Anti-Natalism, Secularism, and The New Definition of Dystopia

Anti-Natalism, Secularism, and The New Definition of Dystopia

Apr 17, 2024 | Parents and Family

Imagine a world without children. Now that would be a dystopia! It’s increasingly happening in countries throughout the world.

I wrote a piece recently about the demographic apocalypse currently enveloping the world and one British woman’s choice to wait too long before deciding to have children. I called it, Have More Babies! I discuss how we got to a point in Western history where having fewer children became a moral good. Environmental extremists based on their assumptions are nothing if not rational. They believe, a la Thomas Malthus, that the world’s resources are limited, and if people have too many children there eventually won’t be enough food to feed the world. That’s a blatant lie from the pit of hell, but if you believe it, you are obligated to be morally opposed to too many babies.

God, however, created a world plenty able to provide for his creatures, and to not believe that is a sin. If we have believed it, or do now, we must repent.

And before you go there, yes we are obligated to be good and faithful stewards of what God has blessed us with, but that’s not the point. What is, is a lie of the devil that destroys people and the possibility of blessing and true human flourishing—that is only possible in obedience to, “be fruitful and multiply.”

Before I address the sin/blessing aspect of our understanding of God’s very good creation, I will share the depressing inspiration for this piece, an article last year from First Things titled, “Anti-Natal Engineering.” That’s click bait for me, and I was not disappointed; depressed, but not disappointed. You should read it if you want to be depressed too. It’s one country’s story of secularism run amuck. Without obedience to God and his word, and the truth about reality revealed in it, this country took its unbiblical assumptions to their logical conclusion. They’ve realized now that it’s too late how terribly wrong they were. That country is South Korea. Other countries in the West fell for the same lie, but none with the commitment and rigor of South Korea.

South Korea’s Journey to an Anti-Natalist Dystopia
The concept of dystopia was bequeathed to us by the modern secular world. Everyone knows it means something like “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.” In modern Latin Utopia means literally “nowhere.” It was coined by Thomas More and used as the   title of his 1516 book about an imaginary island enjoying perfection in legal, social, and political systems.

Dystopia was first used in 1844 by J. S. Mill, but started getting its negative connotation in the early 1950s. As science fiction in popular culture grew, and as secularism flattened life, sinful human imagination created dystopian worlds of unimaginable suffering and hopelessness. That in itself would be a fascinating study beyond the scope of this piece. The reason God commanded Adam and Eve, and us, to be fruitful and multiply, is because He knew without children Dystopia would be the result. Yet, that’s what so many secular people think they want. How did this happen in South Korea?

In the 1960s, the average South Korean women gave birth to six children—today it’s the lowest in the world at 0.79. To get there took a concerted effort on the part of their secular government in the early 1960s. The environmental movement got its start in the early ‘60s, and “overpopulation” became a mantra to shame people into having fewer children. The South Korean government developed this anti-natal mentality into a well-oiled machine through policy and propaganda. It worked exceptionally well, so well in fact, as they’ve tried to backtrack that isn’t working. Women still aren’t having babies. 

Ironically, the government did this because they thought by it the nation might thrive, but a nation can’t thrive without lots of babies. Demographers realized this a while ago, and now are sounding the alarm.

What’s fascinating about South Korea is that unlike the West, there was no sexual revolution. Throughout the decades the culture remained conservative, yet because of effective government and cultural propaganda, children became an optional part of family life, instead of the center of it. The First Things piece states:

South Korea’s public philosophy, not initially informed by the principles of modern feminism or the sexual revolution, emphasized the trials and costs of parenthood in order to encourage fewer people to become parents and people to become parents of fewer.

This worked on a material level. South Korea went from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest. But wealth without children is poverty, especially the poverty of loneliness. This anti-natalist message and mentality has other unexpected consequences. For South Korea,

What began as an effort to achieve national greatness through population control has ended up promoting cultural conflict between men and women and threatening national suicide through population decline.

As demographers have increasingly realized, anti-natalism is a recipe for disaster of dystopian proportions. Imagine going by a playground on the way to work, and there never being any children there. That is dystopia; as the author says, national suicide. The Bible, by contrast, says a society or community having lots of children is a blessing, and a requirement for true human flourishing. From Psalm 127:

3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
    the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
    are the children of one’s youth.
5 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.

Approximating Utopia on Earth
We know that this nowhere place actually does exist, just not on this fallen earth. For Christians heaven is that place, which in due course will be this earth renewed. Until then, on Christ’s own command in the Lord’s prayer, we are bringing some of that nowhere, heaven, God’s will be done, to this fallen earth. We can’t create heaven on earth, but we sure can approximate it. That is the Great Commission to disciple the nations, inaugurated at Pentecost by the power of the Holy Spirit, and God’s covenant promises in Christ. But does God really want this heaven on earth to grow slowly but very surely a la the parable of the mustard seed and leaven or yeast (Matt. 13:31-33)? Absolutely! The biblical case is easy to make, but that’s not the purpose of this post. Rather, it is how we overcome this anti-natalist Dystopia. I’ll start with the first book of the Bible. 

The foundational book of the Bible is about blessing. The word blessing is used upward of 70 times in Genesis. What does blessing mean? The Hebrew, Barak, doesn’t help much; it just means to kneel, bless. We know blessing is a good thing, to be blessed and to bless, but it’s helpful to explore its meaning more fully. 

Greek uses a couple words for bless implied by the Hebrew, eulogeó- εὐλογέω, to speak well of, praise, and makarios- μακάριος, happy, blessed, to be envied. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s a state of existence where things are working, and it’s apparent not only to the person blessed, but to others. 

I came across a lecture by Dr. Mark Futato of Reformed Theological Seminary on Genesis, and he argues that the key theme of the book is “blessing for the nations.” He specifically took that from God’s covenant promises to Abraham. What struck me was his definition of blessing: empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he puts it, “God empowers people to flourish.” I love that! Secularists paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

The beauty of Christianity is that it isn’t just personally transformational but transformational in every way, societal, technological, relational, material, etc. It effects every single thing human beings put their minds and efforts to in the light of God’s word, the gospel, and His law, for our good and His glory. These blessings will eventually leak out from God’s people to bless society. And we are never under the illusion these blessings are solely due to us, but they can’t happen without us, Christ’s body.

The Path to Blessing is Through Having Lots of Babies!
In Genesis, God is specifically establishing his covenant with Abram so through him and his offspring the nations will be blessed. We see throughout Genesis and in God’s covenant promises to Abram that these blessings are to touch so many people they literally can’t be counted (sand of the seashore, stars in the sky, and dust of the earth). God is not miserly in spreading his blessings on earth, and because of his covenant promise immediately after the fall, we realize all of it is done in the face of a cosmic spiritual war to frustrate the devil’s plans. This means it will never be easy and will be done in the face of constant adversity and opposition, but through which we can rejoice in the victory already won by our risen Lord.

One primary way these blessings come is through having lots of babies, and raising them in the fear and admonition of the Lord. I’ve been bummed out in these four plus decades of going to church seeing how many Christian families have two children. Far be it from me to “judge” the parents, but I always wonder how many of them choose to just have two. I believe while maybe not sin, it is terribly sad they don’t realize the call of God on their lives to be fruitful and multiply is not an option.

One reason this should be obvious to Christians is that from the beginning, it is apparent that the faith of God’s people is multi-generational. The word children is used over 450 times in the Bible. Unlike the dominant secularism, Children in the Christian worldview are not a drain of resources, but a way to expand them. In the Bible, not having children was a sign of God’s curse, having many a sign of God’s blessing. That has not changed. Why would Christians want to have fewer blessings and not more?

If we really want to challenge the secularism of our time, and eventually defeat it, the way this will happen is to believe God about the blessings of children for our lives, and the eventual blessing of our society. If we really believe God, then Christian families will have a lot of children, far more than secular families. It is already true that religious families have more children than secular families, but if we are able, and married, we need to up our game. 

So I end with the solution to the anti-natalist dystopia: Have more babies!

 

Persuasive Christian Parent: Teach Your Children Christianity is True!

Persuasive Christian Parent: Teach Your Children Christianity is True!

Oct 19, 2023 | Parents and Family

If you want to be a persuasive Christian parent, and you want your children’s faith to endure for their entire lives, teach them Christianity is true. It’s pretty simple, actually, but it takes work. I’ll justify that briefly below, but having written a book about being a Persuasive Christian Parent, I am convinced parents’ influence on their children is the primary influence on whether they maintain their faith throughout their lives. I know many Christians don’t buy this. They’ve seen children grow up in perfectly fine Christian homes and abandon the faith to one degree or another. They conclude, not unreasonably, that while parents certainly have a significant influence on their children, it is ultimately limited. I reject that. I go into some detail about this in the book, so I can’t do it here. You’ll just have to trust me, or read the book (you’ll be able to listen to the audio book in the not too distant future).

For mom and dad this is going to take some work. If your child came up to you and asked: “Mom, Dad, why do you believe Christianity is true?” Could you give them a credible answer? Be honest. If you stammer, or give them a half-baked answer, you need to get to work. I would like to commission a study, and I suspect I know what the conclusion would be. The study would be of all the young people, says 20s and 30s, who have gone through what we now call “deconversion.” If they grew up in a Christian household, we would ask them a simple question: “Did your parents teach you that Christianity was true, and why it is?” I am convinced the overwhelming majority would answer, no. Or if they did, it wasn’t very persuasive. The reason is that most Christian parents know what they believe, basic gospel, but have very little understanding of why they believe it, why their faith is “justified true belief.” Not teaching our Children why Christianity is the truth about the ultimate nature of things in this secular age leaves them susceptible to the lies of secularism they swim in every day.

The reason I was prompted to write this was because of an Apologetics Canada podcast I recently listened to. It confirmed exactly what I’m saying. The guest was John Marriot who has written five books on people walking away from their faith. He’s interviewed many such people and read hundreds of accounts and found that people don’t walk away because they want to sin more, etc. They say it comes down to no longer believing Christianity is the truth. He tends to believe them. When I heard that I instantly thought of my book, especially the second section on, “It’s All About Truth.” I felt so strongly about the Truth of the matter that when I first started thinking about writing the book, I decided this would be the first chapter. It turned out being chapters 3 and 4 because I felt “It’s All About Parents” was more important to establish up front. To decrease the odds that our children will experience a deconversion as they grow up in a hostile secular culture, the most important thing we can do for them, by far, is to persuade them Christianity is the truth.

Secularism Is Dead
We are living in a secular culture that daily attempts to drown us in its godless worldview. It is critical to understand this is not a threat to our children’s faith. Most Christians will not agree with that assertion. The problem seeing secularism as a threat gives it far too much credit as a credible alternative to Christianity. It is not! In fact, secularism (life without God) is a pathetically weak alternatives that gives zero answers to life’s most pressing questions. Why is it in an utterly secular culture, in the most prosperous country in the history of the world, almost 50,000 people successfully killed themselves last year? Does a God-less worldview have any answers to this beside drugs and therapy? It does not. Secularism is an almost 400 year-long experiment in futility. Once reason usurped God’s throne he was slowly set aside as necessary to a functioning society. But something ironic happened on the way to the coronation of God-lessness. It completely failed. Secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

Therefore, there is nothing to fear from it. As I say in the book, our secular culture is the best friend of our children’s faith. I’ve used the culture all their lives, and still do as they are adults, to defend and argue for the truth of Christianity. Bottom line: If our children are to not only have their faith survive but thrive, they must be convinced with every ounce of their being that Christianity is the ultimate truth about the nature reality. How do we do that? Well, you’ll have to read the book to see how I did it, and see if you think I make my case. For a short blog post I can only do so much, but if you are one of those Christians who realize you need to work on your apologetic chops hopefully this will wet your whistle enough to check out the book.

Think about it. If your children are convinced Christianity is true, could anything make them walk away from it? Most if not all those who walk away from the faith never study apologetics, history, philosophy, or theology in any depth. They don’t come to their rejection after a thorough examination of the evidence. I’m sure after whatever input they’ve received, Christianity is no longer plausible to them, it no longer seems true, or seems real. This brings up a concept called plausibility structures, or the framework in our minds that makes certain things seem true to us and other things not true. It isn’t that they are true or not true, but that they seem so. I address this in a couple chapters of the book, but for those who reject the Christianity they once believed in, it simply no longer seems true to them, is no longer plausible. They’ve lived in a secular plausibility structure for so long with no counter narrative that Christianity doesn’t really have a chance.

There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
(This is going to be the title of a book I want to write in the not too distant future, God willing. That’s how important this is.)

One the most pernicious of the many lies of secularism is that if you’re not a Christian or “religious” then you don’t need faith. The uncritically accepted assumption of almost all people in the West is that if you’re not “religious” then you don’t need to believe things. Only “religious” people believe things, only “religious” people need faith. So the person who decides to reject the Christianity they once believed in thinks they are going from faith to not-faith, from belief to-not belief. What they fail to realize, and what is likely never pointed out to them, is that they are going from one faith to another. After they no longer embrace Christianity they are every bit the “religious” believer as they were before. Only there is far less evidence and plausibility for the veracity of their new faith than Christianity—and it’s not even close!

The question is always what we believe or have faith in, and why we believe it, not whether or not we have faith. The people who turn away from Christianity can tell you plenty of reasons why they no longer believe in it, but zero reasons for their newfound faith. They are under impression they gave up “faith” when they gave up Christianity. In defending Christianity to such people, in what we call apologetics (see I Peter 3:15), they are very easy to deal with. Probably one in a million can give a coherent defense of their new worldview, their new faith. Just asking the rest what they now believe in and why they believe it will leave them dumbfounded. They’ll likely think it’s a meaningless question because they’re no longer “religious.” I’m confident you’ll get a strange look, but it’s a wonderful question to begin a conversation if they’re open to it. If this happens to be one of your children, it’s a good question to get them thinking they don’t exist in some faith-neutral place where they don’t have to make decisions about what they believe and why.

A great phrase to keep in mind when grappling with such things is “the consideration of the alternative.” If we don’t believe in one thing then we are forced to believe in the alternative. Agnosticism is not an alternative but a copout for not thinking seriously about serious things. We may encounter people who just have no desire to think about or discuss serious things, and we just love them and pray. It is all, of course, up to the Holy Spirit, so we pray. However, and this gets us to the work part, we work like it depends on us. The saying goes, we work like it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God. What work am I talking about? Our apologetics chops. Each of us must ask ourselves, how good are we are defending the veracity Christianity. If most Christians are honest, they will have to say . . . . terrible.

Get to Work
That was the word I used about myself back in 2009 (along with horrible and pathetic). I had an encounter with a co-worker and it was embarrassing. He wouldn’t have noticed, but I sure did. After that I committed myself to put in the work. I got a little MP3 player (I still use one!) and listened to everything I could find. I also read everything I could get my hands on. I was determined in Paul’s words to Timothy, to study to show myself to God as one approved (2 Tim. 2:15). The word study (KJV) or do your best in Greek means “(figuratively) to move speedily by showing full diligence (fully applying oneself).” This is not just for professional ministers as was Timothy, but to every single Christian. If we’re honest most of us are lazy. There are many things in life more important to us than our Christianity. This is, I know, tough love. Most Christians know far more about their careers or hobbies than they know about their Christianity, and that ought not to be.

Just going to church on Sunday and reading our Bibles is not enough. Per Peter’s command, if we’re always to be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks us to give the reason for the hope that that have, that is going to take time and effort. There really is no excuse nowadays with the Internet to not show ourselves as one approved when it comes to defending our faith, and that is first to ourselves. Once we are fully convinced and know why, we can share that with others. If we have children, we too can become persuasive Christian parents and have confidence our children will have a faith that endures for life. What we will realize the longer we study and the more we teach is what C.S. Lewis said was the reason he believed in Christianity:

 I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

This is what we have to pass on to our children! Christianity, God in Christ, makes sense of literally every single thing of existence. When they are convinced of this any kind of secular alternative to Christianity will appear to them as the phony worthless alternative it is. God has seen to it by providing for us everything we need for building an enduring faith in both us and our children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Education and the Myth of Neutrality

Education and the Myth of Neutrality

Oct 5, 2023 | Parents and Family, Uncategorized

I use the phrase, “the myth of neutrality” here from time to time when addressing issues related to culture and politics. It also very much has to do with how we educate our children in America. This myth is the fruit of the secularism bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, and which completely smothered the Christian West in the latter half of the 20th century. This mythical idea is as simple as it is deceptive: public life in a pluralistic society where there are many different religions and beliefs must be neutral with regard to ultimate questions, e.g., the meaning of life and death, sin and salvation, God, heaven and hell, the basis of morality, etc. The problem is that we can’t, not a single one of us, be neutral regarding these questions, ever. This applies both to our personal lives and our lives lived in society with other people, including government. Yet this myth has been accepted for a hundred years or more by most Americans, and sadly most Christians as well.

The opportunity to discuss this comes from the approval for a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma in June. Immediately we saw headlines like this: “Oklahoma’s Religious Charter School Aims to Break Church-State Separation.” Oh the horror! It isn’t just liberals, leftists, and libertarians who oppose such a thing, but many conservatives as well. This piece at Current addresses the intrepid David French who thinks the Oklahoma ruling is a threat to religious freedom. It’s shocking that someone who claims to be a conservative (although a Trump-MAGA hating one) and a Christian could be so historically ignorant, but French fits the bill. Everyone knows Thomas Jefferson came up with the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state” in a letter to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, which has come to mean the separation of religion or Christianity from the state.

Regardless of what the secular Jefferson thought it meant, life in America never reflected an impenetrable wall of separation until the mid-20th century. As examples, for most of American history there were sabbath laws, and sodomy was a felony in all 50 states as recently as 1962. The foundation of law in America had always been the Bible and the Christian worldview, but after World War II cultural elites were intent on replacing Christianity with secularism. A significant part of that mission was the Supreme Court  Emerson v. Board of Education decision in 1947 which effectively made secularism the established religion of the United State of America. Christianity and the Bible would no longer be allowed in American “public” schools. In 1962 it was made “official” when the Supreme Court struck down the right for children to pray in schools. Now all would be made to worship at the altar of secularism, and religion’s influence would be confined to the home and church.

In spite of Jefferson’s predilections, America’s founders believed deeply in the importance of religion and education, and to that end the Continental Congress in July 1787 passed The Northwest Ordinance in which they stated:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Religion to the Founders meant Christianity, and its morality and knowledge was necessary to good government and a happy populace. In other words, civilization and the success of American government depended on education and the influence of Christianity. It didn’t follow, however, that encouragement meant government control of education given the Founders’ deep suspicion of human nature and government power. Yet, over time “public” education came to mean government education subsidized by taxpayers controlled by the government. From a Christian perspective there should be no such thing as “public” education let alone government education. J. Gresham Machen put this presciently in his 1934 Education, Christianity and the State:

Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great.

Who can argue with this after 89 years of hindsight. And it looks like Machen might be encouraged by a political and cultural movement to Make America Great Again.

R.J. Rushdoony in his 1961 book, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education further makes the point:

The public school is now unmistakably a state school, and its concept of education is inevitably statist. This is apparent in various ways. First of all, education has ceased to be a responsibility of the home and has become a responsibility of the state. . . . the state still claims sole right to determine the nature, extent, and time of education. Thus, a basic family right has been destroyed and the state’s control over the child asserted.

It cannot be both state and family, only either/or. And this is not just an argument for liberty over against government tyranny, but a fundamentally religious question. American public schools are the establishment of a secular religion in the guise of religious neutrality. Joe Boot in The Mission of God explains:

We can clearly see . . . that neither the structure within which we educate, nor the purpose for which we educate, nor the content by which we educate, can be neutral.

Doug Wilson states why this an indisputable fact in The Case for Classical Christian Education:

Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed. Christians and assorted traditionalists who want a secular school system to instill anything other than secular ethics are wanting something that has never happened and can never happen.

He further asserts that public or “common schools were going to be the means by which the entire progressive agenda was ushered in.” Progressive in the twenty-first century is nothing like the early progressives imagined, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how secular progressive education paved the way for the current takeover of education by cultural Marxists.

Does this mean that what we know as “public education” needs to be “abolished,” to borrow from Marx? Yes! School choice may be a good stopgap measure to take away some of the monopoly power of the government, but it is only temporary. It follows from the biblical imperative of the familial responsibility of educating our children, that it must be completely private and divorced from government at any level. Government money always brings with it government influence. Education is a worldview enterprise, and in America parents should be free to decide in what worldview they want their children educated. Parents should pay for their own children’s education and not forced via taxes to pay for others.                                                                 

What that looks like and how we get there I don’t know. I only know this should be the objective of any Christian who understands the incompatibility of Christianity with any other worldview in the educating of children. In the meantime as we work toward this, I believe that charter classical schools are a critical means to challenging the secular progressive monopoly on education. The ideal is classical and Christian, but even charter “public” classical schools are a powerful weapon against secularism. They reject the postmodern relativism of secularism, and teach that there is objective goodness, beauty, and truth rooted in history and the classical and biblical texts of the Western tradition. The ultimate responsibility for the children’s faith and worldview is the parents, but a classical education will at least not indoctrinate them into the dogmatic secularism of the current cultural and government American elite.

 

 

 

Wisdom on Marriage from Luther and Mangalwadi

Wisdom on Marriage from Luther and Mangalwadi

Sep 5, 2023 | Parents and Family

Having officially been married to my wife Sarah for 36 years on August 15, I think I know a thing or two about the institution, and when I read the thoughts on marriage by these two men of God they instantly become fodder for a blog post. It so happens when I went to Seminary at Westminster in Philadelphia, having driven all the way from my home in southern California, the last thing I expected to find, to say the least, was a wife. But there she was! We got engaged, and it so happens that our pre-marital counselor was the late Tim Keller, a professor there at the time before he moved to New York City to found Redeemer Presbyterian Church and become, well, Tim Keller. I’ll never forget two things he said among many, but these two stand out as especially true in our experience. We sat down in his office in chairs in front of his desk and after some initial niceties he got right to the point:

The only sinner worse than the one you’re marrying is you.

Well, ok. That took a while to sink in, but I can report after all these years . . . . it is absolutely true! Sometimes we argue about who the worse sinner is, but I always win. It’s too obvious! The other thing is related, flowing out of the depth of our sin. I guess we did a personality test and he got to know us a bit, then said this:

You guys are so different you can either destroy one another or sanctify one another.

Keller was not the kind of guy to pull his punches; he was a straight shooter, and this truth was sobering. I believe it’s true in any marriage even if the spouses are more similar in personality. Two self-centered sinners living in such close proximity 24/7/365 is a recipe for conflict, but in understanding and accepting that we are self-centered sinners allows the promise of sanctification and reveals the genius of marriage. It’s not only God’s chosen instrument to sanctify His people and build his kingdom on earth, but also the ultimate redemptive biblical metaphor for the salvation of His people. The significance and profundity of marriage is beyond the ability of mere words to convey, but that’s all we have. It is the most important God ordained institution for extending Christ’s reign on earth, advancing His kingdom, and building His Church, and in that I do not exaggerate. I will explain below.

When I read these two quotes in Vishal Mangalwadi’s book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, I knew I had to share them here. First from the great Reformer, Martin Luther, who is a more pessimistic than I am, but the point is well taken: 

There is no estate the Devil is so opposed to as marriage. The clergy have not wanted to be bothered with work and worry. They have been afraid of a nagging wife, disobedient children, difficult relatives, or the dying pig or a cow. They want to lie abed until the sun shines through the window. Our ancestors knew this and would say, “Dear child, be a priest or a nun and have a good time.” I have heard married people say to monks, “You have it easy, but when we get up we do not know where to find our bread.” Marriage is a heavy cross because so many couples quarrel. It is the grace of God when they agree. The Holy Spirit declares there are three wonders: when brothers agree, when neighbors love each other, and when a man and a wife are at one. When I see a pair like that, I am glad as if I were in a garden of roses. It is rare.

Mangalwadi adds perspective as to why marriage is so great and essential to life in a fallen world:

Marriage brings out the worst in both husbands and wives. They must choose whether to stay in that school of character, or to drop out. The Bible made divorce difficult because one does not learn much by quitting a challenging school. The only way to make monogamy work is to value love above pleasure, to pursue holiness and humility rather than power and personal fulfillment, to find grace to repent rather than to condemn, to learn sacrifice and patience in place of indulgence and gratification. The modern world was created by countless couples who did just that. In working to preserve their marriages and provide for their children, they invested in the future of civilization itself.

I’ll never forget before we got married telling other young people we were getting married, and watching the disapproval on their faces while disparaging marriage. Phrases like, “Poor guy” were common. Given my nature, I would get right back in their face telling them how great marriage is, how important, how I can’t wait, and that they should get married too! I was basically telling them how wrong they were. I remember several, specifically the young women, get kind of a quizzical look on their face seeming to say, that’s refreshing to hear! I think some even said that.

And the reason these people all felt that way? Marriage is hard! But I must cut them some slack because examples of successful marriages are not bountiful, nor were they in the mid-80s. When California, no surprise, got the no-fault divorce laws-band wagon rolling in 1969, divorce became common in America; when the going got tough, as it will in every marriage, this gave people the idea, and the legal right, to think they could easily get out of a marriage, and that unilaterally. They think, why be miserable if I can just be rid of it, and the problem, as if the problem was the other person. Yes they can be, but as we say, it takes two to tango. In fact, second marriages fail at a higher rate than first marriages because the person who failed at the first one is the same person in the second, and bring all their problems, and sin, with them.

The other reason is the secular culture that bought into the arguments of feminism, among the many other evils of secularism. However, feminism all along its historical development from the 19th century on had a point. Because of the fall, the relationship between men and women was distorted. After telling Eve her pain will increase in childbirth, the Lord tells her, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Gen. 3:16, and here is an excellent explanation of this from the ESV study Bible). Men and women were created different, shocking I know, with different roles and responsibilities within a marriage. All of that become complicated by the fall, and thus the thoughts on marriage of Luther and Mangalwadi about how difficult marriage is. I was going to write, “can be,” but that would not be right. The very nature of the unique consequences of the fall for specifically men and women make every marriage, every single one of them, hard by definition.

The fundamental distortion is what this verse describes, and what makes marriage so difficult. Women will seek to usurp the man’s rightful role as the leader and ultimate authority in the family, and the woman is rightfully commanded to submit to her husband in this, but the man will overplay his role as leader and become a domineering authoritarian. This plays out in every marriage over a continuum, but the dynamic in every marriage is the same. How do marriages not only survive but also thrive in the face of such relentless headwinds? Jesus! God has revealed “the secret” in Ephesians 5:21-33. The analogy Paul uses is Christ and the Church, and the good news is it’s not a secret!

 

Three Cheers for Patriarchy! And “Why Sally Can’t Preach”

Three Cheers for Patriarchy! And “Why Sally Can’t Preach”

Aug 29, 2023 | Parents and Family

Since my last post was on the hot topic of Christian nationalism, I figured I’d follow it up with something about another “controversial” topic, patriarchy. I love thinking about the heads exploding at that title! It’s like throwing holy water on a vampire to some lefties, and many who embrace Christianity too. I will let the video do the heavy lifting, but I will say the same God-ordained roll dynamics in marriage apply in some measure in the church, thus the title of a book in the quotes. The author in the video is being interviewed, and I find his thinking helpful in what in our “enlightened” times is considered “controversial,” i.e., patriarchy. That word comes from the Latin for father, and has come to mean male headship and authority in certain contexts like the family and the church. I would love to hear your thoughts.

My Post-Mill Conference Experience and the Children

My Post-Mill Conference Experience and the Children

May 15, 2023 | Parents and Family

If you had told me a year ago that I would be attending a conference on Theonomy & Postmillennialism I would have told you to say no to drugs. But there I was in Georgetown, Texas last weekend with about 500 other people who seem to also have drunk the post-mill Kool Aid as if it was a real, biblical eschatological option. Prior to my “conversion” I didn’t think there were 500 post-mill people in the world let alone that many of them would find their way to a conference in Texas, but there they were. And the vibe was electric. I’m going to do two posts on the conference. While this first one will be primarily about children, and you’ll see why, the next one will be more meat and potatoes eschatology. The two are connected as I hope to convey.

I thought like a death metal concert, most of the audience would be dudes, and especially dudes with beards. Strange how beards have made a come back in America, and we’re talking long, nineteenth century type beards. There were definitely those, but what I didn’t expect was all the children and families. When the speakers were talking there was always the sounds of babies. I was sitting toward the front initially, and had no idea just how many children parents brought to this conference. After initially being annoyed by the disruption, I started to appreciate it, the young, new life, the indication of the blessing of God a la Psalm 127. As Solomon says, “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” It’s unfortunate how man Christians in our day want fewer blessings rather than more, that’s how infected we’ve become with secularism.

Before I address that, on Saturday morning I was sitting in the midst of these families amazed at how well behaved all the children were. I thought, don’t all families bring their children to a conference on post millennialism on a beautiful spring Saturday? Of course they do! After the session, I asked the gentlemen sitting in front of me with all these kids how many children they have, and he said . . . . ten! Be honest, your first reaction to reading or hearing that is a kind of revulsion, right? Don’t lie to me. In the modern secular post-Christian West having ten children is looked at as at least strange. It almost seems wrong. You think of the poor woman who bore all those children. That’s a lot of work! And raising them is ten full-time jobs. I would contend our initial reaction, while understandable given how programmed we’ve become by secularism, is sin. God tells us children are a blessing, full stop. I found out the man with these ten blessings is Phil George, the pastor of Grace Life Church in Dallas. May he and his wife, and their tribe, increase, and that tribe doesn’t have to have that many children.

Which brings me to an article I providentially read after my profound children post-mill conference experience: Western culture is at fault for dwindling birth rates: We are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages. The author, Louise perry, starts the piece with a wonderful analogy of the Cassava plant that was made safe to eat by South Americans hundreds of years ago. Without that process, unbeknownst to them, the people eating it would be slowly poisoned to death by cyanide. Though the people didn’t realize the traditions of cleaning and processing the plant was saving lives, they did it anyway. She compares that to the tradition around a fertility culture where extended families and societies made it easier for women to bear the burden of having and raising children. The analogy is powerful. People in the Western world, which is most of the world today, don’t realize we are as a civilization slowly being poisoned to death by what she calls “the sterility meme.”

The word crisis in her title is more appropriate than anyone knows or will admit. Like being slowly poisoned by eating unprocessed Casava plants, civilization is slowly being poisoned by not enough children being born:

The effects of fertility decline will not become evident until the last above-replacement generation dies. In Britain, that tipping point is likely to come in the 2040s, when most of the baby boomers have passed away. Right now, we are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages, and most people do not recognize it as such. If modernity is cassava, then this is the cyanide.

She states the problem with modernity such:

But what we are now discovering is that, at the population level, modernity selects systematically against itself. The key features of modernity — urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, more time spent with strangers than with kin — all of these factors in combination shred fertility. Which means that progressivism, the political ideology that urges on the acceleration of modernization, can best be understood as a sterility meme. When people first become modern, they have fewer children; when they adopt progressive ideology, they accelerate the process of modernization and so have even fewer.

These are all complex sociological and psychological phenomena, but Christians are not immune. If you go to many churches today you’ll see that most families have two children. We must ask ourselves as Christians, is having only two children on purpose biblical? Is it living in obedience to God? Or is it succumbing to the “spirit of the age”? I would argue it is the latter.

Having said this, I understand why so many Christian families succumb to it. It’s been pounded into our heads almost as long as I’ve been alive, that there are “too many people” on earth, it’s unsustainable. The word “overpopulation” is an axiom, unquestioned as if it were obviously true. Then there is the little issue of children being expensive, and putting a real crimp in your lifestyle. I laughed out loud, literally, when I read this in the piece:

As one of my friends observed soon after having her first baby, “the only thing that limits your freedom more than having a newborn is going to prison.” She’s right.

Raising children is hard! All consuming. If freedom is a priority in our lives, we will have fewer children, and sadly these impediments to having more children keep too many Christian families from having more children.

I once told an Italian couple at a church we attended some years ago that we need to out breed the enemy, speaking of the secularists. Their look told me they weren’t quite sure what to make of that statement. They now have two children, and it looks like they’re stopping there, unfortunately. If I knew thirty years ago what I know now, as the saying goes, I would have tried for more than three children. Three has been an incredible blessing, so I can only imagine the blessings of more. Christians, and religious people in general, do have more children than secular people, but I pray in due course it would become many more.