Pro-Natalist-Falsehoods
Falsehoods come in many flavours. There are outright lies, red herrings, straw men, obfuscation and, sometimes, actual misunderstandings.
Misunderstandings come in many forms. A simple failure to communicate is one. But another is when something is so foreign to what you believe, or so antithetical to what you believe, that you not only don’t agree with it, you don’t even understand it.
I do not call myself a ‘pro-natalist’, although others no doubt will. I do not call myself ‘pro-life’, but child murderers would probably label me with that term.
And when I present my views, there are ‘misunderstandings’ or outright falsehoods that come out of the woodwork. Perhaps directed at me and what I’ve said, perhaps directed at the larger issue, or perhaps drudged up from the fevered imagination of someone who can’t even comprehend a view so alien to their own.
This is what happened the other day and, while I responded in a thread, I think it is worthwhile to do a longer response as its own post. Duly linked, of course, so that everyone can see where it came from, and the author can respond.
Now, apologies for the super long quoting here. The comment I am going to respond to is the very last one, but I included the ones above for context, to see how we got there.
Von
So the problem in this case is that having children is literally something that is commanded by God. And praised by God. And a blessing from God. So to call it idolatry would involve some kind of serious perversion.
ReadsTooMuchPraysTooLittle
Any Christian who has struggled with in/sub fertility for any length of time can tell you unequivocally that fertility/babies can 100% become idols. Chasing fertility is absolutely not the same as chasing God. Please do not place us back under the burden of the law.
Von
Well, this seems to go a couple of different ways.
Can following anything that God calls us to do be done wrongly? It can indeed... if we do so wrongly. But not because we are following what God calls us to do.
It is perfectly possible, indeed likely, that infertile people might despise God's plan for their lives, and reject His guidance. They may forget the age of Sarah at first fertility. They may use unGodly methods to get what they want.
But since having children is a blessing from God, and commanded by God, in order to do so they would have to pervert His will in the how... not in the what. One might love one's wife wrongly, but one cannot do so 'too much'. (as I wrote in my article).
But we don't fix this by calling it 'idolatry' and making out as if God hasn't called us to have children, or called it a blessing.
ReadsTooMuchPraysTooLittle
Yeah. About that. How many folk have worked themselves into broken bodies, evaporated souls, empty bank accounts, and angry marriages, all in their attempts to Follow God’s Command To Have Babies. Are they just not trying hard enough? Not sacrificing enough? Have they not prayed enough? How much pain, emotional brokenness, or financial cost are they expected to bear in pursuit of Obeying God’s Command? How many nights of “adult activities” that no longer derive from love and intimacy, but from obligation, despair, and naked (ha!) Pursuit of Babies Now? Infertility is a major driver of divorce. Are you aware the degree to which Must Get Pregnant actually takes over a woman’s every thought during the day, week, month? If not, you should count that a blessing, rather than an opportunity to preach the Law to others.
Many of us are absolutely in the throes of idolatry and need to hear that it is okay - nay, BETTER - to pursue God rather than babies. I know not one single infertile woman who does not remind herself on a daily basis “how old Sarah was when she conceived.” And yet, Sarah was given a promise, and not all of us have been.
We do not need to hear that that we do not desire the gift enough. We do not need to hear that we lack faith or obedience. We don’t even need to hear “don’t give up” or “with God all things are possible.” We need to hear from our hyper-fertile friends that they love us and enjoy our company and want their kids to be friends with my one, and on the days when it’s really hard, to tell us they will raise their quiverfull to love my one with such depth of Christlike love that they will plop themselves down next to him at my funeral so that he is not left to bear his grief alone, because that is my greatest fear.
What we need to hear is not what so many people with 6 kids say when they get called out for judging someone they didn’t know is infertile, “oh well obviously I didn’t mean if you CAN’T…” as though our lives are somehow second-rate consolation prizes that God sort of…tolerates while he’s waiting for us to become more faithful. What we need to hear is that my one child is just as much of a miracle as your 6, and that it sucks that this world is broken in ways that we don’t understand, and that my husband and I are not failures or Bad Christians. That all three of us together are the family God has given us, and we are beautiful.
It is not disobedient or lacking in faith to not have more/any children. Jesus Himself says that there are those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom. How much more so does the Father look with compassion upon those of us who have spent all that we have and are no better? Yes, He always heals. But sometimes healing looks like the faith to say, “Thy will be done,” and to trust that He will bring *my* will, if not my body, into conformity with His will.
Response
I wouldn’t want you to be left out of the conversation as it occurred, so this is what I responded there:
Von
Let me repeat my point, and see if I can make it clearer:
It is possible to pursue something that God commands… wrongly.
It is possible that God commands something, and we can go about trying to fulfil those commands… wrongly.
It is possible that God commands several things and we may get so caught up in one of those things that we fail to see all of the things that He commands.
I don’t actually see one of the things that you mentioned (pardon me if I missed something, it was a long note) that involved obeying God’s command in the way that He commanded it.
Let me lay out the way that this command of God should be followed, and you tell me where I go off the rails:
1) Marry, young.
2) Have lots of sex.
3) Don’t use birth control.
There. Those three things. All right from Scripture. Now tell me which of them involves any of the things that you mentioned.
Now, a quick note on something that I didn’t answer earlier:
1) God’s command to be fruitful is from Genesis, repeated later in Genesis, repeated later in the OT, and repeated in the NT.
2) God’s command against idolatry is from the Law, repeated later in the OT, and repeated in the NT.
So if one is worried about following the law, then one would need, at the very least, to get rid of the worry about idolatry, not having children. And, in truth, we should be following both.
Doing it Wrong, Doing it Sinfully
The comment I am responding to is so long that I think what I will do, here, is to take what she said and make it into a list, or several lists, but here is the first one:
worked themselves into broken bodies,
evaporated souls,
empty bank accounts, and
angry marriages, all in their attempts to Follow God’s Command To Have Babies.
not trying hard enough?
Not sacrificing enough?
not prayed enough?
How much pain,
emotional brokenness, or
financial cost are they expected to bear in pursuit of Obeying God’s Command?
How many nights of “adult activities” that no longer derive from love
and intimacy,
but from obligation,
despair, and
naked (ha!) Pursuit of Babies Now?
Infertility is a major driver of divorce.
Must Get Pregnant actually takes over a woman’s every thought during the day, week, month?
Now she doesn’t say, but I don’t see how to read this list in the light of her comment except as, “Here is the way that Godly women (and men) are going about trying to fulfil God’s command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’.”
Now, one advantage that we Christians have is that we have examples from Godly men and women throughout Scripture to help guide us in how to obey His commands. So let me ask, which of that is what the Godly men and women did when faced with barrenness?
Because, let us remember, they were often faced with barrenness. Or, at the very least, Scripture highlights several important characters that were, at least for a time. Including:
Sarah
Rebecca
Rachel
Leah
Hannah
The wife of Manoah
Elizabeth
Now, let us look back at the list and see how many of these women (or their husbands), did any of the things in the above list.
Well, first of all, there was a bit of despair. There was also a bit of marital conflict (although not leading to divorce). And yet God, and the husbands, counselled against despair, and definitely against the marital conflict.
Now, several of these women gave their maids to their husbands, in a kind of surrogacy arrangement. I don’t see any of that in her list, although she might include that in her financial issues. However none of the Godly women seemed to have gone overboard in the financial area… they already had the maids.
Now, prayer… that is a big one. In lots of these stories we read about prayer. The wife praying, the husband praying, the priest praying… yes prayer is definitely there. However there is none of the ‘have I prayed hard enough’ issues that she seems to list.
Now, the only other one that I see that comes even close to these women in the Scripture was the one time when Leah bought a night with her husband from her sister. But while he was thus ‘obligated’ to let Leah have her turn, I don’t see anything in the story from either of them to indicate that they didn’t enjoy the sex.
No, what I see in this list that ‘Reads too Much’ posted, except for the bit about prayer, is a bunch of people doing a bunch of things that God doesn’t command them to do, and no one in Scripture did, and then blaming the result on God. Following God’s commands doesn’t work that way. You follow God’s commands in God’s way.
You Weren’t Listening
And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years.
And there was a certain man of Zorah, of the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah; and his wife was barren, and bare not.
And the angel of the LORD appeared unto the woman, and said unto her, Behold now, thou art barren, and bearest not: but thou shalt conceive, and bear a son.
Judges 13:1-3
What we need to hear is not what so many people with 6 kids say when they get called out for judging someone they didn’t know is infertile, “oh well obviously I didn’t mean if you CAN’T…” as though our lives are somehow second-rate consolation prizes that God sort of…tolerates while he’s waiting for us to become more faithful.
Now the biggest problem that I see in her post is where she confuses two things that are literally the opposite. Like actually on the far end, the opposite ends, of a spectrum. Here is the way I see it. You have:
The people who do not wish to have children, and take steps to make sure that they won’t. They ignore or flat out disobey God’s commandment.
The people who wish to have children, and have them. Or perhaps they don’t wish to have them, but realise that God commands them to, and so they have them. Or maybe they just don’t pay attention and end up with them.
The people who wish to have children, or at the very least wish to follow God’s command to have children… and don’t have them. God does not open their womb.
Let me point out that (1) and (3) are opposites. Literal opposites. So when someone is preaching heart and soul against (1), they are literally not talking about (3). The paraplegic, sitting in his wheelchair, is not the subject of the coaches lecture about lazy runners. The blind man, listening to the TED talk, is not the subject of the speaker’s wrath against people who fail to see beauty in nature.
When the Christian speaks of being fruitful and multiplying, rails against birth control, against abortion, against a culture that kills its children, against those won’t tolerate breast feeding… the infertile man or woman desperate to have children needs to realise that not only aren’t they the audience, they are the opposite of the audience.
We each need to remember that we aren’t God. Which not only means that we don’t open or close the womb, but that we don’t know the heart. The person who looks at the childless couple and assumes they are using birth control may be playing the odds, but they aren’t capable of reading the heart.
And, likewise, the family with six children speaking about the blessing of children might not, actually, be judging the childless couple. They might have siblings who are barren. They might even have been barren for a number of years!
Blessing and Curses
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.
And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
John 9:1-3
Let us be very clear. Being barren can be a curse. The barren man, barren woman, or husband or wife of the barren wife or husband, can be under a curse. Scripture is quite clear on that. It can be a curse on the nation, their family, or them individually. That is all very possible.
However it is also possible that it is not one, in any given situation. If you see an entire nation filled with barrenness, that is almost certainly a curse. But when you see one particular women, who has gone year after year without children… that may be God’s timing.
The Christian can deny neither of these possibilities. We cannot look at the barren couple and say, “Oh, they are so nice, I’m sure that God would never…”
But at the same time, they cannot say, “Oh, well, the doctors have said that you can’t have a child…”
Neither one of those is a Christian response. It is God who opens the womb, and God who closes the womb. Blessed by the name of the Lord.
Conclusion
And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.
And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?
Genesis 30:1-2
God shows His favour in many ways. One of these is His provision of children. Our society is filled with those who hate children, those who preach against children, those who preach in favour of delaying children, in favour of ‘safe sex’, in favour of ‘wisdom’ which would limit family size. Those messages fill the airwaves and blog posts. Indeed the post I responded to was one such.
Today’s world has turned God’s message of fruitfulness on its head. They don’t see children as a blessing, but as a curse. They see having ‘too many’ children as foolish, when Scripture blesses the newlywed couple with the call to have ‘thousands’. The couple who has children ‘too early’ is seen as foolish, weak, and unwise… whereas the Scripture’s seek fruitfulness with every act of lovemaking.
Scripture is full of barren women. Godly barren women, many of whom end up in the line of Christ. Scripture speaks of the agony of these women, and the frustration of their husbands. It chronicles the actions of those women as they sought to have children.
But Scripture never uses barren women as an excuse to ignore God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. In fact God will, in the face of the barren women, the barren marriage, literally pronounce a prophesy of children.
There is a difference, indeed all the difference in the world, between the woman whose womb God has not opened, and the willfully barren woman. All the difference in the world.
Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!
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Von also writes as ‘Arthur Yeomans’. Under that name he writes children’s, YA, and adult fiction from a Christian perspective. His books include:
The Bobtails meet the Preacher’s Kid
and
Soon to be coming out is GK Chesterton’s wonderful book, “What’s Wrong with the World”, for which ‘Arthur’ wrote most of the annotations.
Arthur also has a substack, and a website.
Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Links
There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference between the all-important and the unimportant,—why, such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who tho able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide.
Teddy Roosevelt
In Defence of Childless Cat Ladies
… the meme about them, that is. Not the Childless Cat Ladies. I’m not defending them!
I am not sure this group is looking for a conversation. They are just upset.