By Jim Brown, OneNewsNow.com

July 2007 – More than 3,000 delegates to World Congress of Families IV, held May 11-13 in Warsaw, Poland, were warned of growing threats to the “natural family” such as declining birth and marriage rates. They were encouraged to take action to defend society’s most basic institution.

The delegates endorsed a declaration that defined the natural family as “the fundamental human community, based on the life-long marriage between a man and a woman, in which new individuals are conceived, born and raised.”

Poland was chosen as the host country for the conference because of its strong resistance to the anti-family policies being pushed by other members of the European Union and the United Nations.

One speaker warned that European civilization faces eventual collapse if it does not reverse its increasingly secularist course.

Christine Vollmer, president of the Latin American Alliance for the Family, noted Europe has espoused not only “anti-natalist” policies of all kinds, but also policies of sexual permissiveness, which have proven to create infertility on a wide scale.

“This is grave,” Vollmer observed, “but graver still is that the pressure through persuasion and through the tax structure to put babies massively into daycare is creating a future generation of emotionally deprived and disturbed young people, incapable of attachments or of facing the great challenges of an aging population.”

These facts, she noted, have been proven by neurological science.

A leading demographic expert who spoke at the event said the ongoing global decline in fertility is the single-most powerful force affecting the fate of nations in the 21st century.

Phillip Longman, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, pointed out that although world population may be growing, the world’s supply of children is shrinking. It is a trend he acknowledged as strange, but true.

“This trend started right here in Europe 30 or 40 years ago,” he told his audience. “Today in Europe there are 36% fewer children under the age of four than there were in 1960. There are 50% fewer children in Poland than there were in 1960.”

And while many experts know these trends, he added, “what many of us don’t realize is that this trend is now going global.”

Longman said the trend is not being fueled by high infant mortality rates, but is part of a larger trend in both rich and poor countries – people everywhere are having fewer children or none at all, and the adults are living longer.

A Southern Baptist theologian told delegates he believes the family has been weakened by the advance of feminism and “the marginalization of men.”

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary president Dr. Paige Patterson predicted that in a few years, men will be increasingly underrepresented among the intelligentsia and will gradually cede leadership in many areas to women.

Patterson lamented that most of the women ascending to these new roles will maintain a major focus on a career, not on the family and on children.

“Instead of encouraging adolescents to cut the apron strings of mother and venture out into society, we are begging mothers not to cut the apron strings [to] their babies and catapult them prematurely into a menacing world,” said the two-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention. “Mom and hot apple pie have been replaced by institutional daycare centers and cold apple turnovers at McDonald’s.”

Dr. Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America said parents’ choice between the secular and spiritual views of life determines how they will raise their children.

“Values are what make the difference. They have a huge impact on our actions,” Crouse stated. “Values determine how well we handle our responsibilities. There’s a very important progression here I want to emphasize at this World Congress of Families. Values shape a person’s attitudes. Attitudes shape a person’s actions. Actions shape a nation’s future.”

According to Crouse, “the centrality of faith, the necessity of marriage and the sanctity of life” are all essential for a child’s well-being.

Delegates overwhelmingly agreed with her contentions. In their Warsaw Declaration, they called on “[c]hurches and other religious communities to proclaim the truth about life, marriage, and the family,” and urged “[g]overning and political bodies to mainstream the family in public policy as a fundamental and inalienable social good, in order to serve their own nations.”

In the eyes of these pro-family activists, the revitalization of any society begins in the home.