The future of Christendom, according to the Population Reference Bureau’s 2001 annual report, is likely to be pretty bleak. The report’s chief conclusion is that population growth in the West has ground to a halt, while the Third World is reproducing like gangbusters. Tire numbers: “Of the 83 million people added to the global population each year by the difference between births and deaths, only one million are in the industrialized countries.” Within the next 50 years, Germany will likely no longer be ranked among the 15 most-populous countries (it’s the only European country currently in the top 15), and the population of Russia is expected to drop from 144 million to 137 million. During the same time, Mexico is projected to grow from 100 million to 137 million; Nigeria, from 127 million to 204 million; and Pakistan, from 145 million to 252 million.

Europeans and Americans might be alarmed by the report, but they should not be surprised. Birth rates in the West have been tumbling for the past half-century. The Population Reference Bureau calls this a “natural decrease… due both to the low birth rate and to higher proportions of older people in the population.”

The report finds that the “United States is now the only industrialized country in the world with a fertility rate at or above the ‘replacement level’ of 2.1 children per woman,” but that’s hardly a consolation, considering one third of our nation’s births are illegitimate. In other words, married couples are not replacing themselves, and a growing illegitimate population is also bad economic news, unless you are among the few who have found a way to profit from an expanding welfare state.

As governments in the West seek to arrest economic decline, they will continue to encourage liberal immigration from the Third World (even as they schizophrenically spend billions to sterilize the world’s brown people). Their plan won’t work: Peter Brimelow of VDare.com, Donald Huddle of Rice University, and plenty of others have exposed the financial costs of open borders. By the time someone in authority recognizes (much less admits) these costs, it will be too late: The West will have become the Third World.

The contraceptive imperialists at International Planned Parenthood and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and the environmentalists at Zero Population Growth and the Sierra Club are two sides of the same coin. Protecting America’s wide-open spaces is insufficient reason for a wall with 50-caliber turrets along the border. Preserving American civilization is, but its future can hardly be on the minds of people who refuse to procreate. Love of country is meaningless to a people so steeped in self-loathing that they eat pills to avoid perpetuating their name.

Some honest-to-goodness bleeding hearts undoubtedly bought the pill’s empty promises — ranging from greater marital intimacy to fewer abortions. We know today that the opposite is true: Because of the pill and the sexual license it encourages, divorce and abortion have become commonplace and acceptable.

The problem is not permanent, however. Contraceptors, after all, will take care of themselves. As they do, the meek, who have surrendered their lives—and their lineages—to Divine Providence will begin to inherit the earth. It will be up to this remnant of Christianity to evangelize the growing Third World. Doing so may not prove as insurmountable as some might imagine. After all, enough citizens of the Third World are sufficiently meek before their Maker—even those who do not yet know His Name—to appreciate that they ought not interfere with His creative forces.