In a devotional for young adults a couple of months ago, Dallin H. and Kristen M. Oaks urged them to, as a Salt Lake Tribune headline put it, “stop delaying marriage and start having kids.” They lamented that marriage is happening later, and that people are seeing having children as less crucial. They did bring up the problems of expensive housing and student debt that might be obstacles to early marriage and childbearing, but in response didn’t have much helpful other than to tell their listeners to have more faith: “Go forward with faith, and do the best you can in housing market circumstances less favorable than I and your grandparents encountered in our early years. And, especially, work to minimize student debt. In God’s plan we can have it all, but not in the sequence the world seems to dictate.”
I was thinking about this spiritual good of marriage and childbearing in comparison with a secular good, recycling. (I don’t know that I completely agree that marriage and childbearing are always a good thing, but just taking it as a given for now.) We’d all (hopefully) like to do what we can to save the planet’s climate and ecosystem so future generations can continue to enjoy the Earth. Recycling allows us to do a little part by simultaneously reducing the amount of new resource extraction that needs to be done and reducing the amount of space devoted to trash. Even if we want to recycle, though, unless we’re very wealthy, none of us can do it alone. We need social systems in place involving collection and processing of recyclables to make it possible. Laws and policies that facilitate recycling are making this secular good easier (or even possible) to do.
The Church doesn’t have the power of a government to make laws, but it does have power. It has the ears of its members, not to mention tremendous wealth. In the same way that government laws and policies about recycling make it easier to do, the Church could use the power that it has to make a spiritual good the GAs want to see happen easier to achieve. President Oaks mentioned the problem of expensive housing and education. Child care is also expensive. For the substantial fraction of Mormons living in the US, health care is also expensive, especially the process of delivering a baby, even if there are no complications. I appreciate that he acknowledged that things can be more expensive than they were for his generation, but I still think that without living it, it’s hard to fully appreciate. Heck, I’m in middle age, and I can’t even grasp the full weight of how expensive life is looking to be for my kids. There are a lot of economic disincentives to marry and have children, especially when you’re young. Anyway, my point is that waving at these issues with “faith” is little better than when people who love their guns wave mass shootings away with “thoughts and prayers.” The Church has the power to do something here to make righteousness easier.
The Church doesn’t have the option of using tax policy to change people’s incentives, but it does have a similar option in tithing policy. With the tremendous value of all its investments, the Church really doesn’t need to collect much tithing from its members to keep operating. GAs could easily re-define tithing. With a little creativity, they could do so even without having to back off from the 10% figure in the scriptures. They could explicitly ask members to tithe only on after-tax income. More radically, they could tell members to go back to the old version of just paying on their actual increase (and in times where their increase was negative, they would owe nothing). Or they could be more targeted and say if you have children in your household, you should reduce your tithing owed using some formula. (I’m sure they don’t want to get down in the weeds on this, but the formula could be super simple, like subtract one percentage point per child.) Most radically, they could just stop requiring tithing at all, and just tell members to donate what they felt was right, but that no minimum amount needed to be met to get a temple recommend.
You might ask, isn’t this Satan’s plan? Isn’t the whole point of life that we go through difficulty? Won’t we get soft if things are too easy? My feeling is that on the spectrum from life being so difficult it’s overwhelming to so easy that it’s not challenging, most of us are far, far closer to the difficult end, so I’m not too concerned that easing the way a little in one area will suddenly make us all weak. Also, as you could probably guess, I’m not a big fan of the idea that we need to do arbitrary difficult things just because life is supposed to be hard. (This kind of connects to my post last month where I complained about fundamentalist-leaning Church members seeking out outdated rules to make Church harder.)
But if you’re not convinced by my response, consider that the Church is already doing things to make other kinds of righteousness easier. It is building temples all over the world, which will make temple ordinances more accessible to members everywhere. You could argue that everyone should have to have an experience like those told of in Conference, where they have to sell their house to be able to go to the temple and be sealed, but the GAs appear to disagree. Or how about scripture reading? The Church gives away copies of the Book of Mormon (and the Bible) to anyone who’s interested. It makes scriptures, not to mention lots of other Church materials, available on its website. Reading scriptures is another righteous act the Church works to make easier.
To be fair, I should note that this isn’t the case for all acts of righteousness. Wearing temple garments is something the Church asks all endowed members to do. However, especially for women, the design of garments seems to take little account of their bodies or their comfort. See, for example, the recent MormonLand podcast episode, April Young Bennett’s post at the Exponent, and Angela C.’s 2013 post at BCC, as well as Angela’s recent post comparing her 2013 findings with the survey results reported on the MormonLand podcast.
I read once in a pop economics book a description of economics as something like the application of the insight that people respond to incentives. I feel like this gives a better account of human behavior than the GAs’ view, which seems to be well summarized by Mormon, narrating in Alma 31:5: “the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them.” I think that the GAs like President Oaks could do well to consider, when they’re hoping to get members to do something, how the Church itself might ease and support that thing by rearranging economic incentives, rather than just falling back on admonitions to have more faith.
Nice article. Thx for pushing the recycle and reducing-cost-of-childbirth ideas, as well as suggesting ways of fine-tuning the tithing issue.
Temple garments used to go down to ankles and wrists, so they’ve been adjusted to make wearing them easier. In the last decade screen printed marks and new fabrics are meaningful improvements they’ve made. (To be clear: they should keep improving them.)
Thanks, Raymond! And that’s an excellent point I overlooked, DaveW! Garments are clearly a mixed example.
It’s funny that the church will tout some Utah legislation, like anti-discrimination in housing and work for LGBT, as a political achievement of compromise and good policy. But it does absolutely nothing to create laws that provide mandated parental leave, subsidies for childcare, subsidies for businesses to provide part-time employment with benefits, etc. that would incentivize bigger families. Even without legislative pressure, why can’t the church create non-profits with missions to help families and women? It makes no sense. The church is smug and thinks Utah laws are worthy of emulation, but it’s silent about all of the laws and policies Utah has that are anti-family.
That’s a great point, Mary. Because of their political leanings I’m guessing, as much as anything, they are really prone to seeing any problems as individual ones, with no need for any type of government policy change to fix. Grab those bootstraps a little harder!
I read Mary’s excellent comment three times before realizing why the Church can’t support those efforts. Those focuses assume that women work. The mandated parental leave would have to be for fathers only, as the proper Mormon woman is not employed. Childcare subsidies aren’t necessary if mom is at home. Part-time employment with benefits could help out a father, so that one might be okay. The Church wants bigger families in the One True Way, and that doesn’t include helping women have careers and babies at the same time.
Ziff, I love your point about how we don’t need to do arbitrary difficult things just because life is supposed to be hard. I’m working on a post with that same idea. We should keep pushing back against arbitrary hard stuff. The Church likes to believe peoples’ faith is built by struggling, but there are many stories of people quitting the struggle and realizing there’s no point to making your life harder.
And, while I applaud your suggestion to ease the financial expectations on young families, I must tell a missionary story. When listening to a family explain their dire economic circumstances, I immediately thought, “we need to teach the law of tithing soon! They need the blessings so badly!” I apologize for that, but the idea that we get more blessings back than the amount we pay had been so constantly drummed into my mind that I truly believed that. In fact, if you were struggling financially, you should pay MORE tithing, or at least more fast offerings, so you could get extra blessings!
Your idea is a good one, but it will horrify TBMs who believe that paying tithing brings blessings.
Oh, that’s an excellent point, Janey, about how my proposed solution overlooks the idea that paying tithing itself brings blessings (and that presumably paying more brings more). I look forward to your post on arbitrary difficult things!
And I think you’re spot on, too, about Mary’s solution. It’s really too bad that the GAs are still so uncomfortable with just accepting the reality of the need for two-income households for people to make it economically.
This is so funny! His wife was in her middle 50’s and had been single when they got together. She was obviously not taking the commandment to marry and multiply very seriously herself. Now here she is scolding other members for doing the same thing that she was! They never fail to amaze me.
I have thought for a while now that there’s really nothing the church could do that would entice me to start participating again. But if they bought me a house…
Ha! Good thinking, Kirkstall.
Jenni, to be fair to Sister Oaks, given the women-tilted demographics of the Church, lots of women get left out of the marriage-and-family track by simple force of numbers.
Re: Mary & Janey’s comments above. As a CPA & financial consultant for over 40 years who has counseled thousands of married couples, and who has worked on the economics of the working spouse, and published on it, I don’t know if there are 5% of the cases where the working spouse actually adds to the economic/financial well-being of a household, on net. Not when a couple realizes that 100% of the 2nd wage-earner’s income is added onto the 1st earner’s income & taxed at the highest marginal rate; and when she has to repeat paying FICA taxes all over from dollar one (especially when the 1st earner was most likely to get above the FICA-paying threshold), meaning about 40% of the second earners income goes to taxes. Then the 60% left over has to pay for all sorts of additional unnecessary expenses: child-care, wardrobe, eating out more often, pre-prepared microwavable meals, gasoline, auto insurance at commuter rates, extra cars (the 2nd car doesn’t last as long), etc. By the time all’s done, she might be adding $1-2/hour to income, something the 1st earner could have added by working 5 more hours/week. Would the family have done better if the 2nd earner had cooked from scratch, saved in all the other areas, and had the 2nd earner home to help the kids with their homework? And to supervise behaviors? Keeping the kids out of trouble? No, the Brethren are far wiser than we/society give them credit for. These are just the financial considerations. What about child confidence? Esteem? It used to be girls & boys got into trouble in the back seat of a car at 11 PM, now it’s at home at 4 PM. Naw, the Brethren are not only wise, but right and inspired. We’d do better if we listened better. And so do our children.
That’s an interesting perspective Henry. I think what you’re carefully overlooking, even if I buy your figures, is that when a couple divorces, all the pain falls on a spouse who hasn’t been employed. Their experience is out of date, their job contacts are cold, their employment prospects are worse. This is a gigantic issue. Perhaps if you drained just a bit of the patriarchal assumptions out of your calculations, you might have realized this.
Another thing Henry Brock may have assumed is that the one wage-earner is earning high wages. He’s talking about the “marriage penalty” for taxes, which exists if you have one spouse with high income and a second spouse who is working for peanuts. If both spouses are high earners, there’s a “marriage bonus” that kicks in, in which the married spouses pay less taxes together than the sum of what each would have paid separately if they were unmarried and paid taxes as singles.
Besides the economics, there’s also quality of life and self-esteem. My self-respect and self-esteem and general confidence increased a lot when I started working again. Two income households may not just be about the economics of how much disposable income you have.
Your point about the economic harm of divorce is spot on, Ziff. Having just one wage-earner is a huge problem during a divorce. It would add economic pressure to stay in a bad marriage, which is a miserable outcome.
In the past I bought into the logic of Henry Brock which is advanced in many conservative circles. In more recent years I have realized that a working mother enjoys pay raises and career advancements, on-the-job and inservice training, retirement savings, and more. The benefits are not as trivial as Brock assumes unless there is a severe imbalance between the earning potential of the two spouses, and even then they are not trivial if you are the woman and find yourself needing to support yourself for whatever reason (or if you are the man and needing to be supported by your wife for so many different possible reasons). I would point readers to the work of Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke” for an analysis of the situation and what working families can do to strengthen their financial stability. The reality is that moving forward most families are going to depend on two incomes rather than one. We are better off if we recognize that reality.
The rules in the workplace have changed in the past several decades. A non-working spouse who needs, for whatever reason, to reenter the job market after decades of not working is going to find that it is challenging to obtain any job that might have the power to support an individual, let alone a family. Degrees depreciate if they are not used, and letters of reference need to be from sources who know the applicant professionally, not just socially as may have been acceptable in the past.
A working mother contributes to a balanced marriage. When one spouse has more education and more income, the non-working spouse is harmed by the power imbalances that result.
There are ways to make working families work where the children do not pay the price. We can focus our efforts in this direction rather than trying to prop up a system that is no longer viable.