Demographics make news: How will religion shape the oncoming Birth Dearth and vice versa?

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(OPINION) A Newsweek magazine feature back in 1975 was headlined "The Cooling World." (Journalists beware: The supposed 1977 Time magazine cover story "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" is among the countless frauds that infest the Internet.)

Eventually, cultural concern shifted instead to "global warming" (which was then rebranded as "climate change").

Seven years before Newsweek's freeze alarm, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb," which sold in the millions and updated Thomas Malthus's dire demographic predictions from 1798. Ehrlich warned, for example, that due to global overpopulation, in the 1970s "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." He then helped found the Zero Population Growth organization (since rechristened Population Connection).

Now comes the New York Times with a major page-one May 23 feature headlined "Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications." We're told fertility rates are falling most everywhere except Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and that experts project the first population decline in world history will take hold by the end of this century. Click here for Terry Mattingly’s podcast and first take on some of the religion hooks in that story.

Stagnant and shrinking populations will thrill a segment of environmentalists, but these trends also destabilize society — which creates news. Whether with the shared responsibilities families have always assumed, or modern-day governments' social security systems, humanity must have enough younger workers carrying older people to sustain itself.

To keep the population stable, a society needs 2.1 children in the average nuclear family. A survey in The Lancet last year predicted that 183 of the world's 195 nations and territories are on a path to fall below that mark.

The particulars are staggering. The United States is well below that replacement number, and India and Mexico are nearly there, but South Korea has plummeted to a remarkable 0.92. China famously imposed a draconian one-child-per-family policy. As a result, its pension systems are running out of cash and within decades there will be as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds. We will return to that.

At a conference on the birth-rate crisis in Italy, where kindergartens are turning into nursing homes, Pope Francis decried the nation's "demographic winter." In Japan, adult diapers outsell those for babies. Government experiments show that public campaigns and subsidies do little to change the ingrained cultural pattern.

Consider the full-page Mother's Day essay by Elizabeth Bruenig in the Times that described her becoming a mother at 24, somewhat early for a person of her profession and status. Those who might scold young mothers, she said, miss "the truest thing about having children, which is that it isn't a chore but a pleasure, not the end of freedom as you know it but the beginning of a kind of liberty you can't imagine."

Now, what was fascinating was not Bruenig's fond and commonplace sentiment but the contemptuous blowback that praise of motherhood received from many prominent female writers and anonymous tweeters, a phenomenon previously scanned by Terry Mattingly here at GetReligion. Commentary's Christine Rosen aptly called this cultural fury "The Mother of All Meltdowns."

What is the takeaway here? News media professionals should note that major waves of cultural change automatically involve religion. You can count on it.

Thus, it's often said religious couples generally tend to have more children than non-religious ones. Journalists should ask local observers and national experts if that remains true, and why so, and what impact growing secularism in places like North America will have upon the looming Birth Dearth.

The flip side also needs coverage. Religion helps births, but births help religion. Couples who marry and have children are traditionally a major source of religiously engaged adults. Again, ask your analysts why that is.

However, with less childbearing it seems automatic that actively religious adults will shrink in number. Already, unaffiliated "nones" are on the rise, of course. And the year 2019 saw the demise of 4,500 U.S. Protestant congregations compared with only 3,000 new startups (per new data from the Southern Baptists' Lifeway Research).

Here's a final, non-religious thought. The Times population bombshell never mentions the impact of open abortion upon U.S. population trends since 1973. Though that issue is usually debated as a matter of morality, in wholly secular terms does public funding for abortions make sense in an era challenged by population decline?

Once again, consider China. Should, for example, American politicos be watching recent headlines from that superpower?

Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for the Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.