“Failure is one of God’s educators,” writes William George Jordan in his 1898 book, “The Majesty of Calmness.”

I agree, but with this exception: You actually must sit in that classroom, eyes and ears open, notebook at the ready. Too often politicians and many other Americans are asleep or cutting class during that lesson.

Which brings me to a failure taking place right now affecting all in our nation.

The birthrate in the United States is at an all-time low. To sustain a population requires a rate of 2.1 children per female. The U.S. rate currently stands at 1.6. We’re not yet in the dire straits of South Korea, with its rate of .80 or of China with its 1.09, but like most other Western countries, we’re well on our way.

Some in our government advocate paying parents to have more babies in hopes of boosting birthrates. Recently, President Trump announced the “Trump Accounts,” whereby each child born between 2024 and 2029 will receive a $1,000 savings account.

However, throwing money at a problem rarely fixes it. In the case of birthrates, such policies treat symptoms rather than searching for a cure.

The root of this cultural illness is a tangle of etiologies, all which have undermined romance, marriage, and family. Abortion, divorce, a feminism that has ranked careers above the home and motherhood, a widespread philosophy which makes a god of the self and a therapeutic ethos which reinforces that dogma, a culture whose music, literature, and movies rarely display families and children as positive goods, the internet and screens with their sledgehammers of social media, gaming, pornography, and influencers: all are demolishing the idea that the family is the cornerstone of civilization, much less a sacred institution.

Even parents are abetting the demise of marriage and the family. A 2023 Pew poll, “Parenting in America Today,” showed that 88% of parents prioritized financial independence and job satisfaction for their children. Forty-one percent said that getting a college degree was very important, while 21% believed that marriage was an important goal for the young. Only 20% thought the same about having children.

When the first concerns of parents for their children are money and status rather than building families, then the odds against a renewal of marriage and the family seem insurmountable.

What is missing from our debates about birthrates, the efficacy of marriage and the family, the data and discussions, is romance. I don’t mean just the romance of flowers-and-dreams that still ushers many couples into a beautiful marriage. No, I mean a romance regarding life, a love affair that stands head and shoulders above the scalpels of dissection wielded by everyone from social scientists to media influencers. This romance comes only when we tear away the ugly veil of mechanistic modernity, analysis, and algorithms set between ourselves and reality, fences resulting not only in unprecedented mistrust and division between the sexes but ones which blind so many to the beauties and mysteries surrounding them.

The best marriages involve not only the twining of loving hearts, but a romantic view of life itself, a swashbuckling vision of the world. Money and prestige are all fine and well, and help us flourish, but the best married couples, the best of all of us, see living as a grand and holy act of daring guided by wonder. It’s a story whose shadows we see in fairy tales and Jane Austen, in C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Whether we know it or not, we’re all sitting in God’s classroom, and we’re there until the bell rings.

Life is an adventure. Embrace that idea, and we become more fully human. And if enough of us become more fully human, we’ll see an explosion in the birthrate.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pxhere