Introduction:
So, disclaimer: I’ve never read A Handmaid’s Tale…and I probably won’t. Though I heard Atwood in an interview make a very insightful observation; she said that every Utopia contains a Dystopia and every Dystopia contains a Utopia. And I think she’s necessarily correct. I don’t think you can describe a “good place” without knowing what’s bad about “this place”. Likewise, you can’t describe a “bad place” without seeing what’s good and desirable and endangered in “this place”. The Universe that Atwood has created, as a Dystopia, according to her, stems from not only a vision of what is dangerous in our society and culture but also what is endangered. Not only does she point to what she sees as the dangerous end-point of our current trajectory, but she sees something of value in the world-as-it-is…or was, in the case of A Handmaid’s Tale, considering it’s now decades old.
The point of her story is that porn and licentiousness and disease have created a fertility crisis, as well as other crises, and Puritanical, Fundamentalist, Religious Patriarchs have seized power, established a Theocracy and fertile women are used as chattels for breeding stock. Which, as far as a Dystopia goes, that’s not a bad story. Atwood saw a world full of porn and sexual violence against women, she saw the struggling and foundering 2nd Wave Feminist Movement as well as “The Moral Majority” and she saw it from a Canadian’s eyes (knowing the excesses that Americans are prone to) and she made a literary prediction.
And, it turns out she was half-right. There is a fertility crisis – which Malcolm Muggeridge as well as many other Christians predicted in the mid-20th Century. But she was also half-wrong. Christian Fundamentalism did not establish a Patriarchal Theocracy in America.
Fecundity and Fundamentalists:
But the funny thing about fertility crises is that governments tend to see them coming, and smart governments try to head them off! In Sweden one politician proposed extended lunch breaks if that lunch break were to include a “nooner”. Other nations allow mass immigration. Other, less clever nations, simply do nothing and let their populations…depopulate.
In the developed world, including America, this fertility crisis is one that doesn’t seem to have a great answer. Prophylactics, Contraceptives, Hormonal and Abortive Birth Control, and of course Abortion, have meant that even though people are still having sex people aren’t having babies. Moreover, the effects of Feminism, culturally, have placed increasing social pressure on women to not “settle” for being a wife or mother – meaning that women are putting off motherhood, shortening their fertility range. Thus, delayed and cancelled marriage, contraception, and abortion have created a fertility crisis in many subgroups in America.
And the drop is not limited to the usual suspects. For a long time Black Protestants and White Evangelicals (Conservative Protestants is also a term in the literature) topped the fertility charts. But today, Black Protestants and White Conservative Evangelicals are indistinguishable from Mainline Protestants and Catholics in their fertility rates. This is a shocking find considering that the data from 2002 demonstrated higher fertility rates based upon “religiosity” – the more religious you were the higher your chances of havin’ lotsa babies.
But, Evangelicals musta got lost, somewhere down the line. Because while “religiousity” isn’t really a meaningful predictor of fertility – one thing is: political Conservatism. The data collected here show that over time, voting trends are meaningfully and predictably correlated to fertility and that this correlation cannot be accounted for simply by rurality or wealth.
That is significant, if for no other reason than that religiosity and denominational affiliation is a less reliable predictor of fertility than whether or not you voted for Bush or Trump (we shan’t speak of McCain or Romney).
Religion and Politics Are Now One:
Now, it’s always dangerous to delve too deep into the Mines of Moria, but I think as we try to wend our way through Khazad-dûm, we’ll find that if we can avoid the Balrogs see that the real divide in Christianity today is NOT Pedobaptism, or Pentecostalism, and it’s not Calvinism/ Arminianism. The divide isn’t high-church or low church – the divide is a cultural divide. Catholics and Baptists are finding common cause because politically conservative Catholics and Baptists realize that while they may disagree on Ecclesiological issues, they can say the same creeds and believe in the same Jesus and share the same vision for family, government, and culture. This doesn’t eradicate the serious theological differences and disagreements, but the divisions in the Church have revealed that the visions for human flourishing are determinative for how we live our lives. Thus, Anthropological issues, not Theological issues, are the concerns that are causing Christians to cluster – if not Balkanize.
Many Mennonites find they have more in common with Catholics and Lutherans who voted Trump than they do their own coreligionists who voted Biden. The issues that matter today, rightly or wrongly, are not the issues that sparked and sustained the Great Schism, the Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, or even the rise of Fundamentalism/ Evangelicalism.
There is an ecumenical movement in America and it can be discerned by political affiliation more readily than theological predisposition. This is because, today, Anthropological issues are driving and determining our hermeneutical lenses, and these are the issues dividing the church. The Trump-voting Catholic and the Trump-voting Mennonite (and include everyone in-between) find that they have a radically, fundamentally, and irreconcilably different view of the world than other people who share their denominational affiliation. This cannot be underestimated. Nor should it be dismissed as a buncha fundies “prioritizing politics over the gospel”. While there have been, and are, and will be excesses – people seeing Trump and other Conservative political figures as saviors, though this is a much smaller phenomenon than it’s made out to be – these excesses cannot and should not be the exceptions that invalidate the rule. Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Peace Churchers, and Pentecostals who voted Trump tend to have a shared vision for the world and that vision includes having babies and not murdering them in the womb. Indeed, Pro-Life views may account for an enormous amount of this neo-ecumenism. But I don’t think it’s limited to that.
I think that the realignment of religious and political values in America is fundamentally along Anthropological lines. Conservatives have a clear and articulable view of human flourishing. This includes: Pro-Life; Freedom of Speech; Freedom of Assembly; an affirmation of Complementarianism; an affirmation of Sexual and “Gender” Norms; as well as similar issues.
Politics and Religion, while they’ve never really been separable, are now not ever separate. There once may have been distinctions with differences, but now there are none. Big-Government and Authoritarianism has broken the back of Classical Liberalism and since everything is regulable everything is up for regulation. The old adage of live-and-let live, and the limits of Federal legislation to the enumerated powers and, you know, actual laws passed by congress, is no longer in force. States no longer can enforce their moral visions of marriage, sexuality, gender-norms, whether boys can race against or cage-fight girls, whether man can use the women’s locker room, and whether we can murder babies. Once the Federal Government began revoking state’s rights to enforce a conservative moral agenda and instituted a Federally protected liberal moral agenda, Classical Liberalism was broken. Now the options are what kind of theocracy we want.
This meant that the issues that faced individual Christians once every 2 or 4 years – whom to vote for to send to Washington – now became intrinsically and inseparably tied to your moral vision of government which is inextricably linked to your vision of human flourishing. As the distinctions became more and more pronounced politically, in Christian circles the differences began to mount and split congregations and denominations – but the old nomenclature survived.
Doing Demography and Curious Categorizations:
We still do demography based on “Catholic”, “Evangelical”, “Mainline Protestant”, “Black Protestant”, “Pentecostal” – even though for many, if not most issues, this is a category that is only a proxy (and a bad one) at assessing how people orient themselves to the world. These denominators are useful only if you’re asking the wrong question to get the right answer. Similarly, we use “college degree” as a proxy for General IQ, because it’s illegal to give people an IQ test in a job interview. If HR reps could give IQ tests they would, because IQ is an extremely useful predictor of workplace success, whereas a college education is only useful insofar as it predicts General IQ.
In the same way “Evangelical” is only a useful term insofar as it can predict political Conservatism, and political Conservatism is only a useful term insofar as it can predict a specific vision of human flourishing. This means that the literature saying that Evangelicals are having a baby-bust is true. But it’s also, largely, a category error.
Evangelicals ARE having a baby-bust. But political Conservatives are still meaningfully outpacing political Liberals and THAT is the distinction that matters, because Conservative and Liberal are no longer only mildly correlated to one’s religious vision, but heavily and meaningfully correlated. So, religious people ARE still having lotsa babies – but it’s a specific KIND of religious people.
And this brings us back to the title. Call me Offred. Why? Because I, like many Conservative Christians – call us Evangelicals or Neo-Fundamentalists…just not late for supper – have more than an average number of babies and we want to have more. My wife and I value babies and children and life. We believe that children are a blessing from God and that it is our duty to steward our sexuality and fertility for the advancement of the Kingdom of God and His Glory. We do this by having lotsa babies and raising them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. And largely, the people having lotsa babies, have a similar view – even Jews and Muslims have their version of this view. Conservative Religionists share this view. Though I’m speaking primarily about Conservative Christians.
But here’s the thing. You might say, Luke, you having babies doesn’t make you a handmaid (or even your wife!) because you’re doing this freely. Sure, this is just an analogy: obvi! But the point is this, it isn’t JUST Trump-voting religious people who want Trump-voting religious people to have lotsa babies. Liberals do too! Why? Because a prince without subjects is ruined! (Proverbs 14:28) The only way to sustain the Ponzi-Scheme entitlement programs, is by passing debt on to future generations. If there aren’t enough future citizens, then the debt won’t be purchased by anyone because nobody will have confidence that the debt will be worth anything by the time it gets paid off! Our national debt is only worth buying if you expect your investment to pay-off something more valuable than the expense of buying the debt!
The Politics of Dancing…Horizontally:
Enter Child Tax Credits. It’s pretty weak-sauce compared to some Pronatalist policies around the world, but its an indication that the government recognizes the baby bust and the untenability of current economic and debt policies unless we have a massive population influx. A lot of our policies rely on baby-boom rationale, that our population pyramid would continue to have linear growth at the base – despite people knowing that that’s not how wealthy industrialized countries’ populations work.
Thus, for print-and-spend policies to work government needs more babies to be future debt-payers. Moreover, the Liberal politico-religious worldview cannot sustain itself. It is, in many ways, a culture of death. A culture of abortion, assisted suicide, liberality on drug use, and that promotes single-parenthood, experimental sex, and the disruption of family structures and sexual norms cannot be a culture of life. It simply cannot.
Thus, the politico-religious Left relies on the religio-political Right to do what it, itself, is incapable of doing: having and raising lotsa babies. And, if you’re willing, the government is willing to pay you to do it too! Granted, they also want to take your babies at age 3-5 and force them into an indoctrination system that will last 13-27 years. But hey, pros and cons, amiright!
Enter homeschooling. Homeschooling, of course, throws a nasty wrench in the works. This is the best of both worlds for religio-political Right-wingers and still a benefit, but not Win-Win-Win for the politico-religious Left. Thus, I think that if current fertility trends continue – and I cannot see how they will alter without some major black-swan event – expect to see more Pronatal policies and significant barriers to homeschooling.
Conclusion:
The American Fertility Crisis is not going away. Mass immigration risks cultural destabilization, and is opposed strongly by the Right, generally, and many Border States, specifically. Pronatal policies cost money and, for the religio-political Left it risks giving Conservatives more incentive to have more babies and to raise them up to be politico-religious Conservatives, but it does provide a tax-base and native, enculturated workforce. There seems to be little that will transform women in the religio-political Left into women who desire to have large families, as their worldview is, in essence, a culture of Antinatalism and death. The Left, generally, views children as either hindrances to flourishing or as accessories to round-out a successful life, not souls valuable in-themselves as souls.
Unless and until the politico-religious Left finds ways to transform their worldview into one that incorporates high-fertility into its vision of human flourishing it seems that the Left will continue to have increasingly lower fertility rates (at least among wealthy, educated, native citizens). Until that happens, the politico-religious Right with its view of high fertility as a component of human-flourishing will be either a necessary evil to tolerate or a natural resource to exploit.
Margaret Atwood predicted that Fundamentalist Theocrats would force liberal women into sexual slavery to solve the fertility crisis. Ironically, almost the exact inverse is happening – Leftist Politicians are trying to persuade Fundamentalists to solve their Fertility Crisis through Pronatalist policies. And if the politico-religious Right, specifically Christians who voted for Trump of whatever denomination, wish to transform our culture it will only happen if we outbreed and raise up a wave of godly youngsters who wish to advance the Kingdom of God. Call me Offred.