To purchase the entire Summit Lecture Series, Vol. 1 on DVD, go to: summit.org.
So, why aren’t Europeans having babies at a sustainable rate?
You can tell a lot about what people and governments believe their problems are by looking at what they offer as solutions.
France’s solution to their low birth rate was to give families money and other financial benefits, therefore, we can deduce that they thought their problem was finances. This has helped them to a degree, but they are still below the rate of sustainability.
Russia had a different solution, and therefore thought the problem was not finances, but a different problem. Russia’s solution was to institute a new national holiday.
They created National Conception Day.
The day itself takes place on September 12th, and couples who then have a child on June 12th are rewarded by the regional government. June 12th (nine months after Conception Day) is Russia Day, their main national holiday. In 2005 Govorner Sergey Ivanovich Morozov of Ulyanovsk, a region about 800 kilometers east of Moscow where Vladimir Lenin was born, added an element of fun to the national campaign by declaring September 12th the Day of Conception and giving couples time off from work to procreate and produce the next generation. The 2007 grand prize went to Irina and Andrei Kartuzov, who received a UAZ-Patriot, a sport utility vehicle made in Ulyanovsk. Other contestants won video cameras, TVs, refrigerators and washing machines.
So, if Russia thinks that giving everyone a day off of work on Conception Day to stay home and have sex, what can we conclude the Russian government thinks their problem is? They believe that their people aren’t having sex.
But this is not accurate, and there are other statistics that prove it.
For over a decade, Russia had more abortions than live births.
So, Russians are having plenty of sex. They just don’t want to have babies.
As I’ve repeatedly said, ideas have consequences.
150 years ago, Europe embraced an idea. Now, there are reasons it embraced this idea, particularly all the bloodshed that came out of a result of revolutions and ongoing battles between religious groups, but there came about a de facto platform of Secularism. Secularism is a cultural reality which says, “You can believe in God, but God is nothing but a personal, private friend.” Therefore you can’t bring God into the public square. You can have God and take Him off into your corner by yourself, but you cannot bring Him into politics, economic theory, schools, history, or the law. God has to be personal and private for each individual who chooses to believe in Him. And in the 19th century, Europe embraced this.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well if you make God merely a personal, private friend, then what God is NOT is the designer of the universe. And, if you take away the DESIGNER of the universe, you also remove the DESIGN of the universe, and all things within it. One of these things that was designed is sex.
Sex was designed within a particular context: marriage. And sex was designed with particular consequences, one of them being babies. In other words, sex got a divorce. Sex was divorced from its context, consequences and design. So, sex became a personal, private right that you can do whenever you want, however you want, with whomever you want, wherever you want, as if it does not have a context nor consequences to worry about.
So, here we are today with unsustainable birth rates and sexual moral decay where people only think about the here and now and their own immediate urges instead of the long-term benefits and consequences. All this leads to the end of Western Civilization.
Do you think that 150 years ago, when Europe embraced Secularism, they thought, “I know, let’s embrace an idea that will end our civilization.”
No, of course not.
So, here’s the other thing. When I say, “Ideas have consequences”… another aspect of that is that a lot of times ideas have unforeseen consequences. We don’t always see where the road is going to go.