How America Losing Religion Is Hurting the Birth Rate

Newsweek

2 days ago

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The United States is one of many countries struggling with declining birth rates and this is partly because more people are abandoning religion, population and religion experts told Newsweek.
There are many reasons for people all over the world having fewer babies, and Newsweek has reported on the economic pressures making parenthood difficult, the policy changes advocates believe will help encourage more children and the major cultural shifts which have changed society for young people, couples and families.
But "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," demographer William B Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, told Newsweek.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/Canva
America's fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime) is now projected to average 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office's latest forecast released this year. That is below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman required to maintain a stable population without immigration.
Meanwhile, the number of nonreligious people is growing. Last year, "religiously unaffiliated" people (atheists, agnostics or "nothing in particular") accounted for 29 percent of the national population, according to Pew's 2024 Religious Landscape Study, which surveyed more than 35,000 Americans in all 50 states. This is a 13 percent increase from 2007. Newsweek has created a map showing where in the U.S. religion is disappearing fastest here.
Meanwhile, 62 percent describe themselves as Christian and 7 percent belong to other religions, including 2 percent who describe themselves as Jewish and 1 percent as Muslim.
Analysis by the Institute for Family Studies shows a connection, finding that fertility rates among weekly-attending religious Americans have never dropped much below 2 children per woman.
Comparatively, fertility rates among less-than-weekly-attending Americans drops to around 1.7 and below 1.5 for nonreligious Americans, based on data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) from 1982 to 2019 and data from four waves of the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey (DIFS) from 2020 to 2022.
The frequency of attendance matters because the link between religion and fertility is about the practical ways religion impacts people's lives, not just religion's ideological values, family sociologist Nicholas H. Wolfinger said.
"Families and fertility are featured in the doctrine of all Abrahamic faiths [which include Christianity, Judaism and Islam]," he 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," said Wolfinger, a professor of family and consumer studies and adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Utah.
But he added that "correlation is not causation" and cited other major reasons which Newsweek has covered here.
How Religion Impacts Fertility
Family economist Kasey Buckles also spoke about the practical way religion impacts fertility.
"One thing that faith communities do for their members is provide support systems that make it easier to raise children," she 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," said Buckles, a professor of economics and gender studies at Indiana's University of Notre Dame.
She cited Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin who published a paper in April that noted fertility is lowest in places where women have strong labor market prospects but are still bound to gender roles in family life.
"In this situation, many women see motherhood as a bad deal—they work full time like their partners, but then end up working a 'second shift' at home with very little help," Buckles said.
"In both of these cases, the reasoning is the same. Raising children is hard work, and most people need help to do it."
"When that help isn't available—whether that's because the person isn't part of a faith community, isn't getting help from their spouse or family, or for other reasons—parenthood can seem like a bad idea," she said.
Demographer Lyman Stone, director of the Institute of Family Studies' Pronatalism Initiative, broke down another practical way in which religion impacts fertility rates.
"Religious people marry earlier and sort into relatively high-quality matches, because religion opts as a strong coordinating device for young people," he 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."
"Religious community is very helpful for parents, reducing the burden of parenting, providing role models of larger families and helping parents exchange ideas and practices," Stone added.
Can Secular Societies Sustain Birth Rates?
Stone said that it would not be possible for secular societies to encourage birth rates the same way religious ones do.
"The reason religious communities work is because they see themselves as quasi-kin bound in transcendent communities: they have 'stakes' in each other," he said.
But Stone said there are some examples of high fertility nonreligious groups, such as the Roma population, which are "bound by strong, hard-to-replicate ethnic ties."
Indeed, Roma populations in central and Eastern Europe typically exhibit total fertility rates at or above replacement level (2.1) and the majority population average, according to Comparative Population Studies research done in 2021.
Stone also cited communism, "which did manage to boost birth rates partly via highly solidaristic/communitarian messaging, but all aimed at state/class solidarity."
Many advocates have called for more family-friendly policies so that people have access to the support they need to have families, regardless of whether they are religious or not.
These include more parental leave, accessible child care and gender equality. "Countries that have sustained or moderately increased birth rates—like France or the Nordic nations—have done so by investing in affordable child care, paid parental leave, gender-equal workplaces and housing support," Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, previously told Newsweek.
"These create an enabling environment where people feel secure in having children," she said. "Fertility decisions are shaped by long-term confidence.
Theodore Cosco, a research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, echoed her remarks, telling Newsweek previously that "addressing declining birth rates would require comprehensive support mechanisms, such as affordable child care, paid parental leave, health care access and economic stability."