You can review our last article in the series: The Family: The Past, The Present, The Future by Robert L. Millet

As a child of the 70s and 80s, I vividly remember the fears and controversies roiling the United States and Western Europe. Two dangers dominated the airwaves, one more dramatic than the other, but both equally dire in their fatal finality. The first was the total destruction of advanced civilization via nuclear war. Those lucky enough to survive the initial conflagration were doomed to a slow death and deprivation of “nuclear winter” and a return to the stone age. The second was less dramatic, but considered even more inevitable: unchecked population growth was leading to natural resource constraints that could only be delayed but not solved by human ingenuity, most vividly argued by Paul Ehrlich in his explosive book The Population Bomb, first published in 1968. Evidence of this impending scarcity blanketed the airwaves with vivid images of starving children in Africa and long gas lines at home. If these two scenarios weren’t cheery enough for a “sober child” such as myself, many believed that overpopulation would create competition over access to those shrinking resources, inevitably leading to nuclear war, leading to both fears coming to pass. As we studied in my High School English class, the poet Robert Frost wondered whether the world would end in fire or ice. Many confident authorities I watched and read assured my young impressionable mind that we were sure to experience both ends to the world.  

Secular versus Religious Solutions to Civilizational Threats

While these concerns consumed cultural attention, closer to home, several unfortunate consequences of the sexual revolution were affecting friends and family all around me. While the radio and TV celebrated premarital and extramarital sex, even then depicting those opposed to these practices as narrow-minded and hateful, closer to home, I had doubts that sexual license was as consequence-free as it was depicted at the movies, on TV, and on the radio. Divorce was seen not just as a last resort to escape an unavoidably abusive and dangerous marriage but increasingly as a means to obtain greater personal satisfaction and fulfillment.

We might refer to these two developments as a tale of two ecologies. One was concerned with the health and sustainability of the planet. The other was concerned with the health and sustainability of the family as a means to nurture, inculcate, and transmit to future generations healthy moral and civilization-preserving values. While secular attitudes about each of these developments were very different, and most secular commenters did not connect the two, some perceptive religious commenters did connect them. And the solutions they offered were quite different from the secular solutions proposed, such as a “nuclear freeze” or “population control.” In a prescient speech given at BYU Provo on February 23, 1970, Neal A Maxwell said:

We hear a lot today about ecology in the world of biological and physical things. We’re learning that its laws are inexorable; that when we violate them, we pay a penalty, and we pay a price. I would submit to you, brothers and sisters, that there is an ecology and a world of law that pertain to spiritual things, which, when we violate them, has a series of consequences just as inexorable and just as automatic as the ecology that’s born of the world of law and nature; that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a collection of principles weaved together in the fabric of immutable law. [There is no official transcript for this talk, so any errors in transcription or punctuation are mine.]

 Just a year later, he published his book Deposition of a Disciple, where he wrote:

There are no victimless crimes, no private wrongs. For every wrong act, there is at least one victim, the doer, and secondary impacts that we just don’t have the sophistication to measure. We can’t have it both ways: extolling and exhorting over the interrelatedness of things in nature (with which we must truly be more concerned as stewards of this planet) while, at the same time, denying the ecology in human nature. 

The connection of ecology with the family is not incidental. A perceptive secular cultural commentator, Neil Postman, observed that the first use of the word ecology was in Greek by Aristotle, coming from the Greek word ecos for “household.”  Postman encouraged people to be just as discerning and cautious about the kinds of media they let into their homes as the EPA should be about discharges of toxic waste into fragile ecosystems. He died before handheld devices and social media gained currency, but his cautions surely are even more warranted with devices that follow us around everywhere.

In 1993 Elder Maxwell riffed on environmental impact studies in the interest of environmental protection by observing:

Even with its flaws, the family is basic, and since no other institution can compensate fully for failure in the family, why, then, instead of enhancing the family, the desperate search for substitutes? Why not require family impact studies before proceeding with this program or that remedy, since of all environmental concerns, the family should be first? Hundreds of governmental departments and programs protect various interests, but which one protects the family?

Elder Maxwell’s contemporary, Elder Packer, described himself as an “environmentalist” during a 1992 General Conference talk. He said, “My message is not on the physical but on the moral and spiritual environment in which we must raise our families. As we test the moral environment, we find the pollution index is spiraling upward.”

Time Vindicates the Prophets

While I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was an open and controversial question whether divorce was healthy or unhealthy for children. In the popular discourse, many people argued that children would do better if they were not subjected to marital conflict, even if it meant they were raised by a single parent or with a non-biological parent.

Social scientists began studying the question, but solid answers always arrive much more slowly than cultural change.  Researchers examined things like the effect of divorce on children or the effects of different family structures like blended families, single parents, out-of-wedlock births, and so forth. Over the ensuing decades, we now have tens of thousands of studies on family structure, and they present a clear and consistent picture: (1) divorce is almost universally devastating to children of any age, even into adulthood, and (2) children do best when raised by their biological parents who themselves are married to each other.

The benefits to being married, both to men and women, especially when marriage happens without previously cohabitating, are also pretty clear. This has been measured with all kinds of endpoints, from lower divorce rates and higher self-reported life satisfaction. Biological children of married parents have better academic performance, economic security, health, and lifespan, and less incidence of crime, poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, early death, suicide, and mental illness.

While the large body of these studies was amassed before newer non-traditional family structures like same-sex couples and polycules (polyamorous individuals in relationships to each other), there is little reason to think children raised in these could beat or even equal the outcomes of children raised by their biological parents. While the American Psychological Association claimed that there was “no difference” in outcomes for children raised in same-sex couples, they deliberately overlooked contradictory studies, as Loren Marks pointed out. Mark Regnerus and Paul Sullins’ more well-sampled studies (while far from definitive) suggest uniformly negative outcomes compared to children raised by their married biological parents. Similar outcomes would likely apply to other non-biologically-based father-mother family structures like egg/sperm donation or polyamorous relationships where non-kin caregivers are in the home, though these have not been extensively studied.

Prophets of God versus False Prophets of Scarcity

So while time has vindicated the prophets who in all dispensations have extolled this family structure and now are distilled for us in the Family Proclamation, how have the world’s predictions and prescriptions fared? The record there is mixed. In the positive column is the greater care for our stewardship of the earth, which itself is aligned with ancient and modern revelation, as we see in Genesis 1:28 and 2:15, Moses 2:28 and D&C 59:18-19, and D&C 104:13-14.

Increased economic growth in a post-industrial society, along with greater awareness through books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and events like Earth Day, mean that our air, water, and land are cleaner than they have been in two hundred years. The discovery of fossil fuels as a denser form of energy to wood, peat, and dung saved untold forests from being cut down and whales from being slaughtered (whale oil was a preferred lighting source before kerosene and natural gas). Not only were wood, peat, and dung more polluting than fossil fuels, but other forms of energy, such as nuclear and hydropower, were even less polluting. Once the problem of energy storage is solved, solar energy and some geothermal projects show promise as well. Greater economic prosperity and scientific innovation combined with greater awareness of humanity’s effect on the planet have reinvigorated the ancient command for humans to be wise stewards of the earth, which was created for humans to inhabit and possess.

Nuclear war remains a grave threat, with nuclear weapons proliferating to rogue states like North Korea and Pakistan, and very possibly soon (if not already) Iran. The Ukraine war presents a profound dilemma because, at the same time, civilian casualties are mounting on an ever greater scale in Europe since World War II. It is also a place where weapons and troops from five nuclear-armed countries are battling each other: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and North Korea. While perhaps not as world-annihilating as the specter of countries aiming thousands of warheads on a hair trigger at each other from the 60s through the 80s, the likelihood of some kind of nuclear exchange seems greater than ever.

Less noted but, perhaps, even worse than the current conflict in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war is the mass death and sterilization (often involuntarily) due to what is euphemistically called “population control.” When it comes to Paul Ehrlich and his “Population Bomb,” never has an academic been more wrong with a more devastating effect, with the possible exception of Karl Marx. Ehrlich’s dire yet spectacularly wrong predictions led to untold millions of women being involuntarily sterilized in China, India, Africa, and elsewhere. Despite the ready availability of birth control, abortion and out-of-wedlock births are far more widespread than when birth control was not yet available. The World Health Organization estimates that 73 million abortions are conducted annually worldwide—almost half of which are considered unsafe—and it is likely not all of those are voluntary.  The annual deaths due to abortion exceed the sum total of any armed conflict anywhere in the world at any time in recorded history. Only the great Communist and Fascist villains of the 20th century can rival this magnitude of mass slaughter, and those projects of genocide and mass murder were conducted over several years.

Ehrlich and his sympathizers, like the Club of Rome, succeeded all too well. Most countries are now facing precipitous declines in fertility, and with the possible exception of Hungary, no country has succeeded in reversing these declines. This fertility collapse portends a host of dire (though gradual) consequences, most obviously our ability to provide for the elderly who can no longer work or care for themselves.

 Julian Simon had confidence in human ingenuity’s ability to accommodate greater populations with decreasing negative impact on the environment, echoing the scripture in D&C 104:17, which reads, “For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare.” Simon famously made a bet with Ehrlich in the early 80s with uncommonly generous terms: he allowed Ehrlich to pick any number of raw materials a year or more in the future that he believed would increase in price, and if they actually did, Simon would pay Ehrlich the difference in price. Ehrlich and those he consulted with chose five metals whose prices were then tracked from 1980 to 1990. Even though the world population increased by over 900 million people during this time, the greatest population increase in human history, all five metals Ehrlich selected had declined in price during that decade.

This is not to say that the Lord endorses market economics, including all its manifest downsides. Only that time vindicates the prophets of all ages who promised prosperity to the faithful—and not merely or even primarily in the material sense. The Lord’s prophets have remained steadfast in their counsel: the greatest joys in life are found in strengthening and growing families. “The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve” to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force and has not been revoked by the false prophets of scarcity and doom. As Psalm 127 proclaims, “Children are an heritage of the Lord … happy is the man whose quiver is full of them.”

Additional Resources

Cato Institute, “Julian Simon Was Right: A Half-Century of Population Growth, Increasing Prosperity, and Falling Commodity Prices.”

Ana Samuel, “The Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the ‘No Differences’ Claim.”

Paul Sullins, “The Case for Mom and Dad.”

Brad Wilcox, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (forthcoming).

Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Them Before Us: An organization devoted to prioritizing children’s needs above adult desires. They have collected stories of children from surrogates, same-sex couples, etc., yearning for connection to their biological parents.

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