According to the Religious Right, we live in perilous times. To hear the GOP candidates (former and current) talk about it, God needs them to bring this country back to basics because we’ve gone so far off track that if God were anything like he was in the Old Testament, we’d be having a flood.

So then why is the teen birth rate the lowest it’s ever been?

The birth rate for teenagers in the U.S. dropped to the lowest ever, with the fewest number of babies born to the age group since 1946, as health-awareness efforts paid off, U.S. officials said.

I can’t give a citation for what I’m about to say, but I can’t count the number of times I heard a sermon preached about how America was going to hell, largely in part due to unwed teen mothers.

Birth rates fell among all age groups, and racial and ethnic groups. The CDC credited “strong pregnancy prevention messages” with the declines, as well as an increase in contraception. It’s also more common for teenagers to use two kinds of prevention — a condom in addition to birth control pills, for example — when they have sex, the report said.

And oh hey! Guess what? Birth control works. Not abstinence.

Remember that, okay?