I don't know how similar this is to your region, but when I see a mother or a family with a third child when I am out walking or at a store I want to ask "Catholic or Evangelical?" I never do, but as I am likely to strike up a conversation at any time, I sometimes find my answer pretty quickly.
I am told that "drug addict" is another possibility, but I don't see them walking the Rail Trail all that much.
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Heh. I'm in Utah, so my first guess is neither Catholic nor Evangelical.
They could be Lutherans.
@ Deevs - here, too, but there are so few that it's not a good % guess.
@ Mike - not in New England. Those are "Maybe one" people up here, except in South Central NH, where the Apostolic Lutherans of Finnish extraction are. they used to have 13 apiece. It's down to 5 now, but there just aren't that many.
An average of two children dooms a nation to extinction. n average of three children dooms a family to extinction.
I am looking at the families of my cousins. I have lots of cousins because I have 20 aunts/uncles. The first thing is how many of my aunts/uncles had 4 or fewer children while their parents had from 7 to 14 children. This wasn't because of the pill, though there were other birth control methods available. My generation has, on average, 2 children. The older cousins (I am one) are more likely to have three. This has absolutely nothing to do with religion.
Yes, I think in previous generations, while Catholics very often had more children than anyone else, religion was not that strong a determinative factor. At least around here, it seems to be now.
Truly large families are rare here in Texas. Unassimilated Hispanics are an exception, and it is not uncommon to see a pregnant woman speaking Spanish to her two children while pushing a fourth in a stroller. The large Catholic family is a thing of the past. I can think of only one family that had more than three children in my parish. They were mostly ostentatious adoptions and that family blew up disastrously. To anyone with eyes to see, the word Contraception hung over every mass. I am on the graduate committee of a "full-quiver" evangelical with six or seven children, but his type is too rare to bump the group average.
I would add that casual observation of big families can be distorted by birth spacing. There is a conspicuous gaggle of children around a mom who delivers six in eight years; but one doesn't notice the same number of children if the births are spaced over sixteen years. Some apparently large families are in fact "blended," and the fertility of the "mom" is only half of what it appears to be.
I am fairly well persuaded that modernity is a demographic black hole from which no one escapes. God clearly hates infertility and destroys the infertile. The question is not whether the religious are fertile, but is rather whether the voluntarily infertile are in any deep sense religious. All creation seems to cry out, "begone with you!" Sad, perhaps, but apparently true.
@ JMSmith - yeah, it's significant that my number was as low as three, ain't it?
We're neither Catholic nor Evangelical, but we have three children. My cousin has three as well. Over two generations our family has tended to average about 2.5 children per couple. I do hope our children will continue the pattern.
We chose to raise our children in a town with "a lot of Catholics." Frankly, I hadn't really noticed that, until an atheist neighbor pointed it out. Many of our closest friends are Catholics, or Orthodox, or at least religious, so while we aren't overtly religious, we flock with them. Our children also chose to attend religiously affiliated high schools.
I would flip the observation. I think if you choose to have more than one or two children, you are likely to find a warmer welcome in groups that don't look down on having a parent "at home," or at least you are unlikely to hang out with people who go on frequent, expensive vacations.
Interesting point. The influence might indeed flow both ways. I don't see that here, but we are no longer in the child-raising cohort. And Northern New England may be slightly different from the nation at large.
I've kept a bookmark on this article for years: https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-return-of-patriarchy/
This paragraph caught my eye: Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one’s own folk or nation.
He also notes that single-child families tend to extinction.
I notice people writing about a rise of "populism" around the globe. I submit that a move away from globalism may be innate, rather than intellectual. Choosing to have a child is a counter-cultural choice in the US right now. Choosing to have more than two, even more. And yet, the children born into such families will be an ever-larger share of the next generation.
It may be that traditional religion as a filter nets many of the people who are swimming against the tide. It may not be a cause of the decision to have a larger family; there are other factors in play.
I think that is a great leap to larger concepts. It is not only that some religions especially encourage having children, but that they also have a general world-view not so much about population growth as about preservation of what is good. That will quite naturally bleed over into Western Civ, probably nationalism, and the natural small-c conservatism of traditionalism. People who feel comfortable with that culturally would gravitate to those religions as a place that understood them, and the attitudes would be reinforcing to each other.
I still remember a religious landscape in which ethnicity played a large part, even within denominations, so that LCA was still very Swedish and ALC more German, and Italian vs Irish Catholic churches (and even schools) were identifiable by festivals. That has been much more the norm worldwide and still is. It is very western and especially American, to choose one religion over another, or none.
We know a few families with four, five, or more children, and they are in very traditional churches. They are not necessarily very political, though inasmuch as they are they are conservative.
There is also the idea that i used to refer to a decade or more ago, that having children is an expression of confidence in the future. I recall young people saying that they didn't think it was responsible to bring a child into this world "because of the way things are now." It is certainly odd for the safest and most physically comfortable generation to have so many in it who saw/see things that way.
Odd, it's the generation before mine that expressed the idea that bringing children into the world "because of the way things are now" was irresponsible. I remember this clearly as it was expressed to me when I announced that I was going to be a grandmother soon and it made me angry.
A friend of mine told me a story about how he was out with his very large family one day, when a woman approached them to express her delight. "Oh, look at the nice Amish family! Aren't they adorable?" she gushed. My friend said "Uh ... we're Catholic." The smiles vanished in an instant, replaced with a kind of cold fury. "Haven't you people ever heard of birth control?"
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