This article follows the last discussion I had with Jonathan on his YouTube channel.¹ In that conversation, we discussed a concerning worldwide trend: as nations industrialize, they face a fertility decline that accelerates into an unstoppable spiral.

There is only one exception to the trend: Israel. Amazingly, Israel is a tech powerhouse and also has a high, stable fertility rate. And not only that, but Jews in Western countries seem to have reliably higher fertility rates than other groups, often at or above replacement. Why? Are there lessons we can learn? I will try to tell the story in this article.

Death in Cain’s City

In the Bible, the first mention of a city is the one founded by Cain after he slew his brother Abel (Gen. 4:17). This illustrates a recurring historical pattern: in the vast majority of pre-modern cities, death rates exceeded birth rates, especially because so few children survived to adulthood. As a consequence, like the sedentary Cain who killed the nomadic Abel, cities long fed on the countryside, requiring constant rural in-migration simply to maintain their populations.

Thanks to modern medicine and public health, infant and child death rates have fallen dramatically across the industrialized world and are dropping rapidly worldwide. Yet Cain’s spirit still lingers: to this day, cities exhibit unsustainably low birth rates and must feed on suburban and rural populations, though for different secondary reasons.

In farming families, children quickly become net contributors: by the time they are old enough to work, they essentially pay for themselves. Moreover, once parents have three or four children, the marginal time required to raise additional ones declines sharply because older siblings help care for the younger ones.

In cities, by contrast, parents must support children fully — and often well into adulthood — because urban economies currently demand years of advanced education that rural life doesn’t require. Advanced education, in turn, delays marriage, which constitutes one of the strongest predictors of lower fertility. Thus, the average number of children women say they want exceeds the replacement level (around 2.5 in the U.S.), but actual fertility falls short primarily because of postponed marriage and childbearing.²

Cities also accelerate ideological change. Greater density and contact between people speed the spread of both ideas and behaviors — for better and for worse. Christianity first flourished in urban centers two thousand years ago, but the same urban dynamic has more recently been driving secular materialism across the West. Since secular materialism strongly correlates with lower birth rates, cities thus remain demographic sinks, even if child mortality rates have fallen very low.³

This pattern now affects entire industrialized nations, which function like scaled-up cities and face analogous challenges. All such countries are in a serious demographic crisis, with one striking exception: Israel, whose total fertility rate — around 2.9 children per woman — remains well above replacement and far higher than the OECD average (about 1.5).⁴

Israel Cut Off, Rome Grafted

Israel’s fertility today echoes what happened two thousand years ago when Christians, empowered by the Holy Spirit to live fruitful lives, conquered the Roman Empire in large part by means of high birth rates.

Recall that Rome is Cain’s city.⁵ Just as Cain killed his brother before developing technology and founding a city, Romulus killed his brother Remus before founding Rome, which would reach a level of material prosperity unparalleled until the Industrial Revolution. Note further that sexual immorality was rampant in Rome, like in the cities inhabited by Cain’s descendants as chronicled in the Book of Enoch. As I’ve explained in an earlier article and although it’s not by necessity, it’s a fact that death, sexual depravity and technology often go together in our fallen condition.⁶

In ancient Rome, misogyny was especially widespread. Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has shown that pagans practiced widespread contraception, abortion, and especially female infanticide, producing skewed sex ratios (e.g., 131 men per 100 women in some records) and depressing fertility. Christians, in stark contrast, valued women, children, and large families, rejecting those practices.⁷ Analysis of Roman funerary inscriptions has uncovered that Christians had large families not only compared to pagans, but even compared to Jews.⁸

Further, because they were made courageous by Christ’s victory over death, Christians did not fear to care for their sick during plagues, unlike pagans who abandoned them without food or water. This ironically made Christians several times more likely to survive than pagans, and made Christians live longer. If you do the math, it seems that the natural demographic effects of such supernatural Christian ethics accounted for a substantial share of Christianity’s growth in the centuries before Constantine’s conversion.⁹

Thus, when Saint Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans, he addressed a community that had solved Cain’s urban demographic problem — and solved it so successfully that they would eventually outnumber and culturally absorb the pagan majority. Jesus, akin to the shepherd Abel, was redeeming Cain’s city.

Indeed, Roman Christians were mostly recent pagan converts who embraced a Jewish-rooted faith and used the city’s opportunities to their advantage. Symbolically, this fulfills the vision of the heavenly Jerusalem descending upon the earth to receive its riches:

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Rev. 21:2)

And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. (Rev. 21:24)

Note further that in the early Church, Jews had pre-eminence. Jesus Himself was of course Jewish, and so were all his earliest followers. I take this to be why Jews are listed first in Revelation 7, worshipping the lamb at the center of the heavenly city, before the multitude of nations. It also relates to Saint Paul’s famous formulation to Romans:

Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; but glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile. (Rom. 2:9–10)

Thus, a Jewish-rooted faith not only survived but thrived in cities — the very environment that usually destroyed populations. Pagan cities ironically became the breeding ground for a faith that would transform the empire. Cain and Abel were reunited in Christ, who was both a tekton and a shepherd, both the Roman emperor of a technological empire and a nomadic Jewish preacher.

However, as Saint Paul’s formulation suggests, this success was not painless for Jews. Jesus and Paul both warned that many Jews would initially reject the Messiah, allowing Gentiles to be grafted in their place (Rom. 11:17–24). Paul uses the vivid image of an olive tree: unbelieving Jews were cut off, while believing Gentiles were grafted onto the Jewish rootstock. Those who believed became the spiritual foundation (Abel) of a movement that conquered Rome (Cain); those who did not were forced to wander (like Cain after killing Abel).

Rome Cut Off, Israel Regrafted

But that’s not where the story ends. Romans 11:20–23 reads,

Because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again.

Indeed, today the situation seems to unfold as Saint Paul had warned. The technological, urbanized, secular West is experiencing a self-inflicted decline in birth rates, which has started a socio-economic collapse.¹⁰ Meanwhile, Jews — especially in Israel — show remarkable demographic vitality. In the US, Orthodox Jews have a fertility rate well above replacement — around 3.3 — while also being wealthier than the average population.¹¹ No other group, to my knowledge, has achieved this level of wealth without collapsing its birth rates. And perhaps even more strikingly, it seems that Israel is in fact the only industrialized country in the world that might have a future in its current form.

Indeed, Israel is the only nation that has become wealthy without collapsing its birth rates. No other country is even close. Truth be told, it seems that every other industrialized nation has already started going down a socio-economic death spiral. It only remains to be seen how low that spiral will go, and how those nations will re-emerge from the rubble.

As far as pre-industrial nations, it also remains to be seen how they will fare exactly. Alarmingly, as Western ideas and contraceptives spread worldwide, several pre-industrial and industrializing countries are already seeing their birth rates drop alarmingly. Most of South America and Asia have fallen well below replacement, for instance.¹² Cain’s materialism might collapse those nations before they can even enjoy material prosperity.

In any case, Israel remarkably bucks this trend, enjoying both wealth and a stable, high birth rate. Perhaps even more remarkably, and as predicted by Saint Paul, a major reason for Jewish success lies in centuries of mistreatment by Rome and then the West more generally. After Romans destroyed the temple in 70 A.D., Jews moved from a religion of sacrifice to a religion of the book, in which literacy and education became a religious duty.¹³ This would later turn out to be deeply providential.

Indeed, especially in the Rome-centered West from the High Middle Ages onward, Jews were repeatedly expelled, persecuted, and barred from owning land. They were pushed into urban trades, moneylending, and portable professions that could be practiced anywhere. High literacy rates were a godsend in such circumstances. While cities are normally demographic sinks as we’ve said above (for example due to poor sanitation leading to high child mortality), Jews survived and even flourished in cities — an extraordinary historical exception. It’s arguably as miraculous as the Christian takeover of Rome. No other people maintained identity and population through such prolonged urban displacement.

As Saint Paul wrote and many Church fathers have explained,¹⁴ Jews are protected and will make it to the end of the story:

For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the father's sakes. (Rom. 11:25–28)

Western persecution forced the Jews — protected by God — to develop cultural (and possibly even genetic¹⁵) adaptations to city life. Two examples would be high-value urban professions, required to earn enough money to bring children to adulthood, and exceptionally tight-knit family and communal bonds that enable early marriage and alloparenting (shared child-rearing).

Consider how materialism and technology have fragmented Western families into isolated nuclear — or even single parent — units. Prioritizing material gain over familial and communal ties, Westerners frequently relocate, and divorce rates have skyrocketed to around 50% — against the expectation and intention of those who militated for its legalization.¹⁶ In contrast, Jewish communities, by necessity, learned to retain strong extended-family and communal support systems, and strong stigma against divorce. Despite having a much higher marriage rate than the general population (around 80—85%), the Orthodox Jewish divorce rate is amazingly only 10%.¹⁷ No other wealthy and large population has managed this feat. Thus, Jewish families seem inoculated against the materialistic individualism that is hollowing out the Western family.

More generally, what has not killed Jews has made them stronger, arguably thanks to divine protection. The West, having cut itself off through secularization has — unwittingly — prepared the ground for Israel’s regrafting. Because Jews were forced to live in cities for centuries, they were prepared to live in the industrialized West more than Westerners themselves.

I’m not sure what will happen to Jews or Israel exactly, and I don’t want to confuse faith with demographics, but I do think, like Paul, that God has been protecting Jews and preparing them for something. I also realize that modern Judaism is different from what it was at the time of Christ, and I’m not sure what form it will have when the story ends, but one thing is apparent: through the failures of Western Christianity, God has put the Jews back in Israel and is blessing them with the positives of Cain’s technology without its downsides, at least in terms of fertility rates. Remarkably, Jews are no longer precarious exiles, like Cain who was forced to wander from city to city after slaying his brother. Rather, Jews seem to have reached a fruitful balance between nomadic diaspora (Abel) and sedentary Israel (Cain).

It remains to be seen what God will ask of Israel in return. It’s not something I have enough insight to speculate about, but being selected and protected by God typically comes with heavy self-sacrificial responsibilities.... So, if any antisemite is still reading at this point, hold your horses.

Rome Exiled: A Practical Response

Regardless of what plans God has for Jews exactly, we Western Christians can ask ourselves: how to respond to our self-inflicted demographic exile, to finding ourselves once again in Cain’s hostile civilization? The ultimate answer is of course repentance and renewed faith. A down-to-earth lesson we can learn from Jews, however, is this: if you are a parent, discern whether God might be calling you to live in a city, with the mission of raising a faithful family and helping other families do the same.

I suspect that many readers of this essay will naturally have the opposite inclination: leaving the city behind to live a quiet, country life to raise a large family. After all, there are biblical passages about the need to flee cities that have become too corrupt. Lot had to flee Sodom (Gen. 19). Mary/the Church has to flee to the wilderness in Revelation 12. In the Gospels, Jesus himself warns Jews of the coming fall of Jerusalem (70 A.D.):

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come. When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day: For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. (Matt. 24:14–21)

This warning arguably holds for analogous historical situations, such as the fall of Rome a few centuries later, and maybe even the fall of the West today. I do not wish to venture further into the dangerous terrain of historical-apocalyptic mapping, however. I will rather let the readers discern whether Western civilization is in such a terrible state that it must be left behind altogether.

Personally, I take Israel to be a living example that it’s not too late, and that our technological civilization hasn’t yet gone so far that it’s inevitably going to destroy families and faith. At a lower scale, I also see examples around me, in my city or cities similar to mine, of thriving faithful families that use technology responsibly. And I think such families have a very large positive influence — much larger than if they had fled to the suburbs or the countryside.

All other things being equal, the family that is able to live in a city and find ways to pass on the faith will have a much greater impact on the future. Not only will their direct descendants be better adapted to life in a technological city and nation, but such families will also have the social impact of helping other families and couples do the same. This can echo exponentially through the generations, like Noah’s children repopulating the earth, or Joseph’s family multiplying in Egypt. This is how Israel’s current success was forged: one faithful urban family at a time.

Some readers might be concerned that I’m trying to enlist children to fight a war they haven’t signed up for. My point however is that we are all born into a world already at war. There is no escaping it. Since Cain, the city has largely been a place where families die, except for a brief moment of victory in early Christianity. And now, the entire West has become a large city that is hostile to life and faith. So, of course, we can retreat outside of the city where raising Christian families is arguably easier (at least for now), but if we’re retreating, we’re not necessarily setting up our kids for later victory. If we retreat to a suburb, say, we have to be careful not to paint our kids into a corner from which they’ll be forced to retreat even further, say to the countryside. And if that doesn’t go well, where will our grandkids go?

Maybe retreat is inevitable — if the West is too far gone — but maybe not. Despite all its problems, it would be a shame to give up on technology too fast; to go back to an age of recurring famines and high infant mortality, if we can help it. Sure, faith matters more than health, but if we still have a shot at having both, I personally want to contribute. If we can possibly hold on to Christ’s reunion of Cain and Abel, I want to help.

I’ll let the readers discern for themselves. But if you think we still have a chance at integrating technology, faith and life, we do need to go on the offensive at some point and face the heart of the problem: cities.

Men and Women’s Roles: Lessons from Egypt

There are millions of family-specific things we must learn to thrive in cities, many of which are hidden, making them difficult to write about. This is especially true of the feminine aspect of reproduction, which is by nature hidden and embodied in concrete, personalized details that resist abstract generalization. Let’s go through a biblical story to that effect. Once you pick up on the pattern, you’ll notice it elsewhere in the Bible.

In Egypt, a sophisticated ancient technological empire with advanced administration, architecture, and centralized power, the Israelites faced existential threats. Yet they not only survived but exploded in number: “The people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them” (Ex. 1:7). This growth happened despite the demographic sinks of famine, slavery and even later infanticide policies.

Joseph, sold into slavery and rising to become vizier through God-given insight into Pharaoh's dreams, exemplifies a distinctly male role in this reversal. He integrated fully into the empire’s economy and administration. During years of plenty, he stored massive grain reserves; in famine, he managed distribution, acquired land and resources for Pharaoh, and strategically relocated his family (the nascent Israel) to the fertile agrarian region of Goshen. There, shielded from the worst cultural pressures, they could grow. Joseph’s public wisdom and economic stewardship preserved life on a national scale, turning potential collapse into provision and protection.

His story shows how someone who prays and receives divine insight, when channeled through high-level integration into the system’s structures, can sustain and position a people for future flourishing — even (or especially) in urban-imperial settings that demand advanced skills and loyalty to the ruling order. It’s also very relevant that while Joseph worked next to Pharaoh, in the heart of the city, his larger family flourished in Goshen, a rural region. Not everyone is called to lead the technical offensive like Joseph, but someone has to.

In complementary contrast, the quiet, often secret work of preservation and multiplication fell heavily to women. Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, directly defied Pharaoh’s order to kill newborn boys at birth. Fearing God more than the king, they let the boys live and told Pharaoh that Hebrew women were too vigorous to need their assistance in time. God blessed them with households of their own, and the people continued to multiply (Ex. 1:15–21).

Then, when Pharaoh escalated by commanding all boys to be thrown into the Nile, Jochebed (Moses’ mother) hid her infant son for three months before placing him in a basket on the river. Her daughter Miriam watched from afar and, with quick thinking, arranged for their own mother to nurse the child after Pharaoh’s daughter discovered and adopted him — securing not only Moses’ survival but payment for his care. These layered acts of deception, domestic ingenuity, familial coordination and networking preserved the future deliverer while the broader population grew through hidden, unrecorded but relentless fruitfulness: early marriage, large families, and the kind of alloparenting and communal support that allowed parents to raise many children without proportional increases in burden.

In summary, men like Joseph engage the empire’s visible machinery to create space and resources for life, while women operate in the hidden sphere of birth, nurture, networking and covert resistance. They make families thrive, protect the vulnerable, and ensure the next generation emerges even when the powerful seek to cut it off. Together, men and women enable Israel to multiply exceedingly in the city of Cain.

Conclusion: A Critique of Kingsnorth’s Critique

I will conclude by addressing a critique that many readers have probably considered. In his much discussed book Against the Machine, author Paul Kingsnorth is highly critical of cities, diagnosing a centuries-long “Great Unsettling” that severs humanity from the four P’s (people, place, prayer, and the past) replacing them with the four S’s (self, screen, sex, and scientism). This process “unmakes” us by alienating us from roots, limits, and the transcendent, turning culture into anticulture and consciousness into something fragmented and machine-like.

I won’t go into more details, because readers of this blog have likely read Kingsnorth or at least watched him on YouTube.¹⁸ The point, in the framework I’ve used in this essay, is that Kingsnorth critiques Cain, and I broadly agree with his assessment. I however don’t think that Cain is completely irredeemable. This is why, unlike Kingsnorth, I don’t plan on leaving the city to go live in the woods.

While his “Machine” trend no doubt holds for most Westerners and industrialized countries, Orthodox Jews seem to avoid it, especially in Israel. In fact, we can see from Kingsnorth’s own framework that their success in marrying technology and life is not random. Despite being a technological powerhouse, Israel has managed to maintain the four P’s that Kingsnorth says the Machine attacks:

• People: High emphasis on family formation, social cohesion, and collective identity.
  
• Place: Zionism is explicitly a rooted return to ancestral territory after millennia of diaspora; attachment to the physical land of Israel is cultural, historical, and often religious.
  
• Prayer: Judaism provides a living sacred order. Religious observance (especially Orthodox/Haredi) correlates with the highest birth rates; even secular Israelis operate in a society where the sacred calendar, rituals, and transcendent narrative remain pervasive.
  
• Past: Deep continuity with biblical history, exile, return, Holocaust memory, and tradition.

Jews are therefore a living testament to both the correctness and the incompleteness of Kingsnorth’s thesis. The conversion of Rome by Christians would be another. He is right that if his four P’s are respected, a group can resist the machine. Where Kingsnorth seems to fall short however, is how much of the machine can seemingly be integrated when those four P’s are respected. Jews seem able to integrate most of it. So were the early Christians.

Thus, not only is it possible for an individual or a family to resist the machine, it’s obviously possible even for large groups of people. And ultimately, because the Heavenly Jerusalem is a city, cities in general must not be intrinsically doomed. In other words, it’s possible to rescue Cain; it’s possible to enjoy the fruits of civilization without being destroyed by it.

Another way to put it is that Kingsnorth writes in a very democratic manner, as if the effects of technology were uniform across the population and no one could escape them at all. I don’t think this is true. I do think that as technology progresses, fewer and fewer people are able to integrate it successfully into their lives, but some can. For instance, I think that someone who spends more time on social media than they do praying is likely lost to the machine. That implies that most people, if left to their own devices, will fail. In my mind though, the solution isn’t less tech across the board, but the self-sacrificial leadership of those who do pray enough.

Note that the Bible tells a very undemocratic story, as C.S. Lewis pointed out.¹⁹ In the Old Testament, God selects one people — and often even just a remnant within this people, when the majority strays. In the New Testament, Jesus starts very small, with a tiny group of followers, and most people seem not to understand him at all, to the point of crucifying him. In general, God saves through a small elite that is asked to give itself for others, so I’m not surprised that most people seem unable to handle our tech. Most people can’t handle most problems on their own, and God always saves the day through a small elite — like when Joseph saved his brothers.

Right now, God seems to have selected Israel as the elite of the technological world created by the West. They’re not alone of course; there are many Christians who are doing a heroic job of fruitfully passing on the faith to the next generation as the flood engulfs the surrounding culture. Nonetheless, as a nation, Israel seems especially poised to assume leadership on the other side of the deluge. God will no doubt ask much of them.

I’m not sure how the rest of the story will play out exactly, but at the very least, it makes me personally interested in learning strategies from the Jews, such as attempting to raise a faithful family in a city.

1.  Jonathan Pageau, “The Mythology of Demographic Collapse - with JP Marceau,” YouTube, January 9, 2026.

2.  Lyman Stone, “How Many Kids Do Women Want?,” Institute for Family Studies, June 1, 2018.

3.  Lyman Stone, “America’s Growing Religious-Secular Fertility Divide,” Institute for Family Studies, August 8, 2022.

4.  Jewish News Syndicate, “Israel tops birth rate in OECD,” June 24, 2024.

5.  See Jonathan Pageau, “Cain and Abel,” YouTube, October 20, 2022.

6.  Jean-Philippe Marceau, “Is this the Flood? Is Babel Next?,” The Symbolic World Blog, September 27, 2025.

7.  Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity (HarperOne, 2012), part II.

8.  John Stonestreet and Glenn Sunshine, “The Early Church’s Protection of Women and Children,” Breakpoint, May 6, 2024.

9.  Rodney Stark, op. cit., part II.

10.  See my summary in “Is This the Flood? Is Babel Next?”

11.  Per Research Center, "Jewish Americans in 2020", May 2021, pp. 187–208.

12. World Population Prospects, United Nations, “Fertility rate, total (births per woman),” World Bank Group, 2024.

13.  Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, “Jewish Occupational Selection: Education, Restrictions, or Minorities?,” Institute for the Study of Labor, July 2004, pp. 12–18.

14.  For introductions with several quotations from the Fathers, see Codex Justinianeus, “The Fathers on the Salvation of Israel,” Ancient Insights, April 6, 2021, and Nathan Busenitz, “Church History and Israel’s Future,” Cripplegate, June 14, 2012.

15.  Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion (Basic Books, 2010), pp. 187–224.

16.  Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Polity, 2022), chapter 8.

17.  Nechama Carmel, “The Data on Divorce: Q & A with Dr. Yitzchak Schechter,” Jewish Action, Spring 2017.

18.  Jonathan Pageau, “Western Civilization Is Already Dead - with Paul Kingsnorth,” YouTube, January 12, 2025.

19.  C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Geoffrey Bles, 1947), pp. 140–41.