You Can’t Reclaim the Culture by Having More Kids

"The best thing conservatives can do to reclaim the culture is have a bunch of kids and homeschool them.” This is a quote from a prominent conservative commentator from a few years ago, but one can find a similar sentiment on a frequent basis on your social medium of choice. It's an inspiring idea, consonant with the rising pronatalism conservatives are trying to stir up. More importantly, it adds a smug feeling of demographic inevitability to Christian practice: We will win because we're going to outnumber them by doing the things we love doing anyway! The main problem with this contention is that it isn't really true. At least, so far it hasn't really panned out despite nearly two generations trying it. The “culture war” as we know it has been happening since at least the 1980s, and since then there have been plenty of Christian parents homeschooling their large broods. If the same commentators who espouse this strategy are correct in their assessment that Western culture has been sliding further and further into degeneracy over the past several decades, we can say that it has barely succeeded at slowing that slide.