Chief Executive Mom

Visit me at my new website - anniecrawford.com Essentially, I disagree with Campbell's conclusion that the Genesis mandate to "be fruitful and multiply" is a direct command for the church to follow. However, I absolutely agree that children are a blessing to be welcomed and celebrated. Mrs. Campbell and her daughters are wonderfully passionate about children and I have never been as encouraged in my mothering as I was at the Above Rubies conference I attended this April. Nancy Campbell's Above Rubies magazines greatly inspire me both in my motherhood and in my faith. Wonderful, godly ladies contribute to this ministry and I highly recommend the magazine to you. You can follow the link on my sidebar to sign up. The magazine is paid for by open donation.

Upon reading Be Fruitful and Multiply, I found myself freshly inspired to love my children more deeply, to train them more creatively and to receive more into my home, not because it is a law I must obey but because they are indeed delightful and rejoiced over by the Lord. It is wrong that our culture, even much of the church, more often considers children a liability rather than a true, full blessing. Nancy reports with poignant challenge, "Luke 14:23 'Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.' God is the God of the full house. He wants to fill eternity. He will embrace all who will come to Him in His family. Do we have the same heart that God has? Do we want to fill our homes with furniture, televisions and material possessions - or children? Are our homes filled with lasting treasures? The current statistics in the United States reveal that there are more televisions per households than there are children!"

Although her statements concerning population growth are controversial, Nancy reminds us that the Lord, who fed 5,000 with a few loaves and fishes, is not concerned with limited resources. Campbell sites a few studies to counter the popular belief that the world is getting too crowded and that we ought to decrease or even stop population growth. I am not familiar with these studies, but I find the information she offers very interesting as well as plausible. She mentions a study that estimates that the entire world's population could fit into Texas, giving each person 2,000 sq ft. (!) Another cited article states, "[A] myth of the antinatalists has it that population growth diminishes the aesthetic qualities of the human condition. Yet some of the world's most beautiful and most livable cites and the most densely populated."

I found the following quote the most interesting in light of the social impact of the Gospel; "Despite a tripling of the world's population in this century, global health and productivity have exploded. Today human beings eat better, produce more, and consume more than ever before in the past . . . Although some blame dwindling natural resources for the reversals and catastrophes that have recently befallen heavily populated low-income countries, such episodes are directly traceable to the policies or practices of presiding governments." Through my financial involvement with Christian aid ministries, I am aware that many of the crises in the world stem from corrupt government policies, rather than crowding or an inability of the land to provide sustenance. Consider the drastic 1980's famine in Ethiopia. War and civil unrest had ravaged the land before the dry years came. War prevents education and progress, actually digressing a culture; skills diminish as safety and survival alone are sought. After years of outside aid, instruction in farming techniques and some amount of civil rest, those vast stretches of brown cracked land are now full of crops and trees, the population is growing and progressing. (Information summarized from World Vision article.)

The intelligent design and creation science of recent years has emboldened and reminded Christians not to base their faith and lives off the studies of men, but off the Word of God. Every scientific study conducted contains its metaphysical and religious biases, which do affect either the outcome and/or interpretation of the study. Science is not the wellspring of metaphysical truth naturalists have espoused it to be. Campbell's book reminds us not to blindly accept studies that do not consider God's sovereignty and ability to provide for those to whom He gives life. As an environmental studies major in college, I personally had friends who thought it was evil to have more than one child and contribute to the demise of nature. This is an atheistic, evolutionary and not a Christian way of thinking.

The American economy is based upon the principle of growth. Our economy depends on growth to flourish and thrive. Campbell is correct when she writes, "A growing population is necessary for a successful economic climate." The economic decline or at least flattening of Europe coincided both with its increased liberalism and population decline. Here in Texas, our economy is strong, in great degree to the growing Latino population which provides an abundance of workers and consumers. The day labor provided in construction and landscaping alone has largely contributed to the affordable housing we enjoy here. I have a dangerous observation to consider: could not our own sons be doing the manual labor given to the immigrants, adding to the family income and community economy, instead of playing x-box?

Campbell has a practical point when she cites how Muslim families do not limit their families as much as Christians, with an average of 6.8 per family. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, at it isn't largely because of their loving conversion techniques (197). There is a practical wisdom to consider in the Proverb "A growing population is the king's glory; a dwindling nation is his doom." (14:28) Although children are not the only means of expanding Christ's kingdom, nor even the primary, still they are an important part. I do not mean in any way to create the impression of a population war, that we need to reproduce faster than non-Christian groups. That is foolishness. I only mean to point out that there is an enormous amount of wisdom and practicality in the vision for large families. I agree with Campbell that we have been duped by atheistic philosophies when we consider small families to be better than large.

Be Fruitful also contains challenging and what my otuside research has found to be very accurate information concerning the "Pill". By personal OB/GYN will not prescribe the pill, because of it abortificient qualities. He has asked me more than once why Protestants seem so much more resistant to the scientific information showing that the pill aborts embryos approximately 4.6% of the time. Nancy Campbell includes similar information in her book and estimates that this leads to a probable 1.9 million early abortions each year in the United States alone. For more information on this please download Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortions? by Randy Alcorn. This is a very fair, factual book full of scientific information that every couple ought to be aware of. The IUD, in case any reader be unaware, is a directly abortificient contraception, as is the progesterone only pill and the "morning after"pill. Campbell estimates that the IUD alone aborts 2.95 million children per year world wide (176).

Campbell also lists interesting medical information concerning sterilization, childbirth and the risk of cancer. For this information, please see the post Contraception and Cancer.

Campbell is correct in tracing the modern contraceptive movement and cultural attitudes toward marriage and large families to the movement spearheaded by Margaret Sanger, a women who was ardently immoral and racist. I believe even the church is still haunted by unrecognized undertones of her work which so vigorously portrayed children as a burden and the "smothering restrictions of marital fidelity." Why else would almost all Christian couples first assume that they will use contraception immediately upon the wedding night as opposed to the contrary? Why, as Campbell shares, is the news of a pregnancy past the second or third child so often greeted with concern instead of joy? One hundred years ago, although contraception was practiced, it was not the assumed norm. People with more than 4 children were not looked upon as strange or foolish, as they often are today. What has changed? What kind of assumptions and values are unspoken and usually even unthought in this phenomenon? Please note, I am not saying that all contraception is necessarily wrong (though Campbell argues this), but that the church has by and large assimilated general cultural attitudes that began from a very ungodly philosophy without much open reflection or discussion. The Catholic church provides the apparent exception, and it almost seems that fact has influenced Protestant churches in the opposite direction.

For the next post on this book, "The Great," please click here.