Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: Red Diaper Babies
Interviewing conservative evangelical families who reject contraception, The Nation suggests that the large families of these Christians are not just about raising up a new generation in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but about providing troops for the American military. After all, most of these people are in “the generally low-income households of believers who feel bound to supply their children, their arrows for God,” and who are also most likely to see their children in the military.
Bless their hearts, the poor rubes and rednecks out there in flyover country, the magazine implies, they just keep having babies for the war machine and there too dense to know it. As Loretta Lynn would put it, one is a farmin’ and one is a fightin’, one is a preacher and one is a miner and…one’s on the way.
When the Washington Post described evangelical Christians as “poor, uneducated, and easy to command,” the editors issued an apology. When U.S. John Kerry “botched” a joke in which he seemed to suggest that academic slackers would be “stuck in Iraq,” he apologized. What are we to think when The Nation sniffs that Christians who have lots of babies are easily manipulated, hopelessly naive, “low income” Americans?
I suppose we should just remind ourselves that this is a magazine devoted to defending the poor against the wealth, privilege, and elitism of the leisure class.
Gosh, I thought family and children were God’s design for community, culture… humanity. The Nation thinks otherwise. We’re just making poor, stupid soldiers. Amazing.
Related posts:
- Too many babies are teeny TV watchers
- Evangelicals promote ‘orphan care’
- The ‘Quiverfull’ Way
- Single-income Families
- FOXNews.com – U.S. & World – Dutch Hospital Euthanizing Gravely Ill Babies
It’s very easy to forget that some of us are confident in our beliefs and intelligence, while others use religion — including Evangelical Christianity — as the proverbial “Opiate of the Masses.” Something like 80% of black youth in Southwest Georgia end up in one of two places — jail or the army (mostly to get out of jail). This is due to a few reasons — 1) Racism (the justice system down there is full of it, believe me) 2) Economics (most are poor) and 3) terrible U.S. education and 3) Religion — nearly 100% of those black youth are Evangelical Christians, and their mothers cite lack of education SECOND to religion when asked why they’ve had so many children.
Of course, jumping to the conclusion that Evangelicals are just “making soldiers” is off base, but the fact that soldiers are being made due to the fear of hell and lack of real sex education (another product of Evangelicals in some cases) is not untrue, either.
Hmm… I wonder how prevelant the attitude of children is in regards to a “fear of hell”? Sex education, there’s another can of worms. What they get is “sex is perfectly okay for anyone, anywhere since we’ve fixed it with chemicals or barrier methods” or the opposite “sex is bad all the time, everywhere.”
Is evangelical christianity contributing to poor America? I’m not so sure… Perhaps I just haven’t experienced this southern culture to know better.
Certainly orthodox Christianity inherently has a trust that God will provide in time of need. It does not however establish the condition or quality of this care. I often remark that our prosperity has made us complacent in wealth. We don’t really know true poverty and consequently true thankfulness.
If the military is considered a form of welfare, perhaps we should consider reforming the terms of enlistment. I’m not really in favor of subsidized philanthropy. Charitable giving is not the welfare state.
[...] See my previous post to see the relevance: Red Diaper Babies [...]
I’m not sure Christianity is contributing to the poverty situation in America, but I am sure that lack of education is — including sex education. One problem is that people are afraid to use words like “penis” and “vagina” because they think of them as sexual — true, they are sex organs, but they are also just that, organs. The cycle of poverty directly correlates with a lack of education.
By the way, I got the information above from an amazing (and even Christian) organization that works very hard in securing justice for everyone in Southwest Georgia. I don’t think this Southern “experience” can be had by anyone not born there, at least in its purest form, but that’s up for debate (as is everything).