Christians hold $10,000 matchmaking convention to encourage far-right births

01 April

shallow focus photography of hand and people

Editor's Note: This headline has been updated.

The natalist or pronatalist movement — an obsession with the idea that people need to be having a lot more kids — has gained so much ground with Christian nationalists that natalists even have their own convention. Natal Conference 2025 was held this year on March 28-29 in Austin, Texas, and the event included a special natalist matchmaking session, according to Wired.

Wired's Manisha Krishnan reports that the publication obtained an e-mail indicating that "matchmaking may play a significant role at the conference and in the pronatalist movement more widely."

The e-mail, sent by a Natal Conference 2025 organizer named Luke, read, "This is a special email to NatalCon attendees who indicated they were highly interested in finding the missing puzzle piece for singles, matchmaking, marriage, and family formation. We were stunned to receive many emails saying, 'NatalCon needs to be focusing on this, right now!' And we're here to serve you. This is coming from all sectors: singles, parents with dating-age children, grandparents, newlyweds that want to help their friends start families, and more."

Tickets for Natal Conference 2025 cost $1000 for one person or $1900 for two people, and a Saturday-only ticket cost $500. But the matchmaking session was even more expensive: $10,000 for both days, according to Krishnan.

Krishnan notes that the natalist movement has some prominent supporters, including Vice President JD Vance and Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk.

"The pronatalist movement, which views declining birth rates around the world as an existential threat, has seen a boom in recent years, propelled by famous and powerful tech elites, including Musk, who has 14 children," Krishnan reports. "Tweeting about the 2023 Natal Conference, Musk said, 'If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end'…. The movement gained even more momentum during the 2024 election, when comments surfaced of then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance calling Democrats 'childless cat ladies' around the time of his Senate run in 2021; he also previously said people with children 'should have more power' than 'people who don’t have kids.'"

Krishnan adds, "However, the pronatalist movement has been criticized as being racist and classist, with some startups catering to adherents by even offering to screen embryos used for in vitro fertilization for IQ."

Read the full Wired article at this link.

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