Being fruitful and multiplying as faithful sons and daughters of the King is a commandment directly from God from the earliest moment of creation. In Genesis 1: 27-28, Moses wrote, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
Men and women took this serious for almost every moment of our history. The fruit and blessings of a marriage was seen in its children. People had large families and those children were raised to understand the benefit of marriage and children and love their Creator. People did not have to look to government to provide for them in their old age, their children would do it. And then in 1960 the FDA approved the first birth control pill. We were already on the downward slide, but this was the nail in the coffin for our culture.
With this approval and acceptance, the United States government, pharmaceutical industry, schooling system, and the business world went to war against God's command to be fruitful and multiply. From this moment on, the family became the enemy of business and government because it kept women at home and children filling bedrooms and yards. The government, business, and war machine prefers men and women both labor all day and put children in child care under industrial-scale maintenance of their being until they are able to enter the fields on their own.
There have been many cascading effects of the destruction of the family, just look at mental health. No doubt families generate more income with two salaries, but they really make people miserable. This misery enables them to buy more automobiles and every other thing. With two people working you have to more than one car, this is good for the automobile industry. This same effect is cascading across every industry. You can see how business will do everything it can to get people to work, generate money, and then give them the options to buy.
However, since child care costs so much, it is better to have fewer and fewer children to satisfy the school, government, business, and war machine's requirements for laborers. At this point in much of the western/industrialized world, the birth rates are not even at replacement levels. The most capable and able members of society are having fewer and fewer children and starting later because both spouses attend college, then enter the work force, then start thinking about having children in their 30's and by then, they can only afford one or maybe two kids without having to exit the workforce and downsize spending because of the costs and demands of children.
I think about this all the time. Our society and culture are dying. It is being automated, minimized, categorized, and reduced to nothing more than tax paying citizens and leaches. Clearly this is not happening in the Church though right. The Church knows better. They have the very words of God saying to behave and live in the exact opposite manner of our culture. The Church must be a bulwark against this kind of stupidity, right? We are the shining light for others to find!
Unfortunately, the Church has bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. My extended family was Catholic. My mom has seven brothers and sisters. Each one of those eight siblings had two kids, except for one of them, who had three, and none of them are Catholic anymore or having big families. Most of them are members of churches still, but they are no longer following this simple and direct commandment. Society has changed the rules on us. It is too expensive to live. It is degrading for women to have so many children, what about their career? Without a career, what value is a mother?
I have preached in a lot of dying churches. You know what I see in almost all of them? The people who grew up and got married after the pill, they had two kids. These are people who are now in their 60's and later. They bought the culture they were instructed to believe in. They were schooled and told what to think and how to behave forty hours a week whereas they only received 2-4 hours of instruction in their faith. These numbers cannot jive. They became better pagans than they were Christians.
Their religion only had the trappings of faith. I see it every week in church. There are no kids. The older generation holding onto power and control in small churches across North America, they only had two children and both of them left town and went to the city for higher paying jobs. These kids only had 1-2 kids and they only visit grandma and grandpa 1-2 times/year. Inside the Church, we bought Satan's lie and rejected God's truth. We wanted Mammon and not God. If you do not believe me, just look at the size of the families leaving every Sunday.
Christians bought the lie and shot themselves in the foot and now they are overwhelmed by a slew of weird folks demanding you respect their pronouns and not use their dead name. Businesses fly queer flags in their windows and support Black Lives Matter while the Christian working under the umbrella of this business stays silent in the face of all this stupidity, because they have a mortgage, school loans, car payments, and thousands of dollars in electronics that must be fed a constant stream of money to keep working.
We have lost our way. Birth control is not God's way. People do not want to hear this, but God is in charge of the womb. When we decided we would manage it, we got what we have now. Drag queens in schools, queers grooming children as teachers, riots in the streets, and more non sense than my mind can fathom every day. We told God no and He let us, because He is a good and just God. We only have ourselves to blame for believing the lie. I know pastors opposed birth control 60 years ago, but they lost the fight with their flock who wanted the control over their reproductive organs. Churches are closing because we decided being a slave to greed was more important than being a free son and daughter of the King.
I do not expect this to change. I expect birth numbers will continue dropping for the above reason and the Gates/Faucci/Trump injections that are ravaging peoples repoductive organs right now. Humanity is holding on to the edge of the cliff by its fingertips while the Apple/Google/Disney/Government monsters are prying the fingers off the ledge, one by one and people are in free fall to their destruction because they bought the lie.
I think about this turn of events every week when I enter and then leave a church facility. I see it right before my eyes, every single week. It is undeniable if you speak the truth. If you do not believe me, go to the small church in the small town. You will see it. Then I read Resistance Is Fertile in Touchstone and it hit home even further. I am not alone in seeing this and other people will say the same thing, but who is listening? This is not sustainable. We must reject the world and love God. We must have babies and raise families, even if it means we are not the wealthiest family on the block. Reject Mammon and love God and your neighbor.