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.

Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks at a campaign rally at Radford University on July 22, 2024 in Radford, Va. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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

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.”

Human population over the years

One of the tricky aspects of Mohler’s warnings is that he uses research by experts in economics and demographics. For example, he quotes economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde from the University of Pennsylvania saying, “The demographic winter is coming.” Then Mohler adds, “Hear that winter? The demographic winter is coming. We are really talking about a very threatening reality.”

A recent summary of topics on Al Mohler’s “The Briefing.”

But consider for a moment how human population has increased over the centuries. In 1804, the world had an estimated 1 billion people. That number rose to 1.6 billion by 1900, an increase of just 600 million people over the course of a century. But by the year 2000, the world’s population jumped to nearly 6.2 billion. In the first 24 years of this century, that number has increased to 8.1 billion people.

Mohler seems unaware of these facts because he claims, “For most of human history, there was no philosophical debate about the birth rate. The birth rate was simply what happened, and it happened as families and couples had the motivation to maximize the number of children.”

So amidst his apparent ignorance of the unprecedented growth in population over the 20th century, Mohler is in a panic that civilization is on the verge of collapse due to falling birth rates.

“You have to have an adequate number of babies to have an adequate number of boys and an adequate number of girls to make sure you have an adequate number of husbands and an adequate number of wives having an adequate number of babies, say, two decades thereafter,” he wrote in May. “If you don’t, you’re in big trouble.”

Making fun of the Malthusians

One of the reasons Mohler is so sure of himself is that predictions made by liberals during the 20th century about overpopulation causing a food shortage turned out not to happen.

“The prophets of a population explosion have issued regular books and bulletins that paint a depressing picture of a planet running out of both room and resources,” he says. “Now, it turns out that these Cassandras got the picture almost entirely backward.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (Wikipedia)

But these wrong predictions made by liberals weren’t driven by the sexual revolution or an embrace of secularism as Mohler likes to pretend. Instead, they were based on the Malthusian Theory of Population that was popularized by Thomas Robert Malthus in his 1798 publication, “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”

According to the Intelligent Economist, Malthus came up with a set of calculations about population growth and food shortage to show that “populations will grow faster than the supply of food” and thus “exponential population growth will lead to a shortage of food.” And based on the numbers, we experienced exponential population growth in the 20th century unlike any other time in human history. So it was a fair question at the time to ask.

To solve this problem, Malthus promoted the ideas of “family planning, late marriages and celibacy.”

But what Malthus and the doomsday prophets of the last century from the left failed to realize was how unforeseen advances in technology and global trade have drastically increased food production.

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