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It's Tuesday, April 14, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Understandably, there's so many things taking place in the world these days, a lot demands our attention. The most important issue today has to do with the fact that President Trump has called for a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. And the most important thing for us to realize, building upon what we talked about yesterday on the brief, is that freedom of navigation is the fundamental issue when you enforce something like a naval blockade. It is, by any estimation, an act of war. And so, just defined in terms of the law of warfare, a naval blockade is a hostile action. Now, we shouldn't be all that surprised because we are engaged in hostilities against Iran. And so it does fit the larger pattern. I just want to point out that when you undertake a naval blockade, the most famous in terms of American history would be the blockade in terms of the United States naval forces undertaken in order to isolate Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. A naval blockade, then technically, it was an act of war. When you look at this, you recognize that we are once again facing the fact that we have two implacable foes, the United States and Israel on the one hand, and then Iran on the other. We are in a situation of extreme unpredictability with the continued hostilities. It's going to be a very interesting picture to watch, and as we discussed, it's connected to so many other issues in the world. We're going to have to watch it closely. But the bottom line is that if you declare a naval blockade, meaning that you're going to put an effective naval stop to all traffic in the area, you have to follow that up with an actual naval blockade. That's just the obvious reality. But then again, speaking of things that are obvious, President Trump clearly, obviously needs some very clear control when it comes to his social media presence. Just once again, the world is ablaze because of a posting by the President of the United States on social media. Let's just say that in the great scheme of things, anyone operating from a Christian worldview will see that as a problem. And it is particularly a problem given some of the issues that are here at stake. Going back to the Easter morning tweet, looking at this tweet or posting, and in this case, it was on Truth Social, the President's own social media platform, we are looking at a problem that raises serious questions, and they're the kinds of questions that a leader shouldn't raise. The kinds of questions that leadership should dispel rather than raise. And when you have political enemies, you just need to understand political enemies are going to take advantage of this. The New York Times, an article, Trump's erratic behavior and extreme comments. Well, when you just have those kinds of words used in a headline, erratic behavior, let's just say that our biblical understanding of leadership calls for something other than erratic behavior. And so when you're looking at that, you recognize if you play into your enemy's game, eventually you aid the enemy's argument. I won't go further into that issue. Just for all of us, let's watch ourselves on social media. All right, big news giant headline news coming out of Hungary. On Sunday, Hungary held the national election. And 16 year incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orban was defeated by Peter Magyar, who had been a part of his Faidus party, but had split to create an alternative party and was understood to be running more from the political mainstream compared to Viktor Orban, often described in the mainstream media as far right. Okay, huge issues to discuss here. One of the things we need to recognize is that Viktor Orban has single handedly taken on basically the entire liberal establishment, the global establishment, and he's done so with a bit of gusto. And so for 16 years, he has served as prime minister of Hungary. And during those 16 years, he has made Hungary kind of a center of conservative thought, of conservative political theory, of conservative cultural analysis. And a constellation of conservative figures have come in and out of the Hungarian conversation. And in doing so, Viktor Orban inflamed the globalists. He inflamed the European elite leadership class, and he inflamed the European Union and its leadership. And one of the reasons he made them so angry is that the European Union requires common action on so many different issues. And Viktor Orban was often the singular veto to prevent action. He had aligned himself with President Trump. He'd also aligned himself on friendly terms with Russia. And a part of that has to do with history and where history calls. Well, we need to trace some things. And so modern Hungary as we know now is a fairly modern invention going back to the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. But before that was the kingdom of Hungary, which by the way, is one of the longest standing kingdoms in the history of Western civilization. You basically would date it from the year 1000 to 1946. So you're talking about nearly a millennium of history. Hungarian is a unique language. It's often referred to, at least by some people, as a heavenly language because it is so hard to learn. You're going to be in heaven before you learn to speak it. It's a very complicated language. And Hungary is at the intersection of multiple worlds. So if you think of Hungary, you can think historically of Western civilization, the inheritors of the Western Roman Empire. You also have the east and you could think of Russia as the heart of that more Eastern empire, sometimes later known as the Russian Empire, also basically the Byzantine Empire, even before that. Then you have the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim Empire. And remember that Hungary has been at the juxtaposition of these great empires and the struggles of between and within those empires for a very, very long time. Now, the elections that took place on Sunday in Hungary, the polling had indicated that Viktor Orban was likely to lose. And in this case, the bigger issue is Viktor Orban losing than Peter Magyar winning. Which is to say that it is not known exactly what Peter Magyar is going to represent. He was clearly running as an alternative to Viktor Orban and his party. But as several in the international media and other observers have pointed out, Peter Magyar was himself a part of the same government. He was a part of Viktor Orban's political orbit and so was his ex wife. It was some specific events that led to his distancing from the party and the formation of a new party. That new party gave him the platform and on that platform he, he won. And by the way, it wasn't close. It was a massive victory against the incumbent prime minister. Now, another thing to watch here is that Viktor Orban, who had helped to create a very conservative tradition, which was also an anti leftist tradition, it was an anti liberal tradition there in Hungary. He basically was voted out of office after being declared that he was acting as an autocrat. Now, after Sunday's election, Viktor Orban made a statement in which he acknowledged his defeat. And in very gracious terms, he accepted the verdict of the voters that Peter Magyar would now have a super majority to form a new government and to serve as the nation's Prime Minister. Let me just point out the obvious. Actual autocrats don't concede elections and they certainly don't do so in gracious terms. So we are looking at a bit of exaggeration all across the media landscape. Big surprise there. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the aftermath. The big issue on the ground there in Hungary is that the new Prime Minister and his party are going to have enough of a supermajority in parliament that they can force through constitutional amendments. And that means lasting change. And this is exactly what Viktor Orban had done for 16 years in forcing through conservative change, conservative change that in so many ways opposed the general direction of the European Union and the larger liberal class and that set Hungary apart and, by the way, infuriated the intellectual elites and the opinion shapers that really are in power in terms of the European Union. He also created very close working relationships with Donald Trump and, as I say, Vladimir Putin. And that represents something of Hungary's role between the east and the West. And that became very clear in that. Now, remember, you also have throughout so much of history, certainly in the last several centuries, you have of the Austro Hungarian Empire. And so that was the unified empire under the Habsburgs that controlled so much of Central Europe. And by the way, it seems to be one of those empires that was going to last forever, until, of course, it didn't. It fell apart in the aftermath of World War I, as so many of the monarchies and imperial structures there in old Europe collapsed there in the aftermath of World War I. But we are talking about a very long civilizational pattern. And you know what? Viktor Orban made some very important arguments about the perpetuation of those civilizational patterns. It's one of the reasons why so many conservatives were really attracted to what was going on there. Think tanks and other political movements that had a lot of interaction with American conservatives. And I think that interaction is likely to continue. When you look at the election, is it a repudiation of. Of a conservative argument? Well, it's certainly the repudiation of one conservative argument. It's going to be very interesting to see what kind of argument comes behind it, because Peter Magyar may turn out to be quite a progressivist. He might serve in a very liberal trajectory. Then again, he might not. We just don't know. It's going to be very interesting to watch when it comes to Victor Orban again. Sixteen years as prime minister, understand how long that is. That's four US Presidential terms and he was running for a fifth. So at least a part of what's going on here is that when you have an electorate able to choose a leader from time to time, they're going to choose a new leader. That's something that's just kind of baked into the pattern of electoral politics. And this shows that the elections were legitimate. And as a matter of fact, Peter Magyar won the election. He won it convincingly. Viktor Orban conceded and as the press had conceded graciously. So that's again, that's the way elections are supposed to work. I do think it's really important for Christians to understand that Hungarian conservatives had really unearthed a lot of huge questions that are civilizationally unavoidable. I do think for American Christians, it's important to recognize that the conservative movement there in Hungary had unearthed and raised to visibility a large number of questions that are civilization and are going to have to be answered. And so obviously, this is a setback for Orban's government. It's a setback for Orban's political party. Now, whether it's a permanent reset of politics there in Hungary or something less than that, we don't know. But it just reminds you that politics really is about big ideas, very big ideas. And it remains to be seen exactly what the new government's big ideas are going to be. But it's going to replace a government of very big ideas. Even when people didn't like the ideas, they were very big ideas, clearly and forcefully presented. I do think it's really important also to recognize that you have something like a blob in terms of the European elites, a very leftist progressivist blob. And they really want to be independent of any kind of natural order. And they treat any argument for natural order as something they'll describe as far right. That's one of the things that I really noticed in terms of the press coverage about Viktor Orban and his party and his administration. They would say far right. Well, what makes it far right? Well, it's association, his association with the far right movements around the world. Well, okay, well, what else? Well, also his usage of natural categories, that is, categories revealed in nature, like male and female. You get where I'm going with this. It's going to be very interesting to see if voters in Hungary want to be less clear about that. The European elites clearly want it to be so all right here in the United States. Big news over the weekend. It's one of those things that could just be a blip, but I think it points to something bigger, and that is US Congressman Eric Swalwell having to pull out officially to put his campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination there in California in suspension. In other words, it's over. And it's over because you had the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN bring reports from a former staffer about sexual misbehavior and coercion. And then you have the details that start coming, photographs of personal parts and other things, and of course, the general context of. Of the fact that this is a society that is very morally confused. But evidently it still has Some rules. And those rules are you can't take advantage of someone who might be inebriated. That's a part of the story, actually. You can't get a woman drunk in order to take advantage of her. You can't breach certain sexual thresholds when it comes to, say, a behavior with someone who is on your congressional staff. My point is not how substantial this moral judgment is, it's how insubstantial this moral judgment is. In other words, Christians should say, there's just a lot more to this than you are acknowledging. The man cheated on his wife by this accusation. He broke his marriage vows by this accusation. If this is true, and the congressman has sent rather mixed signals on this, he said he wasn't guilty of some of the things of which he was accused, but then he came around and apologized for former bad behavior. And he basically said that he had had to apologize to his wife for very bad behavior. And then he puts his campaign into suspension after numerous other women said that they would also raise issues. And you also had members of his own staff, not just former staff, but current staff, saying that the accusations were credible. Okay, here's a leadership lesson for you. There's a Christian worldview big time lesson for us all, and that is if the people closest to you on a matter of moral charge like this, a charge of immorality, if the people closest to you say, yeah, that's believable, guess what, you are in big trouble. Now, once again, in moral terms, I think Christians looking at this say, you know, there's an awful lot that's really problematic before you get to what the secular world's calling problematic. But we do agree with them. This is a big problem. Of course, as Christians, we understand it's an even deeper problem. I mean, no one really here is talking explicitly about the integrity of marriage and the importance of marriage vows, and no one's talking about the fact that monogamy should be the moral expectation, period. No, you do that. And with Victor Orban, you might be described as being far right. You would be, by the way, very right, very correct in having those concerns. I do think that for Christians, we come back to this again. I think it's very informative that this society still renders moral judgment on sexual behavior. Not all the time, not consistently, but, you know, from time to time, there's a consensus in our society, you ought not to do that. If you do that, you ought not to be the governor of California. If you do that, there ought to be consequences. Because now you have prosecutors, you have congressional authorities. You have even Democratic Party leaders who see it as in their own party's advantage to come out and say, evidently, we have a problem here. We need to deal with this problem. Eric Swalwell, by the way, has been in Congress since 2013. He had been in the 15th district between 2013 and 2023. He has moved to California's 14th district in 2023. He was born in 1980, so he's, he's in his 40s. We're looking at a situation in which this is a family tragedy, but it's also a public tragedy. It is, first of all, in this case, a public tragedy because it begins in a public way, because he is running for the office of governor. He's running for the Democratic nomination for governor in a state like California, the nation's most populous state. Guess what? The political stakes are really, really, really high. Of course, the word came last night that Representative Swalwell has now also resigned from the United States Congress. When something like this happens, when the wheels start to fall off the vehicle, they tend to fall off pretty quickly. All right, so all those things are important. I want to tell you. We need now to turn to something that in the Christian perspective is far more important in the Christian worldview. This is something far more basic, far more important. But having dealt with those other issues, let's get to the most important issue, and that is the fact that data coming from the US Federal government show a birth rate decline in which the birth rate in the United States has fallen. Fallen rather precipitously and rather consistently since the year 2007. Okay, so we're talking about nearly 20 years here, about a 20 year pattern of decline. And there are some contested issues here. There are also some common numbers. So, for example, you have this report, quote, the U.S. fertility rate fell slightly in 2025 to another record low. So just notice this is an article by Sabrina Tavernese at the New York Times. I mention it simply because we need to look at it and understand. Even the way it's written tells us something important. The US fertility rate fell slightly in 2025. Yeah, it fell slightly. So is that good news? It didn't fall more the next phrase to another record low. So it's going down after having been down. Now it's going down, down, down, quote, extending two decades of declines. According to federal data, the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age dropped to 50, 53.1 to 53.8 in 2024. The number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. So this is really important. You take a thousand women, how many babies were born last year in terms of the records, 20, 24, 53.8. In the most current year, the year later, 53.1. So from 53.8 to 53.1, you might say that's not that big. No, it's really big. It's really big. And when you add it to 20 years of losses, we're looking at a reshaping in moral and in demographic terms of the entire American landscape. And it is really devastating news morally and civilizationally. Because when you are looking at a falling birth rate like that, you're looking at more than just fewer babies in the nursery. You're looking at a constricted future. And of course, from a biblical perspective, you're also looking at just getting the whole point of everything wrong. Because in chapter one of the Bible, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And that's exactly what is being rejected here increasingly by men and women in America. All right, so there are other things that are tied to this. So let's just talk about the fact that for the first time now, almost half of the 30 year old women in the United States are childless. And that means never having had a child. About half of the 30 year old women. Okay, so let's just talk about that for a moment. Let's talk about it in absolutely candid terms. So this does not mean that half of all women are living celibate lives age 30. It doesn't mean that. It means that given the contraceptive birth control revolution with the separation of sex and pregnancy, you now have that coming with consequences right down to the birth rate falling nearly 20 years in a row. We're talking about something that's devastating. We're talking about something that's morally revealing. At the civilizational level, it's revealing something is wrong in a society that stops having babies, period. Something is deathly wrong. But at the individual level, we as Christians understand this represents a spiritual crisis. It's a moral crisis. It's a demographic crisis. It's also a spiritual crisis. All right, there are some interesting footnotes to this. Number one, there has been a significant downturn in the number of babies born to teenage girls. Okay, that's good news, right? That's good news. Presumably, most of that's outside of marriage. Most of that is not fitting within the family plan. And so a reduction in teenage births can be greeted as, in one very clear sense, a good thing. If that means that there are fewer unmarried teenagers having babies. That's a good thing. However, there's another side to that, and that is the fact that the precipitous fall isn't just of teenagers. It's of women in their twenties as well. So we're talking about not just teenagers, but women in their 20s having far fewer babies and again, half not having any babies at all by the time they reach 30. Okay, that's massive. Now you're talking about something that, by the way, wouldn't have been possible in any previous civilization. It would have been possible because there were not the birth control or contraceptive methods or abortion for that matter. Legalized abortion. All these things are now prevalent. And guess what? They come with consequences. Moral consequences, Christians understand, to be sure, but also civilizational consequences, demographic consequences. By the way, one of the consequences is going to be that fewer women, and thus eventually fewer couples are going to have the experience of being parents. Fewer women are going to be mothers, fewer men are going to be fathers. Let me just say the Christian worldview reminds us that becoming a mother, becoming a father is a part in the main. In the main for how God really shapes us into the men and women he wants us to be. There's something about the very experience of parenthood that is an instant maturation process made absolutely necessary. Again, there is a place for those without children, of course, in the Christian worldview. But the norm, the normative picture, is for a young man and a young woman to get married and start having children to the glory of God. That should be the norm. When there's an interruption in the norm, we need to understand why. When you talk about half of the 30 year old women in America, the not being mothers, not having the experience of ever being a mother, that's a redefinition of human existence. Just in terms of normative human existence. The fertility rate has now hit this low. And by the way, there are some coming right back. It's very interesting to see some of the arguments that are coming with some people saying women are delaying having children. They're going to have children later, maybe in their 30s or even in their early 40s. Okay, a couple things about that. There's something glorious about women having babies, period, period. Regardless of when that's absolutely glorious, I'm thankful. But we do need to recognize that there's a physiological, there's a bodily component of this. And that has to do with the fact that fertility goes down, the difficulty and complications of pregnancies go up with advancing age. But something else is happening that people don't want to talk about. And that is the fact that the net number of children is effectively reduced if you don't even start having children until a certain age. And so it's a very complicated situation. You also have the acknowledgment that many women are delaying having children, and so they're storing up embryos or eggs. They're looking at all kinds of new technologies. And we talk about that rather regularly because those things emerge in the headlines. But when those things become normal, guess what? We're redefining actually God's intention in marriage and family. And so we'll continue to talk about all these different issues. But the bottom line is that a society that isn't getting married and isn't having children is in big trouble, period. Exclamation point. NASA Public Radio had a very interesting report on this new data, and it includes a statement from Martha Bailey, identified as head of the California center for Population Research at the University of California, Los angeles, s u c l a and that is the bottom line, quote, that U.S. women are delaying motherhood and will have more children later in life. That's a debatable proposition, but nonetheless, let's follow it for a moment. She said, quote, we're seeing big drops in fertility rates for young women, teenagers and women in their 20s. What's not yet clear is whether or not these same women will go on to have children later on. So let me just point out, we need to hope that the birth rate goes up, but when you look at this, you recognize. Okay, that's a pretty tenuous argument. But later, she says this, people are having the number of children they want. Okay, that's pretty obvious. Or the number of children they don't want factoring into their decisions as well and that they can afford at a time that makes the most sense for them. She says, quote, what I don't think anyone is in favor of is a Handmaid's Tale type policy regime where we're trying to talk families into having children they don't want, okay? So you need to recognize that many on the progressive left in this country, the secular left, they think even raising this issue is an infringement upon human autonomy. They are now so detached from, let's just say, biology, from even a concern about birth rate. They're so committed to individual expressivism and personal autonomy, they don't even think it's fair to raise this as a moral issue. And if you do, you're going to be accused of being in favor of a regime like the Handmaid's Tale. Let me just say, you can't make this kind of argument up. She said it right out loud. Okay, so let me just end today by saying something very, very important to me, and that is that where you see authentic biblical Christianity. Guess what you see one of the things you see organically, just out of obedience to scripture, just out of the presence of Christ and his people. Let me tell you what you see. You start seeing marriage, you start seeing childbearing, you start seeing pregnancies, you start seeing children, you start seeing families, and you see growing families to the glory of God. There's something about that. And you know what? If you celebrate that out loud, you're accused of wanting to bring about the regime of the Handmaid's Tale. No, I think Genesis, flourishing is where I would point. And that's exactly where scripture points us as well. And so to all of you listening to the briefing, let's live out the glory of God. Let's rejoice in seeing the glory of God in marriage and families and children and, yes, a growing birth rate. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com you can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmuller for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary or go to sbts.edu for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.