.

In general, they were motivated by deeply biblical worldviews, characterized by trust in God and hope in His providence.

Like Hannah, my subjects groped for descriptions of the life they had rejected—where the number and timing of children were fitted into a narrative of self-identity. They thought of themselves as fitting into a greater narrative of childbearing.

They spoke of self-sacrifice, but not of losing themselves.

Like Hannah, the other women I met extended this contrast to their marriages, to their children, and to the social order more broadly. They believed that the sustained effect of living with needy young children for an extended period of life fosters other-regarding virtues necessary for egalitarianism and civic friendship—such as empathy, generosity, solidarity, and self-denial.

Like Hannah, my subjects described a life of—let’s say—religious seriousness, in which they allowed their beliefs about God and the meaning of life to shape their own hearts and desires.

And finally, like Hannah, they had adopted a posture of openness to children as a way of life—and not as a mere season.

Openness as a Way of Life

Right, so what—how—openness as a way of life translates into each person’s life looks very different. And that’s why you need to meet 12 or 13 women, and not just one.

So I’m going to introduce you to Danielle, who’s the mother of seven.

Danielle illustrated this principle of openness—and this becomes very important on the social science side. I will not discuss that much tonight, but if anybody wants to catch me later, we’ll see.

I mean, just for instance, if you’re going to do a survey of fertility intentions or desires, and your guiding principle is a kind of openness to God’s will—“How many children do you plan to have?” “How many children do you expect to have?”—those are meaningless questions, right?

So all of the survey data on this is certainly flawed. All right—that’s just a start.

So, Danielle.

Danielle was pregnant with her seventh when I met her. She met her husband in medical school. They did not set out to have a big family, any more than Hannah had.

She had a great story. She said she really loved medical school, but when she did residency, she thought it was fairly devastating. She developed horrible anxiety and she hated it.

She said: “So when I was finished, I was so thankful to be done. And it was right before my son was born. So I finished the end of June, he was born in August. And in some ways I entered motherhood in this hard state because those years had been so difficult.”

“But it was such a mercy to not feel like I had to do the same thing that had been so hard for three years.”

“And it was the first time in my life,” she said, “that I hadn’t just gone from one thing to the next.”

Really important. This is very important for women’s labor market behavior.

“I didn’t go from one thing to the next. I came up. I came up for air. And I realized—I don’t want to keep doing this. And I really, really didn’t want to keep doing this.

“It wasn’t something where I said, like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do the fellowship, but I’d be happy to work in primary care or something.’ I really wanted nothing to do with practicing medicine.”

It’s a great story.

The next chapter in my book, by the way, is about a woman who stays practicing medicine. I’m not against practicing medicine.

It was a great story. At that point she said: “I just became this sort of surprise stay-at-home mom. And then I just—you know—I enjoyed my son. I enjoyed being his mom.”

Discovering Love for Motherhood

“I think in a lot of ways—” so this is a huge part of growing up female in America, right?—“that you don’t plan for this thing that you come to discover you love only after it happens.”

She went on:

“It sort of sounds ridiculous in terms of planning. We just sort of kept liking the kids that we were having, and liking having kids, and enjoying the little years.”

“I think there was some degree to which we kind of thought, ‘Well, the kids are little, so if we’re going to have more like this, they should probably be close.’ And I don’t know when we tipped over from that—sort of having our kids close together—to ‘Oh gosh, there’s really kind of a lot of them!’”

“But it certainly was not our plan, you know? No romantic candlelight dinner sketching out our plan with seven kids.”

I just heard from somebody who knows Danielle—and these are all pseudonyms, by the way—and she has nine now.

This was five years ago when I interviewed her.

So she said, “We would have been the most shocked. Probably now I’m sort of like, this is what I’m doing all the time anyway, so there was no impetus not to have more.”

You know—no impetus not to have more.

This becomes incredibly important. I’ll tell you what I mean.

Her no impetus not to have more echoed this posture of openness that I heard across my travels.

People were open. They didn’t necessarily mean they were always trying for another one. But it meant that they didn’t close the door permanently.

The moms that I met did not, in general, have a grand vision for how many kids they wanted. But they didn’t close the door. The door wasn’t closed.

The openness allowed for reassessment of costs and benefits at later stages of childbearing—and time for desires to be reshaped.

Danielle said, “I do think we sort of crossed that point where I’m thinking like, if we’re going to have one or two more, is that going to be a game changer at this point? I don’t think so.”

She did have two more. “And I think I would be open to that. And it feels easier to be open at this point than at other inflection points.”

She explained that with more children, the lifestyle cost of an additional child becomes a lot smaller. Your life is already rearranged—one or two more kids won’t be a game changer.

A Regime Change in Fertility Thinking

Her story recalled the claim made by demographers—which I put on the slide for you—that the regime change between old birth rates and new birth rates arrived with a seemingly tiny alteration in the childbearing decision tree: whether couples were deciding when to stop having children or when to start.

So, in the past, after having a few children at the beginning of marriage, the issue was to adopt contraception or some type of family planning to avoid future pregnancies. But beginning in the 1960s, with the arrival of hormonal contraceptives, couples began marriage by postponing children. And the basic fertility decision then was not to stop, but to start your family.

If the opportunity cost of starting a family—the cost, the lifestyle cost of switching from doing your own thing to starting your family—is a lot higher than the cost of additional children down the line, then that regime change, that tiny alteration, could be monumental.

The Cost of Starting a Family

The stories that we heard supported this thesis. Women talked about the enormousness of the personal and domestic adjustments called for by having a first. And they insisted that the second and third babies were almost as hard. But it doesn’t keep getting harder.

There’s a peak cost in terms of the personal and lifestyle challenges of having children.

Hannah told me, “Three is the hardest number of children to have.” And many people said something similar. The women in our study had a general sense that after two or three, additional children were easier to have.

Danielle spelled this out more explicitly than anyone else: “If we’re going to have one or two more kids, is that going to be a game changer? I don’t think so.”

Besides eating out, she mentioned the size of her car, the shift to traveling less. “I feel like that ship has sailed,” she said. It wasn’t wistful—it was just matter-of-fact. Since she and her husband had already made these adjustments, having one or two more children wouldn’t impact their lifestyle very much. And they expected to enjoy one or two more a great deal—maybe even more than the first ones.

The Math Favors More Children

So a particular type of cost-benefit reasoning began to tell in favor of additional children for some of our study families after a fourth or a fifth child. The fixed costs—such as a bigger car or giving up a second income—had already been borne. The variable costs—personal and lifestyle-related—became smaller. And the expected value to the family in terms of excitement, joy, and love seemed to grow larger with additional children.

Who are these Mothers?

So to sum up: the women in my sample ranged in age from 32 to 71. The number of children they had ranged from five—that was the minimum for my sample, reasons for all of that we could talk about—to fifteen, with an average of seven. I know. The average was seven.

They were Baptists, Evangelicals, non-denominational Christians, Presbyterians, Mormons, Jewish, and Roman Catholic.

Did we lose the slides? All right. All right, there’s one. All right, that’s good.

Forty-five percent of my sample came from families of origin large enough to fit the study sample, with four or more siblings. But 55% came from smaller families. Twenty percent had just one sibling growing up. And 7% had no siblings growing up.

They came from all walks of life—some living in the nation’s wealthiest, most elite zip codes, and others living paycheck to paycheck in the foothills of the American Rockies.

It’s Not About Cost—Not in the Way We Think

The narratives taught us that falling birth rates are not a cost problem—not in the way we normally think about a cost problem. The relevant obstacle to choosing a child, they said, was the cost of missing out on the other things you could have done with your time, with your money, with your life.

The price—they really leaned into this—the real cost of children was what you had to give up.

They talked about sleepless nights for 20 years. About giving up comforts, and plans, and hobbies, and status. And a clean house. Giving up alone time, achievements, and freedom. Giving up meeting your own needs.

One mom said, “Having children and parenting is all about living for someone else, not for yourself.”

The costs, they granted, were big and consequential. But the reason for missing out—their purpose—was much bigger than the losses.

They would give up something of themselves, they said, but their children would give it back to them with interest.

“It’s the paradox of the cross,” one woman told me.

They had a reason to have children big enough to give up their lives more than once. And that reason came from deep trust in God, love for their spouses, or love for their children—and often all three.

And anyway, they said, the losses weren’t the end of the story. Their children were their greatest blessings.

They told me in so many words how their children had saved their lives, saved their marriages, and saved their souls.

By their own account—their words, not mine—they had been saved from immaturity, loneliness, selfishness, and uselessness. And so had their children and their husbands.

More Than Policy: The Role of Faith

They told stories of healing and growth. “We’ve seen miracles,” Esther told us.

The upshot of all this: they believed the nation would be happier and more virtuous if we spent more of our adult lives taking care of children—and if our children grew up with more siblings.

For the women in this rare demographic, children are blessings—expressions of God’s goodness and a purpose of their marriage.

These are the incentives that tip the scales in favor of choosing children.

The data that I heard helps explain why policy solutions to raise birth rates have not worked in the past—and are not likely to work in the future.

What Might Help Reverse the Trend of Low Birth Rates?

Which slide am I on right now?

What, then, might help reverse the trend of low birth rates?

The testimonies in this volume, offered by women at all levels of engagement with paid work, suggest that we look to the strength and vitality of living religious communities. It seems to be in the temple where we find the reasons of the heart that justify the life-altering personal sacrifices that come with having children.

Religious Liberty as Family Policy

So a certain type of religious liberty is a family policy—the only family policy that has a chance. But to have that chance, it has to be thick freedom of religion—not a mere freedom of worship, the bare right to spend an hour of the week at church or synagogue on the weekend.

Religion isn’t free that can’t assist families in passing on the faith and tradition to their children.

So returning to Chesterton’s observation: Who are the critics of curious tone, the random and illiterate hecklers today?

So I want to take a stab at this.

The Illusion of a Secular Family Revival

Some today, bearing the mantle of conservative, tell us that we can revive the family and birth rates without reviving faith. So this was in the middle of Oren Cass’s lecture in March—this was his case, made explicitly, at the first First Things lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation.

He said that, you know, we could convince people like it was their patriotic duty to have children.

Along the same lines, you will hear others urge that we should not be afraid to just use the state power for the right end—such as the family—as if the state has the power to revive the family.

And finally others—you’ll hear this too among our fellow conservatives—others will urge that our mediating institutions such as schools and universities and hospitals should be religious in inspiration. Maybe let’s use a word: “classical.” Or they should be liberal arts—but not too religious.

Being too religious would be to hinder, in a secular world, the project of renewal that unites all of us who are modern discontents of modernity in search of a renewed common good.

This is illiterate heckling indeed.

The task of Christendom is to understand its role among these critics of modernity claiming to have some religion-free insight into the salvation of the world.

But these people have gotten into an intermediate state where they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians—and they cannot leave off being anti-Christians.

So Oren Cass believes that people can and will value children for human reasons and for human incentives. But they fail to see that such a proposition is rationalizable only within the remnant of a grasping Christianity.

Indeed, most of today’s pro-family advocates—many of them are doing very good work—but they fail to assess their own commitment for what it is, which is springing from religious piety.

Others will not value children without the same faith.

So they can’t leave off being Christians when they value children for their own sakes. But when they tell us the family can be saved without religious revival, they cannot leave off being anti-Christians.

In reality, the world has always subjected children to the test of adult ends—like wealth, power, and comfort.

The Role of the Family

From the Ancients to the Gnostics to the disciples of Thomas Malthus and that great eugenicist John Maynard Keynes—this is why a faith that places the God-child at the center has been a scandal.

Did I lose the slides?
No, they’re still there.
Okay, good—it’s like a conference going on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against finding a common purpose with the secular critics of modernity. But what I’m against is losing the narrative. Secular conservatives are with us because they have perceived something correct in the truths of the faith—not because their merely human story has brought forth any new insights.

So Chesterton put it this way:
“Nobody except the messengers of the Gospel has any gospel. Nobody else has any good news, for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.”

There is nothing new in secular humanism. And anything truly life-saving and life-giving is Christian, not humanist. The only green thing in a desert of death.

So we have to close the loop, I say, and play our role. Family policy on its own has no chance of meaningful success in an unchristian land.

The Christian Family Witness

What this means first is that the evangelization and salvation of the world is found in our families—and specifically in our births. The way we give witness to the adorability—the adorability—of the infant God, and to our faith more broadly, is by bringing forth new life and testifying to its desirability when it’s no longer a choice for us.

Supporting our children, our grandchildren, our friends’ children. Prioritizing pro-life work, including adoption and foster care. We have to be a people slavishly devoted to the child—to never tire of testifying to the intrinsic worth of children from the moment of conception.

Second: the resources to have children never can come from anywhere else but the germ of faith. Mothers and fathers, grandparents—all who participate in the life-giving family—are a kind of spring.

So nations and powers can try to wall it off. Like you have a spring flow—you can try to wall it off, you can cover it over—but you can’t summon it. You cannot command it.

The source of the life-giving family—whatever familiar falsifications hide the truth—is simply not summonable. It’s only protectable. You’ve got to protect it. So the state has to protect it.

This was ever true, but modernity—particularly through modern contraceptive technology—made children fully opt-in. They’re opt-in.

So we have to examine the reasons why people would opt in. If the familiarity of love and then marriage and then the baby carriage—if that has any romance left for an exhausted West, a West that subordinates children to adult fulfillment—that romance, although it’s defective, has its roots in the Christian assertion that the child is desirable, the child is lovable, and that the God-child must be worshipped.

Indeed, when the life-giving family is seen from the outside—in the sense of seeing it as a whole against the backdrop of other historic things like those total fertility rates you’ve just seen, today’s demographic trends—it stands out from the background like a supernatural thing. It’s like a miracle.

You look at the whole globe and you say, where is it not like this? You go, “Oh, aha, right there—there’s an oasis.” What do you find in the oasis? It’s always the same: you find religious people.

So it stands out from the background. This is Chesterton’s word about Christianity: it stands out. It does not—it stands out like a supernatural thing. He said it does not fade into the rest with the colors of impressionism.

The life-giving family stands like a Red Cross on a white shield, he said—a thing without rival or resemblance. Still as new as it is old.

Women who Heroically Choose Life, Faith, and Family

So in this book you will read about a small but not insignificant demographic group: women in contemporary America—like the biblical Hannah—who see their children as their purpose, their contribution, and their greatest blessing.

Their stories are profoundly relevant for the demographic policy dilemma as well as for our deeper public dialogue about individualism, the character of our political order, and the future of the American experiment.

The Hannahs in this volume give witness to another sort of reply to the crisis of the West.

Whether you’ve had one child or ten, I invite you into this world—to see the childbearing family as the foreign thing that it is in this world, and to know, maybe for the first time, the childbearing family as a supernatural thing.

Thank you.