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.
