Recent setbacks for social conservative ideals – most particularly on same-sex marriage – have led some to suggest that traditional values are passé. Indeed, some conservatives, in Pat Buchanan’s phrase, are in “a long retreat,” deserted by mainstream corporate America sporting rainbow logos. Some social conservatives are so despondent that they speak about retreating from the public space and into their homes and churches, rediscovering “the monastic temperament” prevalent during the Dark Ages.

This response would be a tragedy for society. For all its limitations, the fundamental values cherished by the religious – notably, family – have never been more important, and more in need of moral assistance. The current progressive cultural wave may itself begin to “overreach” as it moves from the certainty of liberal sentiment to ever more repressive attempts to limit alternative views of the world, including those of the religious.

In the next few years, social conservatives need to engage, but in ways that transcend doctrinal concerns about homosexuality, or even abortion. It has to be made clear that, on its current pace, Western civilization and, increasingly, much of East Asia are headed toward a demographic meltdown as people eschew family formation for the pleasures of singleness or childlessness.

Although sensible for many individuals, the decision to detach from familialism augurs poorly for societies, which will be forced to place enormous burdens on a smaller young generation to support an ever-expanding cadre of retirees. It also frames a spiritual crisis in which people no longer look out for their relatives, but only for themselves, inevitably becoming dependent on government to provide the succor that used to come from families.

A First Step

Conservatives, in particular, need to give up the idea that the fifties – the era of “Leave it to Beaver” – will ever come back. Too many factors, such as women’s growing role in the workplace and the sexual revolution, have altered reality permanently. Only 45 percent of children live in intact married families, and those who cherish the institution of families have little choice other than to embrace other models, including blended families, single-parent households, as well as same-sex parent households.

Families today, notes demographer Wolfgang Lutz, struggle in an environment dominated by adults and their concerns. Many young grow up without siblings, cousins and the extended family network so critical to humans for much of our history as a species. Religion, which historically has supported families, has declined in most high-income countries, including, to a lesser extent, the United States, notes the Pew Foundation.

Secularization generally works against child-raising. Religious people – Orthodox Jews, practicing Muslims, evangelicals and Mormons – have many more children than their more secular brethren. As author Eric Kauffman puts it, secularism appears to fail to “inspire the commitment to generations past and sacrifices for those yet to come.”

These effects are clearly evident in an increasingly post-Christian Europe; German, Greek, Spanish and Italian birth rates are among the lowest in the world, despite the largely unwelcome presence of hundreds of thousands of mostly poor Africans and Middle Easterners. Phil Longman compares Europe to a woman whose “biological clock is running down. It is not too late to adopt more children, but they won’t look like her.”

Germany, with its ultralow birth rate and rapidly aging population, will need 6 million additional workers by 2025, or 200,000 new migrants every year, to keep its economic engine humming, according to government estimates. It will also require ever higher taxes on a diminishing workforce – expected to shrink by 7 million by 2023 – essentially a “demographic reserve” to pay for retirees.

Japanese example

One does not need to be a science-fiction writer to imagine where the decline of family will lead us. Japan’s ultralow rates of births and marriage have already weakened its economic prospects, which seem certain to worsen. By 2050, according to U.N. estimates, Japan will have 3.7 times as many people 65 and older than 15 and younger. By comparison, as late as 1975, there were three times as many children (15 and under) as people 65 and older. In 2050, the number of people over 80 will be 10 percent greater than the 15-and-under population. By 2100, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research of Japan projects a population of 48 million, well less than half the current count.

Similar trends can be found in other parts of highly urbanized, high-income East Asia. A 2011 poll of Taiwanese women under age 50 found a strong majority said they did not want children. Overall, demographer Gavin Jones found, up to a quarter of all East Asian women will remain single by age 50, and up to a third will remain childless.

China also will feel the consequences of low birth rates in the not-too-distant future. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that China’s population will peak in 2026, and will then age faster than any country in the world, besides Japan. Ranks of Chinese children and workers ages 15-19 will decline 20 percent from 2015-50.

Some would argue that the move to post-familialism is inherently progressive and beneficial. Initially as populations decline, a country’s GDP can remain high on a per capita basis. But the negative impacts of rapid aging and diminished workforce are inevitable. Germany’s debt by 2030 could be twice as high per capita as that of bankrupt Greece in 2014. Savings rates, even in traditional thrifty Asian nations as Japan and Singapore, have been dropping, and there is growing concern whether these countries can support their soaring number of seniors.

Whither America?

Will America follow this course? Perhaps not. Most millennials, note generational chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, place great weight on being good parents. The vast majority hope to have at least two children, according to a survey conducted by Pew. These suggest that millennials could well eschew attempts – promoted at universities, media and increasingly governments – to prioritize individual “empowerment” and “group rights” over family.

Democrats, in particular, seem to be pushing this trend, seen by some as beneficial to their political trajectory. Single women have become a critical constituency for Democrats, what pollster Stanley Greenberg has labeled “the largest progressive voting bloc in the country.” Some Democrats, and their media allies, seem determined to use gay marriage as a wedge to undermine the credibility, and even the legal future, of many less-pliable religious groups.

Yet celebrating singleness and unmarried families is not progressive in the sense of how it effects children. Broken families are associated with every kind of social dysfunction, from criminality to poverty and mental illness. Human beings, particularly children, Sigmund Freud noted, need a sense that they matter more to their parents than others; substituting “social” values for familial ones does not make up for the need for the love that comes naturally to parents. “A love that does not discriminate,” he wrote, “seems to me to forfeit a part of its value, by doing an injustice to its object.”

Rather than battle over specifics, both social conservatives and profamily liberals should seek ways to encourage both child-rearing and intact families. Some of these elements are pretty basic: good public education, tax policies that do not penalize married couples and allowing greater tax deductions for children.

Of course, the two sides may not agree on means, but some changes could help toward agreement on societal ends. This relates particularly to issues such as housing, where we need to prioritize the building of the kind of lower-density and affordable housing vastly preferred by families. A future built around the models of expensive and densely populated places – Washington, D.C., Manhattan, San Francisco and, increasingly, much of Southern California – would mimic places with the lowest rates of family formation in the nation. In Manhattan, half of households are single, while, in San Francisco, there are 80,000 more dogs than children.

The goal here, however, should not be to engage in a full-scale reactionary culture war. A successful profamily policy cannot abandon the social gains made by women and gays over the past half century. In the long run, a more tolerant view of marriage – reflecting a greater interest in libertarian approaches to social issues – is a prerequisite for reviving familialism. Seeking to preserve a place for families requires us to move beyond nostalgia and focus on how this most precious institution can be reinvigorated amidst the challenges of modernity.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange and the executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

His most recent book is “The New Class

Conflict” (Telos Publishing: 2014).