How the Church Can Face a New Global Crisis: Childlessness with Matthew Lee Anderson

Summary

---

Podcast Summary

How the Church Can Face a New Global Crisis: Childlessness

Podcast: Know What You Believe with Michael Horton
Host: Michael Horton
Guest: Matthew Lee Anderson (Baylor University, Oxford)
Date: June 17, 2025

---

Main Theme

In this episode, Michael Horton and ethicist Matthew Lee Anderson explore the emerging global crisis of childlessness and declining birth rates. They address questions about the church’s response to these demographic changes, the ethical and theological dimensions of procreation, and how to foster a healthy perspective that affirms both the call to family life and the dignity of those who are childless. The conversation probes cultural anxieties, individual choice, societal pressures, and how the Christian doctrine of the body can shape our understanding.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Global Decline in Birth Rates

• Observation of the Trend
  • Declining birth rates are a feature of developed countries globally and are now a source of concern in America, particularly in urban settings which are less family-friendly.
    • “You have declining birth rates basically everywhere on the globe…urban contexts are not very family friendly.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [02:16]
  • There is a sense of unfamiliarity and discomfort with children in everyday life, and an aging population is raising questions about societal sustainability.

Christian Ethics and the Decision to Have Children

• Can Christians Tell Others to Have More Children?

  • Ethical decisions about family size require discernment, not rigid mandates.
    • “I don’t think Christians can just say broadly there’s any sort of moral obligation to have more babies…But I think we can say as a general rule of thumb, how many babies do you think you can support? And then add one more.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [03:32]
  • There are “better and worse reasons” for having or not having children, and the church must avoid the error of overemphasizing procreation due to social anxieties alone.
    • “What happens is bad reasons for having children start to emerge…Historically, it’s not really gone well when countries have encouraged people to have babies, because usually the reasons for doing so are not reasons that I think Christians would want to endorse.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [05:23]

• Theological Framing

  • Children are a gift—but not the ultimate hope or future of the church. The primary identity of Christians is as ‘children of God,’ not as biological parents.
    • “Children are not quite the church’s future. The church’s future is being children of God. And that has to be the main thing that the church says.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [06:47]

Responding to Overpopulation & Climate Concerns

• Environmental and Resource Anxiety
  • Anderson acknowledges student anxieties about climate change but challenges the overpopulation narrative.
    • “If you decline to have children, you have to ask this question: who’s going to bury you at the end of your life?” — Matthew Lee Anderson [09:29]
  • He contends much of the fear comes from social conditions (like isolation from both elderly and children) more than strictly environmental facts.

Addressing Childlessness and Church Culture

• Navigating Judgment and Stigma

  • Many childless or infertile couples experience pain or alienation, intensified in environments where parenthood is highly celebrated.
    • “A lot of our churches are set up…to reinforce the good of having children…just as a rule, I don’t think I would go to a church that aggressively celebrated Mother’s or Father’s Day.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [12:26]
  • The church should acknowledge both the pain of childlessness and the danger of idolizing family.
    • “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. And I think that sense of hope is what childless couples have to win, have to cultivate, and fight for.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [14:08]

• Building Communal Bonds Beyond Biology

  • Childless couples can find deep, meaningful relationships in spiritual family.
    • “If you cultivate joy for your friend’s child, you can act in a motherly and fatherly way towards that child…fulfilling those dimensions of what God has called you to do.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [15:50]
  • Adoption should not be seen as an automatic next step for the childless; it is a separate vocation and calling.

Gender, Procreation, and the Risks of Reductionism

• Procreation and Gender Roles

  • There is an asymmetrical burden in procreation—women face more demands, and the church must avoid reducing women to “child-birthing” identities.
    • “We have to be able to think well about what women offer. Gestation, labor, being mothers—only women can do that…but within all of that, they’re persons, and they’re more than all of that as well.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [18:00]

• Societal Trends and Technology

  • Anderson warns against technocratic and utilitarian approaches—such as artificial wombs—and frames of thinking that treat babies and bodies as products.
    • “People are desperately trying to figure out how to make babies in labs at a more efficient rate than ordinary procreation…If you can crank them out, assembly line babies, what could possibly go wrong?” [20:13]

The Christian View of the Body

• Core Theological Distinctives

  • Christianity uniquely affirms both the glory and fragility of the body. Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection dignify bodily existence and suffering.

    • “What Christianity has to offer…is, on the one hand, an affirmation of not only its dignity, but its glory. That Christ, in taking on flesh…not only affirms that the body is good, but that its goodness is undefeated and glorious.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [20:50]

  • The church celebrates scars, suffering, and weakness as sites of redemption and glory, transforming shame into beauty.

    • “The wounds of our bodies will become that—they will be places where we will just show, ‘These are the wounds that I got on my way to sanctification.’” — Matthew Lee Anderson [23:20]

  • Anderson shares how this theology of the body was decisive for his own journey to Christian faith.

    • “To me, it just all comes down to the body. Like, this is the whole sum and game of the Christian faith.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [24:09]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “One does not have another baby to please the vicar’s wife.” — Quoted by Anderson to highlight cultural and social pressures around procreation [03:32]
• “Children are not the cult of children. We can’t have cult-like behavior around, ‘children are our future.’” — Matthew Lee Anderson [06:36]
• “The church’s future is being children of God. That has to be the main thing the church says.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [06:47]
• “If you decline to have children, you have to ask this question: who’s going to bury you at the end of your life?” — Matthew Lee Anderson [09:29]
• “I think the pressure to say, ‘Oh, you don’t have children, you should adopt,’ I really dislike that…Adoption is its own vocation.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [16:36]
• “We have to be able to think well about what women offer…they’re persons, and they’re more than all of that as well.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [18:00]
• “Christ, in taking on flesh…not only affirms that the body is good, but that its goodness is undefeated and glorious.” — Matthew Lee Anderson [20:54]
• “This is the whole sum and game of the Christian faith.” — Matthew Lee Anderson on the centrality of the body [24:09]

---

Important Timestamps & Segments

• [02:16]—Declining birth rates and their implications
• [03:32]—Social and moral complexity of procreation for Christians
• [06:36]—Dangers of overemphasizing procreation in church teaching
• [09:29]—Climate/overpopulation anxieties and the “who will bury you?” question
• [12:26]—How church practices can stigmatize childlessness
• [15:50]—How the childless can contribute to church life as spiritual family
• [18:00]—The need to honor women beyond reductive roles
• [20:50]—Theology of the body: dignity, pain, suffering, and glory
• [23:20]—Bodily wounds and sanctification as testimony

---

Tone & Conclusion

The conversation is earnest, thoughtful, and pastoral, marked by academic rigor and personal honesty. Anderson and Horton avoid simplistic answers, emphasizing the complexity of human life, the necessity of hope, and the profound resources Christian doctrine offers for reorienting communal life toward dignity, joy, and shared struggle—whether through raising children or embodying spiritual family in other ways.

---

For listeners looking for robust discussion on faith, ethics, and the pressures facing the church in a rapidly changing world, this episode offers rich guidance and provokes deeper reflection on how to engage both hope and heartbreak together.

Transcript

[A]

Here at Sola, we're passionate about drawing on historic Reformation theology to equip thoughtful Christians for practical wisdom, connecting the dots between the Bible doctrine, the Christian life, and contemporary culture. All that we produce is free thanks to the many who give monthly as SOLA partners. If you join us as a monthly partner, we'll send you a complimentary copy of Michael Horton's book, Ordinary Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World. In an age marked by burnout and sensationalism, Horton shows us what it looks like to live a deeply normal yet profoundly meaningful Christian life. To get your copy, simply head over to solarmedia.org partner to join us in encouraging even more people to grow in knowing God and seeing everything in his light.

[B]

We don't want to live in the village green. At the end of the day, we can all leave and return to our houses of worship. But our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the village Green, where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions. Well, I have the privilege of having a conversation with Matthew Lee Anderson, who is profess at Baylor University in ethics and also as part of the ethics program, Oxford university. Did his DPhil there. And it's great to have you on Matthew.

[C]

I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

[B]

Yeah. Now, your specialty is in Karl Barth's ethics, right?

[C]

Yeah, manner of speaking, my dissertation involves Karl Barth. I don't think of myself as a pure BART scholar. I think the people who do that are on a different level. But I interacted a lot with Bart. I developed his theory of procreation effectively, tried to answer antinatalist objections, people, moral philosophers who think that we shouldn't have babies. I tried to develop a Bardian account of why we should have babies.

[B]

There's a lot of talk about that in the news these days. Right. That in the cities especially, there aren't many children around in the future.

[C]

Yeah, you have declining birth rates basically everywhere on the globe. Doesn't really matter how developed the country is. As countries get more developed, the birth rates drop. We've seen that for ages. At this point, certainly in America, there's growing concern about declining birth rates. And it is urban. Urban contexts are not very family friendly, as people with families who live in those contexts know. And so, you know, we are moving into a situation where people have less familiarity with children. They have less comfort with babies. I travel more than I should, and I feel like I see fewer babies on airplanes than I did 10 years ago even. And so there is growing discussion about what we're going to do, how we're going to approach an aging population, how we should think about procreation in light of some of these shifting social dynamics.

[B]

Obviously, this is one of many issues where there are questions of what is incumbent on Christians, what scripture requires. We can't tell people, you have to have more babies. Right. Or can we?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You think on the authority of God's word, you could tell people.

[C]

Well, I was just thinking about when I was writing my dissertation, I was sitting in a coffee shop in England, and I was listening to a woman talk with her friend about a mutual friend who was being pressured by her pastor's wife to have another baby. And this woman in her charming British accent said, one does not have another baby to please the vicar's wife. And I'm sitting there writing away about why people should have more babies. And I thought, is that a legitimate reason to have another baby? And what's going on where the pastor's wife is pressuring the young woman to have another child? I think you're right. I think it's not the sort of thing that we can say you should have more babies. It's an area that requires a great deal of discernment. There's always, always contingencies, very practical, granular features of a situation that go into those sorts of decisions. And so I don't think Christians can just say broadly there's any sort of moral obligation to have more babies. But I think we can say things like, as a general rule of thumb, how many babies should you have? Well, you might think about, how many babies do you think you can support? And then add one more. Right. So a rule of one more stretches people. It sort of prompts them to rethink the types of things that they're committed to, what sort of comfort level they're expecting, what sort of material comforts they want for their families, what sort of upbringing they want for their children, and what the goods are of a robust, large family life. And I think those are the sorts of exhortations that Christians can get to on these issues.

[B]

And even if we can't prescribe a particular number, there are better reasons and worse reasons. Right. To not have children.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. There are certainly better and worse reasons to not have children. So I think, you know, if we're thinking about procreation and the church, we can think like, what should the church say about these things? I want the church to preach the whole counsel of God and to not necessarily emphasize or accent certain features of it in ways that would be responsive to social situations. Because one thing that I worry about is in doing that, we distort, we create false emphases. So in a situation where we have declining birth rates, emphasizing too much the goods of procreation, I worry that it has a distorting effect. And what happens is bad reasons for having children start to emerge. So socially, politically, there's these discussions that people are having about why people should have babies are intertwined with questions of immigration and nationalism and all these sorts of things. Historically, it's not really gone well when countries have encouraged people to have babies, because usually the reasons for doing so are not reasons that I think Christians would want to endorse. And so I think Christians need to think very carefully about what are the reasons that we're giving people to procreate. How can we affirm the good of procreation? But within the context of the gospel where we're acknowledging the realities of infertility, we're acknowledging the realities of childlessness, that's unwanted and we're offering hope to those people that's real and that's grounded. Ultimately, children are not going to. Flesh and blood does not inherit the kingdom of God, shall we say? Right. Like it's. Children are not the, this isn't the cult of children. This is like, we can't, we can't have cult like behavior around. Children are our future. Children are not quite the church's future. The church's future is being children of God. And that has to be the main thing that the church says. And so we have to be able to support procreation and create communities that support procreation without descending into some of these bad ways of thinking about it.

[B]

How do you argue? You've been doing this for a long time. How, thinking about it also for a long time. What arguments would you give to someone who says, well, you know, actually the earth is overpopulated, we're living on diminished resources, we're destroying the planet, Mother Nature is going to really have a tongue lashing for us.

[C]

Those sorts of arguments are very popular. You know, I teach in a university. I think my students don't feel those sort of anxieties. But I've talked with a lot of college students who do feel climate anxiety in other contexts, not Baylor. Some students will use the language of climate trauma. And for them it is a real question whether or not they should procreate. In light of those concerns, it might be too late. If you adopt the story about climate and overpopulation, actually, the damage might already be Baked in. And so you deciding to not have a child might actually not have the effect. Yeah, you're, that's not going to stop this. I think there's also a lot of, there's some shenanigans that go on within those arguments about how carbon gets counted and how carbon usage gets counted. Basically, I don't think the math works out in the way that many of the people who make these arguments think that it works out. But ultimately I think there is a kind of personal concern that people need to realize. If you decline to have children, you have to ask this question, who's going to bury you at the end of your life? Who are going to be the people who put you into the ground? And that's just not a question that most of my students are thinking about, nor should they. In one way. We don't want young people walking around having quarter life crises thinking about who's going to bury me. The point of youth is feeling optimism and joy and that's fine. But if you're going to make those sorts of long term decisions about your life and say I'm not going to have children during the time when you are most likely to be able to have children, you do need to think about what the end of your life. And so I think that many young people have not considered who's going to bury them. And to me that's a question that should haunt them. Some of the problem here is we have isolated a lot of our elderly people, we have quarantined them into nursing homes and they're not a part of our much of our ordinary lives, especially once you get onto a college campus. College campuses are places that are devoid of babies and the very elderly and.

[B]

Then adult communities that are devoid of babies and young people.

[C]

That's right. And if you have that sort of thing, then if you're young, you're not thinking about the burdens of old age and how difficult it's going to be for you to live as an elderly person on your own. And I think that that makes it easier to think like, well, I shouldn't have children or I'm not going to have children because you haven't really counted the cost or you haven't seen the cost. So I think a lot of the attraction to this view comes from those sorts of social forces and not actually the arguments about climate themselves.

[A]

Here at Sola, we encourage disciples and equip disciple makers by drawing on the riches of the Reformation to apply historic Christian theology to all of faith and life. Our Work is only possible thanks to the generosity of thousands of supporters across the world. In order to keep our resources free, we need your support. Will you prayerfully consider a donation to help us equip and encourage even more people to grow in knowing God and seeing everything in his light? If so, please visit solarmedia.org donate.

[B]

What do you say to people who might hear what you're saying as judgment? Because when you've already said, yeah, there are plenty of cases where people can't have children or it just doesn't happen, there are reasons. How do you help people who are maybe hearing what you're saying as a judgment on them for not having children? How do you respond to them?

[C]

Yeah, it's a great question. The stigma that people who have wanted to have children, who can't, for whatever reason, feel is very real. The pain, the heartache. A lot of our churches are set up in such a way that they do rightly, appropriately, in many contexts, but in other contexts, not rightly reinforce the good of having children. Just as a rule. I don't think I would go to a church that aggressively celebrated mothers or Father's Day. I think that that's a practice within our churches that is in certain respects antithetical to the whole scope of the gospel.

[B]

The new family.

[C]

Yeah, right. Because the church is like the new family. Right. Family bonds within the church are diffused and separated and not based on biology. And the church affirms the good of biology and procreation. So it's not a negation of that, but it points beyond that. And so I wrote an article for Christianity Today years ago. It's one of my favorite articles, so I'll just tout it here. But I wrote an article on the witness of infertile couples in our churches. And one of the things that I think that we need is couples who are childless, who wanted to have children, who bear witness to the good of hope, who by their lives remind all of the couples who do have children that their children are gifts from God.

[B]

Not to be taken for granted.

[C]

Not to be taken for granted. Not to be put on a pedestal or idolized. You know, not to sacrifice their future for the sake of right. But our gifts of God and are fundamentally God's. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. And I think that sense of hope is what childless couples have to win. They have to cultivate, they have to fight for. Is really hard because the church is a place where people are called to mourn with those who mourn. And I don't think that churches have done a very good job of that with childless couples. At the same time, the church is a place where people are called to rejoice with those who rejoice. And the hardest thing, I think for childless couples to here is that the sorrow that they have on the basis of their childlessness that God has not given them this gift does not free them from the obligation of rejoicing with those who rejoice. And cultivating joy for other people's gifts of new life, I think actually allows for the possibility of fraternal and maternal relationships emerging in those types that are not fatherhood or motherhood. Right. So this child's gonna have their father and their mother. But if you cultivate joy for your friend's child, you can act in a motherly and a fatherly way towards that child and support and contribute to you and help the family flourish while also, I think, fulfilling those dimensions of what God has called you to do. Right. As a human being who is in one respect going to be either a father or a mother, whether it's biologically or non. Biologically. So I think there's lots of ways in which cultivating joy can open up new possibilities for types of relationship with other children within the church that we just haven't thought about. Sorry, this is a really long answer. I obviously care about this a lot, but the last thing I would say is I really don't think that churches should slide all of those people into adoption. I think that that's a mistake. I think the pressure to say, oh, you don't have children, you should adopt, I really dislike that. I think that that social pressure is very unhealthy because it raises the question, what is adoption within the church? Right. And if the Lord has, you know, not given children to a couple, that does not entail that the Lord is calling them to adopt. Right. Adoption is its own vocation. It's got its own logic, its own grammar. So it needs to be, I think, decided on independent terms from whether your child listeners or not. So anyways, that's the.

[B]

What are some of the other issues surrounding the child birth rate that concern you?

[C]

That's a good question.

[B]

That's why I asked.

[C]

It's very hard talking about the value of procreation in a world where birth rates are declining as a male. So let's just own that. So one of the things that concerns me is that there's a disproportionate burden in procreation between men and women. The male's part in that process Is not that onerous. Now, I actually think that there's ways in which men who support women through the process of gestation and labor actually do real work. So I actually don't. I think we can discount the male's role in all of that too much. It can be emotionally burdensome, it can be tiring. It's real work to support a woman in the midst of that, but it's also not the real work that the woman is doing. And I do worry that in talking about the goods of procreation, that one of the collateral effects of this would be a kind of reduction of women to childbirthing people. And we see this in certain fringe corners of the Internet, I think, where people are really anxious about declining birth rates and they don't want immigration, and they've got lots of, I think, really diseased, unhealthy ideas. And one of the things that they effectively do is reduce women to hosts for more children. That I think is morally noxious. It's morally repugnant. We have to be able to think well about what women offer. Gestation, labor, being mothers, only women can do that. It's a wonderful calling. It's an extraordinary gift. It's an immense sacrifice. But within all of that, they're persons, and they're more than all of that as well. And I think we can't lose sight of that. We've got to have a vision for women that affirms all of that, but.

[B]

Goes beyond more identity markers, more callings than birthing.

[C]

That's right. So that's one major issue. I mean, I think we're going to see two others would be declining birth rates, aging population, euthanasia. One way in which we're going to solve this is just by killing off the old, letting them kill themselves. I think that's coming close to that. We're getting very close to that. And then, you know, the advancement of other artificial technologies, artificial wombs, we're trying hard to do that. People are desperately trying to figure out how to make babies in labs at a more efficient rate than ordinary procreation. And so I think all of that is a challenge as well as if.

[B]

Efficiency were the most important thing.

[C]

Do it on an assembly line.

[B]

If you can crank them out, assembly.

[C]

Line babies, what could possibly go wrong?

[B]

A lot of these issues revolve around your view of the body. Practically every issue in your wheelhouse all comes down to the body, doesn't it? Our view of the body. What does Christianity in particular have to say about the body in the midst of all these ethical quandaries, there's a.

[C]

Real softball for me.

[B]

Yeah, that's really.

[C]

In three minutes.

[B]

Yeah. It's just a short answer.

[C]

Short answer. It seems to me what Christianity has to offer, an account of the body is, on the one hand, an affirmation of its. Not only its dignity, but its glory. That Christ, in taking on flesh and dying and rising again, not only affirms that the body is good, but that its goodness is undefeated and glorious. The recovery of the language of glory for the body, I think, is really important. That it shines, that it's suffused with a beauty and a radiance, and it draws the eye, that you can't not look at the body when it's in its glorious condition. And I think that Christianity has a way of affirming that whilst also honoring the fragility, the limits, and offering a way to explain the trauma and the sorrow and the brokenness and the hurt that we feel in our bodies. We're never more aware of our bodies than when we're in pain. Pain turns our bodies into a type of object. We'll say, my arm hurts. You know, like, our bodies feel strange when they're in pain, so they feel different from us in certain ways. But what the cross allows is for the recovery and reorientation of that pain and that sorrow that we feel in our bodies and a way of giving it meaning and significance, but then also giving it glory, such that all of the scars are not things that we should be ashamed of, but things that we would delight in. I think a lot about. There's the Roman practice of showing your wounds as a way of authorizing what you did in battle. And it shows up in Shakespeare a lot. You know, like Henry V, his famous speech, we will strip our sleeves and show our scars, right? We'll be able to show, here are the marks on our body of where we fought in battle, and the wounds of our bodies will become that. They will be places where we will just show. These are the wounds that I got on my way to sanctification and all the things that I did in my body that I was ashamed of, where I felt fear. And, like, that actually becomes the very thing that I am most proud of, that I'm most eager to show. Christianity, I think, has a. A way of glorifying the body without allowing us to ever escape it, because it hurts. And I think that that's. I say it's a hard question because it's genuinely. How I became a Christian was this issue. I'D become a Christian when I was in. How many times does one become a Christian? I don't know, but I had one conversion when I was in middle school. But then when I was an undergraduate in college, I spent 30 hours reading Plato's Symposium and wrestling with Plato and the question of the value of the body. And at the end of, I could only see that Christ resolved this problem in a way that no one else could. And it was at that point that I was like, I could never go back. There has never been a doubt in my mind of the truthfulness of Christianity after that one moment. To me, it just all comes down to the body. Like, this is the whole sum and game of the Christian faith.

[B]

The resurrection, the resurrection of John raised and.

[C]

And it's all good and it's. It's glorious. Yeah.

[B]

Well, it's been great talking to you about these things. I think that there's a lot more we could go into and hopefully we'll get other opportunities to do this. Matthew, thanks for coming on the program.

[C]

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

[A]

Here at sola, we're passionate about drawing on historic Reformation theology to equip thoughtful Christians for practical wisdom, connecting the dots between the Bible doctrine, the Christian life, and contemporary culture. All that we produce is free thanks to the many who give monthly as SOLA Partners. If you join us as a monthly partner, we'll send you a complimentary copy of Michael Horton's book, Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World. In an age marked by burnout and sensationalism, Horton shows us what it looks like to live a deeply normal yet profoundly meaningful Christian life. To get your copy, simply head over to solamedia.org partner to join us in encouraging even more people to grow in knowing God and seeing everything in his light.