Russell Moore Blasts NPR for Report Saying Baby-Making Is Immoral Because It Harms the Environment
Russell Moore is blasting the notion that children are a burden in response to a recent National Public Radio feature arguing that the way to protect kids from environmental disaster is to not have them in the first place.
Writing on his website Tuesday, Moore noted that he once muttered "we use organic birth control" in response to a scowling woman at Whole Foods who, by the look on her face, disapproved of his five kids.
The belief that children are a tax on the earth's resources and, therefore, something to be avoided is not new, particularly as dire predictions of impending catastrophes happen with notable frequency on the political landscape.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
On August 18, NPR warned that by 2050, "the average global temperature is projected to rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the point scientists and world leaders agree would trigger cataclysmic consequences" and proposed "drastic cuts in carbon emissions" to stave off the crisis.
And who is most culpable in causing these dreadful emissions?
"The world is expected to add several billion people in the next few decades, each one producing more emissions," the report adds. What is more, researchers from Oregon State University calculated carbon dioxide savings through eco-friendly measures such as driving a hybrid and recycling. But such practical efforts pale in comparison to the benefit to the planet when a couple opts to have fewer children, the study asserts.
This is frustrating for Christians, Moore argues, because those who care about environmental stewardship cannot abide the "many parts of the [environmental] movement insisting on population control."
In a Wednesday phone interview with CP, Steven Mosher, president of the Virginia-based Population Research Institute, said population control advocates fail to understand the benefits of population growth.
"The population bombers haven't come up with the new idea in two centuries," he said.
Mosher, a Catholic and former anthropology professor at UC-Berkeley, noted that the fundamental flaw in the thinking of population control advocates is the view that humans are only consumers and not producers.
"It turns out that the more minds and the more hands you have the more you can produce the better and the better you can produce it," Mosher said.
"Population growth has been the driver of human progress throughout history," he continued, adding "the people who take the shortsighted view that one more baby is going break the back of planet earth are totally unfamiliar with the whole scope of human history."
G. Shane Morris at The Federalist agrees.
"If there's a looming crisis for the West, if not for the world," he wrote Saturday, "it's a population winter that will leave economies in ruin, young people under crushing generational debt, and entire cultures destabilized and dangerous."
Such scenarios are more likely, Morris adds, particularly in light of a new Centers for Disease Control report revealing historically low American fertility rates.
In a biblical worldview, human beings are not parasites on the earth but image-bearers of God who are charged with stewardship and that all of creation reveals the glory of God, Moore points out.
"The call to 'dominion' is not, biblically, a call to exploit the creation," he wrote, "but, just the contrary, to cultivate it safely for the future. This is a responsibility uniquely given to human beings."
If anything should impel Christians to be good stewards of the earth and environment it is children, he added.
"The rearing of children is, at the most primal level, the same impulse that should drive humanity to check a reckless, selfish form of 'dominion.' Our connection to future generations, cultivated in a love for children, is one that is to spark an other-directed, future-directed domino, one that preserves and protects eco-systems for generations to come. Procreation is pro-creation," Moore concluded.
