Erika Kirk and the Myth of Noble Poverty
"Having more kids than you can afford" is not inherently better than knowing your limits; in fact, it's quite the reverse.
Listen. I am not a sociologist. Or an economist. Or a statistician. I am just a millennial mom, a Christian who wants to love her neighbor, not storm the Capitol, trying to help my family thrive in a culture and country that seems, increasingly, to be stacking the odds against us. And I take issue with the idea of having more kids than you can afford.
Recently, Erika Kirk spoke at the Hillsdale College commencement in Michigan. Erika Kirk, for those who aren’t familiar, is a former pageant queen turned right wing influencer. She is also the widow of Charlie Kirk, podcaster and culture war agitator, who was assassinated last September at Utah Valley University. Erika, the mother of two small children, has taken the reins of her late husband’s organization, Turning Point USA, for which she travels the country, schmoozes with top bananas of the Trump administration, and speaks to packed arenas on the importance of preserving Western civilization and traditional gender roles–like being a submissive wife and a stay-at-home mother who is focused on domestic felicity and doesn’t concern herself with matters outside her household.
You’ll have to just imagine me staring into the camera like Jim from The Office. Blink, blink.
For a deeper breakdown of what Erika Kirk had to say at Hillsdale, I recommend Sara Petersen’s excellent essay on Kirk’s speech (and, yes, I did watch the speech in its entirety for research purposes, and then I contemplated a sip of bleach). Today, I want to focus on a single sentence: her injunction to the class of 2026, quoting her late husband. “He [Charlie] would also say to have more kids than you can afford.”
Now you can imagine me grimacing like Michael from The Office. “Nope. Don’t like that.”
(Neither did her audience, by the way. She paused and chuckled after the statement, but no one else did.)
Let me be very clear: I am not against having kids (I have two!), nor against trusting God to take care of your family (in fact, as a Christian I am very much for this!). But I am indubitably against the idea of encouraging young people to make plans they know they have no way of seeing through, in order to fulfill some nebulous idea of “rejecting modernity, embracing tradition,” especially when that encouragement comes from someone who is flying chartered jets around the country.
As I see it, there are two major problems with the idea of having more kids than you can afford:
