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Good morning. Our Saturday evening viewing was Dixon of Dock Green - I watched it each week with my parents and older brothers. One scene from that long series has stayed vividly with me. Mary, PC Dixon’s daughter, had married his sidekick PC Andy Crawford and was pregnant. Suddenly she broke down in front of her father, crying that she was afraid to bring a child into a world that was so full of danger. It must have been during the Cold War, perhaps even in 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis made the threat of nuclear Armageddon very real. Mutually Assured Destruction hovered over our lives like the mushroom cloud itself.

Mary’s cri de coeur came back to me last week as speakers at the National Conservative Conference lamented our low birthrate, claiming that many of our current ills are due to our not having enough babies. Alarm bells went off in my mind at that point – was this a prelude to the state trying to interfere with our personal choices? What about those who prefer not to have children, and all those who long to have children and can’t?

Some commentators, while agreeing that we are not having enough babies to replace ourselves, suggest that the real problem is lack of family friendly policies including chronic shortages of suitable housing and affordable childcare. But I wonder whether there is indeed something deeper going on, a cultural shift away from even thinking about the next generation.

The threat of nuclear catastrophe faded after Cuba, but these days there are deep anxieties around Climate Catastrophe, the onward march of IT, the loss of faith in our institutions. And we still have weapons enough to blow up the world. Perhaps a deep existential fear has crept into our souls and we are simply retreating into bubbles of privacy rather than having babies. Perhaps we need to ask whether our shortage of babies is not just a choice, but an expression of a lack of hope. If that is so, we are facing, not just a low birth rate but a moral and spiritual crisis. And I wonder whether there is any connection between our unwillingness to have children and the fact that a recent survey showed that for the first time over half of us no longer believe in God.

As I read the scriptures week by week I can’t help but be aware that trust in God is linked to the future and children are seen as the greatest of God’s blessings. The name which God discloses to Moses can be translated: ‘I will be who I will be’, that is, a God who looks forward and takes humanity with him.

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