JD Vance’s statement about childless cat ladies is not an aberration from Republican thinking. In fact, it exemplifies the heart of right-wing evangelical politics. Elon Musk recently bemoaned the shrinking population as the greatest threat to American society. He really meant industry. Back in the good old days, procreation was essential for social survival. More laborers in the field meant more food in the larder and barn and more soldiers to defend it. As time went on, more laborers meant more cheap labor in the factories. Today, with the advent of robots and AI, the focus may be on more consumers rather than laborers, but the idea is the same. More people means more profits, and it is the women’s job to make more people. The formula is pretty simple. It is no accident that the ultra-conservative mindset is also against abortion and contraception. Again, more people means bigger profits for the rich and powerful.

This is nothing new. It was why Jesus was crucified. In his day, the good old boys club ran the show in true patriarchal fashion. The woman’s role was bearing children and running the household, while the common man sweats in the fields to grow enough to feed his family and pay off debt, and the wealthy men gathered more wealth. Then along came Jesus. Not an armed rebel but a presenter of alternatives. He gathered a small community family in which all were equal, and all had a story to tell about a new way of living. His followers were an equal number of women and men. The rich and powerful saw the threat to their lucrative system and so had him crucified. The problem for them, of course, was that these people believed that their leader had not been exterminated at all but rather continued to inspire them to expand upon their new life. 

Unfortunately, the vision of a caring and sharing community did not last long, and by the end of the first century, the greedy wealthy had mostly taken over the young church, installing priests and bishops and reworking its thinking about Jesus in a way that supported the power structure, the very same power elite that had crucified him in the first place. [See my book How the Rich Stole Jesus]. There are a number of locations in the New Testament that exhibit the takeover, but the classic and most horrifying is the letter called First Timothy, written at the end of the first century. The message is quite simple: slaves obey masters, women obey men, church members obey the priests, and everyone obeys the government. But it gets worse. 1 Timothy baldly proclaims, “women will be saved through childbearing”. It’s hard to believe, but there it is. When JD Vance denounces childless cat ladies, he represents the heart of fundamentalism, all those white Christian nationalists who define a man by the size of his gun collection and a woman by the number of her offspring. Jesus is/would be horrified.

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Carl Krieg, Ph.D. received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith,   The Void and the Vision,  The New Matrix: How the World We Live In Impacts Our Thinking About Self and God and How The Rich Stole Jesus. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT.