It's not flamebait, it's a legitimate observation. With rising costs of living everywhere, it seems highly likely that the church's tithing policy is a major contributor to lower birth rates for its members.
If tithing had such a big effect, you would expect non-tithing folks to not have a corresponding decline.
You can't just compare it to declining birthrates for the population at large though: you have to compare to cultures with the same emphasis on large families that exists within Mormonism.
Other things have
One of those things being cost of living.
I'm sure it's not the only factor, but it has to be one of them.
This is the main factor, which is my point. Tithing as a percentage of your income has not gone up, but general cost of living has. So if one wants to do an analysis on what's causing the declining birth rate, it makes a lot more sense to focus on the factor that has increased and not on the one that hasn't.
Tithing is 10% of your income. If you make 50k/yr, that's 5k/yr. Is 5000/yr the main thing that stands between people and having children? That doesn't seems very highly likely to me.
If you have a bunch of kids like the church wants and are living paycheck to paycheck (like most people in this country), then yes, 10% makes a huge difference. You don't think $5k a year (or more) would make life easier for a large family?
If you have a bunch of kids like the church wants and are living paycheck to paycheck (like most people in this country), then yes, 10% makes a huge difference.
In actuality it doesn't because there are a lot of mitigating factors. There's some Church aid that shores things up. There's a lot of major support and resources from other members, in about every area you can think of. Long term benefits like careers and housing are more usual than not.
If society was full of comparable networks like that and they were free, I might grant your point. But there really isn't. And if you move to an insular region of the country, it can be brutal to get established w/o some kind of introduction.
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Kids are expensive. Maybe it'd be easier to have more if the church wasn't siphoning 10% of every member's income.
Tithing in and of itself doesn't make a difference one way or the other. It doesn't make persistent hunger-level poverty any worse - or any better.
When is money is simply tight then it's a wash. Funds go to tithing. Funds come from having enough work because of the unique network.
That comment isn't in the spirit of the "Eschew flamebait." part of the HN guidelines.
It's not flamebait, it's a legitimate observation. With rising costs of living everywhere, it seems highly likely that the church's tithing policy is a major contributor to lower birth rates for its members.
Any spending is a contributor.
If tithing had such a big effect, you would expect non-tithing folks to not have a corresponding decline.
The amount being tithed hasn't changed over the decades. Other things have. If one were to point at the cause, tithing would be low on the list.
You can't just compare it to declining birthrates for the population at large though: you have to compare to cultures with the same emphasis on large families that exists within Mormonism.
One of those things being cost of living.
I'm sure it's not the only factor, but it has to be one of them.
This is the main factor, which is my point. Tithing as a percentage of your income has not gone up, but general cost of living has. So if one wants to do an analysis on what's causing the declining birth rate, it makes a lot more sense to focus on the factor that has increased and not on the one that hasn't.
Tithing is 10% of your income. If you make 50k/yr, that's 5k/yr. Is 5000/yr the main thing that stands between people and having children? That doesn't seems very highly likely to me.
If you have a bunch of kids like the church wants and are living paycheck to paycheck (like most people in this country), then yes, 10% makes a huge difference. You don't think $5k a year (or more) would make life easier for a large family?
In actuality it doesn't because there are a lot of mitigating factors. There's some Church aid that shores things up. There's a lot of major support and resources from other members, in about every area you can think of. Long term benefits like careers and housing are more usual than not.
If society was full of comparable networks like that and they were free, I might grant your point. But there really isn't. And if you move to an insular region of the country, it can be brutal to get established w/o some kind of introduction.
The spirit was unhelpfully somewhere between dismissive and disdainful. Putting that aside, the content is worth discussing.