One detail about the recent Catholic contraception controversy strikes me above all else: until a few weeks ago, I never heard the topic of contraception mentioned in a Catholic Church.
When the Obama Administration decided to require religious institutions to include contraception in health care coverage for their employees, the leaders of America’s nominal Catholics unleashed a firestorm of criticism that took much of the country by surprise. Those astonished by the resistance put up by the nation’s bishops probably included the other 1 to 4 percent of American Catholics who, like myself, actually agree with the Church’s teaching that it is mortally sinful to use contraception – i.e., that you can go to Hell for it. The rest of the country either grinned at our supposedly backwards, ignorant and obsolete teaching, then yawned. The popular response to the controversy was to ask why such an issue was being raised in the 21st Century - but the truly shocking thing about contraception is not its irrelevancy, but the deafening silence on the issue in recent decades, given the hidden yet grave damage it has done to our nation. It is a sad fact that the subject isn’t even a topic of discussion in the newspapers and the pulpits any longer, given the gravity of its impact on our civilization. There are many reasons for the decline of Catholicism in America and Europe, but the primary reason that the pews are empty is that this single teaching has been spurned by everyone from the cardinals on down. There are likewise many reasons for the decline of the national power of the U.S. and its Western allies in Europe, but this particular decision has done more to sap our strength than any other single act within our control.
Contraception First, Conversion Last
At one time, I accepted the vague notions that contraception was a matter of such virtues as freedom, progress and enlightenment; I didn’t stop to ask whether it was the freedom to exploit someone else, or what we were progressing towards, or what false light cast that illumination. If I was even aware of the Catholic position, I suppose I would have considered it as flowing from some kind of reactionary bias. The resistance of the popes would have been viewed as an attempt to stymie the Progress of the human race, not a valiant stand against the kind of progress a corpse exhibits when it decays. This is the default way of thinking about the issue in the whole of Western civilization - which is a frightening thing, because it was just a very short time ago that contraception was universally despised throughout America and Europe, for good reason. For all intents and purposes, our leaders have indoctrinated us with a false, Orwellian history that has erased the origins of birth prevention from our memory. And just as the brainwashed characters of Orwell’s novel 1984 accepted every lie of their totalitarian state without criticism, so do we accept every falsehood we have been fed about contraception. The nations of the West grew accustomed to this self-destructive sin within the lifetime of one generation, on the thinnest of excuses, then lost all historical memory of how it got started with equally unnerving speed. This dulling of the reason is itself a side effect of our sin. One of the first consequences of ridding yourself of children is that you can afford to get fat in the stomach – which often leads to men becoming simultaneously soft in the head and hard of heart.[1] When that happens, people will swallow flimsier excuses for greater crimes than ever before. And when it comes to contraception, our nation has essentially swallowed hemlock.
I came to this conviction long before I became Catholic, not out of a blind, biased acceptance of Catholic teaching. I became an atheist before I became a teenager and spent much of the next quarter-century being proven demonstrably wrong on every point; eventually I decided to stop beating my head against a wall and become Catholic, not out of faith or some sort of religious experience, but out of firm knowledge I sometimes didn’t want. Contraception was one of the issues that helped convert me to the Catholic faith in this backwards fashion, because I learned first how birth prevention was destroying America, then came to respect Catholicism because it already knew that. Because this complete reversal led me to a viewpoint that would be considered alien to almost all of my countrymen, I will retrace the steps briefly so that anyone can follow them. The only one most readers can’t follow (thanks to contraception itself) is the direct experience I have with living in what would be considered in big families. My grandmother had 14 children, many of whom around my age, so I grew up together with them and saw with my own eyes how it can be done. My mother had six children including me and I have three other step-siblings on my father’s side, so I directly experienced what it is like to grow up in such a family, not to simply visit one. Although I am not a parent (when you have unpopular views like this, you tend to be persecuted), I have taken care of houses full of countless kids since I was young and cannot sympathize with parents who complain about dealing with just one or two. Later on, I will list some of the innumerable factors that tend to keep “large” (or “normal” by historical standards) families less dysfunctional than today’s nuclear families, which are actually a radical invention of the 1950s.
Babies vs. Birth Prevention
I cannot compare direct experiences with most readers in that sense, since most of their parents and grandparents prevented too many of their brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles from being born. If you have the time, however, I can direct you to the next building block so that you can verify it for yourself: the demographic history of the human race, particularly in America from colonial times to the Great Depression. Pick any place at any point in modern or even ancient history and chances are we know everything about their way of life, from what they ate to the age they married to the number of children they had to the ages they died. I was drilled in this stuff from my first history class as an undergrad right through graduate school, where I majored in American and Latin American history; after that, I continued to learn whatever I could about demographics so I could write my newspaper columns on foreign affairs and The Retreat of the West, which would have been my dissertation had I gone back to finish my doctorate. It would take another hundred columns to cite all of the relevant facts and statistics, but the entire bulk of it disproves every modern myth we have about contraception. First, the death rates for children may have been higher than they are today, but it is false to say that population growth was really curbed by that alone. If people had seven children, perhaps one or two died, leaving five more to expand the population further. Overall life expectancy might have been low due to lack of technology (particularly antibiotics) but if you survived infancy, chances are you might survive into middle age or even live to meet your grandchildren; more than three hundred years ago, New Englanders often lived into their 70s as we do today. The popular idea that the surplus children of large families always died young enough to keep growth in check is just patently false, because without that large population surplus, our ancestors could not have recovered from the Black Death and barbarian invasions to initiate the Renaissance, or later spread across North America so quickly.
The most startling fact about our demographic history is that it completely falsifies the Orwellian lie that our ancestors were simply ignorant of contraception. They just didn’t want it. They might not have had the Pill, but they were aware of many other equally effective ways of preventing conception and simply chose to have more children instead. The mindset of early American women was completely reversed; instead of competing to have the most material goods or status, they competed to have bigger families. They enjoyed being mothers, not plumbers or salesmen; they preferred to make human beings in their own home rather than widgets in some stranger’s dirty factory. Inevitably, some critic will point out that back then, children could be put to work on farms, but this shines more light on the dark motivations of the critic than on history. Certainly parents could get economic benefits from having their kids milk cows and help out at harvest time, but they also could have saved a lot more time, energy and money in the short term by eradicating the same kids as we have. The farm was there to support the family, instead of the family being there to support the farm; the critics who bring up this objection are trying to project our money-obsessed culture back on the past, which is really a disservice to our ancestors. The Puritan settlers of America brought with them the roots of a new religion based on the worship of wealth, but those roots had not yet flowered into the full-fledged love of the Almighty Dollar that we see today. It took several centuries more of spiritual decay, through the age of the Robber Barons and the rise of Corporate America, for that to fully poison our culture. In the last century, the shopping mall has come to replace the town square as our primary local institutions, while at home we are subjected to a daily bombardment with commercial messages that is really unprecedented in human history. Our ancestors may have thought more about money and status than the peasants of medieval Europe, who were guarded against these Calvinist ideas about wealth by the economic teachings of the Catholic Church, but their lives did not revolve around it completely. They went to village halls to talk politics, private homes for parties, town squares for dances and churches on Sundays for sanctification; now face-to-face social contact in America revolves mainly shopping malls and restaurants. If they wanted to avoid commercial haggling, all they had to do was walk away from the town marketplace; they weren’t tantalized with commercial messages in their very homes, the way we are with modern television and radio.
Whether it’s foreign travel or bars of soap, it takes money to pay for all of the goods in those glittering ads – so we cull our children to pay for them. We contracept them out of existence to pay for luxury cars, bigger trucks, larger houses and more food so we can get even fatter, to the point of epidemic obesity. For all intents and purposes, we have magnified the Puritan falsehood that wealth signifies God’s favor into a new deity, Mammon, which dominates our every thought. Evidence for our new national religion can be found everywhere, including in the excuses critics given for demeaning the motives of our ancestors for having more children; we automatically assume everything must have an economic motivation, because the contrary is so rarely seen. It has its own moral code, based on keeping up with the Jones’, which is accepted as a justification for any kind of behavior. What this essentially constitutes is a worship of class prejudice, which is very close to Satan’s first sin; he separated himself from the angels and ultimately from God because he thought his gifts meant that he was of greater worth. The twin sins of pride and avarice have been temptations of mankind ever since, but never before have they been so glorified in one commercial civilization as they have in the modern West, particularly in America. Far too many of today’s women voluntarily leave their homes for factories and offices, in order to make more money for purposes of self-glorification and indulging the wants advertisers put in them; to pay for it, they first contracept their children out of existence, then stick the remainder in day care to be raised by strangers. Even motherhood and fatherhood are twisted by pride and avarice, because they no longer care about their children enough to raise them themselves, but instead use their children as extensions of their own egos. They don’t want to raise men; each mother and father wants to raise Nietzsche’s Superman. They try to make sure that their children have the best clothes and the best education that money can buy, because being poor is considered a more horrible punishment than never being born; to them, wearing hand-me-downs and working at Burger King is considered shameful. As Proverbs 17:5 puts it though, “He who despises the poor slaps their Maker in the face.” Sirach 13:24 echoes this when it says, “Poverty is evil in the opinion of the ungodly.” Every time we take deprive our kids of brothers and sisters out of fear of poverty, we are slapping our Maker. The richer we try to make them, the greater the guarantee that they will have to squeeze like camels through the eye of a needle in order to get into Heaven.
Jesus also singled out the “love of money” as a “very great sin” but no civilization since ancient times has pursued it more fervently than our own. It dominates our every thought, to the point that we can no longer fathom a time when people actually appreciated life for its own sake rather than as an extension of some economic goal. Despite the taint of Calvinism, all of our European and American ancestors were much closer to the roots of the Catholic civilization that birthed them all; even the Protestants churches had much more in common with the Catholic moral code than they do today. That is really not that surprising, since at one time or another the entire continent of Europe and most of the Middle East has been Catholic in the last 2,000 years. What all of Christendom shared was a common love of life, rather than a love of money, at least in comparison to our civilization. We can trace how this ideology was abandoned over many centuries, point by point, bit by bit, in nation after nation, in great detail. In America’s case, we can trace the every step in the establishment of this religion of money from the day the Pilgrims first set foot on Plymouth Rock through the birth of a “culture of consumption” in the 1890s through the 20th Century to the present. Along the way, we can pinpoint 1930 as the year when this new ideology really began to corrupt Western civilization in the area of contraception. Until that year, when the Anglicans became the first to crack, every church on the planet condemned birth control. By the 1970s, the Catholic Church was practically the only one left that hadn’t caved in. This monumental change took place in the course of just one generation, well within the lifetimes of all of my grandparents, some of whom are still alive. The popular image of the 1950s as a sort of reference point for what American life ought to be is completely inaccurate, because in its own way the acceptance of contraception and consequent downsizing of households into “nuclear families” was actually a radical social experiment, one that represented a departure from human experience every bit as drastic as the supposedly decadent ‘60s. Until that generation, contraception was despised as a barbaric thing. We have detailed knowledge of who pushed for its legalization and why, and their reasoning was utterly ugly.
By the mid-‘90s, I had long been aware of the rise of this culture of consumption, this vast change in ideology and the demographic history, to the point where I had already written an entire chapter in The Retreat of the West on how the “Birth Dearth” was sapping our national power. I considered myself a vague admirer of Christ at that point, right up until the day I was bored and began flipping through a reader for a college class in philosophy, which was probably outdated when I was in junior high. The book of essays presented a wide range views on a smorgasbord of philosophical topics, including the text of the Humanae Vitae.[2] Pope Paul VI published this encyclical against contraception five days after I was born, which seemed so long ago; how could this fossil possibly know what he was talking about? I intended to glance through it once for amusement, but by the second time I was knew I had seen one of the best philosophical proofs ever put to paper. This pope was almost prophetic when he predicted well in advance the decay of sexual morality that began in the late ‘70s and continues to this day, thanks to the newfound ease of avoiding pregnancy. This was but one of several negative consequences, all of which came to pass. Others included government-imposed involuntary sterilization programs in places like India in the ‘70s and the One Child Policy in China. I didn’t want to admit it, but every dire warning Paul VI issued came to pass; his arguments had a surprising core of truth. In the intervening years before I became Catholic I went on to learn the basis of Church’s teaching on the subject, but this was just icing on the cake. Along the way I came to agree with the opinion of G.K. Chesterton, the greatest Catholic writer of the early 20th Century, who wrote back when “birth control” was still a distant danger:
“But there is one type of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular propagandist of what he or she absurdly describes as Birth-Control.”
“I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes sure that there shall never be any birth to control…these people know perfectly well that they dare not write the plain word Birth-Prevention, in any one of the hundred places where they write the hypocritical word Birth-Control. They know as well as I do that the very word Birth-Prevention would strike a chill into the public, the instant it was blazoned on headlines, or proclaimed on platforms, or scattered in advertisements like any other quack medicine. They dare not call it by its name, because its name is very bad advertising. Therefore they use a conventional and unmeaning word, which may make the quack medicine sound more innocuous.”
“Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a flat refusal to take the first and most obvious step along the road of Eugenics…The obvious course for Eugenists is to act towards babies as they act towards kittens. Let all the babies be born and then let us drown those we do not like. I cannot see any objection to it; except the moral or mystical sort of objection that we advance against Birth-Prevention. And that would be real and even reasonable Eugenics; for we could then select the best, or at least the healthiest, and sacrifice what are called the unfit. By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly from mercenary motives. Until I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold, scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement.”[3]
At Chesterton’s death in 1936, the spiritual decline of the Western world had only advanced to the point where birth prevention was still an idea of the radical fringe, like eugenics; by the late 20th Century, it had paved the way for a far greater evil, abortion. And by the time of this writing, there are people in the halls of academia openly discussing the supposedly “complex” issue of involuntary pediatric euthanasia – i.e., a “scientific programme for drowning babies.”
Where Starving Children Come From: The Theory and Reality
Our high school and college classrooms are not taught the theories of philosophers like Chesterton, but they are thoroughly indoctrinated in the patently false ideas of men like Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who pioneered the whole concept of overpopulation. To put it in his own words, the human race is doomed to perpetual poverty unless breeding is deliberately limited because "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical rate." Like many of the ideas of the so-called Enlightenment, it sounds pithy at first, but it is both mentally unbalanced and demonstrably false. Protestant philosophers have a longstanding serious weakness for manic depressive thinking, for making false idols out of certain virtues or demonizing false devils, then oscillating between the two from one generation to the next; that is why Western Europe and America have been besotted for centuries with quite mad crusades, ranging from Prohibition to the Salem Witch Trials to the Red Scares of the Cold War. Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” applies quite nicely to many Protestant thinkers. So too does the reverse, because some of them go to the other mad extreme of valuing causes and principles without bothering to count the costs. Malthus brought this insane brand of cynicism to bear on the issue of population, because he only counted the price of sustaining human life without even bothering to address the issue of the economic value it brings. To put it simply, he only saw people as mouths to feed, not as hands that could be put to work to make more food.
Because of this senseless error, his ideas were being proven wrong even as Malthus wrote them. He did not realize that the population of Europe (as well as the rest of the world) had been growing fairly steadily from one century to the next for most of recorded history and was just beginning to experience a fantastic leap forward in population growth, thanks to the technological advancements of the 19th Century. What this did, in essence, is increase the carrying capacity of the continent, which is still increasing to this day. Where did this technological growth come from though? The tinkerers of the Victorian Age would never have had the education, time or resources to come up with their inventions without a large and growing number of laborers to do the grunt work of farming and industrial production, which gave our scientists and other thinkers capital to build upon. We would be without light bulbs and telephones today if men like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell had to spend most of their time harvesting their own wheat and building their own homes. Typically, the rule throughout human history is that population growth produces prosperity, not poverty, because on average each pair of hands can be put to work to yield more food than they consume. The surplus they produce can be used to further increase the carrying capacity of the land, by making more efficient use of resources; it is a sort of serendipitous spiral, the opposite of a vicious circle. Thankfully, no one listened to Malthus in his day, otherwise the Industrial Revolution might have never happened. Edison and Graham Bell might have been contracepted out of existence, along with the workers who fed them and the teachers who taught them.
When evil men try to justify measures control population, they usually point to evidence like the shanty towns of the Third World, the destitute people who crowd the streets of cities like Calcutta and São Paulo and the starving children depicted on television commercials for relief charities. All of this misery has nothing to do with “overpopulation” and everything to do with economic maldistribution, in virtually every instance on the planet. This is an issue I have a lifetime of deep, detailed knowledge of and I do not have space to to discuss statistics like GINI indexes and the historical circumstances for each and every country, but the story is the same everywhere: over the course of several centuries a capitalist system of land tenure has penetrated every corner of the planet, so that there is less and less room for the poorest rural laborers to live independently of a global system which is geared entirely to the interests of the rich. This system was established by a wide range of dirty tactics, such as colonization by European powers in the 19th Century, to financial manipulation by institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, to bribery of national legislators and dictators by multinational corporations, but the result has been the same everywhere: instead of producing for themselves, the world’s peasants now have to produce for the international marketplace, i.e. the rich nations. In some cases, local elites simply stole the peasant lands through brute force; in other places, such as Guatemala, legislators were bribed to pass laws that put the common lands of indigenous communities up for sale. The capitalist economists of the rich Western nations openly advocate the deliberate conversion of all of the world’s farmland to a cash basis and are gradually succeeding through a multitude of means that seem harmless at first, such as extending property taxes to rural peasants, but which are actually designed to drive them out of business. Peasant families may lose their ability to feed themselves through a process like this: first they are required to produce a surplus for the market in order to pay new taxes; as a result, they eventually have to sell out to corporate agribusinesses, if their ancestors had not already done so at gunpoint over the last few centuries; then they become landless laborers who are paid the bare minimum starvation wages that Big Business can get away with. To make matters worse, in the effort to establish this new system, capitalists often disrupt age-old land tenure patterns that peasants had relied on for generations to protect them against famine. For example, the IMF or World Bank may step in and require governments to stop funding seed banks, on the premise that they are an unnecessary “socialist” expense, which leaves peasants vulnerable to the economic effects of droughts and pests. Governments will often have to accept such austerity measures as a condition for continued loans to buy foreign goods, including food they could have produced themselves, if their farming sectors weren’t dedicated to producing food for foreign markets. This leads to an insanely convoluted system in which nations like Ghana end up spending $1 billion annually to import food that they could easily produce for themselves, if their farmers were not forced to harvest luxuries like coffee to export to the rich nations. Another example is Venezuela, which imports 70 percent of its food because its production is devoted to luxury goods for foreign markets. There are endless variations on the same story, with specific land tenure patterns and the degree of maldistribution varying from place to place, but the trend is one direction: to eliminate the economic independence of farmers across the planet. This deliberately places them in a precarious position so that they have to go to work for Big Business, which keeps the price of the imported food on our dinner table low by driving down the wages of rural laborers. In many corners of the planet the farmland has been hoarded by wealthy oligarchs, such as in Venezuela, where most of the arable land is left fallow to drive up the prices of exports. This leads to another bizarre byproduct of capitalist economics: extreme rural poverty despite the availability of enormous swathes of uncolonized land.
Because the upper class of the planet is gradually locking down every inch of land on the planet in this manner little by little, there is less room for marginal producers to squeak out a living – so naturally, they flee to the cities in search of work, only to live precariously in ramshackle tenements. This is precisely why you see the largest shantytowns in places like Brazil and Venezuela where the maldistribution of land is at its most drastic. The streets of some of India’s leading cities are crowded with beggars precisely because so many millions of India’s farmers have been driven from their land. There is no famine in India; there is no shortage of land in Central America; it has just all been hogged by the rich, whose false “free market” policies fly in the face of what the Old Testament teaches us, in Isaiah 5:8, about hoarding the means of production: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” It is true that there are bona fide shortages of food in North Africa due to famines, but in many cases, capitalist economic policies have exacerbated them badly by eliminating all of the supposed “inefficiencies” that once protected peasants from their effects.
As St. John Chrysostom once wrote in his “Four discourses, chiefly on the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus,” the rich fool in Luke 16 goes to a particularly hot place in Hell merely for ignoring the destitute man outside his home.[4] This is a risk we all take each time we see starving children with flies on their faces and turn the channel, for Lazarus has been laid at our doorstep. Our complicity goes deeper than that, however, since much of our imported food is bought at artificially low prices and the industrial goods we pay for it with are sold at artificially high prices; the next time you bite into a banana or drink a cup of coffee, keep in mind that whoever produced it may have gone hungry that night, since they could no longer produce food for themselves instead. Also keep in mind that much of what we call “aid” to foreign countries is actually in the form of guns to help put down revolts and strikes by landless workers of this sort. The rest of our aid is often in the form of loans on terms that force nations to turn over control of their economic policies to multinational corporations and institutions like the IMF, who then remove whatever protections those workers had left. Other so-called “economic aid” is also designed to integrate the economies of poorer nations into our own, so that they become dependent on us. Compared to these poisonous forms of aid, direct grants of food are a pittance – and even this is sometimes corrupted, as it was in the 1980s in Guatemala, where free food was used to lure peasants out of hiding so that the brutal military government could track them.
For confirmation of some of what I just said, start with World Hunger: Twelve Myths by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins.[5] The term “myth” is a misnomer, however, because these are really Orwellian lies manufactured by the upper class. There is no shortage of land. There is no great famine. There is no “overpopulation.” The “useless eaters” you see in the world’s shanties could be put to productive work, but the rich won’t let them, because they’ve already got most of the world fenced off. It is no accident that Malthus developed his argument in England, because this is where the whole global system of inequality started; the greedy English gentry first stole all of the land belonging to Catholic charities, then fenced off all of the common land belonging to the peasants in the enclosure movement, then wondered why their small towns were depopulated and their big cities were burdened with multitudes of underemployed people. The English upper class had to invent welfare as we know it immediately after Henry VIII committed the first of these crimes, which constitute one of the greatest land thefts in history. They’ve been whining about “the dole” ever since, but by the act of fencing the country off and stealing the means of production, they brought it on themselves. This has led to another Orwellian myth, of a big handout of aid by our governments to the overpopulated Third World. There are no huge giveaways of food to the poor of the world; in truth, most of the exploitation is in the other direction. That is why it is an even greater sin on our part to recommend or even demand that the people of the Third World start contracepting themselves out of existence like we do, because in essence we have stolen from them and are compounding our crime by demanding that they stop having children as well. The argument that they should stop breeding because they can’t afford to have more kids with distended bellies is cruel, because those distended bellies are a product of our exploitation. Once a person has descended to this point, they are not just ignoring Lazarus; they are actively trying to prevent him from ever being born. Chesterton was a popular guy in part because he genuinely liked people, even his enemies in debate, but he said that the one stupidity he couldn’t put up with was birth prevention; likewise, I can put up with any kind of idiocy, except the despicable argument that poor people should stop breeding simply because someone else has already robbed them.
In essence, the extension of the capitalist system into every dark corner of the earth has constituted one of the greatest crimes in history, and we are desperately trying to cover the visible evidence of our failed system by contracepting away the “useless eaters” driven into the favelas, aid missions and refugee camps of the world by our own voracity. Even when North Americans and Europeans practice birth prevention on themselves, it is a form of exploitation, because it frees up the parents and the surviving children to live higher on the hog. The richest generation in history is routinely culling its children in a panic out of fear of poverty, without the slightest threat that their kids might someday be reduced to walking skeletons. If our children are in that much danger of starvation, then perhaps the capitalist system does not work half as well as advertised. If prosperity is measured by the number of cell phones per person, then the poorest inner city American is more affluent than the kings of generations past; but if we measure it by the number of children, then we are the poorest and most unproductive generation since antiquity. If we truly can’t afford to have a dozen offspring like our ancestors, despite all of our modern technological advances, then the warning of Revelation 3:17 applies to us, for “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” The common denominator in this whole discussion always comes back to money, but what is money for, except to support more life? Yet there is one other purpose that money can be devoted to: self-glorification, which is the crux of the problem. It is essentially a cultural and religious one, for unlike the people of the Third World, or our ancestors, we worship Mammon. They have children despite poverty because they love life for its own sake; we don’t have children because we love money for its own sake. The sad fact is that if we were actually pursuing material prosperity, the best way to do it in the long run would be to have more children, who would further increase our planet’s carrying capacity. Good typically involves a trade of short-term pain for long-term gain, while evil entails short-term gain for long-term pain and the issue of global population is no exception. By contracepting themselves out of existence, nations like China and India are getting a one-time economic boost by stealing from future generations, just like the West did in the last century, but at the price of long-term prosperity. The economic stagnation of Japan for the last three decades can be traced to its graying population, which is an omen of what is to come for the rest of the world that buys into the Gospel of Greed and listens to our suicidal advice on population control. No economic system can ever satisfy the demands of avarice, because the whole point of the religion of money is to create social inequality, so that someone can feel superior to someone else; the rat race can never be won; you might get ahead of the Jones’, but then the Jones’ would be unhappy. In the effort to get ahead, however, we might resort to evil, even self-destructive courses of action. What overpopulation theory boils down to is another attempt by the rich to exploit the poor of the planet, despite the fact that their own prosperity depends on the very people they’re trying to eradicate. It’s a bit like the top of a pyramid trying to rid itself of its base; in wiser ages, our ruling classes knew that larger social pyramids gave them wider power bases and opportunities to extract wealth. We happen to live in one of those insane ages where the ruling class at the apex has gone mad with pride and now believes itself to be self-sufficient, to the point that it no longer needs workers to exploit, or even an underemployed lumpenproletariat to keep in reserve. The whole effort reeks of the madness of some recluse millionaire who doesn’t realize that they need surplus servants, in the event that the gardener, the driver or the chef cannot work that day. In their lunacy, they have forgotten that no one is going to weed the garden, drive the limousine or cook the lobster after they fire the servants.
Catholicism and the Consequences of Contraception
The mad millionaires who govern us can also afford to hire better publicists, which is why you’ve haven’t heard the truths discussed above. In fact, their publicists are so good, they have succeeded in fooling most of the Catholics of the Western world. Although most of capitalist economic theory is heretical according to dogmatic, infallible teachings of the Church, not a peep is pronounced in the pulpits or the pews about mortal sins like hoarding the means of production, paying unjust wages, charging unjust prices, usury or speculation, to name a few. There might be some derisive mention of “socialism” without any understanding of what the term means, or any mention of the Vatican’s explicit approval of leftist economic policies like nationalization or progressive taxation - all of which would cause the average “conservative Christian” to foam at the mouth with indignation, if they knew how radical those teachings actually were.[6] As a result, the leadership of the Catholic Church is putting up less resistance to capitalism than at any time in history - except for the occasional protest of the last sane man on the planet, Pope Benedict XVI, the only world leader willing to even mention the sin of usury now. When most Catholics and their bishops see the technological marvels and material prosperity of America and its allies, a vague assumption comes to mind that they must be doing something right. Even in saner ages, much of our prosperity was always due to some form of exploitation, such as chattel slavery or treating the Third World like a milch cow, but in abortion and contraception we have found an even more lucrative source of dirty cash: the unborn. In the last four decades, at least one billion children have been aborted worldwide, including about 45 million in America; now add in at least a billion more contracepted out of existence; then multiply by the thousands of dollars of initial expenditure it costs to raise each child to Western standards of living and you can see just how dependent our whole global economy is upon this cheap, invisible, defenseless source of capital. Abortion and contraception represent a multi-trillion dollar boost to the global economy, at least in the short term. The bill is already coming due, however, in the form of economic stagnation, which is being compensated for by even more culling.[7]
The byproducts of this massive culling are to blame for many of the ills that beset the Church in the Western world today, although most clergy are unable to connect them together. They view modern prosperity with a paralyzing curiosity, since it shouldn’t work according to Catholic doctrine - and it doesn’t, but that is not clear unless we take the time to count the dead. Because of the excess wealth this culling gives to the survivors, the people and the clergy alike can afford to become both fat and dull of mind, which often go hand in hand; at which point any kind of discipline, especially religious, feels like a burden. That is why most of our churches have been turned into clubs for group therapy, as Archbishop Dolan has warned against. Another side effect of that is widespread acceptance of the ungodly notion that poverty is evil – when in fact, it is wealth and power that corrupts. And make no mistake about it, the bishops of this generation have been badly corrupted by both. If not, the Canadian clergy who signed the Winnipeg Statement of 1968 to disavow Humanae Vitae would have been repudiated by the rest of the world’s bishops. They know full well that under canon law, the signers of that statement earned themselves automatic excommunications ley sententiae, just like the 96 to 99 percent of ordinary parishioners in America who disagree with it. They know that both the renegade clergy and wayward parishioners have committed the mortal sin of heresy merely by rejecting the Church’s teaching, and therefore cannot take Eucharist without committing sacrilege. If our priests and bishops actually believed this teaching, they would move Heaven and Earth to stamp it out from their parishes, by warning the rank-and-file Catholics at each and every Mass not to take Communion if they disagreed with it. Because so many of the clergy are concerned more with wealth and status than with saving souls, they don’t bother to give their faithful any moral instruction at all, on any issue, let alone the controversial ones like contraception. In fact, they don’t teach much at all except vague platitudes, usually in a manner that contradicts the Church’s detailed, unchanging and quite unpopular code of morality, which doesn’t fit nicely with their sacraments-only pastoral approach. Their superiors likewise don’t care much about this or any other controversial moral teaching, but they do care greatly about their own personal power – which is precisely why America’s bishops objected so strenuously to Obama’s health care mandate. His unjust rule change would have had a trifling impact on the number of babies contracepted away, but it stepped on their toes and threatened their power base. In fact, I have personal knowledge that some of the bishops who have been most vocal in the current controversy routinely cover up the misdeeds of the clergy under their supervision, including numerous heresies like birth prevention. They view their fellow clergy as members of the Old Boys’ Network and see their dioceses as personal fiefs. That is why I never heard the term “birth control” uttered in a Catholic Church in the last nine years since I became a catechumen.
It is sad that such a large proportion of our clergy is so faithless and cowardly, since birth prevention is the most glaring and obvious reason for declining church enrollments in North America and Europe. They puzzle over why parishes are closing left and right and why the pews, the monasteries and seminaries are empty, but it is their own fault. This is a startlingly simple problem: everyone’s dead. They’ve contracepted and aborted themselves out of existence because the clergy were too gutless to warn them about the dangers. The future of the Catholic Church in the West can be extrapolated from the amount of gray hair seen at each Mass; judging from that, the closing of parishes has just begun. There may be a family in each parish who belong to that faithful 1 to 4 percent and bring four or more kids with them – I personally know of one Catholic couple who are successfully raising seven kids – but the rest of the parents bring in just one or two children, if any. In the film Never Forget, Leonard Nimoy asks critics who doubted the Hitler’s Holocaust, “Well, where are the children?” Likewise, if anyone is following this teaching, why don’t we see the pews filled with kids?
The Secular Costs of Birth Prevention
The decline so visible in the interiors of our churches is a microcosm of what’s going on in the wider world, at least in the West. It is true that the heresy of birth prevention has put the souls of hundreds of millions of Catholics at risk of eternal damnation, but I’m not concerned here with this private matter within the Church. Regardless of whether you’re Catholic or not, the issue of birth prevention is an issue with very grave public consequences that cannot be ignored; this is not an issue of private sanctity but of a public policy that has done grave and lasting damage to our nation. I am writing this not to point church lady fingers like a Republican politician, merely to have someone to look down upon, but because it is a matter of national survival. I learned about its dire costs first, then became Catholic later because the Church had so much convincing evidence on this and many other topics that I had should have listened to sooner; I am Catholic for the very utilitarian reason that I think that everything anti-Catholic is bad for humanity and by extension, for my country, but few of heresies in history have been so directly destructive as this one. The Catholic Church had very sound, practical reasons for warning against contraception and the branches that exist in North America and Europe are already paying high penalties for ignoring it.
Westerners of all faiths are also feeling the symptoms of secondary diseases spawned by birth prevention, though they know it not. The empty pews are a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of America, which would already be experiencing population decline if not for immigration. Kansas is giving away free land again; the Dakotas are already experiencing population decline; in my lifetime, much of Western New York has gone out of cultivation, as the woods and grasslands have reclaimed the farms of our ancestors. All of the Western democracies have also experienced economic stagnation for three or four decades, to a lesser degree than Japan, but for the same reasons: the numbers of producers and consumers aren’t growing much, so economic production and consumption is permanently anemic. A secondary side effect of this has been a phenomenon known as an inverted age pyramid, in which the ranks of the middle aged and elderly grow faster than the number of youngsters; until our man-made demographic disaster, this was always an unhealthy sign of some devastating war or a vast plague like the Black Death. In our case it is an unhealthy sign of national suicide, which has left us with fewer and fewer workers to care for more and more retirees. As a result, our stagnant economies have been further burdened with deficits in pension funds and programs like Social Security, which were designed in the 1930s when population growth was taken for granted. Like airplane schemes, however, they require consistently growing numbers of contributors to retain solvency. An even more subtle upshot of the inverted age pyramid has been the decimation of the night life of the U.S., where in one generation nearly everything with a social purpose has been virtually wiped out: bowling alleys, amusement parks, cinemas, miniature golf, fraternal clubs like Rotary and Odd Fellows, they’re all either gone or on their way out. Many taverns had been already been transformed into meat markets by the end of the ‘70s, just a decade after Humanae Vitae warned about this very danger. Families are also disintegrating for many reasons that would take too long to list here, but one of the most obvious is that they require family members; without kids, there is no family. Like stillborn stars, families that are too small don’t have enough gravity to stick together, so they tend to drift apart, sometimes across the country as the ties between them fray and fade. A larger family will always retain some mass, so that there is something for members who have moved to return to. Families are also losing many of the hidden economic benefits that greatly ease the burden of raising more children, such as older children providing a cheap source of labor for chores like day care and dishwashing that increase in proportion to family size. Malthus was dead wrong even at the level of the individual family, because more children means more hands to work to put food in their mouths. Of course, even with these built-in economic benefits, larger families will have to make more sacrifices, but for a better cause than keeping up with the Jones’. Many parents today teach their children to give up things in order to compete in society[8], which is actually an evil thing, but when a child has to give up things for a brother or sister, for the sake of the family, then they learn true self-sacrifice. Without that sense, they tend to become spoiled – which is exactly what happens when all the wealth saved through birth prevention are wasted on excess food or leisure, or to avoid manual labor. Instead of paying to make our kids fat and arrogant, we could spend that money on more brothers and sisters, while simultaneously teaching them virtue.
Another argument against contraception is that it is a slippery slope that will eventually lead Western governments to forcibly curtail the sizes of families. Don’t laugh, because much of our ruling class, from our politicians to our businessmen, is fairly open about pursuing population reduction at all costs through deliberate social engineering. It is already being done to you with a combination of propaganda and economic pressure, which is easily applied in an environment where the capitalist class already controls most of the means of production. Obama’s contraception gaffe was just another feeble attempt to move further down that road; yet another recent sign was a court order by a Rochester judge barring a local woman from getting pregnant, on the grounds that she was a welfare case. The real danger is Big Business, which gives Big Government its marches orders; we are all in the same boat as that woman, since we all exist at the mercy of Corporate America. Ideally, I would like to see voluntary progress in the opposite direction, in a spiritual revival that will lead people to reject the mercenary values of the upper class and get married young, then have as many children as possible, rather than fornicating for decades then contracepting and aborting their kids away to get rich. We need to develop an entire counterculture devoted to life, one that will recolonize our depopulated country. That would take a dose of pioneer spirit, of a kind I only see now among the Mennonites, who are buying up the abandoned farmland of Western New York. Perhaps the Catholic Worker movement could initiate such a rural revival by establishing new farms run by the distributist economic principles of Dorothy Day. Yet if a repopulation movement did arise, one made up of people who could resist the stigma of lower standards of living in return for high standards of ethics, then they would eventually suffer persecution. Much of our ruling class admires China’s One Child Policy and wish that democracy did not stand in their way of implementing the same program here, at least for the poor, but there are easy ways of nullifying that. In our day, the easiest method to circumvent human rights and liberty is to appeal to the judiciary, which can simply overturn any law they don’t like, as the Supreme Court did illegally in the 1965 Griswold case on contraception. Perhaps in the future states will step in against large families on the grounds of “child abuse” if parents can’t afford candy or Nintendos for their kids. At least in America, any forcible effort to curb family sizes will have to be directed mainly against the poor, thanks to our culture of class prejudice, and will be painted as a “private sector” thing. For example, just off the top of my head, I can think of many ways that this could be done; for example, a poor but large family may denied the same HEAP assistance, unemployment insurance, Social Security, health care benefits or any other benefits that smaller families also depend on, if they don’t refrain from having more kids. Of course, the capitalist system is paradoxically what makes everyone dependent on Big Government in this first place, by monopolizing the means of production and eliminating any possibility of producing for one’s self outside of the marketplace, but this important distinction will be glossed over. The deeper that capitalism penetrates our society, the more dependent upon the will of the rich we will all become, one way or another.
The trend of decay is all in one direction and our enemies are in a frame of mind in which they intend to keep on pushing as long as they can. Unless we push back, hard, then eventually renewal will become impossible. It is actually a vicious circle, because as I wrote in The Deaf Protesting the Blind: The Failure of the Occupy Movement and Other Organized Dissent Since Reagan, genuine reform movements cannot succeed in a declining population. Middle aged people don’t make revolutions, young people do. They have been steadily disappearing for decades, which is why you may never see a response like the Vietnam War protests in our lifetime. That does not bode well for the Occupy movement, or the anti-abortion movement, or any other reformers who stand against evil of any kind. Yet unless we can muster the strength to change direction quickly, the direst consequences of birth prevention will erode our national power further. Back in 1930, when the Anglicans caved in on contraception, America and its European allies used to export colonists to the rest of the world; now, just a lifetime later, we are being overrun by an unprecedented wave of illegal immigration. For all intents and purposes, we’re being invaded – but it’s hard to muster up the will to fight them if we’re not going to populate this empty land ourselves. Because most Americans live in big cities or drive on crowded roads, they don’t realize just how vast an area of the interior is still empty. If our descendants don’t populate it, someone else’s will. And if we finally do decide to limit immigration again, we may find that we no longer have even military resources to keep them at bay. This is less of an issue in the U.S., which shares a border with a single weak but friendly neighbor of a similar culture, but a serious long-term problem for all the nations of southern Europe, as far as Russia. All of them share borders with neighbors belonging to entirely different civilizations, all of whom are growing in terms of economic and military power and exporting their immigrants in vast numbers. A generation from now, those weak neighbors may be strong enough to force down any barriers that the European Union and Russian put up to Muslim and Chinese immigration. Our man-made demographic disaster was already a silent factor in many of the wars the West lost in the last century, like Afghanistan and Vietnam, and it will undoubtedly lead to direr foreign policy crises in the future. Back in 1900, the Western nations accounted for 29.7 percent of the world’s population, but by 1996 the proportion had crashed back down to 18.5 percent – or about the same level as in 1200-1400 A.D., when the Ottoman Empire and Mongol invaders menaced Europe. Europe was able to recover from disasters like the barbarian invasions and the Black Death mainly because of steady population growth, which made up for the sudden deficits during troubled times like this. In the absence of natural, healthy population growth, with all of its built-in advantages, our entire civilization may not survive its next crises. And given that contraception has paved the way for the far greater crime of abortion, which has snuffed out the lives of one billion children in just four decades, in the greatest Holocaust in human history, it is questionable that we deserve to survive.
The writer is a former reporter with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] This loosely paraphrases a comment by G.K. Chesterton about men going soft in the head after.
[4] Chrysostom, St. John, 1869, Four discourses, chiefly on the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus. Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer: London. This book is must reading for anyone who wants to comment on the economic teachings of Catholicism.
[5] Lappe, Frances Moore and Collins, Joseph, 1986, World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Grove Press: New York.
[6] That includes Republicans like Rick Santorum who criticize contraception, or Reagan, who paid lip service to recriminalizing abortion. Both men care far more about their anti-Catholic, anti-human economic policies, which in turn drive people to contracept and abort their children.
[7] For example, Russians now abort about two-thirds of their babies in order to make up for the economic collapse that began with the fall of Communism, which was in part due to the legalization of abortion and contraception under the Communists.
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