Pronatalism and patriarchy in Christianity
J.D. Vance not only wants to prevent women from having abortions, he wants to make them have more children. And unfortunately, his argument isn’t fringe; it's rampant within conservative Christianity.
J.D. Vance’s pronatalism and anti-abortion statements are offensive to most people who hear them. In fact, “Presented with a list of options to describe Vance in August, the most common answers were ‘conservative,’ ‘anti-woman,’ and ‘weird’... The percentage calling him ‘extreme’ shot up 13 points." Most participants apparently disapprove of his record entirely.
It’s crystal clear to most that Vance’s policy positions have nothing to do with caring for our nation’s children and more to do with opposing freedom for women to make decisions about their health, including reproductive health.
It’s not surprising that proponents of controlling women’s bodies are promoting the GOP ticket. David French has expressed similar views to those of J.D. Vance in the past. Nonetheless, this week, French penned a column stating he would vote for Harris because the personalities on this ticket are unelectable. Although he agrees with their pronatalist and anti-abortion policies, he wishes the GOP would soft-pedal their more radical positions in order to win the election.
French’s support for Harris, although positive, nonetheless reveals that it is the rhetoric that he finds distasteful, and not the substance of Trump and Vance’s policies.
I think church history clearly accounts for this canonized patriarchy. For most of the history of the church, women had two vocational choices only. They could either work for the church or bear children. They either needed to become subservient to church patriarchy or become subservient to the patriarchy in a nuclear family.
Beth Allison Barr in The Making of Biblical Womanhood notes that the situation got much worse for women during and after the reformation, however. She argues that the option to remain celibate during the period of the middle ages, had been liberating for many. “Virginity empowered them. Women became nuns and took religious vows, and some, like Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen, found their voices rang with the authority of men. Indeed, the further removed medieval women were from the married state, the closer they were to God. After the Reformation, the opposite became true for Protestant women. The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers, the godlier they became.”
Obviously the church’s history of controlling sexuality is problematic since it forbids abortions and birth control. But Barr’s point is that despite that, things got even worse for women. Post-Reformation, women’s primary vocation became rooted in child-rearing. Not only is this sexist, it is deeply homophobic and transphobic, as well. Not only is the only job of cis-women to bear children, this position also makes it clear that women who choose not to have children or can’t do se, are less noble, less godly than those who do.
This mentality is endemic in conservative churches, so much so, that strong women are often degraded as Jezebels. It’s not surprising that Donald Trump reflexively uses a sexist epithet against Kamala Harris, an empowered woman. Vance called her one of the “childless cat ladies.” Because the control of women is normalized in the church, well-meaning Christians need to apply extra effort to change the narrative and the culture. Our response must be to praise single women, transwomen, and women without children (i.e. to offer them the same privileges we readily supply to cis-gendered, straight men). We need to hear their voices and honor their choices. We need to advocate for laws that allow them to live with freedom, dignity, and autonomy. We need to call out pronatalists as the patriarchs they are, and humbly confess the role that the church has played in authoring, sponsoring, and preaching patriarchy. As a male pastor, I confess my own complicity in sexism and patriarchy, and I seek to divest from it, as a toxic power structure that has benefited me.
We must point out that the extreme views of Vance are common to conservative Christianity and that simply defeating Trump and Vance won’t be enough to liberate women. We need to address the patriarchy that resides in our churches and in our hearts. We need to advocate for all women’s liberation. And if we are interested in increasing the birth rate, we need to know that promoting freedom and allocating resources are the ways to make that choice more feasible—not oppressive and controlling policies. Empowering women as individuals, as leaders, and caring for them with all of our resources, allows them to freely make choices that feel good and right to them. We need universal health care, good public education, guaranteed maternity and paternity leave, as well as full access to reproductive clinics and freedom over one’s bodily self. We need to build a society where women can live free and healthy lives without state interference or cultural coercion.