Birth Vector

@G – With birth rates, there must always be an awareness that they are an index of spiritual health – and not the thing itself. Therefore, one should not aim at increasing birthrates as a target. The idea is that if one achieves what ought to be achieved, the birthrates will increase quite naturally.

When I used to study fertility, it seemed clear that the CJCLDS was an exception, an unique outlier among large and cohesive groups, in terms of having above replacement fertility by choice.

All the other instances in the world seemed either to have high fertility because this was an unstoppable outcome of having sex (because fertility control methods being unavailable or forbidden), or else the groups were living a substantially pre-modern life – cut off from the mainstream despite being in the developed world.

Such would be the Amish, Hutterites, ultra-orthodox Jews, and some immigrants to the west among the most devout Muslims. Of these, some life off religious charity or state subsidies, while others have a pre-modern low standard of living.

For a while; Mormons managed to live as economically successful members of modern societies, and using contraception; but with a chosen high fertility. However, this turned out to be a temporary phase. The downward pressure of modern societies on fertility has overwhelmed the exhortations of religion.

Something very fundamental would need to change – and I can ‘t see how this could avoid being focused on the basic relationship between the CJCLDS and the mainstream modern world. The ideal of a Good Mormon also being successful in terms of education, salary, status, etc would need to be seen as a Trojan Horse: in fact, as of now in The West, it is impossible to be successful without being routinely and deliberately dishonest, and professing active and explicit support for several or many of the major strategies of world evil.

There is not much wriggle room. If this fact is acknowledged, then there would need to be a reversal of more than a century of CJCLDS thinking on its relationship with “the world”.

Realistically; I don’t suppose there is much, or any, appetite for this degree of institutional change at this late stage – especially after so many decades of incremental assimilation to mainstream values, and the more recent rapid convergence at high levels with respect to the core totalitarian agenda.

But unless there is such a reversal of trends, then the future of the CJCLDS is already mapped-out in terms of its eventual destination; and that is the same future as currently inhabited by the other once-large Christian denominations – whether Episcopalian, Catholic, Nonconformist, or the more recent foundations.

All have low and still shrinking fertility (when recent immigrants are excluded), and in all instances this is an index of declining religious ‘health’. Assimilation to the mainstream Just-Is a species of apostasy; however it may be linguistically disguised.

I’ll echo BGC on the primacy of spiritual health over “just have kids,” with a personal example that weaves together so many themes in this post and the comment above that I’m not going to bother to count.

My wife and I are now (apparently) pushing up the church birthrate in our own little way, with child #5 due in December. This is Milestone B.

But 10 years ago (Milestone A) I was a separated father of 1 with no interest in bringing any more children into this vale of hedonism. I’m not sure the thought of more children even crossed my mind. The reasons were fundamentally spiritual rather than practical, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

For all the preceding years of my adult life I had been skeptical of spirituality to the point of being — in practical terms, although I didn’t embrace the label — an atheist. And during that time (this wouldn’t surprise BGC) I held Christianity in particularly low esteem, to the point of being a minor anti-Christ, a term I’m sorry to say I sometimes did gleefully apply to myself.

How does one get from A to B? I never would have, if it hadn’t been for the writings of BGC over the course of many years. Sometime in the late aughts I had started reading his commentary on science. During that time (I recollect) he became a Christian. As natural for one of my ilk, I completely ignored all his “wacko religious stuff” while continuing to read the stuff about science, because it was cool. But my interest was piqued when he started writing about Mormons and their birthrates. So exotic! Even though I had grown up in eastern Washington state, close enough to the Mormon belt to have a number of classmates and even a good friend in the church, I had never learned anything about their beliefs or thought about their strangely large families. But BGC’s notes about high birthrates planted the seed of an exotic interest, made more exotic by BGC’s introduction to this blog, where I encountered G’s “sweetness of mormon life” posts. Exotic indeed! Surreal! Someone might actually enjoy this life?!

As BGC explored the theology behind it, I began back-reading all the wacko religious stuff. I started reading Mormon stuff on my own. I read William James as a parallel. To use his term, I was enthralled with the “pluralistic universe” possibilities and how they solved so many of the problems that I had seen as intractable to the Christian God that I grew up with.

Fast forward to 2015. I decide to take my then pregnant girlfriend to a ward I found on Google Maps. A year later, we were members.

Without the entire belief infrastructure of a father and mother in heaven, of eternal families and so on, we would never have gotten to #5. I do believe the infrastructure is a necessary condition for wanting to have a large family in the modern anti-natalist milieu. As much as I love reading Peachy Keenan’s exhortations to “have more babies!”, I can’t help but think it’s a cart before the horse.

Yet even with the infrastructure and within the church, as G and BGC have pointed out and my wife and I have experienced personally, there is a very significant social/cultural aspect to large family life that makes the infrastructure belief alone potentially insufficient.

In our tiny ward in Minnesota, we are currently the only family with more than 4 kids. There have been others, from time to time, but they have moved out. Moreover there are only a few with 4 kids and the rest have fewer. In practical terms, this means many of the wives have time for careers, esp. as the kids grow older or if the kids are spread out over time. It means many of the women have less relevant experience for my wife to lean on: two of her (best and now departed from the ward) girlfriends have 5+, which provides experience and perspective that is simply not attainable with smaller families.

A related phenomenon within the church, infiltrating from the ocean we swim in, is that it is harder and harder for one man on one salary to supply the same housing and lifestyle expected by those families on two salaries. Too much that could be said about that, but not for today.

Sounds like BGC is suggesting we need to grow lungs and exit the ocean for our own survival. Maybe. For my own particular family situation, we seem to be evolving that way incrementally, having less and less commonality with normal people: near-zero media, home-schooling, etc. But we are still fully dependent on the system for my work and the modern lifestyle it affords. Eventually, if we truly insist on spiritual health first, that may have to go as well!

Why not biology? I’m thinking of OCD and other genetic disorders. Such kids take extra years to develop sufficient social skills to be attractive for marriage. Those years plus pre-marital chastity shrink the fertility window greatly.

And it’s caused by generations of endogamy among highly intelligent, rule-following, structure-minded people. “I’ll only marry a returned missionary” is a pretty strong selective pressure. Two bright and rule-minded parents likely have genes that combine to create OCD and related disorders in their children.

If a population is undergoing natural selection for traits that lower fertility, what other result would you expect?

SC’s comment was surprising and humbling.

I’m not sure what I am suggesting ought to happen; except that present trends will lead to de facto decline and destruction, and doubling down on what has been done up to now will not work in reversing it.

Thank you G and Bruce for your startling thoughts. I was recently reading a book about the Amish and they are very deliberate on how they interact and integrate with society. I don’t want to go their route but their success certainly echoes your sentiments here that we Latter-day Saints need to think much more deliberately about which parts of society we’ll choose to integrate with and which are not worth the cost. It’s no longer enough to just avoid R-rated movies or whatever.

I’ll add that I think the church leadership is slowly pushing us in this direction. A lot structure has been removed in recent years and I think they’re opening up space for more personal revelation if we’re willing.

Simply put, the birth rate is declining because we either don’t understand the plan of salvation or don’t believe it.