A Man With a Twofold Mission
Gators' Tebow Credits Religious Upbringing for His Success
By Amy Shipley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2009; E01
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- The first time Florida quarterback Tim Tebow faced a large crowd, he trembled with nervousness. Still months away from emerging as a high school star in northern Florida, Tebow, then 15, had never felt 10,000 sets of eyes upon him.

And most unsettling of all, he was nowhere near a football stadium. In fact, he stood some 9,300 miles away from his home at a village in South Cotabato, Philippines. On the first of now-annual missionary trips with his father, Tebow stood behind a microphone and told the assembled high school students about his Christian faith, putting to the test evangelistic skills honed through years of speech classes at home.

Six years later, Tebow, the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner, has become so comfortable addressing crowds that he spoke to inmates at a Florida prison in April. And he has seen so much poverty and despair during his visits to the Philippines that he can't imagine getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as the BCS national championship game on Thursday, when his No. 1 Gators will face No. 2 Oklahoma.

"Pressure is not having to win a football game; pressure is having to find your next meal," Tebow said this weekend. "Even though we love it so much, football is still just a game. A lot of people bleed over it and love it, and I'm one of those people. But at the end of the day, I know what's more important, and pressure is definitely not football."

The more Tebow talks, the more it becomes apparent that almost everything he knows about leading a football team he's learned away from the field. Many important lessons came in his parents' home near Jacksonville, where all five Tebow children were home-schooled and prepared for the missionary trips that would commence when they turned 15. Others came on the ground in the Philippines, where Tebow traveled from village to village, talked to thousands of students and visited the four dozen children at the orphanage his father helps run on the island of Mindanao.

"I did enjoy every part of it, but at the same time, some of it's extremely sad," said Tebow, who was born in the Philippines and moved with his family to the United States when he was 3. "For some people, it can be pretty overwhelming. At the same time, the people you are able to help, you get a lot of joy from."

Pam Tebow said she geared her home-school lessons to her children's interests, with an emphasis on public speaking to ensure they could effectively communicate their beliefs when they were older. Bob Tebow, meantime, described himself as the taskmaster of the family. He insisted the children tend to a half-acre garden -- which provided nearly all of the vegetables for family meals -- and dispose of fallen trees in the back yard as measures designed to teach discipline, and the family had a firm rule: no complaining.

"Influencing people is so much more important than taking out the trash," Bob Tebow said by telephone from his home. "But you still have to take out the trash."

Despite the emphasis on their missionary endeavors, the Tebows embraced their third son's fascination with football, a game he began playing at 6. Though Bob Tebow wished Tim had chosen baseball, a sport known for the longevity of some players' careers, both saw the potential in raising a star athlete.

"I learned as a college student that whatever platform you have . . . you can take that platform and influence people for bad or influence people for good," Bob Tebow said. "In our country, people look up to, and listen to, football players. Is that right? They do, so it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong.

"I wanted all of my kids, not just Timmy, to use whatever they were good at for God's glory."

With the kind of size that allows him to run with the football as well as throw it downfield -- Georgia Coach Mark Richt called him a "freak of nature" and Kentucky defensive end Jeremy Jarmon described hitting him as akin to "trying to tackle a linebacker" -- Tebow could pass for a tight end. Yet when asked to describe Tebow, teammates and family frequently summon words that emphasize tenderness rather than toughness. Whenever the Tebow children would gather together and, at their parents' request, comment on the best qualities in their siblings, Pam Tebow said they all would cite Tebow's kindness.

"He's a great teammate, a great guy," Gators wide receiver Louis Murphy said. "He's caring, loving. Anything you want, you can ask him for, and he'll help you out."

Without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, Tebow frequently reveals personal details that shed light on his wholesome upbringing. He noted that one of his primary pregame routines is drinking a glass of milk the night before the game. He says his competitiveness is rooted in friendly but contentious games of Monopoly and Risk under the Christmas tree at the Tebow homestead, and he credits his father for being his biggest role model, teaching him how to lead with encouragement rather than criticism.

He hasn't, however, backed down from tough talk on the job. When Mississippi handed Florida its only loss of the season on Sept. 27, Tebow issued a tearful apology to the team's fans. Before standing up and saying "I'm extremely sorry" at the postgame news conference and guaranteeing that the Gators would be the hardest-working team in college football the rest of the season, Tebow sat at his locker and prayed about it.

"I didn't want to just go out there and speak straight out of emotion or just ramble on just out of anger," Tebow said. "I wanted to say something that meant something and something that was going to last, and also find the positive out of the situation."

Not only does Tebow seem at ease stating his mind publicly, he also seems to have enjoyed his mandatory interview sessions in recent days, eagerly responding to just about everything thrown at him, and even grinning at hard-hitting questions before taking each one on. He smiled broadly every time he was queried about Oklahoma defensive back Dominique Franks's comment this past weekend that Tebow would qualify as only the fourth-best quarterback in the Big 12.

"I'm just thankful for being fourth," he said with a grin. "That's pretty nice. I'll take it as a compliment."

And how does Tebow handle criticism so smoothly?

"You're always going to have naysayers; that's something I learned a long time ago from my parents," he said. "There are always going to be people who say bad things no matter what you do. . . . You just have to do what you think is right, and do your best. . . . My parents really helped me with that."

All five children received college scholarships, Pam Tebow said, and three remain directly involved in Christian ministry. A daughter, Christy, became a full-time missionary in Bangladesh. Robby is the area director for the Northeast Florida Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Peter, a computer engineer, is an intern at the University of Florida's Campus Crusade for Christ.

Tebow, meantime, preaches from a different pulpit, only the message isn't really much different. As questioner after questioner pressed on the apparent slight from Franks and the motivation it seemed to offer, the grin never left Tebow's face.

"I'm just going to come out here and play as hard as I can," he said. "That's something I was going to do in the first place."

The World Won't Be Aging Gracefully. Just the Opposite.
By Neil Howe and Richard Jackson
Sunday, January 4, 2009; B01
The world is in crisis. A financial crash and a deepening recession are afflicting rich and poor countries alike. The threat of weapons of mass destruction looms ever larger. A bipartisan congressional panel announced last month that the odds of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the year 2014 are better than 50-50. It looks as though we'll be grappling with these economic and geopolitical challenges well into the 2010s.

But if you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s. The economic and geopolitical climate could become even more threatening by then -- and this time the reason will be demographics.

Yes, demographics, that relentless maker and breaker of civilizations. From the fall of the Roman and the Mayan empires to the Black Death to the colonization of the New World and the youth-driven revolutions of the 20th century, demographic trends have played a decisive role in precipitating many of the great invasions, political upheavals, migrations and environmental catastrophes of history. By the 2020s, an ominous new conjuncture of these trends will once again threaten massive disruption. We're talking about global aging, which is likely to have a profound effect on economic growth, living standards and the shape of the world order.

For the world's wealthy nations, the 2020s are set to be a decade of hyperaging and population decline. Many countries will experience fiscal crisis, economic stagnation and ugly political battles over entitlements and immigration. Meanwhile, poor countries will be buffeted by their own demographic storms. Some will be overwhelmed by massive age waves that they can't afford, while others will be whipsawed by new explosions of youth whose aspirations they cannot satisfy. The risk of social and political upheaval and military aggression will grow throughout the developing world -- even as the developed world's capacity to deal with these threats weakens.

The rich countries have been aging for decades, due to falling birthrates and rising life spans. But in the 2020s, this aging will get an extra kick as large postwar baby boom generations move into retirement. According to the United Nations Population Division (whose projections are cited throughout this article), the median ages of Western Europe and Japan, which were 34 and 33 respectively as recently as 1980, will soar to 47 and 52, assuming no miraculous change in fertility. In Italy, Spain and Japan, more than half of all adults will be older than the official retirement age -- and there will be more people in their 70s than in their 20s.

Graying means paying -- more for pensions, more for health care, more for nursing homes for the frail elderly. Yet the old-age benefit systems of most developed countries are already pushing the limits of fiscal and economic affordability. By the 2020s, political warfare over brutal benefit cuts seems unavoidable. On one side will be young adults who face declining after-tax earnings, including many who often have no choice but to live with their parents (and are known, pejoratively, as twixters in the United States, kippers in Britain, mammoni in Italy, nesthocker in Germany and freeters in Japan). On the other side will be retirees, who are often wholly dependent on pay-as-you-go public plans. In 2030, young people will have the future on their side. Elders will have the votes on theirs. Bold new investments in education, the environment or foreign assistance will be highly unlikely.

Aging is, well, old. But depopulation -- the delayed result of falling birthrates -- is new. The working-age population has already begun to decline in several large developed countries, including Germany and Japan. By 2030, it will be declining in nearly all of them, and in a growing number, total population will be in steep decline as well. The arithmetic is simple: When the average couple has only 1.3 children (in Spain) or 1.7 children (in Britain), depopulation is inevitable, unless there's massive immigration.

The economics of depopulation are grim. Even at full employment, real gross domestic product may decline, because the number of workers will be falling faster than productivity is rising. With the size of markets fixed or shrinking, businesses and governments may try to lock in their positions through cartels and protectionist policies, ushering in a zero-growth psychology not seen since the 1930s. With each new birth cohort smaller than the last, the typical workplace will be top-heavy with graybeards. Looking for a flexible, creative, entrepreneurial labor force? You'll have come to the wrong address. Meanwhile, with the demand for low-wage labor rising, immigration (assuming no rise over today's rate) will double the percentage of Muslims in France and triple it in Germany. By 2030, Amsterdam, Marseille, Birmingham and Cologne are likely to be majority Muslim.

In Europe, the demographic ebb tide will deepen the crisis of confidence reflected in such best-selling books as "France is Falling," by Nicolas Baverez; "Can Germany Be Saved?" by Hans-Werner Sinn; or "The Last Days of Europe," by Walter Laqueur. The media in Europe are already rife with dolorous stories about the closing of schools and maternity wards, the abandonment of rural towns and the lawlessness of immigrant youths in large cities. A recent cover of Der Spiegel shows a baby hoisting 16 old Germans on a barbell with the caption: "The Last German -- On the Way to an Old People's Republic." In Japan, the government half-seriously projects the date at which there will be only one Japanese citizen left alive.

An important but limited exception to hyperaging is the United States. Yes, America is also graying, but to a lesser extent. We are the only developed nation with replacement-rate fertility (2.1 children per couple). By 2030, our median age, now 36, will rise to only 39. Our working-age population, according to both U.N. and census projections, will continue to grow throughout the 21st century because of our higher fertility rate and substantial immigration -- which we assimilate better than most other developed countries. By 2015, for the first time ever, the majority of developed-world citizens will live in English-speaking countries.

America certainly faces some serious structural challenges, including an engorged health-care sector and a chronically low savings rate that may become handicaps as we age. But unlike Europe and Japan, we will still have the youth and fiscal resources to afford a major geopolitical role. The declinists have it wrong. The challenge facing America by the 2020s is not the inability of a weakening United States to lead the developed world. It is the inability of the other developed nations to be of much assistance -- or indeed, the likelihood that many will be in dire need of assistance themselves.

A major reason the wealthy countries will need strong leadership are the demographic storms about to hit the developing world.

Consider China, which may be the first country to grow old before it grows rich. For the past quarter-century, China has been "peacefully rising," thanks in part to a one-child policy that has allowed both parents to work and contribute to China's boom. But by the 2020s, as the huge Red Guard generation born before the country's fertility decline moves into retirement, they will tax the resources of their children and the state. China's coming age wave -- by 2030 it will be an older country than the United States -- may weaken the two pillars of the current regime's legitimacy: rapidly rising GDP and social stability. Imagine workforce growth slowing to zero while tens of millions of elders sink into indigence without pensions, without health care and without children to support them. China could careen toward social collapse -- or, in reaction, toward an authoritarian clampdown.

Russia, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, is likely to experience the fastest extended population decline since the plague-ridden Middle Ages. Amid a widening health crisis, the Russian fertility rate has plunged and life expectancy has collapsed. Russian men today can expect to live to 59, 16 years less than American men and marginally less than their Red Army grandfathers at the end of World War II. By 2050, Russia is due to fall to 20th place in world population rankings, down from fourth place in 1950. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin flatly calls Russia's demographic implosion "the most acute problem facing our country today." If the problem isn't solved, Russia will weaken progressively -- raising the nightmarish specter of a failed state with nukes. Or this cornered bear may lash out in revanchist fury rather than meekly accept its demographic fate.

Of course, some developing regions will remain extremely young in the 2020s. Sub-Saharan Africa -- which is afflicted with the world's highest fertility rates and ravaged by AIDS -- will still be racked by large youth bulges. So will several Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. In recent years, most of these countries have demonstrated the correlation between extreme youth and violence. If that correlation endures, chronic unrest and state failure could persist through the 2020s -- or even longer if fertility fails to drop.

Many fast-modernizing countries where fertility has fallen very recently and very steeply will experience an ominous resurgence of youth in the 2020s. It's a law of demography that when a population boom is followed by a bust, it causes a ripple effect, with a gradually fading cycle of echo booms and busts. In the 2010s, a bust generation will be coming of age in much of Latin America, South Asia and the Muslim world. But by the 2020s, an echo boom will follow -- dashing economic expectations, swelling the ranks of the unemployed and perhaps fueling political violence, ethnic strife and religious extremism.

These echo booms will be especially large in Pakistan and Iran. In Pakistan, the number of young people in the volatile 15- to 24-year-old age bracket will contract by 3 percent in the 2010s, then leap upward by 20 percent in the 2020s. In Iran, the youth boomerang will be even larger: minus 31 percent in the 2010s and plus 30 percent in the 2020s. These echo booms will be occurring in countries whose social fabric is already strained by rapid development. One teeters on the brink of chaos, while the other aspires to regional hegemony. One already has nuclear weapons, and the other seems likely to obtain them.

All told, population trends point inexorably toward a more dominant U.S. role in a world that will need us more, not less. For the past several years, the U.N. has published a table ranking the world's 12 most populous countries over time. In 1950, six of the top 12 were developed countries. In 2000, only three were. By 2050, only one developed country will remain -- the United States, still in third place. By then, it will be the only country among the top 12 with a historical commitment to democracy, free markets and civil liberties.

Abraham Lincoln once called this country "the world's last best hope." Demography suggests that this will remain true for some time to come.

Neil Howe and Richard Jackson are researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-authors of "The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century."

Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 21, 2008; A10
BOSTON -- They are not religious, so they don't go to church. But they are searching for values and rituals with which to raise their children, as well as a community of like-minded people to offer support.

Dozens of parents came together on a recent Saturday to participate in a seminar on humanist parenting and to meet others interested in organizing a kind of nonreligious congregation, complete with regular family activities and ceremonies for births and deaths.

"It's exciting to know that we could be meeting people who we might perhaps raise children with," said Tony Proctor, 39, who owns a wealth management company and attended the seminar at Harvard University with his wife, Andrea, 35, a stay-at-home mother.

Humanism is both a formal movement and an informal identification of people who promote values of reason, compassion and human dignity. Although most humanists are atheists, atheism is defined by what is absent -- belief in God -- and humanists emphasize a positive philosophy of ethical living for the human good.

The seminar's organizers wanted to reach out to people like the Proctors -- first-time parents scrambling for guidance as they improvise how to raise their daughter without the religion of their childhood.

"I'm often told that when people have kids, they go back to religion," said John Figdor, a humanist master's of divinity student who helped organize the seminar. "Are we really not tending our own people?"

Across the country, religious observance hits a low for people in their mid-20s and steadily increases after that, "in conjunction with marriage and children," said Tom Smith, of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, which has polled people about religious affiliation and practice for decades.

Religious congregations are good at supporting parenting, said Gregory Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard who organized the seminar. Although most humanists may not believe in God, he said, they do believe in sharing their lives with others who share their values.

"Why throw the baby out with the bath water?" Epstein asked.

Most Americans are religious and believe in God, but a growing number of people have no religious affiliation. In 1990, 8 percent of respondents in the General Social Survey said they identified with no religion. In 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, the figure had doubled to 16 percent.

In recent years, the chaplaincy at Harvard has hosted humanist speakers such as novelist Salman Rushdie, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and U.S. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.). Student interest is booming. But something happens when those students graduate, marry and become parents.

For the Proctors, especially for Andrea, who grew up in a Catholic household, arriving at the seminar took a lifetime of questioning.

Growing up, she attended church each Sunday, took Communion and was confirmed. She became disenchanted after a sex scandal at her parish was poorly handled, she said. Then in college, she was "exposed to a lot of different beliefs in religions and science. It causes you to question."

Tony grew up fascinated by his neighbors' ability to find community at church, which he sometimes attended with them. "Every Sunday they would go to church and see friends. That was a neat thing," he said.

The Proctors found themselves making decisions about religion when they had a daughter last year. Andrea said her parents asked, "Of course you're going to baptize her, right?" She answered, "Actually, no."

Instead, Andrea did a Google search for someone who might perform a nonreligious ceremony to mark Sienna's entry into the world and found Epstein, the Harvard humanist chaplain.

Epstein officiated at the ceremony, while both sets of grandparents spoke about their hopes and dreams for the child, Andrea said. The Proctors named "guide parents" instead of godparents.

By the time they got to the Harvard seminar more than a year later, they were ready to organize a larger community of families like themselves.

A room full of concertedly nonreligious people has its idiosyncrasies. At the seminar, someone sneezed, and there was a long silence -- no one said "Bless you" or even "Salud" or "Santé."

For sale were T-shirts saying "98% Chimpanzee" or showing a tadpole with the words "Meet Your Ancestor." There were also children's games from Charlie's Playhouse, a Darwinian toy company, illustrating the process of evolution.

A recent study found that many Americans associate atheists with negative traits, including criminal behavior and rampant materialism.

People often ask, "How do you expect to raise your children to be good people without religion?" said Dale McGowan, the seminar leader and author of "Parenting Beyond Belief." He suggested the retort might be something like, "How do you expect to raise your children to be moral people without allowing them to think for themselves?" He advocates exposing children to many religious traditions without imposing any.

At the seminar, Andrea Proctor was thrilled to meet another mother who would like to start a group of parents and children meeting weekly or biweekly.

"We just put a huge pool in our back yard," Tony Proctor said. "We might have to start humanist barbecue pool parties."