JD Vance and Al Mohler use fuzzy math to sound an alarm on falling birth rates
This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on September 10, 2024.
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.”