JD Vance and Al Mohler use fuzzy math to sound an alarm on falling birth rates

Over the past two months since Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate, many people have been surprised to learn about Vance’s demonization of women in the workplace and his strange fascination with large families.

Just this past week, another quote from a 2021 interview was revealed where Vance said: “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle … instead of starting a family and having children.”

To Vance, women being in the workplace rather than in the kitchen is a problem that has reached apocalyptic proportions.

“We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country,” the radical Catholic vice presidential candidate told the Napa Institute that same year. “Even among healthy, intact families, they’re not having enough kids such that we’re going to have a long-term future in this country.” Then he added, “If you don’t have babies, if you don’t have life, you do not have a future country.”

Vance’s panic echos the talking points that white supremacist supporters of eugenics have been promoting over the last century, with “healthy, intact families” traditionally being code for white families in contrast to “unhealthy, broken families” supposedly being from the Black community.

“The major problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born.”

In 1911, former President Theodore Roosevelt began echoing the fears of race suicide that had been growing since the end of the Civil War. Then the psychologist Paul Popenoe started demonizing interracial marriage and same-sex relationships in the 1930s as a way of promoting the reproduction of white families. His assistant was James Dobson, who became the most influential person shaping white evangelicalism’s view of the “biblical family” in the 20th century through Focus on the Family.

The eugenics movement gained momentum again through the 1987 Ben Wattenberg book, The Birth Dearth, in which Wattenberg argued: “The major problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born. If we don’t do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white man’s land.”

So it should be no surprise that a leader of the conservative movement in the Southern Baptist Convention would echo the misogynistic mumblings of Vance and the racist rhetoric of Wattenberg.

Al Mohler, the SBC’s most prominent theologian, has explicitly used Wattenberg’s white supremacist “birth dearth” term in at least seven articles. And he recommends Wattenberg’s books and writing by name at least another three times. For him to recommend Wattenberg’s work and to spend decades repeating Wattenberg’s rhetoric without condemning Wattenberg’s white supremacy is notable.

In one piece from 2004, Mohler warned, “The average woman in the world today bears half as many children as did her counterpart just 30 years ago.” Then he prophesied, “The population implosion the world seems soon to experience will be due to the confluence of materialism, human ambition, self-interests and secular ideologies.”

That was 20 years ago. And he’s still talking about it today in apocalyptic terms, stating in May this year that the birth rate “is such a significant issue that, quite frankly, other issues pale in significance,” and claimed it “threatens the very existence of human civilization” and “can only be described as catastrophic.”

Human population over the years

One of the tricky aspects of Mohler’s warnings is that he uses research by experts in economics and demographics. For example, he quotes economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde from the University of Pennsylvania saying, “The demographic winter is coming.” Then Mohler adds, “Hear that winter? The demographic winter is coming. We are really talking about a very threatening reality.”

But consider for a moment how human population has increased over the centuries. In 1804, the world had an estimated 1 billion people. That number rose to 1.6 billion by 1900, an increase of just 600 million people over the course of a century. But by the year 2000, the world’s population jumped to nearly 6.2 billion. In the first 24 years of this century, that number has increased to 8.1 billion people.

Mohler seems unaware of these facts because he claims, “For most of human history, there was no philosophical debate about the birth rate. The birth rate was simply what happened, and it happened as families and couples had the motivation to maximize the number of children.”

So amidst his apparent ignorance of the unprecedented growth in population over the 20th century, Mohler is in a panic that civilization is on the verge of collapse due to falling birth rates.

“You have to have an adequate number of babies to have an adequate number of boys and an adequate number of girls to make sure you have an adequate number of husbands and an adequate number of wives having an adequate number of babies, say, two decades thereafter,” he wrote in May. “If you don’t, you’re in big trouble.”

Making fun of the Malthusians

One of the reasons Mohler is so sure of himself is that predictions made by liberals during the 20th century about overpopulation causing a food shortage turned out not to happen.

“The prophets of a population explosion have issued regular books and bulletins that paint a depressing picture of a planet running out of both room and resources,” he says. “Now, it turns out that these Cassandras got the picture almost entirely backward.”

But these wrong predictions made by liberals weren’t driven by the sexual revolution or an embrace of secularism as Mohler likes to pretend. Instead, they were based on the Malthusian Theory of Population that was popularized by Thomas Robert Malthus in his 1798 publication, “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”

According to the Intelligent Economist, Malthus came up with a set of calculations about population growth and food shortage to show that “populations will grow faster than the supply of food” and thus “exponential population growth will lead to a shortage of food.” And based on the numbers, we experienced exponential population growth in the 20th century unlike any other time in human history. So it was a fair question at the time to ask.

To solve this problem, Malthus promoted the ideas of “family planning, late marriages and celibacy.”

But what Malthus and the doomsday prophets of the last century from the left failed to realize was how unforeseen advances in technology and global trade have drastically increased food production.

This doesn’t mean Mohler suddenly has legitimate cause to dismiss the concerns of the left and to promote his family values. It simply means we worked together and came up with technology and systems to solve our problems.

The replacement rate alone is not a reliable guide

To Mohler, the issue is one of “simple math.” If we don’t have enough babies being born, then we won’t have enough workers to pay for the retirement needs of the elderly. “Eventually, the math tells you the story,” he confidently declares.

According to a 2015 United Nations Expert Group Meeting on Policy Responses to Low Fertility, “The United States has hovered for four decades at just under the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.” The replacement rate is the number of children a society’s women need to average in order to maintain a country’s population apart from immigration.

But according to the National Institutes of Health, due to a variety of factors, “fertility level is not, in itself, a reliable guide to population growth, and it is instead better to examine actual or projected population growth directly, then subsequently relating such growth to fertility, mortality, and migration.”

In other words, reality is a bit more complicated than Mohler’s “simple math.”

An economy of growth dependent on childbirth and cheap labor

To Mohler’s point, there is something to the concern of not having enough workers to pay for those in need in our economy. But before jumping on board with Mohler’s conclusions, we need to reflect on the nature of the economy we’ve created.

Conservatives like to argue the U.S. economy is one of freedom and merit, where everyone has the opportunity to create wealth over time.

In order to do this at the rates we have, we need to maintain a growing population. One way to do this is through immigration. But conservative politicians and pundits today promote the “replacement theory,” which spreads fear of white Americans being replaced by immigrants from the global south. Democrats, on the other hand, point to the fact that immigrants are necessary to perform physically demanding jobs at such low wages that native-born Americans don’t want to perform, and that removing them would hurt our economy by raising our costs.

Of course, another way to maintain population growth is through childbirth. But because costs of child care are through the roof and have increased by 32% since 2019, many couples opt to have fewer children, have children later in life, or arrange for one parent to stay home. When stay-at-home parents are considered in economic terms, they are producing the workers of tomorrow. But while our economy most often depends on women to play that role, we don’t value them by offering them anything in return. As Raj Patel says in The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy: “To reproduce workers requires more than making babies. It’s a long process of child-rearing, feeding, clothing, housing, educating, socializing and disciplining, and the costs of this are the source of perhaps the most fundamental misvaluation worldwide — the market’s treatment of women’s work in the home.”

And lest we forget as a result of all the conservative book bans and demonization of Critical Race Theory, during the first 246 years of our nation’s formation, our economy grew on the backs of slaves.

Each of these scenarios for growing the economy depend on labor that pays zero to very low wages.

And who benefits the most from this model? The rich.

According to the Federal Reserve, in 2021, households in the top 1% of income owned 30.9% of the wealth, with households in the bottom 50% holding just 2.6% of the wealth. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused many of us to lose our jobs, billionaires increased their wealth by 70%. U.S. billionaires alone now are estimated to be worth a combined $5 trillion.

So it’s no wonder Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has said, “These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.”

Working together through shared investment

Of course, changing any of those factors — immigration, women in the workplace, or slavery — could dramatically affect our economy, since our economy depends on population increases and cheap labor to grow.

But potential effects on our economy should have played zero role in whether or not it was right to free the slaves. And the same thing is true for how we treat immigrants and women. We should treat people well because they are our fellow humans, not because they are financial pawns in a game being played by billionaires.

Women should be free to pursue the careers they want because they are no less human than men are. They should be free to have as many or as few children as they want because they are no less human than men are. We should be able to do the right thing and then work together to deal with the financial challenges that may come from treating one another with basic human decency.

If women going to work makes it more challenging for them to have the number of children they’d like to have, we should be able to work together as a community to make both priorities happen.

“As JD Vance once tweeted out, ‘Universal day care is class war against normal people.’”

In a piece for the Washington Post, University of Colorado demographer Leslie Root wrote that our nation not having enough kids “can burden governments, since it means they may struggle to pay for elder care,” but having too many kids “tends to burden families, who pay most of the costs of caring for children.” She added, “One bright side to the current population panic is that it has opened up conversations about ways to make life better for Americans.”

But while recommending an investment into paid leave, education and health care, she cautions that our “primary goal should be to support, not to entice.”

In other words, these are complex and nuanced conversations we could be having together to support women pursuing their dreams and enhancing everyone’s quality of life. But any form of working together in our country is demonized by conservatives as socialism. As JD Vance once tweeted out, “Universal day care is class war against normal people.”

Blaming women

Mohler loves to base his views about men and women on his interpretation of Adam and Eve in Genesis. But the one thing he says that seems somewhat similar to Genesis is when he, like Adam, blames women.

“It has been noted for a long time that the declining total fertility rate has a lot to do with the attainment of increased education by women and the delay of marriage, especially when it comes to women, and the entry into the workforce of women,” he writes.

He says women who consider marriage and childbearing as a “lifestyle choice” are committing one of the “deadliest” sins.

In Mohler’s worldview, working together to solve our problems doesn’t mean figuring out solutions that foster wholeness for everyone, regardless of gender, race or class. Instead, it means everyone submitting to their place in a hierarchy.

This is why he told Larry King in 1998: “If you’re a slave, there’s a way to behave.” Then when asked if he would criticize the slaves who tried to escape, Mohler said, “I want to look at this text seriously, and it says to submit to the master. And I really don’t see any loophole here as much as, in terms of popular culture, we’d want to see one.”

“He’s simply shifted the way Southern Baptists treated slaves in the 19th century to the way they treat women today.”

Of course, he recanted his comment when he was called on it 22 years later. But he didn’t explain why he was wrong. And if you consider the way he’s talking about women, you realize why. He’s simply shifted the way Southern Baptists treated slaves in the 19th century to the way they treat women today.

If you’re a Southern Baptist woman, there’s a way to behave. Submit to your husband. And there are no loopholes no matter what our culture says. It’s the exact same argument. He knows he can’t get away with explicitly making racist statements today. So sexism scratches his racist itch in the name of a biblical worldview.

Mohler reminds us, “The charge that was given to Adam and to Eve was to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth.” But despite supposedly going from just two people to more than 8.1 billion people in 6,000 years, Mohler claims, “Far too many Christians have bought into the idea that we did that, but we didn’t do that.” And despite the fact that 80% of today’s world population happened during the time Mohler claims we became secular, he’s blaming secular women for not being fruitful and filling the earth.

He claims to value “simple math.” But Mohler Math doesn’t make any sense.

Like JD Vance, Al Mohler has no desire to foster human flourishing for women. He wants to put them in the kitchen and on the bed, while men get to pursue their dreams. In fact, Mohler says getting women pregnant needs to be our “No. 1 national priority” and our “first civilizational responsibility.” But women shouldn’t have to choose between spending “90 hours a week working in a cubicle” or being Mohler’s Handmaids.

As John Beckett, coordinating officer of the Dallas-based Denton Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, recently warned: “Beware those who preach against falling birth rates. Their interests are likely at odds with yours.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.