Every few weeks brings a fresh diagnosis of America's baby bust: unaffordable housing, the cost of childcare, stagnant wages, fewer marriages, rising infertility, the widespread use of contraception and abortion, and the simple opportunity cost from higher education and career opportunities. This week added another suspect as recent studies found that the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 may explain up to half of the decline in birth rates among Americans under 25. At the very least, the arrival of the smart phone tracks the decline in births. And, while each of these factors explain some aspect of the issue, there is no single reason why birth rates have sunk to record lows. Nonetheless, two groups still buck the odds, having children at much higher rates than their peers across the nation—religious Americans and conservatives.

Drawing on Pew’s 2023—24 Religious Landscape Study, a recent Institute for Family Studies report found that church attendance predicts a state’s fertility rate better than most factors, accounting for “57 percent of the variance between state-level total fertility rates.” The result is that red states, which tend to be more family friendly with affordable housing and higher rates of religiosity, are bringing forth more kids than blue states. The report goes on to say,

Northeastern states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts have less than 15% of their adult population frequently attending religious services and have fertility rates at or below 1.4. By contrast, states like South Dakota, Utah, and Mississippi have at least 40% of their adult population frequently attending religious services and have total fertility rates at or above 1.8.

Of course, none of this means cost is irrelevant. While unaffordable housing accounts for about a quarter of the variation in fertility from state to state—and anyone weighing a second bedroom against another child knows the pressure is real—religion explains 57 percent of the variation to housing’s 25 percent.

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Case in point: While Utah and Idaho are two of the more expensive states to live in compared to income, they boast some of the highest fertility levels. Why? Because sincere religiosity simply overrides the price tag. Taken together, this religious divide is fueling what the report calls a “Great American Family Sort”—a steady drift of marriage and childrearing into red America.

The divide isn’t only geographic. In a second Institute for Family Studies report published in June, researchers surveyed more than 7,000 Americans ages 18 to 54 and found the same gap between individual conservatives and liberals, wherever they live. Conservatives are having more children, with 1.40 children on average reported compared to liberals’ 1.09. Likewise, 40 percent of conservatives had no children at all—which is still higher than previous generations—and yet much lower than the 51 percent of liberals who are childless.

Sadly, this also reflects how individuals think about parenthood itself. Liberals are twice as likely to doubt they’d make good parents (18 percent versus 9 percent), and they are far more likely to view raising children “very complicated, difficult, or stressful” compared to their conservative counterparts (36 percent to 24 percent). I feel real sympathy when I see numbers like these, because they can reflect a deeper spiritual and psychological crisis among liberal men and women. Having children is one of the surest signs of confidence and hope in the future. To willingly forgo it or delay kids indefinitely can reflect a kind of self-rejection: a scarcity mindset that frames children as a burden on the planet, or a deeper brokenness and pain the person hasn’t found a way to face.

So why do believers keep choosing what their neighbors defer? And to make it personal: Why has our family—and many of the other Gen Z Christians we know—prioritized having children, at odds with the broader culture?

First, as Christians, we know that the Bible is absolutely clear that children are a gift and a blessing, the natural overflow of marriage, and that life is sacred from the moment of conception until natural death. Far from merely taking from us—our time, our money, our sense of self—children are described in Psalm 127:3 as “the fruit of the womb a reward.”

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Second, Christians also have a robust theology of suffering, one that teaches that suffering isn’t wasted but is even used for our perfection (James 1:2-4), and that it is only in dying to self that we truly live (John 12:24). Finally, God’s Word teaches us to look beyond ourselves and our materialistic culture to the ultimate, eternal reality that we are living for so much more than meets the eye, and for a God so much bigger than we can imagine.

As the Elisabeth Elliot wrote in an essay “On Motherhood and Profanity,”

Those who focus only on the drabness of the super-market, or on the onions or the diapers themselves, haven’t an inkling of the mystery that is at stake here, the mystery revealed in the birth of that Baby and consummated on the Cross: My life for yours. The routines of housework and mothering may be seen as a kind of death, and it is appropriate that they should be, for they offer the chance, day after day, to lay down one’s life for others.

Let it be so, as Christians continue to shine a light on the goodness of marriage and family, even amid painful health diagnoses, cost pressures, and the uncertainties of this life; for behold, Christ has overcome the world.