Those who think demographic statistics should be of interest only to social scientists and policy wonks should pay close attention to Stanley Kurtz’s recent article, “Demographics and the Culture War,” published in the current edition of Policy Review. A Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, Kurtz is one of the most thoughtful observers of social trends on today’s scene.

For decades, Americans have been warned of an impending population explosion that would threaten world happiness, human health, and perhaps even threaten the end of the human species. The prophets of a population explosion have issued regular books and bulletins that paint a depressing picture of a planet running out of both room and resources. Now, it turns out that these Cassandras got the picture almost entirely backward.

The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age–and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.