When Catherine Ruth Pakaluk stepped to the podium at Brigham Young University on October 28, 2025, she offered not another lament about falling birth rates but a daring proposal: that the crisis of the modern family is, at root, a crisis of faith—and that the best “family policy” any nation can adopt is to defend and expand religious liberty.
Her speech, Why Children Became Useless: Faith and the Future of the Family, lays out a provocative thesis: birth rates decline not because of economic pressures or government programs, but because “children have become useless to the modern household.” Like horses replaced by the Model T, children have been displaced by machines, welfare programs, and contraception. “The essential question,” she said, “is not Why aren’t people having kids? but Why do people have kids?”
Pakaluk argues that the highest motive for childbearing—the one that alone produces above-replacement fertility—is spiritual, not material. People who view children as “blessings from God” rather than as financial liabilities are the ones who continue to build thriving families. And because this conviction depends on faith, religious liberty itself becomes the keystone of any effective family policy.
“Religious liberty is the best family policy,” Pakaluk declared. “The government must do less so that churches can do more—so that they can return the hearts of people to their God, breathing new life into the American family.”
A Call for “Relentless Deference”
Rather than proposing new spending programs, Pakaluk called for what she termed “relentless deference to churches as the providers of a public good that nations cannot buy.” In her view, faith communities are the true incubators of family life. They nurture the moral and spiritual commitments that sustain marriage and make childbearing desirable—even joyful—despite its sacrifices.
Her policy prescriptions are strikingly concrete:
- Governments should “talk to their members [of religious communities]” and bring them into policy conversations.
- They should “let churches run schools and pass on their values.”
- They should “give pride of place in law and policy to religious colleges and universities,” which she noted “outproduce young and fruitful marriages by every measure.”
- They should “not spend their tax money on things [churches] find evil.”
- And they should “root out welfare programs that compete with the rightful work of the people of God.”
If governments insist on meeting family needs directly—bypassing the church—“the polis becomes a secularizing force,” she warned. What once was a religious mode of caring for the vulnerable has been replaced by a bureaucratic one. The result: the state grows, the church retreats, and the people lose the spiritual vitality that makes family life possible.
Protecting the Source of Motivation for Families
From her talk we can infer several powerful reasons why religious liberty matters so profoundly to the survival of the family.
1. It protects the deepest motive for having children.
Pakaluk observed that people no longer need children for labor, old-age security, or even sexual fulfillment. Those “children of need” have been replaced by machines, social programs, and contraception. The only remaining motive is wanting children “for their own sake”—a motive she called the fire of faith. “Usually this type of motive,” she explained, “is nourished by a living religious tradition.”
Religious liberty therefore safeguards the very conditions that allow this motive to survive. When faith communities are free to teach that children are “blessings from God” and “expressions of divine goodness,” they ignite the moral imagination that sees in every child not a liability but a miracle.
2. It protects life-giving resources that no government can manufacture.
Pakaluk called “lifegiving families the ultimate resource—a lifegiving spring whose source is faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Nations and princes, she warned, “may wall off that life force, cover it over as they have in many times and places, but they cannot summon it. They cannot command it.”
Religious liberty keeps that spring from being capped. It ensures that faith—rather than bureaucracy—remains the well from which the next generation drinks. In an age of demographic decline, protecting this wellspring may be the most urgent act of national self-preservation.
3. It counters the cold calculus of economic utility.
Modern societies, she said, “view children as useless liabilities.” The cure, however, “is to reclaim the supernatural value of the child—to announce and give witness to the central biblical tenet that the child is desirable, lovable, and bears the image of God.”
Without religious liberty, that testimony is silenced. Faith communities become timid, and the world remains trapped in its utilitarian logic, where value is measured only in productivity and profit. Religious freedom allows believers to stand apart from that logic and to remind the culture that love, sacrifice, and new life are ends in themselves.
4. It empowers countercultural courage.
Finally, religious liberty “creates space for living religious communities and the fire of faith to justify the heavy personal cost of having kids.” In Pakaluk’s words, “The conviction that marriage is holy and children are wantable still leads young men and women to lead countercultural lives.”
In an environment often hostile to large families, the freedom to live one’s faith publicly becomes essential. Religious liberty emboldens those who would otherwise be isolated—to form communities, teach their children, and witness that family life is not only possible but joyful.
Faith as Fertility Policy
Pakaluk’s analysis also exposes why government attempts to raise fertility through subsidies or incentives almost always fail. Hungary, she noted, spends five percent of its GDP on pro-natalist programs, yet its fertility rate remains below 1.4. “If people were interested in having children but merely constrained, resource nudges would work,” she said. “But they don’t.” The problem is not economic scarcity but spiritual scarcity.
The state can offer childcare credits, but it cannot offer meaning. Only the church can do that—and only if it is free. Hence, her insistence that government “do less so that churches can do more.”
This principle inverts modern assumptions about social policy. Instead of treating religion as a private hobby or potential obstacle, Pakaluk portrays it as a public good indispensable to national flourishing. In this vision, defending the rights of faith communities is not sectarian favoritism; it is enlightened statecraft.
Lighting “the Fire of Faith” Again
Pakaluk closed her BYU address on a note of hope. There is no reason, she said, to despair over low fertility or family decline. Around the world, people of all faiths—and even some with none—who believe that “having kids is as worthy of pursuit as other noble pursuits” continue to form families. Fertility desires, she reminded listeners, are changeable: “Life experiences, new information, and religious conversions are just a few of the ways that people come around to wanting children.”
The task, then, is old-fashioned missionary work—rekindling faith itself. She recounted how one of her interview subjects, a Jewish father of nine, jokingly asked whether her study was “to make fertility great again.” “Not quite,” she laughed, “but if you had to ask me, ‘How can we make family great again?’ I couldn’t come up with a better answer than to say, Light in America the fire of faith again.”
That fire, she insists, is what transforms the cost of family into joy, turns the “useless child” into a blessing, and secures the future of civilization itself.
Watch and Reflect
Readers can watch Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s full address, Why Children Became Useless: Faith and the Future of the Family, on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9pk-ZRWE74. The full transcript of her talk is available through Brigham Young University.
In an age when demographic charts point downward and policymakers scramble for technocratic fixes, Pakaluk’s message rings with both realism and hope: the renewal of the family begins not in a legislature but in a church, not in a subsidy but in a sanctuary. The surest way to save the family is to safeguard the freedom that allows faith to flourish.
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Steve Bowcut is an award-winning journalist. He is an editor and writer for Religious Freedom Under Fire as well as other security and non-security online publications. Follow and connect with Steve on Substack and Facebook.
