No kids

Does God care whether couples have kids?

The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., ever-controversial president of Kentucky’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has stirred debate by asserting that it’s “an absolute revolt against God’s design” if husbands and wives purposely avoid bearing children.

It’s a sensitive issue. American Jewish thinkers have expressed alarm about their community’s shrinkage and conservative Roman Catholics hold pro-birth attitudes.

Secular columnist Mark Steyn predicts that much of what we call the West “will effectively disappear within our lifetimes” due to declining birth rates. Other analysts worry that declining births mean that eventually there won’t be enough younger Americans to pay into the Social Security system.

To Mohler, raising children is both a God-given duty and “one of the most crucial opportunities for the making of saints.”

Following Southern Baptist style, Mohler based his case on the Bible, saying it teaches that “marriage, sex and children are part of one package. To deny any part of this wholeness is to reject God’s intention in creation – and his mandate revealed in the Bible.

“Couples are not given the option of chosen childlessness in the biblical revelation,” he contends. “To the contrary, we are commanded to receive children with joy as God’s gifts.”

A favored Mohler proof text: “Children are a gift of the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them” (Psalm 127:3-5).

A bitter response was written for ethicsdaily.com by Miguel De La Torre, a fellow Southern Baptist minister, alumnus of Mohler’s seminary and father of two who teaches social ethics at the Methodists’ Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

Whether Mohler realizes it or not, De La Torre says, his “full-quiver” theology is “white-supremacy code language advocating for the increase of white babies.”

De La Torre also claims Mohler’s viewpoint would forbid birth control, since if children are a blessing then “the best that humans can do is have as many children as possible.”

However, Mohler didn’t oppose contraception, nor did he define the number of children a Bible-based couple should have.

Mohler also says he wasn’t talking about couples who desire children but are unable to have them, only those who are capable of bearing children but “reject this intrusion in their lifestyle.”

The Bible “points to barrenness as a great curse,” he notes, alongside its depictions of children as divine gifts.

But De La Torre believes it’s “the height of biblical naivete to impose modern concepts upon ancient texts.”

He contends that in the Old Testament, children were a “blessing” primarily in economic terms because in ancient agricultural societies, “extra hands to work the field” were valuable, and offspring provided financial security in old age.

Mohler’s crusade was occasioned by things like a Salon.com article titled “To Breed or Not to Breed.” He objects that “animals breed” but “human beings procreate and raise children to the glory of God.”

Other provocations were debates about child-free apartment buildings and tax policies, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s coverage of couples who prefer to spend money on gadgets rather than on children, and the formation of No Kidding!, a childlessness organization.

To Mohler, it’s “sick” that one member of No Kidding! says she transfers motherly feelings to her dog.