A Polite Rebuttal to Helen Roy's "Fertility Idolatry"

Is a Christian Permitted to Pursue Wealth for the Sake of Children?

I’m posting this off schedule because it’s currently relevant, and I know there are others, who like me, feel like Mrs. Roy’s recent writings are missing the point.

I’ve been a fan of Helen Roy’s content now for a number of years now. Her aesthetics especially have been very inspiring and validating, and I know many people who feel like she gave them a gift through her appreciation of traditionalism. However, lately, I — and others — have felt a little gas-lit by her recent content. I believe she’s going through a deconstructing period, which is normal for all of us. But it’s jarring for loyal readers when the content starts to shift and demoralize and demonize what the author once deemed very good.

I want to offer a sort of rebuttal for her last essay fertility idolatry. I don’t really disagree with what Helen is saying as much as I disagree with the thrust of her essay, which seems to lack both charity and consistency of vision.

My great-grandmother and great aunts. 1967. There were thirteen children with the sons.

Mrs. Roy opens her latest Substack essay with a quote from the late liberal-leaning Presbyterian pastor and author, Tim Keller. He asks, “What is an Idol?” and simplifies that “an idol is anything that is more important to you than God”. It’s an excellent answer, but without reading the entire book it’s somewhat vague — does he mean this literally or metaphorically? It’s also odd for a Catholic writer to open an essay up with a quote from a denomination that universally believes Catholicism to be the very definition of idolatry. However, we all love to quote the best quotable sources, so I don’t think this is worth getting hung up over¹. Tim Keller also writes (not quoted in Mrs. Roy’s essay) that the top three modern idols in the Western church are: Experience, Doctrine, and Consumerism².

These sentiments are as old as time, spoken by many saints and Popes, and written into scripture:

"No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon" ~ Matthew 6:24

After quoting the Presbyterian pastor, Mrs. Roy rightly claims, “Anything can become an idol.” She then delves into three anecdotes detailing how fertility has become a sort of “god” for conservative media personas.

1. Dehumanizing childless “cat” girlbosses

2. Parental resistance to accountability

3. Reproducing in Spite of Finances (the point I’ll be giving the most airtime to)

It is observably true that Mrs. Roy is correct when she says fertility has been idolized by many conservatives. Too many refuse to say “Thy Will be Done” when it comes to how many children they will have, and they take their fertility into their own hands through abortion, birth control pills, and IVF. Or they become embittered instead of grateful for what God gives them wishing for more or less, but never content with the blessing allotted to them.

However her essay doesn’t really address that aspect of idolizing fertility. In fact, Mrs. Roy doesn’t mention submitting to God’s will once. A Hindu woman might have written the essay. Without acknowledging the proper authority over our fertility, it’s pointless to talk about how it’s become idolized at all.

Instead the essay is mostly a collection of non sequitur arguments influenced by memes designed to prioritize (idolize) status and wealth over children.

There is absolutely nothing innately perverse about desiring children and wanting to raise more Christian souls for the Kingdom of Heaven. And there is nothing immoral about grieving one’s infertility. Yes, it is wrong to vilify women who suffer infertility, and it is also wrong to demand that you know better than God when it comes to having children. But the desire for children is natural, instinctual, and healthy. In order to not become consumed by this natural God-given desire, though, one must also remember to submit to God’s will.

It is right to warn women about the dangers of sacrificing all their best child-rearing years to a career or to a cat. It is perverse to prioritize cats and clout. I’m not condoning any hate a woman might get for those things. But there are many Christian women who often lament having had their priorities mixed up, looking back, and saying, “I wished I’d just have married that man and had babies with him. But I was told that my brains shouldn’t be wasted on that.”

Can Smart Girls be Truly Happy with the “Trad Life”?

There is nothing wrong with warning women that they might someday regret not having children now. Most IRL women aren’t being vilified for choosing a career over a family. In fact most women are being pushed and applauded into choosing money first. Yes, the online redpill bros are gross and talk about this issue in a gross way. But why are we paying them any attention? Ignore them. They dehumanize women for all sorts of reasons. That is uncharitable, unchristian behavior that should not be fed into.

Helen Roy shared a meme that portrayed the girl with a job as looking sad and lonely, and the girl with a family as being beautiful and happy as if this was a false equivalency dreamed by the right.

The opposite sort of meme is actually much more common. Regular women aren’t interacting with real life redpill guys. They’re being told, “Until men can balance the home-work life and pick up the slack³, you shouldn’t have to. Do what you want to and have children later. Now that you can freeze your eggs you have even more options!”

It is not dehumanizing or misogynistic to inform a woman that those things are simply not true. Women don’t deserve to be lied to, but unfortunately the most popular, normal thing to do is lie to women about their fertility and future happiness.

And yes, I was sad and lonely before I married. A lot of people told me the grass wouldn’t be greener on the other side, that marriage would be really hard, that men are dirty and gross and demanding. Those were lies. The grass is greener. I was good at what I did — I loved “girl-bossing”. But I am more content and fulfilled now.

However, women who celebrate their fertility are not usually the same people who dehumanize women who don’t have children. Those who idolize their fertility struggle with God’s plan for their life, but it is not something that is easy for an outsider to judge. But childless women are usually scorned only by those who are irrelevant and themselves have no children — redpill guys.

In Catholicism the nun is as revered, or perhaps moreso, than the mother who bears a dozen children.

Edith Stein wrote that all women were called to spiritual motherhood, and that it is a noble calling that bears both spiritual and biographical children. She said, “To be a mother is to nourish and protect true humanity and bring it to development”

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I only briefly want to touch on Mrs. Roy’s second point.

She states that the fact that parents don’t discipline their children in church is a sign of how they’ve idolized fertility. It’s actually not. It’s a sign of selfish, lazy parenting, and honestly it’s not something I’ve witnessed often in larger families. Often people who allow their children to misbehave in church have one or two or three spoiled brats, and these parents have determined that it is not God’s plan for them to have more children.

I also want to point out once more that she didn’t give any Catholic examples of children in church, but instead sited a tweet from an Anglican family who were reprimanded by their Anglican curate.

I have never known a large family who doesn’t discipline their children in church. In fact, it’s always ironic to notice that the more children a family has the quieter the children tend to be when it’s time to be “seen, not heard”. Those who have many children don’t usually believe in gentle parenting, but practice, “spare the rod, spoil the child.”

Generally speaking, Catholic churches are quite child friendly as opposed to a majority of mainstream protestant churches. I have been to many protestant churches where a pastor gets annoyed when a baby makes a peep. However, without fail, when a baby cries at mass, I’ve almost always heard the priest make a positive comment.

Pope Francis said, “Let the children cry. It is a beautiful homily when a child cries in church, a beautiful homily.”

I will also throw a good word for the Eastern Orthodox churches, where children are encouraged to roam freely about. It’s one of the most beautiful things about their liturgies, and makes the church feel alive.

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Her final point, the reason why I am spending any time writing this rebuttal at all, is the one I take the most issue with because it is rife with red-herrings.

Mrs. Roy claims that people idolize fertility through their idolization of poverty.

A twitter woman posted, “If you’re in your 20’s get pregnant, go into debt if you have to.” It was based on the luxury-maxing meme “Buy a Rolex, go into debt if you have to”.

However, the internet loves to be obtuse: a) this twitter account wasn’t promoting poverty or debt for the sake of having babies, she was just rolling with the meme b) and families might experience tight finances if they have many children, but I’ve never heard of anyone falling into debt because of their children. And I know a lot of large families.

Another man shared the tweet, writing, “Controversial take: Having kids isn’t that expensive. The expensive parts are if you decide to quit a job to take care of them or pay for daycare/private school. It’s a big lifestyle decision, but lots of not-rich people afford to have lots of kids.”

This poster is a CEO of some tech company and has 372k followers, with no tweets talking about the virtues of poverty. He simply suggested that one doesn’t need to not wait for financial stability (leaps and bounds from pursuing an impoverished life), but nothing about his tweet could be interpreted as Helen Roy responded to it:

“Poverty fetish!”

And when I pointed out that the man seemed to have no interest in poverty, she blocked me. Which leads to me further think that Mrs. Roy isn’t after truth but curating the next hot take.

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I would like to take a break to quote a seventeen page homily⁴ written by St. Basil the Great in 386 A.D. titled, To the Rich. I don’t have space in this essay to share the entire homily, but I do encourage all my readers to get a copy of “On Social Justice” before you form opinions about poverty, especially if you’re Catholic.

Thus, those who love their neighbor as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbor; yet surely, you seem to have great possessions! How else can this be, but that you have preferred your own enjoyment to the consolations of the many? For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love.

St. Basil the Great, To The Rich

Helen Roy has a habit of cross-referencing Christian cultures as if they are all one large blob. She did this in her essay on feminism when she said that Temperance and the Prohibition movement “rooted in Christian doctrine and aimed at preserving or restoring societal values, often in ways that affirmed women’s traditional roles as mothers while expanding their rights and opportunities for virtue”. It is true that Feminism had a lot of Christian as well as secular influence, but it was mostly pushed by liberal denominations (Methodists and Quakers who are also known for women priests and rejecting gender roles) before being adapted by more conservative protestant groups such as the Baptists. However, there were never any notable Catholic⁵ women involved in the suffrage movement or teetotalism — imagine trying to remove the blood of Jesus from the Eucharist!

She does this another time when she slips in pot-shots in her essay and in the comment sections at large, home-schooled evangelical families. I’m not sure how much experience she has with such families and I don’t necessarily have an issue with throwing well-aimed pot-shots, but I happen to have a lot of experience in evangelical Christianity being raised in it and being the oldest daughter of twelve children, and having about thirty close friends who were also raised similarly.

Although I grew up quite poor, I never heard of the idea of Voluntary Poverty as a virtue, because I was not Catholic. I was raised to be proud, even if we were poor. We worked hard. We did not intend to be poor, but to be well-off if God ever saw fit to bless us with wealth. If ever God had given us millions of dollars through the labor of our hands, we wouldn’t have tithed it to some church because, like many evangelical Christians, we did not believe in tithing to churches. We would’ve bought land, been a little more generous than we already were with our neighbors, and lived more comfortably.

I don’t know of any evangelical Christian families that talk about the virtue of poverty, and it’s not preached at any of the churches I ever heard of. It is true we simplified our needs, but only because we lived within our means. But now my family is more well-off and wouldn’t be considered impoverished by anyone’s modern (or past) standards.

When my husband first spoke to my father about courting me, he asked how we’d manage to afford so many children. My dad told him, “Don’t stress about how many you might have. God usually only sends them one at a time, and He provides what you need along the way.”

My dad wasn’t preaching poverty, but encouraging my husband to trust God’s will in these matters.

Mrs. Roy inferred in her comment section that the only women who are promoting simple lifestyles for many children (in evangelical circles) are either media influencers, or oppressed. That’s simply not true, even as a generalization.

Many of my friends are glad to have been raised as they were and will remain conservative evangelicals with desires for large families. Some of my friends have many children now. Others struggle with infertility. Some of them are financially well off, others aren’t (ironically my friends with more children are the ones doing better with money, while the ones struggling with infertility are also poorer). All of us together must learn to say, “Thy Will Be Done.”⁶

“But wealth is necessary for rearing children,” someone will say. This is a specious excuse for greed.

St. Basil the Great, To The Rich

Mrs. Roy writes, “There’s nothing intrinsically good about poverty” quoting from perhaps her first Catholic source, albeit misapplying the quote to fit the context of her argument. This essay itself seems to have been designed to be a little misleading, starting out with, “Jesus Christ did not condemn the possession of worldly goods, or even of great wealth; for He himself had rich friends.”

Jesus also had friends who were prostitutes Jesus friends were sinners not yet made into Saints. He by no means condoned any of the sins of his friends, and He very much did condemn the possession of worldly good and great wealth.

Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

“Which ones?” he inquired.

Jesus replied, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,’^[a] and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’

“All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?”

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”

Matthew 19:16-30

It is true, in the sense that there is absolutely nothing intrinsically good about any virtue on its own. Faith without Charity is dead⁷. Prayer without humility is arrogant. Prudence can turn into stinginess. Generosity can lead to egotism. Even Charity, the virtue the Apostle Paul spends an entire chapter praising, degenerates into something shallow and secular when removed from all the other Christian attributes. Virtue is all of these inhumanely impossibly hard things coming together and that becoming Good by the Grace of God.

Poverty, too, must be paired to God’s will in order to be intrinsically virtuous. ST. Francis wrote that poverty is the queen of virtues because it instructs us thoroughly on spiritual humility. Our current Pope, too, living the life of a Franciscan, discusses how material poverty instructs a soul on the ways of spiritual poverty.

“How I long for a poor Church for the poor!” ~ Pope Francis

Mrs. Roy throws in a few more out-of-place disgruntled complaints about families who prioritize children over the pursuit of wealth, all most likely sifted from various corners of the internet:

“There seems to be a strange effort on the part of online pronatalists to insinuate that everything you could ever want that costs money is inherently superfluous. You mention college, they say “oh, your kids don’t need to go to those WOKE places anyway.” You mention extracurriculars (music, athletics), they say “oh, kids don’t need any kind of structured play or recreation…just let them outside.” You mention housing, they say, “our ancestors lived in shacks with twelve kids!” You mention proximity to multiple generations of family, they say, “three hours isn’t a bad drive.” You mention the lack of economic opportunity where real estate is affordable, they say “as a Christian, you should love poverty!”

I’ve simply not really heard many people say any of this other than my husband, who does want to pursue a Franciscan lifestyle for our family life. But even he has not said quite all of this. There are no families with many children living in a shack, unless it’s a temporary thing they are doing as they build their family home. Most home-schooled large families I know are huge into doing extracurricular activities, more so than the public educated children. (extracurricular activities don’t have to send you into debt either). Several of my siblings are competitive swing-dancers. Most of us play multiple instruments.

Our children will most likely do theater and get piano lessons from me, as long as they are interested. I also took art lessons, hip-hop lessons, and Wingchun lessons when I was a kid and was able to afford to pay for these out of my own earnings without feeling deprived of anything else I might’ve wanted. Many of my friends went to college, I chose not to, and instead took various classes for a semester here and there between traveling and running my business. I had a fat savings⁸ when I married.

Some women put off having children until they’re older. I feel like if I ever want to attend a university, I can do that when I’m older.

As for living so far away from family that one need drive three hours, I laugh at such a complaint because where I lived in Montana, the land is so vast one drives that far to get groceries or see friends often. I know it’s different in the South or in the East, where I now live. But now we live in walking distance from most of our community, and our family is so scattered it would be too difficult to choose one place to live based on this. I know this is just my experience, and maybe others do wish to close that “three” hour gap. May God give them the means to do so. But having children isn’t what is making that impossible. Inflated housing costs are outrageous and difficult for many of us despite the number of children God gives us.

It is left up to the individual family to discern whether affordable housing is worth the sacrifice of being a living farther from family.

Although you speak as though children were your concern, you betray the inclinations of your own heart. Do not impute guilt to the guiltless! They have their own Master who cares for their needs. They received their being from God, and God will provide what they need to live. Was the command found in the Gospel, “If you wish to be perfect, sell you possessions and give the money to the poor,” not written for the married? After seeking the blessing of children from the Lord, and being found worthy to become parents, did you at once add the following, “Give me children, that I might disobey your commandments; give me children, that I might not attain the Kingdom of Heaven?”

Who will vouch for the prudence of your children, that they will use what is left to them for their good ends? For many, wealth becomes an aid to immorality. Or do you not hear what is said in Ecclesiastes, “There is a grievous ill that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their wonder to their hurt,” and moreover, “I will leave that for which I have toiled to those who come after me, and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish?”

Take care then, lest after countless efforts to acquire riches, you end up providing others with resources to commit sins. In that case, you will find yourself double punished, both for acting unjustly in your own right, and for furnishing others with the opportunity to do the same.

~ St. Basil the Great, To the Rich

My overall impression from the essay is that Mrs. Roy hasn’t read many Catholic scholars’ opinions on the virtue of Poverty with a sincere heart, or if she has, that’s she’s been called to another lifestyle, or that perhaps she cares more for whatever beliefs are High Status. I can think of no other explanation for the change in her tune given that there’s been only whiplash and no true explanation for the sudden mockery of traditional values.

I do not write this to attack Helen Roy, but to defend the delineation between authentic traditional family life and online redpill bros. We have no business in blurring those lines.

It is also unfair to suggest that a father is not providing for the needs of his family when he refuses to pursue prosperity, or that women love their babies are somehow making idols of their babies because they want them. It is a perverted inversion. Children, not gold, is the true blessing of God.

Traditional Christians (Catholics and Evangelicals) are not evil for being proud of their growing families, and they are not evil for refusing to idolize the pursuit of prosperity. These people are not interested in anything redpill guys have to say on the matter, so it’s best to leave all memes out of the discussion and focus on remaining humble and loving as we strive to submit to God’s divine plan.

Consider carefully, you mortal, the true nature of wealth. Why do you find gold so alluring?

~ St. Basil the Great, To The Rich

1. Yet. I will return to this critique.

2. https://www.gospelrelevance.com/2015/05/04/tim-keller-on-idols-in-western-churches-today/

3. Why Women Choose Careers over Family

4. Based on Matthew 19: 16 - 22

5. In The Progressive Era Murray N. Rothbard writes on how pious groups (mostly Protestant groups) vs liturgical churches (predominantly Catholic) warred with one another through different political movements, and how the pious churches pushed teetotalism and public schools as a way to subvert Catholicism in America.

6. Matthew 6:10

7. 1 Corinthians 13

8. dowry