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Christians Say the Darnedest Things: Women Duty Bound to Give Their Mothers Grandchildren

lori and ken alexander

We have too many friends our age (in their 60s) who have children that are either not married or are not having children. These friends WANT grandchildren desperately, but their children aren’t interested. Why is this?

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God wants us to pass down biblical wisdom to our children and grandchildren. They aren’t going to get it from our culture. They will be told to be independent, travel, and make money instead of marry, bear children, and guide the home (1 Timothy 5:14). It seems that most young women are on birth control these days which is highly dangerous. It is even causing infertility. Women are most fertile in their late teens and twenties, then fertility goes dramatically down.

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Women, you must teach your daughters the beauty of God’s ways. The greatest way you do this is by showing them. Show them that you love your husband, their father. Be an example to them of a joyful, godly mother. Sure, you are going to go through trials and sufferings. We all do. And sure, there will be many difficult days of mothering, but difficult isn’t bad. God’s path for us isn’t the easy, broad path. It’s the narrow path that leads to life!

Train your daughters to be homemakers from a young age. Teach them how to keep a home clean and tidy, to cook, bake, garden, can, iron, sew, and all that it takes to run a home. Let your husband work with your sons on becoming masculine men who will want to grow up to have families of their own. As your daughters grow older, go through my study guide with them so they can see clearly God’s will for them from His Word. Read the Bible to them from a young age. Have them memorize many verses. Pray with them daily. Take them church faithfully. Homeschool them. You be the one to raise and teach your own children so when they grow up, they will want a family of their own.

— Lori Alexander, The Transformed Wife, Many Never Will Become Grandparents, June 16, 2021

Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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14 Comments

  1. Avatar
    Karuna Gal

    This lady knows very well that crushing student debt, poorly paid jobs without benefits, expensive and hard to find childcare, obscenely expensive housing and the existential threat of global warming are keeping young people from marrying and having children. Young people are not fools. And a lot of them saw the struggles of their own parents to survive in the post-Reagan mess our country has become and want to avoid that as best they can. Children cost money that young people can’t spare. If this lady is so “pro-family” she should support subsidized day care and affordable housing, decent maternity/paternity leave, universal healthcare, etc. And not demonize young people for using birth control to keep themselves solvent and sane.

    • Avatar
      Charles S. Oaxpatu

      The woman who wrote that stuff does not believe women should work for money outside of the home. She is a subscriber to the great Christian Fundamentalist and Conservative Evangelical master plan. Here are the steps in that formal master plan:

      (1) End all abortion rights and make all forms of contraception illegal—-yes—-even condoms.

      (2) Husbands fuck their wives as many times as possible throughout every year.

      (3) All American women will get pregnant and stay that way throughout most of every fertility year.

      (4) Gigantic numbers of pregnancies force women to leave their jobs and stay at home to mother their new kids and submissively kiss the ground their husbands walk on.

      (5) Multiple pregnancies will prevent these wives from ever going back to work again (women are enslaved in their homes for life).

      (6) Christian Fundamentalist and Conservative Evangelical wives will have far, far, far, far more children than the heathen wives.

      (7) Massive expansion of the Christian Fundamentalist and Conservative Evangelical population will occur in the United States.

      (8) All Americans will be coerced into becoming Christian Fundamentalists/Conservative Evangelicals—-and Republican voters—–for life.

      (9) Christian Fundamentalists and Conservative Evangelicals will purge the Earth of all major sins and most minor sins (except for their own—-of course). This will require killing billions of uncooperative sinners. You remember the famous saying from the movie “Night of the Living Dead.” To kill the ghoul, you kill the head. You kill the head—-you kill the ghoul.” Get the picture? “To kill the sins, you kill the sinners. You kill the sinners—you kill off all their sins.”

      (10) Jesus looks down from Heaven, sees an Earth so purified he will be unable to soil his pure white robes, undergoes a major male orgasm at the sight, descends to the Earth with a shout, and makes his post-millennial “second cumming.”

      From things she has said to me in the past and other things she has written, Lori Alexander believes in Items 1 through 7 (above). Furthermore, I have long suspected Lori Alexander is a card-carrying Christian Reconstructionist, Christian Dominionist, or Christian Theomonists. Such people believe in Items 8 through 10 (above)—-except for the cumming part—-which was just a small joke on my part—- because all the other stuff is just as crazy.

      I know it sounds crazy, but that is the plan. What about it American women? How many of you knew about all of that? How many of you women out there have recognized that you are that dangerous and that powerful in this world? A whole, 10-point religious master plan is centered around one thing—–and one thing only—–Christian Fundamentalist and Conservative Evangelical clerics taking total control of the female reproductive system in order to subdue the Earth for Jesus.

      I have heard some crazy bullshit in my time—–but all of that just about takes the cake.

    • Avatar
      thatotherjean

      Hear, hear! You want people to reproduce, Lori? Subsidize child care, cancel student debt, demand affordable housing, for a start. Work at reducing the effects of global warming, so there may be decent places to live and raise those children. But all you and your followers do is advocate for criminalization of abortion, restricted birth control, and reduced opportunities for women outside the home. It’s not working, Lori, and it shouldn’t. You can’t lead, you’re not willing to follow, so get out of the way.

  2. Avatar
    dale m.

    Hmmmmm …. Does she mention the Peoples Republic of China ?!? Nay. Nay. They’re trying to tell their country folk to have as many as 3 children now (they’ve removed the limits because their population is going to fall by 200 million in less than a decade). The new generation do not want children yet, this young generation are the only one’s that are going to support the older generations. Russia’s in the same position but currently now in freefall. I also don’t see these two pushing to adopt Africans or Asians. So. Having babies for China and Russia would be noble indeed. But. Nay. Nay.

    • Avatar
      Matilda

      I’m an amateur China-watcher since I went there in 2006 to help my friend bring home her adopted baby daughter. The one-child policy ended in 2015 as it became clear there were not enough working-age folks to care for their elderly relatives. Many chinese live in small city apartments, their working hours are long and childcare expensive. Also it’s customary to pay for extra tuition out of school hours. Many therefore say they can only afford one child. In one province, where abortion is now banned, a brave feminist organisation is opposing the government saying forced abortion was the norm till 2015 – local cadres could just suddenly announce forced abortion on any woman up to her due date….and now women are expected to produce children ‘for the state.’ There’s a kind of plus side, countless millions of girl babies were exposed over centuries as the culture and the need for strong peasant farmers required sons. Now girls can go and work in one of the thousands of city factories and send the same amount of money home to their elderly parents as sons can…so suddenly girls have value that they never had before.

  3. Avatar
    Jennifer Kunkle-Clark

    This sort of bullshit makes me think of the ridiculously large Duggar family…and then throw up in my mouth a little bit.

  4. Avatar
    Yulya Sevelova

    Having household skills is always good to know. I can do most of those things in Lori’s list. No kitchen to take care of though, lol. People who don’t like kids, just shouldn’t have them. Lori IS on another planet,of course.😆

  5. Avatar
    Astreja

    My adult daughter has no intention of becoming a mother. I am 100% fine with that, and I would be utterly horrified if she ever had a child because she thought it was her “duty”… to anyone.

    Butt out and fuck off, Alexander.

    • Avatar
      thatotherjean

      One of my daughters married and had a child; the other one bought a business remains unmarried. Considering their personalities, they both did the right thing, and they’re both successful at what they chose. What’s for a parent not to appreciate?

  6. Avatar
    William

    Haha the never ending evangelical crusade of guilt. And what is guilt here if it’s done nothing wrong? It’s the guilt of selfishness, borne of manipulation. The mother wants grandchildren, do we care what the children want? No, give us babies, and we’ll use any trick we can to guilt you into it.

    And people complain when Christian children complain of religion being used as a manipulative tool?

    The truth is in times past people needed not only children to survive but also husbands and wifes. Life was hard then compared to now. Of course it don’t matter that Paul said it’s better for a Christian to not marry (and therefore not have children), let’s ignore that part and use other parts of the bible as an excuse of piety rather than selfishness.

  7. Avatar
    Obstaclechick

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/declining-birthrate-motherhood.html?smid=fb-share

    Just one of many articles about declining birth rates. I figure the fundies and white nationalists are probably freaking out.

    Personally, I think it’s great that women now have more agency over their lives in order to be able to take care emotionally, financially, psychologically, educationally, etc, children that they CHOOSE to have instead of a default system of trying to get by because they had no choices.

    Lori, stop being a selfish cow trying to force your children to have kids because YOU want to be a grandma.

  8. Avatar
    Autumn

    I have only dim hopes of grandchildren, am I wistful? Sure! Am I going to try to guilt my daughters into having kids for my sake? Nope!

  9. Avatar
    Karen the rock whisperer

    My mother wanted lots of kids. She was infertile. I was an only child, adopted at birth. My parents loved me very much, though my mother in particular wasn’t all that good at the job. I realize now, that she didn’t have good parenting modeled to her, and she suffered badly from anxiety.

    Denied a houseful of children, my mother decided she’d take a houseful of grandchildren. She told me often, while I was growing up, that I would marry and have four children. She even decided my husband would be named John. When Husband and I got engaged, I told him about that, and said that if his name had been John, I would have asked him to change it. 🙂

    We both had reasons for not wanting children. My reason was chronic mental health issues. I didn’t feel capable of parenting well, and I refused to do to my children what my mother had done to me. But my mother refused to accept that I suffered from depression, or that I needed my psychiatrist and therapist. When your debater doesn’t accept the premise of your argument, the rest isn’t going to work. We went around and around, for years, every time we met. I had not yet reached the point of being able to tell her what I needed to tell her, which was that my choice to have children was my business, she didn’t get a vote, and the topic was off the table. Finally, she started in on my for the last time, and I gave her the look I used to frighten the junior engineers who worked for me. She shut up about it.

    A choice is a choice; as an adult, you make it, and accept the consequences. I admit, sometimes I wish I’d had children. But it’s a selfish wish, because I think parenting well would have been a challenge for me and probably beyond my husband.

    Oh, and Mrs. Transformed Wife, I learned how to cook, clean, can, keep a house up, do minor repairs, mow a lawn, grow my own food, serve guests, all that stuff. Didn’t make me want to have kids.

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