A Misguided Call for High Birthrates

Wednesday, 10 June 2009 11:20

Bummer. Daniel Akin, the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary is encouraging Southern Baptists to have more children in order to increase baptism rates and counter the growth of Islam. From a story at ABPnews.com.

Akin said he remembered when he was a seminary student and Bertha Smith, an iconic Southern Baptist missionary who died in 1988, "scared the daylights" out of seminarians by telling them that using birth control is a sin.

"God killed Onan for it and he might kill you too," Akin recalled her as saying, a reference to story from Genesis about a man whom God kills for refusing his obligation to sire a child for his sister-in-law after his brother died. "Then she said this, 'Listen, we will never win the battle against the religion of Islam, because they have children and we don't. And it's a very simple matter of mathematics. Eventually they will outnumber us.' She was a prophetess."

Akin said that is demonstrated by looking no farther than Europe. "Islam will take over Europe and it will never fire a shot," he said. "They will simply outnumber them as white Europeans have less or no children, and Muslims continue to have them at a very large, healthy rate."

"You say, 'What are you saying?' I'm saying you need to have a bunch of kids," Akin said. "It has a missiological motivation."

Read the detailed article at ABPnews.com... there's a lot more there.

A few responses:

More is not always better. If we care about our world and the limited resources that we all must share, more may be akin to gluttony (seeking excess because we can).
Children are indeed a gift, but are gifts in themselves - not a means to an end (in this case, growing the number of Christians).

The sense that the future of Christianity relies on competing with the birth rates of other religious groups (in this case, Islam) is also disturbing. People should choose their path of faith and discipleship out of love and devotion, not because it is their family or cultural heritage.
To approach religious traditions as if they are in a competitive race misses the point that there is much faith traditions can do together and learn from one another.
Thankfully, not all Baptists are fundamentalists (as evidenced by the excellent reporting of Associated Baptist Press on this issue).

What do you think of Akin's comments and ideas (or of my comments)?

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Oooooooooookay!
written by Bullwinkle Q. Pettigrew, June 10, 2009

It's probably none of my business, but is Dan's wife particularly close to his brother? Just wondering. This is the kind of wackiness that shows how the Religious Reich is just spinning out of control. We just got done talking about Al Moheler's measly little quiver, and now SBC-related folk are standing up and saying with a straight face "no one wants to join us anymore, so we're going to have to breed our way out of our problems?" Big points for chutzpa, but a large deduction for a pronounced lack of personal responsibility and common sense.

Here's one for Al and Dan: solid research shows that the human species enjoys a higher birthrate when it is deprived of food. This is somewhat related to the higher birthrate in some Muslim countries. Maybe you should do a speech encouraging starvation for Jesus, too. Your faces don't have that "unfed" look of good breeders. Obviously, you'll have to bring back the Old Testament practice of polygamy, too, in order to maximize your breeding potential. Good luck with that. Just cut back on the "battle" language, lest we think you're too fond of your guns.

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