The cult of child hatred

James Taranto, a secular editor for the Wall Street Journal, posted an interesting item last week as part of his popular "best of the web today" column, The War on Fertility. James was looking at an essay by Lisa Miller in the Washington Post, Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility. Apparently Ms. Miller takes umbrage that some Republican presidential candidates have large families and have the arrogance to not hide them away during the campaign. If you missed this column, you need to read it because it is equal parts fascinating look into the anti-child mindview and important lesson for believers. Here is the intro...

Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel. Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000 babies.”


There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Especially worrisome is the inevitable corollary to that belief: Women should put their natural fertility first — before their brains, before their ability to earn a living, before their independence — because that’s what God wants.

Gasp, there is nothing worse than a believer that...believes! It cracks me up that she has assigned a blanket, unspoken motivation that covers all of the past and present republican candidates even though that group contains a libertarian Christian man in his 70's, a much younger evangelical woman, a Roman Catholic and a mormon. She seems more put out by large, intact families than by Newt Gingrich and his serial adultery.

Needless to say, when she writes "There's nothing wrong with big families, of course", it is inevitable that she does think there is something very wrong with having a large family, namely that having a large family and daring to show them in public is somehow striking a blow against "women's reproductive freedom". How else to explain the "smug fecundity" of these...these....parents!

Of particular and unpleasant interest are the comments that follow her essay. If you thought she was a bit over the top, you ain't seen nothing yet! It is always instructive as well as ironic to read the vitriolic rants of people spewing hatred, stereotypes and intolerance toward those they accuse of....hatred, stereotypes and intolerance.

I have never, not once, heard anyone among the "Christian right" tout any of the candidates for their large family size. That doesn't mean that nobody has made that case but I haven't seen it and I certainly spend more than my fair share of time reading places where that should come up. This isn't really an issue among the "Christian right" at all as much as it is a visceral reaction among the secular Left to large families, at least large in the eyes of people in New York, D.C. and Los Angeles what qualifies as a large family. Where we live a family with five kids is not all that unusual but I can assure you that even in the Midwest large families garner a gasp and head shake response, perhaps more polite than in larger population centers but a shocked and disbelieving reaction regardless.

Although many people would classify me as intolerant because, for example, I think murdering unborn children is wrong, I don't presume to tell anyone else how many children to have. Of course I also don't presume to tell anyone how many children are enough. I think that decision is something left to each family to decide for themselves. For Christians it becomes more complex because we do have some explicit teaching from the Bible that describes children as a blessing from God which we ought to embrace rather than avoid, something that is formative rather than something to put off until the last moment. That doesn't mean that the Quiverfull folks are correct but I certainly am more sympathetic to their view than those who view children in a manner little different from the world.

That really isn't my point here. It is hardly news that "traditional" families seem to agitate people of a certain political viewpoint, especially if they are large families. Of greater concern to me, and what is sure to get some people wound up, is the way that feminism is being integrated into the church. From Taranto's post:

...why does it so bother Miller that the Romneys, Santorums and Pauls (and also the Palins, whom she mentions in another paragraph) made the choice to have large families? If she cared about choice, she would recognize it's none of her business. But contemporary feminism does not actually value choice, except as a means to an ideological end, which is the obliteration of differences between the sexes. The biggest such difference consists in the distinct and disparate demands that reproduction makes on women. Thus in order to equalize the sexes, it is necessary to discourage fertility. Implicit in contemporary feminism is a normative judgment that having children is bad.

James Taranto, an admitted unbeliever, seems to understand something that a lot of Christians are missing. Feminism is not a force for the "liberation" of women, it is a method for ideological transformation. A lot of Christian are buying into a form of feminism dressed up in Christian sounding language and in doing so are unwittingly buying into a worldview that has a goal far beyond women pastors. It is a worldview that diminishes the importance of family, replaces mothers with institutionalized childcare and ultimately denies the image-bearer understanding of humanity as unique in the world. It is lived out in the disbelieving looks large families get and the subtle insults (don't you know what causes that?) even in the church and in the burgeoning literature of neo-feminist Christians who consistently misinterpret and misrepresent Galatians 3:28.

I make no apology for sounding the warning against the influence of feminism in the church. To me it is no different than any other worldly influence, whether patriotism or materialism or environmentalism, that seeks to pervert and diminish the worldview that should be the focus of Christians. Just as patriotism conflates national identity with the church and militarism flips the peacemaking life of the disciple on its head, feminism seeks to replace the complementary and interdependent structure of the family with the radical but false independent life that reduces women to occasional baby-makers before sending them back into the work force as a unit of production. Let me be clear, women are not "liberated" by going to work outside of the home. We are living in a culture that rapidly is becoming one where staying at home, once the norm, is becoming something only the very well to do can afford (see this excellent comment on this very topic by the same columnist, James Taranto: The Unchained Woman). When staying at home with your children becomes a sort of luxury good and status symbol, who is really benefiting from feminism? Not the women who scramble all week to get their kids up, ready for school and daycare, rush to drop them off before trudging off to work only to do the same scramble in reverse at the end of the day. Certainly not the children who are raised by and large by strangers because the harried schedule of their parents and economic pressure of a two-income society reserves full-time parenting to the country club elites.

As the church we are called to look at life and the world differently, to not be carried along by every wind and whim of the culture but to hold fast to the timeless and counter-cultural teaching of Scrpture. This is true for the family more than almost any other facet of life and not surprisingly the family is often ground zero for attacks from the Enemy. Not every Christians is called or able to have a large family and having a large family is not a sure sign of theological maturity but we must be wary of worldviews that teach beliefs that run contrary to the Bible. Even if those beliefs are not overtly anti-Christian we must examine the underlying worldview of those who teach worldviews contrary to Scripture, whether in the family, in education, in the church or anywhere else. Although some honest opponents of the faith will be open about their opposition, many others utilize a more subtle influence that often is dressed in religious language and aimed at tickling our ears. We must constantly be wary and hold up every belief to the Word and the influence of the Spirit working in conjunction. Otherwise we invariably will be led astray by those who deny the Son of God. The more we look and think like the world, the less we look and think like Jesus.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

God opens AND closes the womb

Obviously infertility is not an issue I have had to deal with. We could hardly stop getting pregnant! For many in the church though it is a very real and very heart-breaking topic and it is one that doesn’t get a lot of conversation in the church because it is so hard to talk about in a culture that by and large gushes over the blessings of children. Especially for people like myself and others who have and embrace large families, talking about infertility is something that is often easier to just not do. So I appreciated reading an interview by a sister in Christ with a large family, speaking to another sister who has struggled with infertility: Viewing the Quiverfull World Through the Lense of Infertility, Part 1.

The interview is excellent, open and honest in a way that is kind of rare in the church. I would encourage you to read it especially if you are someone who is a “big family” person or someone who is or has struggled with infertility (or know someone who is).

Russ Moore on the evangelical view of children

I am turning my attention back to Russell Moore's wonderful book on adoption, Adopted For Life, and came across this gut wrenching quote on how American evangelicals have adopted the world's view of children:

Like the rest of American culture, we often see children as something expected but to be minimized, lest they get in the way of our dreams. And we think that's a sign of health. (Russell Moore, Adopted For Life, pg. 76)

That is sadly true.

Where are all of the babies?

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Americans had the lowest birthrate in 2009 that we have had in a century.

The U.S. birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century.

Births fell 2.7% last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

"It's a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before," said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report.

The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That is down from 14.3 in 2007 and 30 in 1909, when it was common to have big families.

It is an interesting phenomena that Americans and most other industrialized nations are seeing birthrates shrinking year after year, especially since the population is living longer and the ballooning amount of unfunded mandates is going to fall on the shoulders of an increasingly smaller pool of workers.

Some of this clearly has to do with extending “adolescence” (more on that in a later post). It also has to do with the equation many people have pounded into them that children are a liability and should be factored into your budget like a new car or funding your Roth IRA. When the economy goes bad, people cut back on all sorts of stuff including children. I don’t think that people have to have as many kids as they physcially can but I certainly disagree with the notion that kids have to be built into your budget like anything else. I wonder how many people that put off having kids or having more kids pay bills for cable, Netflix, internet, multiple cell phones, new cars and annually take expensive vacations. In many ways it seems that we make all sorts of luxuries “necessities” and see children as “discretionary”.

I fully expect this behavior from the world but from fellow believers I see a very similar attitude, an attitude of “children are a blessing but I don’t think I can handle more than a couple of blessings”. The voluntary restrictions on family size in the Body of Christ speaks to how deeply we have embraced what the world values and how thoroughly many of us see God’s blessings as incompatible with our lifestyles. Is it better to not have children because they are “so expensive” or is it better to have and love children who wear hand me downs, never go to Disney and perhaps can’t afford to go to the best colleges?

We go into debt to finance an unsustainable and empty lifestyle and go to extremes to prevent children from coming into this world. If that isn’t a sign of a society that is on the precipice of disaster, I don’t know what is.

Best of the week entry 2

This entry comes from a Roman Catholic blogger on the environmental impact of large families. As she points out in Big Families Are the New Green, large families are not generally environmentally destructive, at least not more so than small families. I loved this line:

Probably not. Moms of many already know that the work of caring for seven children is not the same as caring for one child times seven. In some ways, it’s easier. In the same way, many large families actually have a small-er carbon footprint than a typical family with one or two kids. A household of nine is not like a household of three times three. It just doesn’t work that way.

That is spot on. There are economies of scale in large families and I would hazard to say that because we spend less time running around, buying fast food/convenience food and hand clothes down instead of purchasing a new school wardrobe every year, we probably have a smaller "carbon footprint" than many smaller families. I have commented before that many of our neighbors with one of two kids or even no kids at all put out as much or more garbage each week. We may be lots of people but we conserve our resources and are pretty frugal. It is an interesting article with lots of common sense, so before your friends with the recycling t-shirt and Prius badger you into saving the planet by refusing to have children, keep in mind that most of what they are accusing large families of is simply not true. It is not only possible but quite realistic to be good stewards of God's creation at the same time that we fulfill our calling to be fruitful.

The anti-natalism in America

Great editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the Duggars, they of the 19 children and homespun clothing, and the underlying cause of the mix of fascination and revulsion they cause in the general population. Here are several excerpts from Duggar Economics: The Costs of 19 Kids :

Yes, the Duggars are an easy target: They have taken the idea of a large family and given it an exponential boost. And their lives are not exactly filled with suburban glamour, fancy college degrees or evenings at home reading aloud from collections of symbolist verse. The family tends toward plain clothes, warehouse-club portions and the New Testament. And yet the discomfort with the Duggars is not merely an expression of class snobbery. It has partly to do with their hyperfertility. There is a creeping anti-natalism in America that has made having large families a radical act.

Even by historical standards, the Duggars' soon-to-be-19 kids are exceptional. In 1800 the American fertility rate—that is, the number of children born to an average woman in her lifetime—was 7.04 for whites and 7.90 for blacks. (The first census was taken in 1790, and the numbers for the races were tabulated separately.) Over the years, the fertility rate trended inexorably downward. Today the average American woman has only 2.09 children, just a hair beneath the replacement rate of 2.1. The rate for Michelle Duggar's demographic group, non-Hispanic whites, is just 1.85. In 1800, the Duggars would have been odd. By today's standards, they seem positively freakish.

I don’t know that the Duggars are “hyperfertile”. They certainly have no problems getting pregnant but I think that even an average couple without fertility issues that got married early, had sex regularly and never used contraception would have quite a few kids. We have eight and we have used contraception sporadically through our 17 years of marriage. Take that away and we probably would have ten or more kids and still have several more kids ahead of us. The Duggars are not hyperfertile so much as the majority of America is anti-fertile. The industry in place to prevent or “undo” pregnancy is huge and the prevailing American attitude is that kids are something to think about when you are closer to 30 than 20 (or more frequently closer to 40 than 30!), something to consider only once you have “lived life” and travelled and certainly something to be limited to a “nice sized family”, i.e. 2 or 3 kids. This is the socially acceptable family size and tragically it is true in the church to very nearly the same extent. There are pockets of Christians with larger families but they are few and far between and often are a viewed by fellow believers as a weird blend of blessing and oddity.

What was troubling was a paragraph of stats that the author, Jonathan Last, inserted in the middle of the story:

There are scores of reasons for society's decreased fertility. Better medical care reduced infant mortality. In 1850 more than one in five children died in infancy; today that number is just a little over one in 166. With more babies surviving, families needed fewer births to achieve their desired family size. Effective birth control reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies. And, beginning in 1974, widespread access to abortion reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies that were brought to term. Forty-eight million abortions have been performed in America since Roe v. Wade; for perspective, the entire baby-boom generation comprises 75 million people.

The sheer number of abortions in America is staggering and when you look at the baby boomers about to retire and whining about Social Security insolvency, feel free to point to the nearly 50,000,000 workers who will never pay a nickel into the Social Security trust fund because they were murdered in the womb. We are reaping the fruit of a bloody harvest in the form of social insecurity for a whole generation because children became choices and now that same generation that exulted in their new found freedom to prevent and terminate pregnancy at will is looking around at am empty trust fund and demanding that someone do something about it.

Being the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Last examines the economics of children and it is fascinating:

Whatever its merits, the welfare state is a disincentive to childbearing. Each generation of workers pays for the retirement benefits of the generation ahead of it. The system is powered by babies, who grow up to become productive little FICA contributors. But even if you never have children, someone else's kid will eventually pay for your Social Security benefits.

Even as economic incentives for childbearing have diminished, costs have grown. The welfare state required an enormous new tax burden, for instance. When Social Security was first instituted, in 1937, only 1% of earnings up to $3,000 were taxed. Today Social Security and Medicare eat up 7.65% of earnings up to $106,800. According to a study by the Tax Foundation, the median American family in 1955 paid 17.3% of its income in taxes. By 1998, the median two-earner family paid 40.9%. All of which makes family formation much harder. As demographer Phillip Longman observes, young white men since the 1970s have seen a 40% decline in income relative to their fathers—for young black men the figure is 60%.

While the government started taking more of a family's money, the expense of raising a child shot to the moon. The Agriculture Department estimates that the costs of raising a child from birth to age 18—that is, clothes, food, health care—averaged $207,800 in 2007. In real dollars, that's a 15% increase since 1960. But the department's numbers leave out three big-ticket items: child care, college tuition and forgone salaries.

The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies reports that in 2008 the average cost of a full-time nanny was $9,630; the average cost of full-time day care was $14,591. That's as much as a year at college. The average cost of state-university tuition, along with room and board, is now $14,333. Private colleges average a good deal more— $34,132. But what's really striking is the rate of increase. During the past 35 years, the real-dollar cost of college has increased by 1,000%. That's not a misprint.

I especially liked the part where we see that the total tax burden on Americans has exploded from 17.3% in 1955 to 40.9% in 1998. Little wonder that so many families think they need two incomes to survive. In spite of the healthy tax deductions for kids, our society as a whole is structured to discourage children at the same it depends on a steady stream of new workers to fund the welfare system, which is really what Social Security and Medicare are: a welfare system writ large in the form of generational income redistribution. Instead of saving your own money for your own retirement, you pay money into a system to pay for the retirement of someone else and then you rely on an as yet unborn worker to pay for your retirement. Great system! At least until the fertility rates plummet and the post-retirement life expectancy jumps up. This self-defeating system is brought to you by the same people who want to take over health care. No thanks!

Ms. Last ends with this:

The Duggars have mortgaged their financial futures for their children. Yet we're the ones who will benefit. In 1940 there were 160 workers paying the tab for each person collecting Social Security. By 2006, there were just 3.3 workers supporting each pensioner. The Social Security Administration estimates that by 2034, there will be only 2.1 workers for each person collecting a government retirement check.

In an era when it is rare for a bourgeois couple to have even three children, the Duggars are helping subsidize our retirement at considerable costs to themselves. Instead of mocking them, we ought to thank them.

Amen to that!

As if they don't have enough issues

I have intentionally never commented on the Jon & Kate plus Eight circus. At the urging of a friend, I watched once and was so nauseated from listening to the parents whining about how hard their lives were, I never watched again. Raising eight kids takes a lot of effort? Who knew? Well, I knew and no one follows me around with a camera to capture the complaining because we don't. We know and we knew how challenging having eight kids is and we feel blessed to have a big family and not because we get a TV contract for exploiting them.

But you can't miss the constant news coverage ranging from marital problems to general unpleasantness to allegations of child labor law violations. Turns out though that all of that is not the biggest problem. Their biggest problem is that they are not a "green" enough family. Despite their efforts to recycle and such, they find themselves on the receiving end of the ire of environmentalists for having a large family:

Yet while there was much fanfare about the eco-move in the media, some environmental experts see big families and going green as mutually exclusive.

"A family with eight children could be green in the short term, if they lived at such a low standard of living that they didn't consume more than a family with two children, or if they existed in extreme poverty — which isn't an acceptable way of going green," says Rosamund McDougall, policy director of the U.K.-based Optimum Population Organization (www.optimumpopulation.org).

"In the long term, though, it is almost impossible for large families not to increase overall environmental impacts."

One of the reasons for the lack of green-ness is the emission of carbon dioxide.

If the eight children depicted in the show lived in Britain, they would each emit about 750 tons of carbon dioxide over a lifetime, McDougall explains. (American carbon-dioxide emissions per capita are about double that of Britain's.)

"What's more, if the eight children each had eight children, not taking into account the fact that eight husbands or wives would be absorbed from other families, there would be 64 grandchildren, each emitting 750 [metric tons] over a lifetime," says McDougall.

"Compare this with the total emissions of the two children who go on to have two children each, and you see only too clearly how the impact multiplies over time.

The different worldviews are starkly on display there. Christians see (or should see) children as "a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward" (Psalm 127). Eco-types see kids as carbon dioxide generators, merely consumers of resources and producers of pollution. What a sick worldview that sees the blessing of children as nothing more than spewers of carbon dioxide and large families as mini- Exxon Valdez wrecks.

Homeschoolers, big families and multigenerational impact

One of the statistics that caught my attention at the INCH conference had to do with the potential disparate influence of homeschooling families on the culture. Homeschool families on average have more than twice as many kids as non-homeschooling families. That is an enormous disparity and conferences like this one reinforce the idea of multigenerational vision with the youth and children being raised in these families. Properly done, these kids are being raised to rebel not against their parents or their faith but against the culture of mediocrity, of narcissism, of immorality and of death that surrounds them.

Make no mistake. The number one reason we homeschool and the reason that overrides all others and a reason that would be sufficient even if it were the only reason is obedience to God. Obedience to the mandate to raise our children in the fear and admonition, the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Eph 6:4), to speak to them of the Words of God morning and night and make them central in our homes (Deut 6: 7-9), to teach our sons to turn to us and the elders of the church to learn what has come before (Deut 32:7). But we also homeschool because we know that the children we raise now will someday be adults and go into the world. When they go we need to make sure that they are equipped for what they will find, that they will see all that is wrong and much that is right in that world and will be prepared to take Jesus Christ to the lost. Children in public schools are well-prepared to deal with the world on the world's terms. They are well-prepared to fit in with the culture and society, to become "productive members of society" and to do what is expected of them by the world. They may even "go to church" and be good people, but by and large a public school education is not going to prepare them for the enormous challenges that are ahead of us. When our vision for our kids only extends to the graduation ceremony of high school or the commencement ceremony at a college, we have failed them. Our vision as those entrusted with children must go beyond surviving the teen years and bloom into a multi-generation vision of the family that transcends the world's social structure and prepares children to become adults taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ from our homes and into the world.

The enormity of the task we face and the charge we have been given is far too great to compress into a few daily devotionals in the evening, youth groups, VBS and Sunday mornings spent rushing to and fro to fulfill our religious obligation. The task at hand demands our full attention and we cannot fulfill that mandate from God when our kids are being raised and taught for the most part by strangers and subcontractors.

INCH: Fellowship Session

We broke up after dinner into little sessions. We chose the homeschooling large families group. It is wonderful to be surrounded by hundreds of other couples who are Christians and who homeschool their kids. No one is going to look at us like we are weird because we are Christians or because we homeschool. But get us in that room and not only is everyone there homeschooling and devoted Christians, they all had at least five kids. One couple came in late and didn’t realize that they were in the wrong session until they introduced themselves as a couple with an 8 and 11 year old. We politely told them they were three kids short and had to leave. We got to talk about frustrations and concerns and boy is it nice to hear other people who have a large family express the same concerns we have. We aren’t weird! Well, maybe a little but we are not alone.

NPR piece on quiverfull now available

The report on large families, esp. quiverfull families, is on NPR this morning, you can read it or listen to it here (it is about five minutes long): In Quiverfull Movement, Birth Control Is Shunned. From the intro...

Among some conservative Christians, a movement is giving new meaning to the biblical mandate to "be fruitful and multiply."

The movement, called Quiverfull, is based on Psalm 127, which says, "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them."

Those in the Quiverfull movement shun birth control, believing that God will give them the right number of children. It turns out, that's a lot of kids.

It is a pretty fair article, without the usual “opposing view” people screaming about how we are eating up all the food and destroying the environment. You can tell that it is a completely foreign world to the correspondent Barbara Bradley Haggerty, as it is to many people.

This is something I am assuming was taken somewhat out of context…

That's also the hope of Nancy Campbell, a leader of the Quiverfull movement and author of Be Fruitful and Multiply.

"The womb is such a powerful weapon; it's a weapon against the enemy," Campbell says.

I don’t know that the way it is portrayed is all that accurate and I hope it wasn't chosen for shock value. We didn’t have a bunch of kids because we thought they were useful tools in the culture wars. We had them because God blessed us with them and we embraced that blessing. I also don’t know that the way it is written really is representative of what Ms. Campbell is trying to say. I get what she is saying when she says stuff like: "We look across the Islamic world and we see that they are outnumbering us in their family size, and they are in many places and many countries taking over those nations, without a jihad, just by multiplication," Campbell says.. It is not all about that, but if God’s people won’t have children and won’t raise their children up to follow Christ and won’t evangelize, well pretty soon we won’t have many Christians left over, will we?

What is really instructive is to read the comments that follow at the end of the article. Here are some samples…

I hate to see christians pigeon holed like this... not all are crazy, right wing conspirators that want to topple whole religions and societies in the name of christ.

I really wish the tax laws in this country were overhauled so that people who choose to have more than 2 children actually had to bear the full, complete cost of each additional child. No Federal or State handouts, no exceptions or exemptions, no nothing!...Then if they want to go on a population jihad fueled by irrational, archaic religious beliefs fine, but the entire cost comes out of their personal pockets, not mine or anyone else's!

This story about the Quiverfull movement is frightening to me on so many levels! It seems that their idea is to multiply to such great numbers that they will be able to take over the country (perhaps the world!) in order to deny those of us with a different perspective our right to live as we see fit. One of the very things that make this country great, and I might add something that enables THEM to do as they wish. There is room for everyone at god's table. Although with such irresponsible breeding, and giving no thought to the fact that this world does have finite resources, there may be no food for anyone to eat there.

Certainly it is rational to view stay at home moms with more than 2.1 children as being terrifying! Eeek, she has five kids, run! That is just the first few comments I read, I can imagine that the tenor of the conversation will continue to reflect this sort of narcissism. I am tempted to reply back but I figure that is just a waste of time. NPR is aimed at a particular audience and it is apparent from the comments already posted that no one is interested in having an intelligent conversation. It was just a few years ago that women had twice as many kids as they have today, but these people make it sound like some crazy movement that sprang up out of nowhere.
npr quiverfull national public radio quiver full quiverful

NPR on big families

Tomorrow morning on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, they are running a piece on large families and the quiverfull movement. I had someone from NPR email me a few weeks ago to ask if we were part of the quiverfull movement. Technically we are not, although I am sympathetic toward much of the agenda (obviously!). I am not sure what sort of reception the movement is going to get from NPR, especially since the advertisement for it this afternoon spoke about seeing kids as ammunition in the culture war. I will listen to it in the morning and put the link up when it appears online.

A proper perspective on large families

Perry from Life In A Shoe was interviewed recently on a local radio station in Texas, responding to the claims that people who have more than 2 children are being "irresponsible". His words are sound ones, reflecting the proper view of what the Word of God says about the blessing of children. You can listen to the interview here, it is less than 20 minutes long and worth the time to listen to.

(If you read the post on their blog, you will see why Perry seems so quiet. He was guiding a deer hunt and trying to keep quiet so as not to spook the deer!)

The NY Times on large families

A co-worker pointed me to an article in the New York Times from Sunday on some of the hostility that large families get in society titled And Baby Makes How Many? . Oddly, the NY Times was kind of sympathetic which seemed out of character for them. Big families tend to be looked at as something pretty odd, which is why people have reality shows about them (when we are asked if we watch those shows, I always tell people why would I? If I want to see life in a family full of little kids, I will just go home!) But the numbers bear out that large families are rapidly becoming a distinct and tiny minority in America….

If large families are the stuff of spectacle, it is partly because they have become rarer.
In 1976, census data show, 59 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 20 percent had five or more and 6 percent had seven or more.

By 2006, four decades after the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to use birth control (and the last year available from census studies), 28 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 4 percent had five or more and just 0.5 percent had seven or more.

“Three is still O.K.,” said Michelle Lehmann, the founder of lotsofkids.com and a mother of eight children who lives outside Chicago. “When you have four, people start raising eyebrows. When you go to five, people are like, ‘No way.’ ”

Beyond 10? “They think you are lying,” said Mrs. Gunnip, who also writes two blogs for so-called mega-families, those with eight or more children.

It is amazing to think that the percentage of families with 7 or more children has decreased in 30 years by more than 90%. I think Ms. Lehmann hits the nail on the head, the society as a whole looks at the size of your family and makes judgment calls based on how big the family is. 2 or 3 is great. Even four is sort of OK, but I know from personal experience that when you get past five people start to really look at your oddly.

One thing I found especially telling was the argument that having a bunch of kids is ecologically irresponsible.

“Every single person has multiple impacts on multiple environmental resources,” said Alan Weisman, the author of “The World Without Us,” which advocates a one-child policy to return the world to early 20th century population levels. “It’s a no-brainer that the more people there are, the more stress there is on an ecosystem that doesn’t get any bigger.”

Parents of large families counter that they have an economy of scale: a light bulb lights a room whether there are 4 people or 14. Their children learn not to take long showers, to share space, to appreciate hand-me-down toys, clothes and books.

“Large families are some of the greenest families,” Mrs. Gunnip said. “They don’t tend to have a lot of money, so they make sure things go as far as they can.”

That is a great point. My kids are not wearing brand new Baby Gap stuff, they wear hand-me-downs. My boys have worn pink jammies to bed when they were little because we were not going to buy brand new stuff. They don’t eat lunchables or drink out of juice boxes. They eat sandwiches they makes themselves and drink water or milk out of a glass. We don’t generate much more, or even as much, garbage as smaller families. Our kids are not consumers by and large. There are tons of houses around us that are much, much larger than ours and they house families with a couple of kids. Even though the reality is that large families are probably not substantially greater consumers of resources and that we are not replacing the population in many Western nations, the mindset that is becoming more and more prevalent is that there is something faintly immoral in having larger families. Dr. Mohler addressed news out of Great Britain last week that sounded ominously like the government there was considering limiting the number of children, as more than two was declared “irresponsible”.

As I have said before, it doesn’t surprise me that many unbelieving families look askance at large families. What is troubling is that so many Christian families have the same attitude. I am encouraged to see that families who desire to have large families and embrace the blessing of children are able to find support from people all over the country via blogs and other electronic media. In an given community or church, you may find a couple of big families but online you can run into thousands, and all of them are going through the same trials and struggles, getting the same inane questions (no there are not all my kids, six of them followed me in from the parking lot) but also are enjoying the incredible blessings that large families bring (a couple that are mentioned in the article that I am unfamiliar with are lotsofkids and largerfamilies).

It is an interesting article, you should check it out.

Some good news

From the Wall Street Journal:

No Waiting: Younger Women Are Saying Yes to Motherhood

For nearly 40 years, women have been delaying childbirth longer and longer, partly to launch careers. Now, this trend may be ending.

For the first time since government records have been kept, the average age at which women have their first babies posted a decline -- according to newly released data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Mothers' mean age at their first childbirth fell to 25.0 years in 2006, the most recent figures available, from 25.2 in 2005. Women ages 20 to 24 led the shift, with a 5% increase in the rate of first births.

A one-year reversal doesn't make a trend, of course. But the study lends weight to anecdotal evidence that young women are tuning in more closely to their biological clocks. "It's the first time it's ever gone down, and certainly that's noteworthy," says Brady Hamilton, co-author of the study.

The relegation of children as an afterthought, even among Christian couples, is leading inexorably to a decline in our society. We are rapidly approaching the point where we will not replace ourselves and are probably already at that point when we look at our societal expectations. We expect that we will work from about 20 until about 65 and then retire and live off our pensions, retirement savings and Social Security. But with people living longer and longer, and having ever fewer children, we are going to see our society becoming "top heavy" with far more adults in retirement than adults in the workforce, and that means that in order to support the system of expectations that we have, an ever increasing percentage of the wages of working Americans will have to be allocated to the care and support of the elderly.

The whole problem is compounded by the interference of the government in the process. Our government is inherently inefficient, so we have perhaps the least efficient institution in our society being given the greatest share of responsibility for our retirement. So we have society telling people "wait to have children until you are ready", which leads to later and later child bearing which in turn makes child bearing more difficult leading to the rise of fertility treatments. So here is the logic: save your money, wait to get married, get married late, have a hard time getting pregnant and then blow all the money you saved on fertility treatments or adoption. There is a difference between getting married later in life or having natural difficulty getting pregnant and the willful postponement of children until a more favorable time. This is especially true in Christian couples. Not that Christian couples wait longer than non-Christians, but that they should know better. Children are a marvelous blessing. I would hazard to say that after the miracle of salvation, there is no greater blessing a Christian can receive than children.

But what are we teaching our children? Are we teaching them through words and deeds that children are a necessary nuisance, one that should be avoided for as long as possible? Or are we encouraging them to seek the blessings of Christian marriage and children? Based on family size in churches and the age of parents, I would say that we certainly are not making having children a priority for our children.

I have more to say on this (surprise, surprise) regarding Christian kids and college later. Suffice it to say that if we are prioritizing careers, travel and fun for our kids and de-emphasizing marriage and children, we are failing as parents. If your daughter grows up to be a doctor or if your son grows up to be an engineer and they never grasp the blessings of marriage and family, you have not done your job as a parent and your children has been done a disservice.

Being fruitful

Last Friday Dr. Russ Moore filled in for Dr. Mohler (he is on a missions trip to Turkey) and the show, Encouraging the Blessing of Children, was just chock full of wisdom. The topic was on how the church can encourage Christian couples to embrace families, even large families with lots of children. Given my recent focus on abortion, I thought it was a very pertinent topic of conversation. How should the church approach children? Shouldn’t the church be counter-cultural and say that even as the world rejects the blessing of children, the church embraces and desires to receive that blessing as much as possible?

The evangelical church in all its forms is mighty quick to condemn homosexual marriage as sinful and reject the world’s interpretation of its normalcy, but when it comes to kids? Not so much. It could just be that it is always easier to preach against “them”. “They” are doing this or that and it is wrong, but it is harder to say things that impact those in the pews. I think that is true of lots of stuff that rarely makes it into sermons. Why not speak out about modest dress? What about headcovering? Because it makes people in the pews uncomfortable to talk about issues that reflect poorly on them instead of pointing the finger at the vague, amorphous “other”. Virtually every church is dominated by married couples and those are the people that need to hear that children are a blessing, a great wealth. When you say to people that children are usually the natural result of and one of the primary reasons for marriage, that might just prick the conscience of the couple that is “waiting for the right time” to have kids or who is limiting their family size to just a couple, a “nice little family”. It is sad that saying that children are a blessing and exhorting families to not shy away from but instead to prayerfully seek out those blessings is something of a controversy in the church. The world says wait until you accumulate financial blessings and then accept kids. The Word tells us that children are a blessing. There is nothing a married couple can do, nothing, that will truly prepare them for having children.

One of the most important things we can do is raise our children up to view having children as a great blessing. I worry that we are doing a poor job of this in our home. The last thing I want is for our kids to see us viewing a large family as being a burden and not wanting to have a large family of their own. So we are trying to do more as a family. Our new home will help, we are unable to all fit around the table in our current place because the dining area is so small, so we are looking forward to breaking out the big table that seats 12, putting in all of the leaves and all sitting down for meals again. We are also working out a pretty hard and fast weekly schedule so that we have more of a plan instead of letting the week happen to us. We are looking to schedule time for dad and daughter, mom and son, mom and daughter, dad and son time. That will mean that I will have to set aside doing some of the things that I do to unwind, but since I am driving all of 2 minutes to work starting next week I hardly have an excuse to need time to “unwind”. The incredible importance of family is something is that is Scriptural but is also passed on generationally. If your parents discouraged you from having kids, you are probably less inclined to have them. If you don’t encourage your children to have children and show them from the Word of God that children are a blessing, not a burden and that waiting for the “right time” to have kids in your marriage is kind of missing one of the key components of marriage, you can expect your children to emulate the world’s view that children are a necessary evil, an expense to have but not until as late in life as possible.

One of the things that the mormon church does very well is encouraging marriage in their young people. Show me a mormon missionary and I will show you a 20 year old guy who values marriage and is eager to get home, get married and start a family. Now the theological reasons behind that are seriously flawed and heretical, but what mormons have created is a marriage and family culture within their church. I am not recommending we emulate the mormon church, but we can and should do a better job in teaching our children to value marriage. Not just don’t have sex until you get married, but to value marriage, to seek it out, to have a culture of marriage that has as an integral component having and raising children. If we treat marriage and children as separate components, I think we are doing a disservice to our children. Just as I would strenuously reject my child marrying an unbeliever, I would be very hesitant to see my children marry someone who does not share their views of children. Once you are married, it is a pretty poor time to figure out what your spouse thinks or desires regarding children. That is not to say that there are not circumstances of infertility (an issue I want to discuss in the near future and the proper Christian response to it) or couples that for a variety of reasons get married later than usual. But for an average couple getting married in their twenties, the priority should not be vacations to Europe now and putting off children until later.

As Dr. Moore’s guests demonstrate vividly, this is where the older Christians should be discipling the younger. That is such a vital part of a healthy church and has clear Scriptural mandates (Titus 2: 2-8), but what do we do? In many churches we segregate the young couples from the old, the married from the single. What a shame that is! Where should young Christian couples learn about marriage? From other young couples or from older, more experienced couples? Where should Christian singles learn about and see demonstrated the blessings of a Christian marriage? From other singles or from married couples? Let’s look at it from a secular source. Where do you want your doctor to learn to perform heart surgery, from an experienced heart surgeon or another medical school student? Older saints with forty, fifty or more years of marriage are a treasure trove of wisdom, but instead we let younger couples just stumble along and figure it out on their own.

The church must take the Scriptural teachings on the blessings of children seriously. Not just in passing but as a core value of its doctrine. If we are going to sponsor Dave Ramsey seminars, which are fine, we ought to be spending far more time on encouraging the blessing of children among Christian couples than we do about making budgets. We should teach on money so that it doesn’t become an impediment to Christian families, but we should teach on the blessing of children because that is one of the main points of having a family and an integral part of the church and of God’s plan for humanity. What good is a family with a great financial plan that rejects the blessing of children in their home? We are not commanded to leave our mother and father and cleave to a financial plan, we are to cleave to our spouse and become one flesh and be fruitful and multiply.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

Under arrest for excessive fertility?

Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. (Psalms 127:3-5 ESV)

Do we still believe that? By "we" I mean the church. Dr. Mohler brought up this issue on a recent radio program in response to some statements by secular writers, and he was pretty vocal in what he though about the issue. These writers and speakers are quite strident in their belief that having large families (large being defined by them arbitrarily and with an eye towards a shrinking populations) is inherently immoral and perhaps ought to be make illegal or at least taxed some heavily so as to become impossible for any but the elite (which is no doubt part of his plan).

When I heard and read from Dr. Mohler about this, I wanted to read it myself. I am comfortable with Dr. Mohler’s objectivity, but I still needed to read for myself and see if perhaps he wasn’t blowing things out of proportion. He wasn’t. The worldview that Paul Ehrlich and others like him subscribe to and are evangelists for is chilling in its callous disregard for the sanctity of human life. For Paul Ehrlich and his ilk, human beings are two things: 1) a source of pollution and 2) a means of production. The comments from Prince Phillip are pretty irrelevant because no one really cares what he thinks and he is generally considered to be a moron, so when a person with four kids says this:

The duke hints that curbing family sizes may be the best means of keeping the soaring cost of staple food products, such as bread and rice, in check.

“Food prices are going up,” he tells his interviewer, Sir Trevor McDonald. “Everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great – too many people. Basically, it’s a little embarrassing for everybody. No one quite knows how to handle it. Nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by the government.”

you are free to write him off as a crackpot. But Paul Ehrlich, despite the myriad of horrible false predictions he has made in the past, has an audience and for some reason credibility. He has written dozens of books and articles, all spectacularly wrong but he still gets press coverage. I can only assume his coverage is linked to the media wanting to believe what he says, no matter how wrong he is. Women in the work force in increasing numbers, abortion on demand, sex-ed at all ages, railing against SUVs as the mark of the beast all fit into the agenda of the media. So when Ehrlich says things like this, they deserve attention:

What do you mean by that? What is the U.S.'s role in contributing to world population?

Ehrlich: We have over 300 million people, which makes us the third largest population. But when you factor in our consumption and the technologies we use, like SUVs, our impact on life-support systems is much higher than even China's, and certainly higher than India's, which are countries with 1.3 billion and 1.1 billion people each.

I believe it is immoral and should be illegal for people to have very large numbers of children because they are then co-opting for themselves and their children resources that should be spread elsewhere in the world. You only get a chance to get your fair share.

Immoral and illegal. Having a family bigger than what Ehrlich thinks is acceptable is immoral and if he had his way would be illegal. The implications of this worldview are stunning. Ehrlich is so concerned with illegal abortions but what about illegal pregnancies? Will we come to a day when population stormtroopers kick down doors of secret OB offices, and dragging women off to have forced abortions? Think that sort of thing isn't happening in China? Or less extreme, what about families who are deemed unworthy being taxed into starvation? This is the inevitable end result of this sort of elitist totalitarian worldview.

What is perhaps more disturbing is this next statement:

How many is "very large"?

Ehrlich:

The issue is: What is the political position to take? In a country like the United States, we should stop at two. But if you had an ideal situation, you might have a lot of people who have no children at all, and some people who have as many as three or four because they happen to be particularly good parents, and are going to raise their children very well.

So someone, ideally, should have more kids if they are determined by some outside entity to be "particularly good parents" they should be "allowed" to have more kids, but others should have no children. Care to wonder who those who don't have the right to have any kids are? IQ too low? Too fat? Too religious? There is a word for this philosophy, although Ehrlich doesn't come out and say it:

Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention. Throughout history, eugenics has been regarded by its various advocates as a social responsibility, an altruistic stance of a society, meant to create healthier, stronger and/or more intelligent people, to save resources, and lessen human suffering.

That may sound harsh, but Ehrlich and his disciples praise the murderous policy of China that has led to countless abortions of girls because they are less desirable. That would be perfectly fine with Ehrlich.

More from Ehrlich...

“That's a problem we have in this country. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are not the result of a woman intending to become a mother. That's a shocking statistic and it betrays the fact that we ourselves have very ambivalent feelings about sexuality and reproduction, and are not very good about allowing women to achieve all that they would like to in life by planning when they want to be a mother and when they don't.”

Well here is a more relevant statistics. Nearly 100% of women who become pregnant get that way through sexual intercourse. Even with widespread availability in this country of contraceptives and education, women and teens still get pregnant in staggering numbers out of wedlock. Some is carelessness, some is frankly intentional, a tiny fraction is coercive but the issue is that when we are teaching sex ed we ought to make very clear that if you decide to become sexually active, the odds are pretty good that you are going to end up pregnant.

What is more relevant is the very idea that a particular family size is immoral and that there are people like Paul Ehrlich and many others who would make it illegal to have more children than Paul Ehrlich or bureaucrats or other self-appointed “population experts” decree. What is immoral is looking at people as some sort of disease on the planet. We were placed on this earth by our Creator to rule over and have dominion over the planet. Ehrlich looks around and sees the poor, the religious, the ugly, the stupid as breeding more people like them and wants them to stop. If they won't stop based on his brilliant arguments, he is fully willing to use coercion and force to make his nightmare a reality.

Unfortunately this attitude has bled into the church. Many Christian couples look at large families as unthinkable. When did having lots of kids, being fruitful, stop being a sign of blessings from God and start becoming a hassle and a line item in your budget? Where are the sermons on the blessings of a full quiver? Where in pre-marital counseling are couples told of the blessings of large families?

We have a big family, and then brings big responsibilities but also big blessings. I will encourage my children to have large families as well. The biggest predictor of a persons worldview is their parents, so it is my hope that as Christians rediscover large families, the doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich will gradually become extinct.