I don’t agree with many of National Review’s John Derbyshire’s conclusions on parenting, but he does have an interesting take on one recent item: an Arkansas mother giving birth to her sixteenth child. This is especially relevant given our recent discussions here on dwindling childbearing among the so-called “mainline” Protestant segment of American Christianity. Writes Mr. Derbyshire:
A normal person’s reaction, on hearing about this, would be: “God bless them! But how on earth do they manage financially?” The United States is running a bit short of normal people, though, and filling up with types like SF Gate columnist Mark Morford, who wondered aloud:
Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words — assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will never be allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right — where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on culture? Where is the counterbalance to offset the damage?
(Doesn’t that word “asexual” seem a bit out of place in this context? Whatever.) What you are hearing there is the squeal of fear that comes from a liberal who notices a thing he’d much rather not notice: that the only truly philoprogenitive groups in the world are religious minorities — fundamentalist Christians, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims. Whatever you think about atheism intellectually or spiritually, it’s a Darwinian bust… whatever you think about Darwin.
