I am an enthusiastic natalist. By that I mean that I want our nation to grow, I want people to have as many children as they want to have, and I want those people who are on the fence about having children to feel encouraged about their ability to raise one.

I’m not a natalist for economic reasons — though I do think aging societies can create economic problems. And I agree with my colleague Jessica Grose that there is too much panic among natalists about declining birthrates. I also believe that life itself is good. Ideally, the decision to have a child carries with it a decision to love another person more than you love yourself, and that kind of sacrificial love is a foundation of a flourishing society.

Sacrificial love is not exclusive to parents, of course, but it flows naturally from decent people when they have kids.

I am, however, skeptical of natalism as a movement. At the political level, it strikes me as mostly futile. It has more promise as a cultural cause, but even then it is often scolding and even malicious. When JD Vance rants, for example, about “childless cat ladies,” he’s not engaged in a coherent cultural argument. He’s mocking those who live differently. When a prominent right-wing activist like Charlie Kirk says that “the childless are the ones that are destroying the country” and adds that “if you’re bad, you probably don’t have children,” he’s doing much the same thing.

During my years in fundamentalist Christianity, I also saw a sense of moral superiority develop around large families. Movements like Quiverfull would teach that large families were a sign of religious obedience, and even less extreme believers would often view the single life as somehow suspect — in spite of clear biblical endorsements of singleness.

And then there’s the darkness of natalism as a response to immigration, especially as a response to immigrants of color. The racist “great replacement theory” depends in part on the notion that immigrants are essentially replacing a population that can no longer renew itself. The response is to both shut the doors to newcomers and revitalize the native birthrate.