The Dilemma of Waiting Well - Introduction to Margret Sanger
What does it mean to wait well? I am not terribly patient and find myself constantly asking what I can do to move things along. I wrestle with this because I also see what, in my eyes, seems like the “perpetual waiter,” the Christian who finds that they are always waiting on God to give them clarity. I was recently talking to a friend of mine (Tyler) who put this idea into words that I had not previously considered. So much of the revelation in this post comes from the conversation I had with him. I have found that today, many of us as Christians find ourselves in these seasons of “waiting,” and in these seasons, we will often find ourselves asking for “clarity,” asking that God would clearly define for us if this is the path we are being called to take. In this conversation with Tyler, he made a point I had not really previously put into words. “If we are always waiting for clarity, then why do we need faith?” I think this is something that we, as Christians, know. The human condition is to crave stability and to crave certainty, we want to know without a doubt that this thing we want to do is the “right” thing to do. And yet, when we know something without a shred of doubt, there is no longer any need for faith, for faith is our ability to choose or to do something despite not knowing without a doubt the final outcome. An example of this is anytime you and I get into our vehicles, we have faith in our skills as a driver, we have faith in the ability of other drivers, and we have faith in the laws established in the use of the vehicle we are getting into that we are going to be able to get to our destination.
We constantly make choices based on some form of reasonability and a measure of faith. Even if many might not translate this into faith, it is exactly that. Our lives are conducted every day on some measure of faith. And yet, for some reason, we as Christians often seem to be a group that becomes paralyzed into indecision. Because we want from God what we do not expect from the rest of the world, we want God to guarantee us that this thing we want to do will not end in failure or pain. We want God to assure us that if we do X thing, it will have the outcome we desire. This is an expectation we seem to hold exclusively with God. Here is where I feel we find many of us get stuck (Myself included) we get stuck waiting for God to give us 100% certainty. But as Tyler said during this conversation, when we do that, we may often miss the mission when we await clarity rather than acting in faith.
I have been thinking through this conversation since then. As someone who tends to lean into extremes, I find I have to spend time deliberately thinking through these things. I can lean into the extreme of “I’ll wait till God gives me 100% clarity,” or I can lean into “I can’t wait at all, and if I do wait, I will miss this opportunity,” and so I try to figure it out by my own means. Maybe I am alone in these extremes, but I suspect not. I suspect we all tend to lean into these extremes; each of us has a proclivity to one or the other, depending on the situation. So for me, as I continue to seek wisdom in my decisions, I find myself trying to be mindful of my own weakness in this area and realizing once again that sometimes there is nothing to do but to take the leap of faith and trust God will take care of you along the way and course correct you as needed.
Mother of Madness, Mother of Death
Margret Sanger 1879 - 1966
Margret Sanger was born in New York and died in Tucson, AZ, at 86 years old. She was a “woman of her time,” a radical racist, a feminist, and a eugenicist who was lauded as a brave revolutionary by the Nazi party. She was the sixth of eleven children and was raised in a devote Catholic home. Her faith was eventually replaced by a faith in science, and she would instead subscribe to Secular Humanism.
Secular humanism is a philosophy or life stance that emphasizes human values and the importance of reason, ethics, and justice while explicitly rejecting religious beliefs, the supernatural, and superstition. It is rooted in the idea that human beings are capable of morality and self-fulfillment without reliance on deities or religious doctrines.
This worship of science would drive her to become obsessed with the belief that a chief sin was the inability of women to have autonomy over their reproduction. This led her to seek funding from groups like the “Rockafeller Foundation,” which would support her work in the research and development of what became “the pill.” A technology that would revolutionize the social fabric of Western culture. Some have even called this technology the “Social Atom Bomb” of the twenty-first century. This technology would become a pillar of the “women's rights” campaigns. Through time, this technology would allow modern young women to have casual sex just as the worst versions of men had done in ages past. This, in Margret’s eyes, was the ideal. She believed that a truly liberated woman was a woman who had the ability to choose to live with no moral boundaries in regard to her sex life.
In addition to this, Margret Sanger was also an avowed racist who sought the extermination of the African American people through the “Negro Project.” This project would allow her to target and eliminate African Americans by placing her clinics in African American communities. Something that can still be seen today if you look up their clinic locations. Margret Sanger began the American Birth Control League, which would later become what we know today as Planned Parenthood. Margret Sangers’ ideology is still very much alive today, and we are living through the fallout of her work. But it is also her work that prepared the American mind for the work that Alfred Kinsey would release in 1948 in his book “Sexuality in the Human Male.” The book would spark the sexual revolution and begin the next phase of eroding the Chrisitan Sexual Ethic of the American mind.
When I first started studying and thinking through the chaos that is the modern dating landscape and the sexual perversion within which we live. I began this work because I heard a very different story growing up from my parents of what their dating world looked like. How did we get to a place where men and women see one another as enemies rather than mutual allies facing the calamities of the world together? How did we get to a cultural moment that would make its chief identity sexuality? How did we get to a place where women were taught to see men as oppressors rather than protectors? (I’ll write more on this character next week) How did we get to a place where men and women look at one another with distrust, both seeing the other as the villain of the story?
These are some of the questions I am seeking to understand and answer. I truly believe if we can unveil the beast at work and bring it into the light, then we can restore a semblance of order. Now, there may be another group who thinks I am simply exaggerating the situation. For those, I would challenge you to give me an answer for the fundamental cultural shift we have seen since the 1960’s.
Some Data to consider
Average Age of First Marriage
Todays Male: 30.1 - 1950s Male: 22.8
Todays Female: 28.1 - 1950s Female: 20.3
Average Length of First Marriage
Today 8.2 Years - 1950s 20+ years
Average Divorce Rate
Today, 14.56 divorces per 1000 marriages - 1950s, 2.5 divorces per 1000 marriages
That is a 482.4% increase in divorce rates in 74 years.
Average Children Per Family
Today 1.94 - 1950s 3.7
Now, this number can seem very minor, but let's look at this a little deeper to consider the number difference at scale.
Average Birthrate
Today
U.S. population: approximately 332 million
Birth rate: 56.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44
1950s
U.S. population: approximately 151 million
Birth rate: 122.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44
Decrease in births of 0.54%
2024 births per year: 3.73 million
1950s births per year: 3.71 million
But we still have to consider the difference in populations as well to truly understand the difference. The simplest way to do that is to take the birthrate of the 1950’s and apply it to our current population. Taking these numbers into consideration, we would see an average of 8.16 million births per year! That equals a total of 54.4% decrease in childbirth.
Average Abortion Rates
Today, Abortion numbers 1,037,000
1967 Abortion numbers 25,918
This is based on the Johnston Archives. This means we have seen an increase in abortions by 3900.4% increase since 1967. So much for safe, legal, and rare. We have made the most dangerous place on earth for a child in their mother’s womb!
Single-Mother Households
Today, 10.9 Million single-mother homes
1950s, 1.5 Million single-mother homes
This number seems off, as there is no reported difference between single-mother homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Regardless, the difference is still dramatic. This difference constitutes an increase of 481.4% in single-mother homes, which means an increase of 481.4% of children being raised without a father figure in the home.
In-Prisoned Population
Today: 1.9 Million
1950’s: 264,620
This is a total increase of 618% in our prison population.
Imprisonment Rate
2023 = 572 per 100,000 people
1950 = 175 per 100,000 people
This is a 226.9% increase in our imprisonment rate. I can’t guarantee a direct correlation between single-mother homes (Fatherless Homes) and the increased incarceration rate, but there are many studies that have spent a significant amount of time on this subject, and the evidence leads us to believe there is a very strong correlation between these two things.
There are many questions that could yet be asked on what other downstream effects we are living through due to the sexual revolution and the people that gave birth to it. There are, in my mind, many other characters upon whom we must lay some measure of blame: Margret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey are but two thus far. In the end, here is the beautiful truth despite these dire statistics. We are not powerless against these forces; we each have an opportunity to, at an individual level, take responsibility by choosing to live by a different standard. The Christian moral ethic is what the West was built upon; no matter what someone’s belief is, if they adhere to the Biblical standard, they will find that there is a measure of order that can be found in the midst of chaos. When you realize this reality, you can’t help but ask the question “why,” and if you allow that “why” to lead you to pursue the truth in full, you will find it invariably leads you back to God, it leads you back to Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
I hope this post has been insightful and encourages you each to consider how you, too, can take a stand against the cultural tide.
