Comment of the Month

From SC. Lots to chew on.

SC

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!