The Bible, unlike secular society, considers children a blessing—not a burden.

Roman legislation, the Law of the Twelve Tables, actually required a father to put deformed children to death.

Jews were almost alone among ancient peoples in their opposition to infanticide.

In the biblical account of creation, God creates man and woman—and the first thing he tells them to do is to have children. “Be fruitful and multiply [pru veh-ravuh], fill the earth,” is the first commandment of the Bible, according to rabbinic tradition.

But for some people today, children are viewed more as a curse than a blessing.

For example, according to Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of the 2005 work The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love, the Genesis account of the creation of man and woman, and the biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply,” are “texts of hate” that modern men and women must forcefully repudiate.

“Can anyone seriously argue today that these words are the ‘Word of God?’ ” the bishop asks. “Are they not little more than texts of oppression?” ¹

Spong is particularly agitated about the injunction to have procreative, heterosexual sex.

In his chapter “The Ethics of Overbreeding,” Spong writes what is, in effect, a Planned Parenthood brochure, using the same old, now discredited Malthusian arguments from the 1960s about global “overpopulation.”

His example of “overbreeding” is a woman who has five children. He describes a fictional character—clearly modeled after the infamous Andrea Yates—an evangelical Christian who followed the teaching of Genesis, had five children, and became so overwrought that she drowned them all.

From this and similar examples, Spong concludes that the divine commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” is “nothing less than a prescription for human genocide.”

Spong’s argument is as follows:

a. We know for a fact that having children is evil. It causes pollution and overpopulation.

b. The Bible clearly states that we should have children, should “be fruitful and multiply.”

c. Therefore, the Bible is obviously wrong, is not to be trusted, and should be ignored whenever we feel like it.

Denouncing the Roman Catholic Church and “fundamentalists” who continue to welcome children into their lives with joy and gratitude, Spong darkly warns about the need to enforce a “limitation on human expansion.”

It is hardly surprising to discover, then, that Spong is an enthusiastic proponent of abortion and homosexuality—both of which encourage a “limitation on human expansion.”

Yet in the biblical account, heterosexual attraction and procreation are part of the divine plan, ordained from the beginning of creation. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife and they shall become one flesh.” “They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed” (Gn 2:24–25).

The Genesis account may be a “text of hate” for the Episcopal Bishop Spong, but no less an authority than Jesus cited it explicitly when asked about the legitimacy of divorce. “From the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no man should separate” (Mk 10:5–9).

Scripture Says

“Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.”

Psalm 127

Although Christianity did later develop an openness to celibacy and virginity as religious vocations—accepting Jesus’s invitation in Matthew 19 to renounce sex for the sake of God’s kingdom—the ancient biblical texts heap praise upon human fertility and view children as an unqualified blessing to be cherished rather than as a curse to be avoided.

Jesus himself appears to have had a singular appreciation for the wondrous spirit of children, which was rare in the ancient world. “Let the children come to me,” he told his disciples, who no doubt tried to shoo away some young followers, “for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it” (Mk 10:14–15). In this, as in many things, Jesus was merely reflecting and intensifying the insights of the Hebrew Bible.

“Truly children are a gift from the Lord,” proclaims Psalm 127. “The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed, but shall speak with their enemies in the gate.”

Indeed, procreation and human fertility are so central to the biblical narratives that they form the very basis of God’s covenantal (brit) promise to Israel. God promises Abram, “This is my covenant with you. You shall be the father of a multitude of nations.... I will make you exceedingly fertile” (Gn 17:4, 6).

Ancient Israel’s pro-life stance

The Old Testament has such a “pro-child” orientation that “barrenness”—the inability to conceive children—is widely viewed as a curse from God.

Abraham’s wife Sarah, the women of Abimelech’s household, Rebekah, Rachel, Manoah’s wife, Hannah, the Shunamite woman, and Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary, all were “barren” women whose wombs were “opened” by God. And once their wombs were “opened,” they gave thanks:

“Shout for joy, O barren one, you who have borne no child; Break forth into joyful shouting and cry aloud, you who have not travailed; For the sons of the desolate one will be more numerous than the sons of the married woman,” says the Lord

(Is 54:1).

Plus, it’s not as though the biblical authors were unaware of birth control.

The texts may not describe the scientific details, but the gist of the matter was well understood. Even as early as Genesis, there is a plain awareness of human biology.

Genesis 38 relates the strange story of Tamar and Onan. Tamar was married to Judah’s son Er, who died. Invoking what was known as the Levirate Law, Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife, and perform your duty as a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother,” Genesis relates. But “Onan knew that the offspring would not be [considered] his so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother”² (Gn 38:8–9).

This act of coitus interruptus or contraceptive sex so angered God that he took Onan’s life.

But Tamar was not to be deterred in her desire to have children. When Judah reneges on his promise to have his younger son father a child by Tamar, she tricked him into fathering one himself—by pretending to be a Temple prostitute.

This “pro-child,” pro-family orientation set Jews—and later, Christians—apart in ancient times.

“In our time, all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and a general decay of population,” lamented the Greek historian Polybius around 140 BC. “This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life.”³

Go to your room, or we’ll kill you

Many ancient pagan societies believed that parents possessed an unqualified right to kill their own children for any or no reason.

The Law of the Twelve Tables, a Roman legislation circa 450 BC, actually required a father to put to death any deformed child (Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto). (Modern moral philosophers, like Joseph Fletcher and Princeton University’s Peter Singer, advocate the same thing.)

The killing of female children was so widespread that, just as in Asia today, the ancient world had a large abortion- or infanticide-caused imbalance in the sexes. (That imbalance today is about 100 million lost female lives.) A letter written in 51 BC from a pagan husband in Egypt to his wife, revealed the casual way pagans viewed killing infants, particularly young girls:

Atheist “Wisdom” Versus the Good Book

“Woman’s destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.”

The Marquis de Sade

“My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my
Saviour.
Because he hath regarded the humility of
his handmaid; for behold from henceforth
all generations shall call me blessed.”

The Canticle of Mary, from the Gospel of Luke

A Book Atheists Want to Burn

What’s So Great About Christianity, by Dinesh D’Souza; Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2007. Glad you asked—Dinesh D’Souza has the answers, especially to refute such atheist advocates as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. Other books that might lie among the ashes of the atheist book-burners are John Stott’s Basic Christianity and C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Know that I am still in Alexandria.... I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered [before I come home], if it is a boy keep it, if a girl, discard it.⁴

Ritual child sacrifice was also widely practiced.

According to Plutarch, for example, the Carthaginians “offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mothers stood by without a tear or moan.”⁵

This is the cultural background for the practice of passing children “through fire,” which biblical prophets denounced in Ezekiel: “You slaughtered my children and offered them up to idols by causing them to pass through the fire” (16:21).

And in the book of Jeremiah: “They built the high places of Baal that are in the valley of Ben-Hinnom to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I had not commanded them nor had it entered my mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin” (32:35).

The Jews—almost alone among ancient peoples—abhorred killing children. The Roman historian Tacitus actually condemned the Jews for their inexplicable opposition to infanticide. “It is a crime among them to kill any newly born infant,” he said, adding that they have a strange “passion for propagating their race”⁶ (Histories 5.5).

But eventually Israel—in its desire to emulate the practices of “the nations”—began to kill its own children as well.

According to Psalm 106, “They mingled with the nations and learned their works.... They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons, and they shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and their daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, desecrating the land with bloodshed” (Ps 106:35, 37–38).

In fact, the sin of child sacrifice is understood by the Bible as being one of the major reasons why the northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians, in 750 BC, and the people taken into exile.

“They mutilated their sons and daughters by fire . . . till the Lord, in his great anger against Israel, put them away out of his sight” (2 Kgs 17:17–18).

Today’s “culture wars” rip at our roots

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

At the root of today’s so-called “culture wars” there lies a fundamental disagreement about just this issue: Is natural, procreative, heterosexual sex a good thing—as it is depicted in the ancient Hebrew Bible? Or something from which men and women need to be “protected”?

Are children a blessing to be cherished, as the Bible teaches? Or are they a burden to be avoided or dispensed with as pagan philosophers claim?

For more than two thousand years, the Jewish and Christian communities assumed as a matter of course that procreative, heterosexual sex—and the children produced by it—are good things.

The Jewish sages taught that sex is the woman’s right (onah), not the man’s. A man has a positive duty “to give his wife sex regularly and to ensure that sex is pleasurable for her.” The Talmud taught that once a man had a son and a daughter, he had fulfilled the commandment (mitzvah) of procreation—but in practice, Jewish law (halakha) limited when birth control was permitted.

As for Christianity, virtually every Christian ecclesial community viewed the deliberate avoidance of children as a sin. Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer who married a former Catholic nun, believed that “truly in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than procreation.” Luther insisted that each conception of a new child was an act of “wonderment . . . wholly beyond our understanding,” a “faint reminder of life before the Fall.”⁷

Luther even denounced birth control and abortion long before they became widely practiced:

How great, therefore, the wickedness of [fallen] human nature is! How many girls there are who prevent conception and kill and expel tender fetuses, although procreation is the work of God! Indeed, some spouses who marry and live together... have various ends in mind, but rarely children.⁸

Planned Parenthood’s dark beginnings

But beginning in the early twentieth century, anti-family crusaders—such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood—began to target Christian churches and liberal Jewish organizations in an effort to “convert” them to the anti-child point of view.

While sometimes Sanger appealed to women’s health issues, her most powerful arguments were largely social in nature. In the Birth Control Review, Sanger wrote frankly about the eugenic agenda behind the “planned parenthood” movement:

Birth Control is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator . . . the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit” is admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization. . . . The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective.⁹

For Sanger, among the most “unfit” of all were minority populations, particularly African Americans, whom she believed exhibited an unfortunate tendency to “breed” excessively.

From the very beginning, Planned Parenthood crusaders deliberately “infiltrated” Christian churches in order to inculcate their ideas. They found useful idiots—such as Planned Parenthood supporter Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who ran for Congress and publicly supported the entire birth control agenda, including even partial birth abortion—who could spread the anti-child gospel among the churches and synagogues in ways that they, avowed atheists, could not.

At first, the Christian and Jewish communities were skeptical of the notion that children were something that should be avoided or, at the very least, “planned.”

But slowly, step by step, one by one, over about twenty or thirty years, the various Christian denominations and liberal Jewish organizations caved in. With the advent of oral contraceptives in the early 1960s, the sexual nirvana prophesied by Margaret Sanger—which she defined as “unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children”—had arrived.¹⁰

Within a few short years, Ellen Peck would publish The Baby Trap in 1971 and proclaim that having a baby is “the biggest mistake of your life” and Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, would convince government and media elites that the greatest problem the world faced was too many children.

The Bible in American History, Part V

“It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”

Horace Greeley

Who Said It?

“I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.”

Thomas Jefferson

Even though virtually every single one of Ehrlich’s dire predictions would be proven dead wrong—and the developed countries of Europe now face a disastrous “birth dearth,” not a population bomb—his conclusions about “over-population” are still unquestioned dogma among the older, more insensate members of the media, government, the law courts, academia, and the clergy.