In a 2021 speech, J.D. Vance blamed the “childless left” for the nation’s problems and wondered whether people with kids shouldn’t have more voting power than those without children. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance added that women who haven’t birthed children, like Vice President Kamala Harris, are “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He added, “It’s just a basic fact.” 

Vance is both right and wrong about this. It’s true that people with children can experience a profound metaphysical connection another human being that, by all descriptions, is a source of ineffable joy that simultaneously provides a tangible connection to the future. On the other hand, having children is not in and of itself a guarantee for any of this. Without a well-formed conscience and an understanding of what contributes to human flourishing, having children may not produce the anticipated bright future for parents, their children, or anyone else. Indeed, unmoored parents may be a danger to society. Mao, after all, had 10 children while neither George Washington nor James Madison had any natural children. It’s not hard to see which of these men offered greater blessings to their posterity.  

I’ve met leftist parents of several kids, but those kids, like their parents, are often resentful, narcissistic, and anti-American. It is important to remember that a good and patriotic childless person can do more for America than a large family of people who are neither good nor patriotic. 

In 2008 I was diagnosed with lymphoma. I was just 44 at the time and dating someone who was 10 years younger. Before my diagnosis, there had been a strong possibility of marriage and children, but the cancer was a very tough cross to bear. “Cancer can ravage relationships.” I remember reading that in a magazine at the time I was going through chemotherapy. It’s true. Many relationships don’t survive the strain. Ours didn’t. 

After I was diagnosed, I didn’t think I had much time left, despite doctors telling me I had a solid reasons to hope for several more years. At around the same time, I learned that Andrew Whitfield, a strong and handsome young Welsh actor who was playing Spartacus in the TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, was diagnosed with the same kind of cancer. Whitfield passed away in 2011. Naturally, I thought, “If Spartacus is a goner, then I probably am, too.” 

Fortunately, that wasn’t God’s plan. I do remember, however, lying in a hospital bed and having this thought: “Thank God I got to be young in the 1980s.” I was grateful to have experienced what some people now call “Peak America.” In the America of my youth, everyone defended free speech. The movies and books were original and brilliant. Kids today don’t have the freedom or the guts to do many of the dumb, dangerous, and romantic things we did that made life worth living. There were no digital distractions. We danced, went to parties, fell in love and all in analog. It was a loud and preppy and joyful time, but it was also mystical. You could spend a lot of time in prayer and contemplation without the pull of a thousand messages in your pocket. My parents were my biological flesh and blood, and they loved me, but the Jesuits who taught me about the Bible, philosophy, Shakespeare, and Thomas Merton, though childless themselves, were also crucial influences. How many kids have such teachers today?

The experience of having cancer and surviving it filled me with a deep love for America and a willingness to sacrifice myself, if necessary, to prevent the socialist left from destroying the country. I want everyone’s kids to grow up in an America like the one I knew in my youth—one that is free, joyful, and thriving. 

Although I came to understand during my treatment that God wasn’t done with me yet, I couldn’t have guessed how big the job was going to be. It arrived, like a hurricane, in the middle of the biggest political battle of 2018. The details, which are in my book, The Devil’s Triangle, aren’t important to rehash here. But there is an irony in the context of Vance’s remarks: If not for my own childless existence Roe v Wade might still be the awful law of the land. At the time, one of my oldest friends remarked that it was as if my entire life was designed to prepare me for this moment: “You’ve been sober 30 years. You’re physically tough and beat cancer. You’re a conservative who has read widely on communism and the East German Stasi, groups that used the same tactics the Democrats are using now. It’s like your life has been boot camp for this.” She also said there was a dark moment when she thought the pressure was so great I might commit suicide. I replied with the Spock line from Star Trek: “I’ve been dead before.”

What my friend said about my preparation for battle may be true, but there is more to life than politics and more than one battle in any given life. If I survived cancer and the persecution of Stasi left it’s probably because my role models are not just Spartacus and Whittaker Chambers, but also Jesus Christ. As I’ve gotten older and worked harder to follow His example, there are more and more times when I find myself “the indispensable man” in situations where no one else has been available to offer what is needed. Perhaps that has happened to you, too. It happened for me when I became a caretaker of my mother in the last five years of her life. It happens when friends who want to stop drinking call me for help. It happens when you just happen to meet someone who needs some empathy and affirmation.

After the trauma of the last decade and a half, I have learned to focus on kenosis, the term for Christ emptying himself out for us on the cross. Mine is a weak imitation of the Lord’s, as it comes from a person who can be arrogant and headstrong and selfish. But in the moments when am enveloped in the grace of Jesus, I understand what is meant by it. “This is it,” I think in those moments. “This is why I survived. This is why I’m here.”

So, while J.D. Vance is right to worry about America’s declining native-born population and what it means that so many Americans are foregoing family formation, there are deeper problems, perhaps. The real danger is from people who do not have the opportunity to learn from the experience of emptying themselves out (as parenthood is surely one way people learn this lesson). Selfishness can wreak havoc on our political system, but it’s also true that unselfishness can be learned in other ways than parenthood.

Indeed, under the circumstances—with the large number of leftists in America and rise of politicians like Kamala Harris—it’s even possible that a population boom might not be among the things most needed to save us. Who will be the parents of these children and what will they be teaching them? These are the people who voted for Obama, whose own father abandoned him and whose father substitute was Frank Marshall Davis, a communist. A lot of what’s left of my life will be spent trying to undo the damage caused by the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and their kids. I’m all for Americans having more children but the truth is that we have our hands full with trying to improve the quality of the population we’ve got.