Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 750-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Subscribe to One Nation, Indivisible with Andrew Seidel:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/one-nation-indivisible-with-andrew-seidel/id1791471198
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0w5Lb2ImPFPS1NWMG0DLrQ
Why do conservative, high-control Protestants in America emphasize the need for Americans, especially Christians, to have children? How is this consistent with their past positions, and how has it changed over time? How does this relate to conservative Protestant views on the use of contraception, which have always been a mixed bag? And how have changing articulations of these views brough conservative Protestants and conservative Catholics closer together in their respective ideologies of sexual and gender? Listen to this week’s episode as Dan tackles these questions.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I don't know about you, but my schedule is packed.
I got kids' activities, trying to get them to school every day, big work projects, and much more.
It's easy to let my priorities slip, even when I know they make me happy.
In the past, I've benefited from therapy.
It's made me somebody who understands his past experiences with more clarity and somebody who has coping skills to deal with my ongoing challenges every day.
If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try.
It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule.
You just have to fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists anytime for no charge.
Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp.
Visit betterhelp.com slash rc to get 10% off your first month.
That's betterhelp.com/rc.
Welcome to It's In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American My name, of course, is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Thrilled, as always, to be with you.
And as always, thank you to those of you who listen, those of you who support us in so many ways, subscribers who help us keep going and keep doing the things that we're doing.
A lot going on in the world, as you know, and all of you supporting us in these different ways are what keep us going and help us to be able to do our small, but we hope, important part in sort of addressing those things.
As always, I want to invite folks to reach out whether you've got thoughts about this series that we've been looking at.
We've got to talk about the sex stuff.
That's the series that we're in.
The series, it's in the code more generally.
If you've got topics you'd like to talk about, things you'd like to say, responses to earlier episodes, what have you.
Just general feedback.
Always welcome that.
DanielMillerSwag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Feel free to reach out to me.
I also hover around the Discord.
You don't always see me there, but I do spend time there.
And continuing to solicit topics on a couple things.
One...
Questions I wasn't allowed to ask in church.
So if you've got an idea of the kinds of things that if you were a church person, questions that you kind of knew you couldn't ask, let me know.
Put that in the header.
Or what I'm calling anti-apologetics, those people in your life, or maybe you've read others or encountered them on Twitter or X or wherever, saying, you know, here's why God has to exist.
Anybody who believes God doesn't exist is an idiot for the following reason, you know, whatever, whatever those arguments are.
Email me those.
Put that in the header as well.
Kind of compiling some stuff for some upcoming episodes.
I want to dive in this week.
As I say, we're continuing the series.
We've got to talk about the sex stuff.
And today I want to talk about breeding Christians.
Okay?
What do I mean by that?
Well, we've looked at a number of issues related to normative conceptions of sex and gender, of what counts as sex, the purpose of sex, and so on.
And today we're kind of building on that.
But I want to look at two related issues.
Now, the issues of birth control and the ideology of needing to have kids, the injunction that Christians need to have children.
Really, it's the injunction that Americans need to have children, but specifically that white Christians need to have kids.
And this is a nexus where a lot of these other themes flow together in ways that are, I think, more complex and fluid than we might think.
And it's why it's important, in my mind, to go through all of those other kind of foundational issues before you get into some of these things that are the things we start seeing, not just, you know, in churches, but in public policy and statements by politicians and so forth.
So, let's start with this, okay?
It is absolutely taken for granted within this religious subculture of American high-control Christianity, absolutely taken for granted, That a marriage will result in children.
And again, remember that so far, we talked about marriage, we were talking about cis-hetero, monogamous commitment, you know, one man, one woman for life, etc.
It is just absolutely taken for granted that this will result in children.
And why?
Well, remember that the purpose of sex within the sex-gender ideology of high-control religion in America is the purpose of sex as procreation.
That's the whole point.
Talked about that.
I think that that idea that the purpose of sexist procreation is incoherent and doesn't make sense, and you can go back and listen to those episodes.
But the creation of children is the driving force between the entire institution of marriage within this ideology, and the ideal of the nuclear family, right?
And by the nuclear family, of course, I mean, you know, the sort of mom, dad, and their kids.
The nuclear family is the centerpiece of the social model within...
Within this religion, especially as it has emerged within the 20th century in America, this model of the family is God's ordained model for society and human relationships.
And there are a lot of places you can go and learn more about this.
One that I found really useful is Sophie Bjork-James' book, The Divine Institution, White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family.
If you want a little bit deeper dive into that, that's a great place to go.
Some other good resources.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that that's a historically contingent conception of the family.
Even the Bible, the so-called inerrant Bible that all these conservative Christians tell you they believe in, does not typically have that model of the family.
It's much more sort of tribal, or you might think of as extended families or clans or different kinds of things like this.
But within the gender ideology, the sexual ideology of high-control religion, The nuclear family is God's ordained model for society and human relationships.
Okay?
So that's some of the background.
That's why it's taken for granted that marriage is going to result in a family.
And just to give an illustration of this, growing up within this subculture and pastoring within this subculture, so I mean, for a good chunk of my life, this was, you know, if I was a fish, this is the ocean I was swimming in.
I don't think I ever encountered anyone who openly stated, now there may have been people who thought this, who believed this, who were practicing this, but I don't think I ever heard anybody just come out and say that they were not planning to have children or that they were actively working to never have children.
In other words, their understanding of birth control use was to prevent ever having kids.
I've been kind of racking my brain in anticipation of this episode.
I know that this is anecdotal.
I know that's not scientific or anything to talk about my experience, but That's my experience in, you know, two or three different denominations, different geographical regions and cultural regions of the U.S., engaging with people of different life stages.
It's got to be thousands of Christian folks that I would have talked to by then, people in dozens and dozens of churches, churches that I would speak in, churches that I participated in, and so forth, churches that I pastored.
I don't think I ever heard anybody say.
I don't think I'm going to have kids, or I don't want to have kids, or we're working to prevent ever having kids.
To the extent that that kind of family planning, even the language of family planning, right, kind of presupposes that one is planning to have a family.
But there would be discussions of family planning and birth control.
We'll get into that in a minute.
But if that ever came up, the notion of people who just weren't going to have kids, who didn't want to have kids, for whatever reason, It was always negative.
People who chose not to have children were described as selfish, or they were self-centered, or they were too career-focused, or, you know, whatever.
Okay?
Within Christian parlance, they were worldly.
They were focused on what the world wanted.
That's hard to say.
The rewards of the world, not what God wanted.
In the cases where somebody would talk about people who opted not to have kids at all, it was always negatively construed, okay?
And what this highlights is this.
So on the one hand, I say it's taken for granted that married couples that have children, right?
Most of the time, it was not at this time.
And I think that this is something that is changing, and we're going to get to this.
But at that time, if I heard sermons about families and stuff...
It wasn't really the injunction that you have to have kids.
It was just taken for granted.
Everybody in the room knew that married people were going to have kids, right?
But the fact that that wasn't just an assumption, that that was a norm, that that was an expectation, would come through when you would get these rare instances where for some reason it would come up in discussion that somebody was planning not to have kids, and then it would come out that they were doing something wrong.
So that was left unsaid as long as it could be left unsaid.
But if it was challenged, again, this was usually indirect.
This was not usually in a room where somebody said, I'm not planning on ever having kids, and people would jump on them.
It was more, you know, the kind of thing where somebody would be talking about, well, you know, my sister and her husband aren't planning on having kids and we need to pray for them, you know, because they're being selfish or whatever.
Stuff like that.
If it was challenged, if it did come out, if this, let's say, this counter position came out, that, you know, maybe we can be married and not have kids.
The pushback would be swift.
It would be uncompromising.
And when I say uncompromising, I mean we're going to start throwing out the Bible verses about being fruitful and multiplying and all of this kind of stuff and how children are a blessing and all of this.
And all the work that you have listened to me do on...
The Bible and how it operates as an authority, when you start invoking the Bible within high-control religion, it is an authority that cannot be challenged.
You are claiming divine mandate for whatever you are saying the Bible is talking about.
So the pushback would be swift.
It would be uncompromising.
Okay?
And what that reveals for me, again, this isn't going to surprise you, we're talking about high-control religion, is that this is an issue about control.
We find another dimension where high-control religion is not simply about belief.
And I know that folks that have listened to me for a long time, you've heard me say this a lot, as not just somebody who does this podcast, but as a scholar of religion.
This is one of my real sticking points.
Americans think of religion in terms of belief.
And a lot of long historical reasons in even, you know, just Western society and culture, why we tend to think of religion in terms of belief, that religion is believing in certain things.
It's about more than belief.
It's not just about belief.
It is about the most fundamental, intimate, and comprehensive dimension of our lives.
And folks, there's nothing that is more intimate and fundamental and comprehensive than the question of, like, producing offspring, of what it means to be a family or a couple.
Or what have you.
Because it touches on all these other dimensions we've been talking about.
It touches on relationality.
It touches on sexuality.
It touches on gender.
It touches on desire.
It touches on all of those things.
And that is what is being policed with this notion that there's an obligation for married people to have children.
And again, that writes out queer folks.
That writes out a whole bunch of other people.
So those who choose not to produce families, they're not just out of the norm.
They stand outside of God's will and intention for shared community.
And just as an illustration of this, these different Christian sex books that I've been reading and discussing, most of them will have a discussion where they're very clear and say, look, purpose of sex is producing kids.
And some will say, or came across one that specifically says that Christians are obligated to have as many children as they can successfully raise into the Christian faith.
And even, you know, last couple episodes ago, talked about, you know, the sex-positive purity movement and maybe the most, quote-unquote, sex-positive book within that.
It's the one that doesn't come out and say that, but it's silent about it, and its silence articulates this notion.
Christians are obligated to have children.
Okay?
But there's more to say here.
As I say, this dimension has always been there for me.
It was always taken for granted, but it was largely left unsaid unless and until it was challenged.
And I think this dimension of high-control religion, this dimension that specifically emphasizes the need of Christians to have children, has become more pronounced over the course of my adult life.
If I think over the last, like, say...
A couple decades, and honestly, even the last 10 years.
And specifically within conservative Protestant circles, and this is an important thing, and those of you who understand something about the dynamics and the contours of American religion, this will make sense to you.
Catholics have always been known for larger families.
We could talk about the groups like, say, the Latter-day Saints, right, which are also known for larger families for really complex and very tradition-specific reasons.
But within more mainstream American Christianity, Catholics have always been known for larger families.
Due largely to their position on birth control, their sort of universal opposition to so-called artificial birth control.
Again, we're going to get to that.
The situation with Protestants was more complicated.
Okay?
So Protestants weren't always known for having as big of families.
They were not always known for advocating this as openly as, say, the Catholic Church might.
But we're now all familiar.
With the conservative Christian calls for Christian Americans in particular to have more children.
We've seen it with the public resurgence and increasing mainstreaming of radical traditionalist Catholicism.
You just think of figures like J.D. Vance.
10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, if I said to somebody, you know, traditional Christians believe really strongly you need to have kids, and somebody wasn't in that world, they might be like, well, that's kind of weird.
I didn't know that.
We all know it now because we see it in the news.
It's part of the culture war.
But we're also seeing it not just within Catholicism, but within broader Protestant circles as well.
This is one of those areas where I think there's been a convergence of that radical traditional Catholic side of Christian nationalism and the conservative Protestant side of Christian nationalism around this issue of, you know, the family and the American family and the need to have children and so forth.
This is one of those points of convergence.
It's a core part of Christian nationalism.
And what I'm trying to highlight here is it has a cultural visibility that it didn't used to have.
And that's the question that makes us say, why?
What changed?
Why did this go from being maybe a presumption that people within church walls had that might not be explicit?
They're not standing up on the steps of the Capitol or somewhere delivering a speech, you know, talking about people needing to have kids.
They're not saying that you're inhumane or anti-human if you choose not to have children or something like that.
Why did it change?
Why do they care so much?
What shifted?
I'm Andrew Seidel, a constitutional lawyer, activist, and author of The Founding Myth and American Crusade, books that explore the relationship of church and state and fight Christian nationalist disinformation.
We're all bracing for another Trump administration.
It's going to be rough.
So let me give you something to look forward to.
My new podcast, One Nation, Indivisible, with Andrew Seidel, is launching in February.
I'll be right there with you each week discussing politics, religion, and the law.
We'll be talking with expert guests about everything happening in the Trump administration, the judicial system, and with the separation of church and state.
And here's even better news.
Every week I will drop bonus content.
And if you are a straight white American Jesus premium subscriber, you'll automatically get all the bonus content from my show.
You can sign up today at accessmundi.us.
We'll get through Trump 2.0 together.
Tune in for the debut of One Nation Indivisible with Andrew Seidel from Access Mundi Media.
And for me there are at least two major shifts.
And they're related, that have occurred, again, just over the last few decades.
And I feel weird that I'm old enough now that I can talk about the last few decades, and I know what those were.
But there are two issues.
Here's the first one.
The first one has to do with notions of Christian identity and what's called church growth.
Okay?
Traditions, excuse me, Christians traditionally, and certainly conservative American Protestants specifically, place a high value on growing Christianity through conversion.
Christianity has always been a conversionistic tradition.
It has always sought to win converts to Christianity.
And within Protestantism in particular, and within conservative Protestantism, conservative, high-control Christianity, Christianity is not a religion that you can be born into.
You have to become a Christian.
Even if you are a child and you're born to Christian parents or raised in a Christian home, there comes a time when, in contemporary American parlance, You have to give your heart to Jesus.
You have to accept Jesus as your personal Savior.
You have to have a personal relationship with Christ and so forth.
That's how one becomes a Christian.
That's something that has to happen.
And traditionally, you know, quote-unquote, winning people for Christ, winning people to Christ, that has been understood by fundamentalist and conservative Protestants as the mission of Christians in the world.
Famously in a Bible passage that they call the Great Commission, where Christians are told to go out into the world and make disciples.
That has been understood as the Christian calling.
So Christians, on this understanding, are called to grow the church, understood as the Christian community, by winning Christian converts.
So churches, your church down the street, the church you're part of, it should be growing.
It should be getting bigger.
It should be gaining members.
How?
Because you're going out in the world and you are winning converts.
People are converting to Christianity.
And when churches grow this way, that was what was known as spiritual church growth.
Okay?
By bringing people into the faith.
And within this model, Christians are also called to have children and to raise them in the Christian faith, and this is what was known as biological church growth.
So the idea that even though they have to convert, you should still have kids, and you tell them about Jesus, and eventually they become Christians, become part of the church, and so forth.
Why does all that matter?
Because prior to the past two or three decades, conservative Protestant churches were growing.
And if you compared them to liberal and mainline Protestant denominations and churches, Those churches were declining.
They were losing members rapidly.
And conservative Protestant churches were growing.
And I can remember this.
When I was in college, when I was a pastor, you know, just right out of college when I was a seminary student, there was still, at that time, a lot of sort of triumphalistic language within conservative Protestantism about, you know, the power of the gospel and they were holding to the faith and truth.
Because evangelicalism and conservative Protestantism was growing while liberal and mainline Protestantism was declining.
But recent decades have seen this trend slow and reverse, and we've talked about that in the podcast before.
Those conservative churches and denominations, they're not growing like they were.
They're not triumphalistic anymore.
They are shrinking.
They are losing members.
It turns out, it appears, if I put my social science hat on, that The same dynamics that were crippling the mainline and liberal Protestant churches are slowly catching up to conservative churches as well.
They are not effectively winning converts to the faith.
And it also turns out, to add a wrinkle to this, that much of that church growth that was going on was biological growth.
In other words, it was growth not because they were actually winning converts from outside Christianity, but because they were converting their children.
And as birth rates have declined among conservative white Protestants, biological church growth has also declined.
So there just aren't enough new Christians coming into the church to replace those leaving, and their churches are no longer growing like they were.
So one reason why the demand for conservative Christians to have children, why it has become more pronounced, is that the subculture has been staring down a perceived crisis in its overall numbers.
And so this thing that was just a presumption and something that was taken for granted is now having to come out into the open as an active injunction placed before people.
Okay?
That's the first reason why I think there's been this shift in emphasis.
Here's the second, and it's related, but it's culturally broader, and it owes directly to white supremacism and Christian nationalism.
And again, this is something we've talked about on It's in the Code.
It's something that Brad has interviewed people about.
We've both talked and written about this.
Declining numbers among particularly white conservative Protestants, it has also corresponded with broader demographic changes within the US population.
And we all know that the US is trending toward becoming, or will become in the near future, a majority-minority nation.
And so the language of white replacement theory, the racist theory that people of color are trying to...
To replace whites, to make America not a white nation by basically outbreeding them, has gone from being a fringe, right-wing piece of white supremacist rhetoric to being a mainstream part of the American Christian nationalist vision.
And we've discussed this before.
So this has created a sense of crisis among conservative whites in America that just melds right into this Christian ideology of having children.
And their own sense of crisis, of declining numbers, and so forth.
So, the racialized notion that white people have an obligation to, quote, perpetuate the race through birth has been melded with Christian nationalism into this conservative, Protestant, Christian ideology of having children.
And the result is what we hear from Christian nationalist cultural warriors at present.
That Americans, quote-unquote, and read, White Christian Americans.
That's what we mean.
That's what you need to hear when I say Americans.
White Christian Americans have a divinely mandated responsibility to produce offspring.
So it has gone from something that is taken for granted to become something that is now an active culture war issue.
That's what has happened since the last several years.
And I think it touches on these demographic trends, both within American religion and more broadly.
That have been going on for decades.
Okay?
So that's the whole Christians need to have kids piece.
The other piece of this that comes up, and a lot of people ask me about this, is the question of birth control.
Okay?
And specifically the question of birth control, again, within conservative Protestant circles.
Again, Catholic sexual morality is consistently held that any quote-unquote artificial means of birth control violates God's design.
It interrupts the natural function and aim of human sexuality.
So...
Official teaching, you know, bans the use of, say, condoms or birth control pills or things like this, okay?
But conservative Protestants have traditionally been much more accepting of the use of such methods, right?
As long as they were understood not to induce abortion.
So, like, conservative Protestants in their opposition to abortion often oppose things like the so-called morning-after pill because, in their view...
Once an egg has been fertilized, that's a human life and it's abortive and so forth, but things like the birth control, like regular birth control pills, condoms, and so forth were permitted.
Now, but that was always within that framework that marriage would produce children, okay?
So the idea was Christians and married people are called to have children, but within that framework, it's acceptable to be good, quote-unquote, you know, stewards of what God has given you.
It's permissible to hold off having children, for example, until you can financially manage it.
It's okay to have only as many children as you can financially support.
It is alright to only have as many children as maybe is sort of healthy for the mother who's giving birth and all of these different kinds of things.
And also within the more, quote unquote, sex positive articulations, it was also permissible so that couples could just continue and consistently have enjoyable sex without worrying about always producing children.
But it was always within that framework.
Now, there was always a range of opinions on the topic, but conservative Christian leaders and ethicists typically affirmed that there was a legitimate and positive role for the use of contraception within the framework of Christian marriage.
Generally, there were exceptions.
When I was in college, we used to have discussions about this in like Christian ethics classes and so forth.
And I've read, you know, positions by different people.
Usually they will say that within the framework of this norm of conception of having kids, the responsible use of family planning is permissible and so forth.
But there were people, and the first time I encountered them was when I was in college.
It was the first time I met conservative Protestants who said that they were just universally opposed to birth control.
The idea being, God is the one that is in control.
God has called us to be fruitful and multiply.
God has given us sexuality, so we're going to exercise that, and God will decide when we have kids.
So there was always a range of positions.
But the predominant one was that there was a valid and legitimate use and space for the use of contraception and birth control and family planning within the framework of this normative vision of the family.
This seems to be changing, though.
There's still a diversity of opinions, especially among Christian leaders and intellectuals.
But there are also more conservative Protestants who are vocal and active in their opposition to any form of birth control.
This is another place where the ideology of conservative Protestantism and the traditional teachings of Catholic morality are, again, coming closer and closer together within contemporary Christian nationalist articulations of the faith, right?
And a great example of this is when you have evangelical-led companies like Hobby Lobby.
Who oppose requirements of the Affordable Care Act fund birth control, right?
And so in Burwell versus Hobby Lobby, we found, you know, SCOTUS made the decision and said that requiring companies to provide birth control violated their religious freedom.
That was a shift because traditionally it hasn't been a part of conservative Protestant teaching.
That birth control is the sort of anti-birth control, that to require birth control would be to violate religious freedom.
That was a shift, and it has become much more mainstream in recent years.
And I think that this ties in with this increasing visibility of the demand, the increasing injunction that good Christians are called to have children.
I think that the reason why the opposition to birth control has expanded within high-control religion...
It's because of this sense of crisis and the need to be more explicit and more injunctive about the requirement to have children.
So those are sort of the two pieces, this ideology of having children and this changing sense of relationship to birth control.
Where does all that leave us as we kind of wind this down here?
Again, conservative American Protestants have always believed that Christians should have children.
But I think this emphasis has become more pronounced and more explicit and more openly normative in recent decades.
And I think tied in with this, conservative American Protestants have or now demonstrate more widespread opposition to birth control than was traditionally the case.
And as always, my interest is, okay, so like, what does that tell us?
That's useful information, but what does it mean?
What does it highlight?
Again?
It highlights that this isn't just about theology or beliefs or what the Bible says or whatever.
And here's my trick.
It never is.
This is the bait and switch that high-control religion plays all the time.
It puts these positions forward and says they are immutable, unchangeable teachings of God and so forth.
And yet, when you look at their historical development, they have changed all the time, or they're often very new or novel, or they take on different nuances.
If it were the case that it was just about fixed teachings and immutable truths in the Bible, the teachings wouldn't change, the beliefs wouldn't change, and they have.
So what it highlights, once again, is the truth hidden in plain sight, which is that high-control religion is about control, that that's what the aim of conservative American Protestantism is.
It is about control.
The changing values and the articulation of issues related to birth control.
The injunction for white Christians to have children, it arises at a time when white Christians feel that their control over American politics and society is under threat.
It represents a kind of anxiety, a cultural anxiety about the loss of power and control.
That is what it represents.
Don't be fooled by the triumphalism of contemporary Christian nationalism and the MAGA movement.
This is a movement.
Including these high-control religious articulations that is born out of a sense of threat and crisis.
That's why somebody like Donald Trump has to perpetuate a sense of threat and crisis all the time.
There has to be a threat and crisis to motivate it.
They are evidence, these shifts, of a deep-seated cultural insecurity, and that is what makes them especially dangerous.
Because high-control religionists in America, they are like an animal with its leg caught in a trap.
That is violent and dangerous.
They are ascendant now, but their numbers are decreasing.
And as they decrease, their teachings become more extreme, more normative, more apocalyptic.
And the demands for white Americans to have children and white Christians to have children are part of that.
We find, again, the melding of this traditional religious ideology with white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
And we get the contemporary articulations of this.
It's time to say goodbye here.
Again, a little bit longer episode.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us.
Again, Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Welcome any insights, thoughts, feedback, pushback, topics I didn't get to, anything like that.
I still have a long list of upcoming episodes.
I love them for that.
Those of you who subscribe and get the supplemental episodes know that I address some of these issues or take a deeper dive sometimes in the supplemental material.
