With most reasonable people worrying about overpopulation these days, it can be surprising to encounter right-wing Christians getting mad at women for not making babies. That, however, is exactly what they’re doing. For years now, right-wing Christians have blamed women for not having tons of kids. But they’re only looking at a certain set of women here. As it turns out, they’re fine with most women having fewer children—while at the same time they’re demanding that one very particular group of women take a substantial health and financial hit to make lots and lots and lots of babies.

And these women should have babies for their leaders’ comfort. Er, I mean to obey Jesus. No wait, I mean for the American dream. No, for their own morality’s sake. But really, for their leaders’ comfort. It’s the new NEW moral panic over America’s falling birthrate, folks! And we’ll check it out today.

(This post first went live on Patreon on 1/17/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: A youth minister swears off lock-ins; the Power Team; Pinterest ideas for lock-ins.)

(Note: A TRUE CHRISTIAN™ is convinced that their own quirky li’l take on Christianity is the only valid one. TRUE CHRISTIANS™ vociferously gatekeep the label of “Christian” to mean only those who: 1) believe basically the same things their judge does; 2) haven’t gotten caught doing anything the judge considers completely off-limits; and 3) die with the first two conditions being valid.)

Gab owner orders women to make more babies—but just certain women

Andrew Torba—a right-wing Christian nutjob and white nationalist—is the owner of the notoriously insecure right-wing social-media site Gab. In May, he took to his blog to write yet another passionate screed. But he wasn’t in the mood to discuss social media. Oh no. Not this time.

No, he had Team TRUE CHRISTIAN™ on his mind.

That day, he lectured women for not having enough babies. “You need to be babymaxxing,” he commanded them. He explained that “babymaxxing” means having as many children as possible. (Who knows? Maybe even extremist Christian nationalists know that “quiverfull” is a tainted brand.)

However, Torba directed these demands toward only one group of women: TRUE CHRISTIAN™ women.

Like all such men do, Torba blithely hand-waved away all the costs and time involved in adequately parenting even one child. He insouciantly assured readers that “it’s tough, but not impossible, to have a large family when the economy is so rigged against you doing so.” So if they wanted big families enough, his readers simply needed “a lot of self-sacrifice and a reevaluation of [their] priorities.”

And his readers needed to make those sacrifices and reevaluations—and those babies—soon and quickly, because it was their duty before Jesus Christ himself.

Defeating enemies not through the truth, but through overwhelming numbers

Not only would obeying King Andrew Torba also constitute obeying Jesus Christ himself, he told his readers, but “babymaxxing” would give TRUE CHRISTIANS™ like themselves a leg up on defeating their enemies:

[B]y focusing on our own households and prioritizing the growth of our families, we can counteract the destructive influence of our enemies, most of whom do not have children of their own. As their ideas and ideologies die with them, our faith and values will continue to thrive. . .

Of course, Torba also expects his readers to fully and completely indoctrinate all those children with all the free time and money they’ve saved through self-sacrifice and the reevaluation of their priorities. Obviously!

Interestingly, this term spread quickly through the right-wing Christ-o-sphere. A few weeks later in early June 2024, a recent college graduate wrote a hilariously-non-factual post that used the term. She even breathlessly hinted that her tribemates needed to breed as much as they could because “the powers that be may start policing family sizes in the future.”

Yes, because obviously Democrats are very well-known for interfering with people’s reproductive decisions and dictating others’ family planning. Oh for sure. That’s not something Republicans and right-wing Christians do, ever. (/s)

(Some years back, I knew a married couple dealing with one spouse’s terminal illness. They coped with their dread of his looming death by having tons of children. At the time I worked with the other spouse, she was gestating Baby #5. Both of their families and friends, all right-wing religious folks, condemned the couple’s childbearing decisions. I think I was the only person the wife knew who didn’t criticize them. I wasn’t thrilled with her plans, but I also knew it wasn’t my place to say anything. Right-wing nutjobs are all for freedom of choice—as long as the choice is the one they think they’d have made in that situation.)

So many religious leaders are wringing their hands over babies

Because right-wing Christianity is thoroughly (if unwittingly) in thrall to the money that rules our world, such lecturing isn’t even restricted to TRUE CHRISTIANS™.

Over a decade ago, I wrote about the Chief Rabbi of the UK. This rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, was wringing his hands over a certain dearth of babies in his country. According to him, it was a catastrophe in the making! It was the end of civilization as we knew it! People were just too “individualistic” to care what religious leaders (like him) thought about their personal lives! They no longer deferred adequately to religious authorities (like him)! And obviously, that’s why UK people weren’t marrying as often or making as many babies!

As he said at the time, equally obviously (to him) this decline in marriage and childbearing/rearing had nothing to do with anything the government had done or not done. Instead, he declared, “It’s the fault of what we call culture, which is society talking to itself.”

At the time, we all had a good laugh about that—because most of us are not UK lords in highly-placed, great-paying sinecures and so we know exactly why people aren’t marrying and making as many babies as they used to. If he’d bothered to talk to literally any working-class person in his country, he’d have gotten an earful about the topic.

But he didn’t.

Why these imperious jackholes likely didn’t talk to any regular people about their family planning decisions

I suspect Sacks wouldn’t have liked that earful. It would have involved all the forces arrayed against low-earning people that make them understandably reticent about tackling any long-term project that’s guaranteed to eat ginormous amounts of their time and money for decades to come. Despite his criticisms, most people aren’t going to shoulder huge burdens just for his comfort.

That’s why everyone just laughed at Sacks instead of taking him seriously. Unless the guy planned to help them find the time and money for more children, he could sit on his thumb and swivel for all they cared about his hand-wringing.

And then we did the same thing when the insufferable Ross Douthat lectured feminists for not having babies. In his view, their childbearing decisions had led them to think less about America’s future. But it had also made them afraid of their own futures, since they’d be facing old age without the help of grown-up children. Thus, they’d voted for Trump.

Yes, it’s very tortured reasoning. Logic and her daughter, Critical Thinking, have never been friends of his. I’m not even sure the guy even had children of his own at this point, despite having been married for a while. The important thing is that he figured out another way to condemn women for something that isn’t actually our fault—while letting his own tribe off the hook.

Of course, Douthat wasn’t the only one blaming women for Trump’s 2016 election win. But he was certainly one of the least acquainted with reality.

Nothing has changed in religious leaders continuing to demand women have babies

In February 2020, the evangelical magazine Christianity Today raised a sharp and strident alarm. See, Americans were having fewer kids! At this time, the pandemic hadn’t even really begun in America. So you can imagine how freaked out evangelical leaders got when that crisis led to further declines in American childbearing.

Indeed, by mid-2021 a Southern Baptist seminary bigwig, Al Mohler, took to his blog to complain about the whole situation. In his view, the dip in childbearing after the housing crash of 2008 reflected something more than just financial stress:

But here’s where even at the time we had to point out that economics alone really can’t explain this. Yes, in times of economic depression or recession there often is a dip in the birth rate, but it’s clearly tied to an economic urgency, and families quickly get back to the business of having babies, raising children, the birth rate goes back to normal or even an elevated rate, but that’s not happening. And what we’re looking at is the fact that through human history, there are people who have lived under far more dire economic circumstances that still went on to have babies.

It’s comical to see someone this ponderously earnest and yet this divorced from the reality of lower-income Americans’ lives. I reckon he hasn’t got any family members who aren’t at least moderately wealthy. I think that because most middle- and working-class Americans could easily tell this guy the truth.

For decades, financially-insecure people have been delaying or deciding against parenthood

The economy, for poorer people, never recovered after that 2008 crisis. Indeed, housing only got more expensive. Survival costs only rose relative to paychecks. And rising medical and educational costs only eviscerated more and more of us. Comparing apples to oranges by pointing to previous economic crises in America’ past won’t lead more people wanting to make babies now.

Americans aren’t the only ones facing this new financial reality. Last year, an Australian study found that the same thing was going on over there:

Analysis from KPMG released this morning shows the number of babies born in 2023 was the lowest since 2006 – a far cry from the post-pandemic surge in births in 2021 and 2022.

It sounds like that surge occurred because the Australian government gave its citizens more help than Americans got. But once that help dwindled, economic reality set in again.

Evangelicals’ biggest obstacle to making babies is that they’re at heart not that different from the rest of us

I realize evangelicals love to think of themselves as different from other people. They’re just so, I dunno, DIFFERENT I guess. But really, they’re not. Barring the weirdos at the most fanatical end of their spectrum, most of them respond to economic and cultural cues the same way everyone else does.

That means that their middle- and working-class members face the same economic crunches as everyone else in those classes. When everyone else in their general class complains about loneliness, they’re lonely too. And tired. And pressed for time and worried sick about making their bills and having to decide between paying the electric bill on time or getting groceries.

Not counting college, American parents can expect raising just one child to 17 to cost over USD$310,000. If they allow their adult child to live with them past 18, as many do these days, obviously those costs only continue to climb.

But costs alone are not the only factor involved in these decisions. In 2021, Pew Research found that a slight majority of American non-parents said they simply didn’t want to have children.

It may well be that the decline in both parenthood decisions and Christian membership share a cause in common: When people can decide for themselves what they want to do, many opt out. It may well be that the only reason most people had kids in years past was because they had no real choice in the matter. Birth control gave people real choices about parenthood for the first time in human history—just as civil laws and human rights advances gave us real choices about religion.

Just as with Christianity, as well, the only real way to reverse the babymaking decline involves ripping away people’s rights to make intimate decisions for themselves.

Betraying their desire for babies to indoctrinate

I don’t think right-wing authoritarians have overlooked that fact, either. I’m certain that they know that their power and comfort can only be maintained through iron-gripped control over others. I think they know that emotional manipulation isn’t anywhere near enough to get them that level of control.

Worse, though, they themselves have told us that they know their worldview can only survive through forcing fundamentally untrue ideas onto vulnerable children. They plan to do this even if such indoctrination yields nebulous rewards that might never materialize (given how many children end up deconverting or at least walking away from right-wing extremist Christianity).

That is why they want babies. Not because it’ll totally restore the American dream. No, it’s just the only thing they can imagine that will maintain their power.

Torba and his ilk wouldn’t dare suggest that their ideology should survive and thrive on its own merits. They already know it can’t. Rather, they fully embrace their ideology’s purely earthly, man-made nature—and its complete and utter lack of anything divine at its center.

Somehow, I doubt that a real omnimax god would need all this coercive power to make his religion thrive. If anything ever was, this is “what does God need with a starship” stuff.

Crying for more babies won’t make more babies, though

It’s just interesting to me that evangelism and conversion don’t really factor in to any of these authoritarians’ plans to save TRUE CHRISTIANS™ or the American dream. Right-wing Christians appear to have completely given up on selling membership to their groups to non-Christians.

For years, I’ve been noticing this exact trend. Right-wing Christians still pay lip service to evangelism and conversion, of course. Evangelicals in particular do, and who’s surprised? After all, it’s part of their group name.

But these days, even evangelicals seem far more focused on outbreeding the people they see as their worst enemies. When they bother to evangelize these days, the effort is obviously more about enforcing ingroup cohesion than bagging new members for their churches.

So far, these dysfunctional authoritarians seem content to try to guilt and shame their followers into breeding more babies. That’s as far as their powers go. They’re not willing to campaign to ease the financial or time burden on families, either, which will only lead to more right-wing Christians deciding not to have children.

At least the flocks’ refusal to comply will give their leaders ample sermon grist for years to come—and provide yet another moral high horse for the very few right-wingers who can obey their leaders’ demands.

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Captain Cassidy

Captain Cassidy is a Gen-X ex-Christian and writer. She writes about how people engage with science, religion, art, and each other. She lives in Idaho with her husband, Mr. Captain, and their squawky orange tabby cat, Princess Bother Pretty Toes. And at any given time, she is running out of bookcase space.

1 Comment

Quiverfull: Not gone, not forgotten - Roll to Disbelieve · 01/27/2025 at 4:00 AM

[…] I see today’s hardline right-wing Christians demanding more babies of their followers, it always makes me think of the old Quiverfull movement. Indeed, this movement contains a lot of […]

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