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Given Latter-day Saints’ penchant for baby-making, accounting, and genealogy, you’d expect that there would be a glut of excellent research about current Latter-day Saint fertility. But you would be wrong.1

It’s honestly kinda shocking. It’s clearly something people are interested in. The New York Times, the Salt Lake Tribune, and The Atlantic have all published articles in the last three months about the declining fertility rate among the Latter-day Saints! However, they didn’t have the data needed to tell the story properly.

In this post, I will:

1. Explain what is missing from the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Salt Lake Trib’s approach

2. Lay out my best estimate of the Latter-day Saint-specific current fertility rate

3. Review historical rates of Latter-day Saint fertility

4. Investigate why LDS fertility was so high in my parents’ generation (the Boomers)

5. Briefly speculate why it is declining today

Let’s go.

1. What is missing from The New York Times, The Atlantic’s, and The Salt Lake Trib’s approach

The question the articles want to answer is what is going on with Latter-day Saint fertility? But because they don’t know the Latter-day Saint total fertility rate, they rely on faulty proxies. The New York Times article focuses on Utah’s falling fertility rate, but less than half of Utahns now identify as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Atlantic reports on the church’s massive decline in reported births, but births are only recorded if optional paperwork is filled out in a timely manner by parents and an unpaid volunteer in the local congregation known as “the clerk.” So the record decline of church-reported births could be driven by decline in church activity or even by an increase in clerk laziness about paperwork!

The Trib’s article relies on lagged measures of fertility that capture how many kids members had rather than how many they are having. For example, The Trib reports on the “average number of children per family that respondents said they were raised in,” which is not a good way to capture a rapidly changing situation.2

2. My best estimate of the Latter-day Saint-specific current fertility rate

Now that I’ve established that these esteemed institutions all use faulty measures of Latter-day Saint fertility, please enjoy my own personal faulty measure of Latter-day Saint fertility!

The gold standard of fertility reporting is the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). TFR represents the average number of children a woman who is currently in her childbearing years will have.

I can use existing data to provide an estimate of the TFR of self-reported Latter-day Saints in Utah.

The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute calculated the total fertility rate of each county in Utah for the year 2023. The Public Religion Research Institutes also provided estimates of the percentage of people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints in each county of Utah for the same year. We can examine the relationship between these two estimates, scaled by county’s population, for each county in Utah below.

Note the correlation between TFR and percent LDS, especially among the more populous counties.

I will assume that the non-LDS fertility rate of each county is the same as the CDC’s national estimates of counties of the same classification on the rural-urban spectrum.

However, fertility rates fell 8% in the U.S. between 2017 to 2023 (and has stayed flat since 2023). I will assume that this 8% decline took place uniformly across types of counties.

“But wait!” you cry. “Why do we think Utah’s non-LDS population is comparable in its fertility habits to the national average?”

So glad you asked. The non-LDS population in Utah might be pulled in opposite directions by the ubiquity of their Book of Mormon-reading neighbors:

1. The prevalence of kids and the child-friendly atmosphere might influence them to have more kids than national average

2. Given the salience of the church in Utah, nonmormons may feel the need to make choices that clearly demarcate themselves as not mormon (e.g., not propagating a horde of children or getting married at 22)

Which effect is stronger? I don’t know! It may vary by county. Hopefully, the two effects mostly cancel each other out and my estimate is pretty good.3

Anyway, we use the assumed non-LDS TFR along with the data above to compute the LDS TFR for each county. Here’s the results by county4:

Now we can use the county estimates of LDS fertility along with the LDS population estimates to obtain the overall LDS TFR estimate in Utah. I find that the TFR of people in Utah who self-identify as Latter-day Saints is 2.1 children per woman.

Now all I need to do is forget everything I’ve ever learned in my economics classes and extrapolate the TFR of Latter-day Saints in Utah to be the TFR of the Latter-day Saints throughout the U.S.5

I’d be willing to put money down (or at least I would have been before last Sunday) that the total fertility rate in the United States for people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints is between 2.0 and 2.3.

3. Putting the Latter-day Saint fertility rate into historical context

Pew Research published the following in 2014.

This is completed fertility, not the total fertility rate, so to compare this against a modern TFR estimate is actually to compare cohorts that are separated by 30 years.

Using this data, let’s compare the decline in fertility between self-identifying Latter-day Saints and national average:

It looks like fertility among latter-day Saints is declining (both in relative and absolute terms) MORE quickly than U.S. fertility.

So the obvious question: Why is Latter-day Saint fertility declining so quickly?

But to answer that question, we first need to understand why it was so high in the first place. Latter-day Saint fertility decline today represents an increased convergence with the trends of society. How was my parents’ generation able to buck societal trends and have so many kids?

4. How was my parents’ generation able to have so many kids?

Premarital sex was (and is) a big no-no according to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To paraphrase what wrote for in her analysis of Orthodox Jews’ fertility in the U.S., such a prohibition is much less implausible when community members marry around 20 years old. And that’s exactly what my parents’ generation of Latter-day Saints did.

After a 21-year old man proposed to a 20-year old woman, their engagements would only last three or four months. Weddings weren’t too fancy and the reception was most often held at a church building (cost of renting the venue: $0).

After their early marriage, they tended not to use birth control, at least not initially. The church’s stance on contraception was not obvious to its members at the time, as a a 1979 publication of a church magazine response to an anonymous question shows. “Is it our understanding that we are to propagate children as long and as frequently as the human body will permit?”6 The church permitted contraceptive use for the spacing of children, but church leaders also denounced the use of “selfish and unwarranted birth control” in 1979.

Despite the fact that my parents’ generation of Latter-day Saints got married when they were still wet behind the ears, their marriages mostly survived. Only about 20% of them got divorced in the following 40-50 years, less than half the divorce rate of non-Latter day Saints for that generation.

I’m not sure all the reasons for that, but the fact that Latter-day Saints consider marriage to be a sacred covenant not only with your partner but also with God is certainly a contributing factor.

Church leaders discouraged women working outside the home into the 1980s. Back then, housing prices were cheaper relative to median incomes in the U.S. than they are today, so many of my parents’ generation were able to buy a house shortly after marriage despite their household only having a single income.

The institutional church promoted a domestic vision of motherhood. For example, in a 1979 General Conference of the church, Neal Maxwell said:

When the real history of mankind is fully disclosed, will it feature the echoes of gunfire or the shaping sound of lullabies? The great armistices made by military men or the peacemaking of women in homes and in neighborhoods? Will what happened in cradles and kitchens prove to be more controlling than what happened in congresses?

This kind of traditional, idyllic view of motherhood (and the fact that it was mostly articulated by men) is a controversial and divisive issue within the church today, but my sense is that my parents’ generation generally accepted it uncritically.

On Mother’s Day, the woman with the most children and the woman with most grandchildren was recognized publicly in some congregations.7

Women throughout the congregation supported each other and helped each other raise their kids. When a woman would give birth, the women’s organization would organize volunteers to provide meals for the family for the first few weeks of the new baby’s life. (This last practice continues unchanged to this day).

5. Why is the birth rate declining now?

Latter-day Saint fertility is likely falling for all the same reasons that fertility is falling throughout the world. To paraphrase of the Institute of Family Studies: fertility is down because marriage is down, and marriage is down because socializing is down. Lyman estimates that 75% of national fertility decline is due to declining marriage rates.

I have a theory that the declining marriage rate is a bigger part of the national puzzle than it is for the Latter-day Saint subculture. In other words, I suspect that the fertility of married couples of Latter-day Saints is falling more than the fertility of married couples of Americans generally. The reason I believe this is because Latter-day Saint women have increasingly entered the workforce in the last few decades. This was accompanied by a cultural shift away from the traditional, idyllic vision of motherhood described above. Perhaps an energetic, capable, married Latter-day Saint woman who might have ended up with six kids in my parents’ generation will end up today balancing three children and a job.

Nevertheless, let’s accept Lyman’s analysis as a starting point rather than my rudderless speculation. Latter-day Saint fertility decline is likely mostly due to decline in marriage.

[EDIT: I should have gone more with my gut. Since posting, Ciara Hulet made me aware of an article she wrote for NPR that includes analysis from Stephen Cranney that suggests that the LDS fertility decline is likely more due to falling fertility within marriage than LDS marriage rates falling. I’ll write more about this in the future.]

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6. Conclusion

The Latter-day Saints have historically had a healthy demographic profile as high birth rates have kept the congregations young:

Given the decline in the Latter-day Saint birthrate and retention rate, that may change. I’ve seen a few congregations where the adult to child ratio is really high, and it feels sad to me that that could be coming for the denomination broadly in the U.S.

I enjoyed being a kid among a horde of kids. I am the fifth of seven children. My cousins are as innumerable as the sands of the sea. As a kid at church, there were always enough other kids that we could play impromptu games of basketball.

I don’t mean to be too nostalgic. I’m grateful for the reforms that have happened since the 1970s in my own religious tradition.

But is it possible for Latter-day Saints to hold on to their historically pro-natal culture in our new setting? I’m not sure, but I have a guess of at least part of what it would require.

It was modelled by my Aunt Karen (who isn’t actually my Aunt, but rather my dad’s cousin). When I was living in Utah, she invited me over to her house for dinner. I pulled up a chair next to a second cousin who I was dimly aware of. It felt awkward but the food looked good so I still felt grateful Aunt Karen invited me. Just before we started eating, she stood up and said, “Once you’re finished, please don’t worry about doing the dishes. If you feel like doing something nice for me, talk to each other.”

The Puritans are an easy group to make fun of, so people have been doing it for 400 years. “A Puritan is such a one,” the London lawyer John Manningham wrote in 1602, “as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.”1 Three centuries later, the American journalist H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

It’s not based on nothing. The Puritans could be illiberal, intense, and unpleasant. “Dig up a carcass dead of the plague and go and kiss it,” a Puritan preacher named Hugh Peter told his congregants in the 1630s, “sin is more horrible.”2 Some Puritans were so offended by representations of the cross (what they considered a graven image and thus forbidden by the second of the ten commandments) that they smashed stained glass windows, destroyed crucifixes in cathedrals, and slashed flags with crosses on them into bits with their swords. When the Puritans held political power, they branded adulterers, banished heretics, and embraced public whippings.

Today, puritan and puritanical are not words of endearment. In October 2021, the Atlantic’s cover story, “The New Puritans” by , articulated a fear that Puritan-esque intolerance and demand for social conformity were on the rise.

Be that as it may, there is at least one lesson we could learn from the Puritans: their seriousness about sin extended to their own conduct. Sure, they were judgmental of others, but they also considered how judgment’s finger pointed to themselves.

For example, the Puritan minister Samuel Ward, who would later serve as one of the translators of the King James Bible, left a remarkable diary that includes a daily confession of his sins as he trained to be a minister at Christ’s College, Cambridge. On May 11, 1595, he reproached himself for feeling angry because of his tutor, Mr. Newhouse, gave such “long prayers.” Two days later, he felt “little pity for the boy who was whipped in the hall.” On other days, Samuel confessed lusting after praise, “adulterous dreams,” a wandering mind at prayer, “immoderate use of God’s creatures,” longing after plums that he vowed not to eat, and (the hardest one to believe) “forgetfulness in noting my sins.”3

It wasn’t just Samuel. Another Puritan preacher, Richard Blackerby, told his grandchild,

what a vile heart I have, and how I am plagued with proud thoughts. Child, if thou hast any acquaintance with God, pray for me, that God would purify this filthy heart.

Reading about the Puritans’ negative self-conception reveals how positive modern religion, spirituality, and culture are. Daily sin journals are out now; daily gratitude journals are in. Pastors are unrelentingly upbeat and encouraging. Popular Christian writers like Marilynne Robinson write about “waking up in Eden” every morning.

And this kind of positivity is present in the non-religious world too. A friend who attended UC Berkeley in the early 2010s told me about the constant presence around town of a man who held a sign that said “YOU ARE PERFECT!” Becky Kennedy has sold millions of copies of parenting books under the very un-Puritan premise that we are all “good inside.” As summarizes, the industry and culture of wellness sends a similar message:

[The inner] self is good, and its recovery is the original fount of human happiness. But it has been polluted by an outer society that feeds us unhealthy foods, . . . that sets goals and expectations that build anxiety and self-doubt, and by competitive urges that undermine our self-esteem.4

This positive conception of the self is deep in our culture.

Now then, I don’t want to come across as too grouchy. I like positivity! I mostly think the fact that the Puritans lost the fight over the popular conception of human nature is a good thing. But I also think that the pendulum has swung too far.

With constant emphasis on an “inner good self” and little emphasis on “sin,” people are too inclined to think whatever they do is good or justified. It doesn’t require a religious affiliation to realize that the “good inside” message doesn’t account for humanity’s natural selfishness and cruelty. As Megan Dent wrote in her excellent rebuttal of Becky Kennedy’s gentle parenting philosophy,

You couldn’t build a successful parenting business these days on the basis of the more challenging, but probably more accurate depiction of human nature captured by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, who wrote in his Pensées (c. 1660), “What a chimera a human being is! What a novelty. What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy!”

For Christians, it is worth considering that without the concept of sin, Christianity is basically pointless. As Jesus points out, “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.” Forgiveness of sin is only meaningful if sin means something real.

No one seriously wants to go back to the time of the Puritans. But they got this right: humans are not wholly good creatures, it is worth admitting and wrestling with the bad that is inside all of us, and if we are going to call out sin, it’s good to start with the self.

In the 1600s, a community of English settlers in Massachusetts resolved that they would live in complete harmony with biblical teaching. “No custom or prescription shall ever prevail amongst us,” they proclaimed, “that can be proved to be morally sinful by the word of God.” They included plenty of citations to the Law of Moses, so they were not naive about what they were signing up for. Persons convicted of adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy, stealing, and bearing false witness would “surely be put to death.”1

Ultimately, though, the Puritans of Massachusetts settled for banishing heretics and branding adulterers instead of killing them.2 So why did they chicken out?

A tradition of liberty had developed enough by the mid-1600s that even these religious zealots were uncomfortable jettisoning it in favor of complete consistency with the Bible. The Puritans’ legal code also included laws outlining redress for victims of domestic abuse, the right to appeal, and a democratically-elected government, none of which are found in biblical law. An early version of liberalism had already taken root among the Massachusetts Puritans.

Liberalism is an individualist and egalitarian tradition that emphasizes due process rights, religious liberty, and freedom of speech. Liberalism

confers on all men the same moral status . . . and accord[s only] a secondary importance to . . . historic associations and cultural forms.3

In his book Liberalism as a Way of Life, the philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism is the “background culture” of the modern West. He writes,

I believe most of my readers should identify liberalism as the source of their values: not just of their political opinions, but of who they are through and through.

The religiously devout are less likely to be disciples of liberalism “through and through,” but they are still deeply influenced by the tradition. Lefebvre continues,

No one in this globalized age is anything “all the way down.” There are, for example, no Christians all the way down—no one of Christian faith whose worldview is not entangled with other cultural influences (such as nationalism . . . and liberalism).

Disentagling Christianity and liberalism would be a futile task as they have so deeply influenced each other. But that’s a topic for another day. Today, I want to talk about how we react to the moments in the Bible that conflict with liberalism’s values. Here are three such examples:

1. In the middle of the ten commandments, God tells us that He

   punish[es] children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but show[s] steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments (Exodus 20:5).

   The Christian idea that “men should be punished for their own sins” fits seamlessly with liberalism’s individualistic outlook, but God’s insistence that divine punishments and rewards can get passed down the generations offends our liberal4 sensibilities.

2. In one of only two narrative passages in Leviticus, we read the story of a man who blasphemes while brawling with another man. The blasphemer is brought to Moses and kept in custody while the will of the Lord is revealed. The Lord tells Moses,

   [L]et all who were within hearing lay their hands on his head, and let the whole congregation stone him. And speak to the people of Israel, saying: One who blasphemes the name of the LORD shall be put to death (Leviticus 24:10-16).

   The special emphasis Leviticus places on blasphemy, a concept utterly opposed to liberalism’s tradition of free speech and religious freedom, is unsettling for a modern reader.

3. In the gospel of Luke, James and John ask Jesus if they could burn down a city that did not receive them graciously.

   Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did? (Luke 9:54).

   This callous suggestion shocks those of us accustomed to liberalism’s emphasis on religious freedom and individual rights. Ultimately Jesus says no, but, as James and John point out, there is precedent elsewhere in the Bible for what they ask.

Generally, Bible believers ignore moments like these. There aren’t many people like the Puritans out there anymore that want to embrace the whole biblical enchilada. Sermons, Sunday school manuals, and Children’s Bibles tend to draw out the anecdotes and ideas that are spiritually enriching and consistent with today’s values while ignoring everything else. This is understandable—believers don’t want to choose between two sets of beliefs they hold sacred: their belief in the Bible and their belief in civil rights.

But I submit there is something to be gained from pausing and zooming in on these moments of tension. For one, our reactions to these episodes might help us be honest about what we actually value. We can recognize that Lefebvre is correct when he says that modern Christians’ “worldview is entangled with other . . . influences.” This is something that the Puritans didn’t want to admit, but their revealed preference shows that even they chose liberalism’s values over biblical law at times. In turn, this realization might help us recognize that we have more in common than we may have thought with those who do not share our faith, including with those who do not belong to any religion.

Lefebvre writes,

The most obvious and important realities can sometimes be the hardest to think and talk about.

Often, we only begin to understand our own culture by stepping outside of it. For many people, the best exposure they have to a deeply illiberal society is through the Bible. Reflecting on the illiberal moments in the Bible may raise some uncomfortable questions for believers, but it might also clarify our own values and even help us appreciate the remarkably accepting society in which we live.

29 of my 32 great-great-great grandparents migrated to the Western United States as part of the Mormon Exodus; the other three were born in Utah after their parents had made the trek. 15 of them traveled from their homes in the British isles; the other 14 came from the Eastern or Midwest United States. Despite the fact that they lived in a time when most people could only travel as fast as a horse could carry them, their birthplaces and death places are separated, on average, by 3,176 miles. 25 of them died in Utah, six in other locations in the American West, and Eliza Dyer died in childbirth near Council Bluffs, Iowa, a stop on the Mormon Trail. She had no help. She and her twin babies were buried in the same coffin.

They were a crazy, ambitious, and committed bunch. In 1852, Levi Savage, Jr. left his new home and growing family in Utah to evangelize in Burma for the two-decade-old Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It took him nine months to get there. He found locals to live with and to teach him the Burmese language free of charge. He had little success in converting the locals or the occupying British soldiers. After two years in Burma, he underwent a treacherous 13-month journey home that included joining a handcart company of recent British converts on the Mormon Trail.

The immigrants who gathered to Utah were poor. In 1851, a Lutheran bishop in Denmark wrote that the Mormon converts were made up of “the dregs of the population.”1 In The Gathering of Zion, the historian Wallace Stegner describes the British converts as “the casualties of the industrial revolution, life’s discards, to whom Mormonism had brought its irresistible double promise of a new start on earth and a guaranteed Hereafter.”2 To keep costs down for European converts who couldn’t afford it, the Church organized companies that would travel without animal assistance. “Propertyless, ill-equipped, untried and untrained,” Stegner writes, European immigrants “were not only going to Zion, they were going to walk there, nearly fourteen hundred miles, hauling their belongings on handcarts.”

Levi Savage Jr. counseled his handcart company against leaving for Utah too late in the season. The company leader reprimanded him for his lack of faith. Levi responded heroically,

Brethren and sisters, what I have said I know to be true; but seeing you are to go forward, I will go with you, will help you all I can, will work with you, will rest with you, will suffer with you, and if necessary I will die with you.

Levi didn’t die, but everyone involved suffered. On October 25, 1856, Levi perfunctorily noted in his journal, “nothing of much note transpired, except the people died daily.”

The first generation of Latter-day Saints had an us-against-the-world mentality. According to the aforementioned Danish Lutheran Bishop, the “so-called Mormons … disdain and mock their fellow citizens, whom they call heathens, and call themselves the true Christians.” Brigham Young cheered on the U.S. Civil War, seeing it as just retribution for the United States’ mistreatment of the Saints.3 My ancestors took comfort in the tradition of Christian martyrs. “The trials of the Latter-day Saints are nothing compared with those of the former-day Saints,” my great-great-great grandfather Jesse Smith recorded in his journal while he was on the run from the enforcement of anti-polygamy law. “It seems that the Saints must be hated and reviled by the wicked and unbelieving world.”4 Jesse fled to Mexico to avoid conviction.

The craziness was sometimes a bit much, especially in the eyes of the next generation. Brigham Young sent John Van Cott and his wives and children, including his third wife, Caroline Pratt, to settle rural Sanpete County in Utah. While there, John and Caroline’s son and my great-great grandfather, Oscar, went to bed hungry every night. Oscar blamed Brigham Young for his hardships and was critical of the church all his life.5

Despite the fact that none of them had much formal education, they were impressively literate. As children, they worked in factories (up to 13 hours a day) or on the family farm instead of attending school, but somehow they learned to write long letters and rhymed poetry. No one would mistake their poetry for Walt Whitman’s, but it’s more than I would expect from someone with a decade of formal schooling in the U.S. today.

Their biblically-obsessed Protestant culture meant they mastered the fundamental academic skills of reading, writing, and arguing about religion. My ancestor Joel Hills Johnson was offered a scholarship to attend a Presbyterian college to become a preacher after a poem he wrote criticizing the Universalists went 19th-century viral. (He declined.) My great-great-great-great-great grandpa Asael Smith would have been the subject of Joel’s scorn; he was a founding member of a Universalist society in Vermont. He wrote a letter to his descendants encouraging them to believe that God “will have all mankind to be saved” and warned them not to think that they are “one whit better by nature than the worst heathen in the darkest corner of the deserts of Arabia.”

My great-great-great grandparents embraced something radical. They broke profoundly with national and religious traditions and were mocked and persecuted for it. Their embrace of polygamy was controversial then as well as now: in Europe, missionaries were portrayed as sex traffickers in popular media, while in the U.S., the Republican Party was founded to stamp out “the twin relics of barbarism: slavery and polygamy.”6 Converts called their home countries “Babylon” and articulated homesickness for a place they had never been. Once in Utah, they built log cabins, participated in a communal economic system, and implemented enough irrigation projects to earn the nickname “the Lord’s beavers.” They fought locusts off their crops with shovels and sticks, ate bark, roots, crows and wolves, negotiated and fought with the local American Indians, and, somehow, managed to survive.7 In the evenings, they sang hymns, read scripture, and said prayers in families or groups. On the whole, it went better than one might expect for the gathering of the dregs of the population.

There’s a way of interpreting the Book of Job as quite anti-intellectual. Job faces a cocktail of catastrophes and then questions God. At the end of the book, God appears, and, completely ignoring Job’s questions, demonstrates his power. Job repents for his earlier questioning and is blessed. He lives happily ever after, the end. So, under this interpretation, the takeaway from the Book of Job is that “it’s better not to ask questions as long as we are trying to follow God.”

If this is the message of the Book of Job, then why is the Book of Job such a favorite for the doubters and the intellectuals? Part of the answer is because of the strength of Job’s arguments. One theme of the book is that Job would love to take God to task for his unfairness.

Job 13:3:

But I desire to speak to the Almighty

and to argue my case with God.

Job 23:3-4:

Oh, that I knew where I might find him,

That I might come even to his dwelling

I would lay my case before him

And fill my mouth with arguments.

Job 9:32:

[God] is not a man like me that I might answer him,

that we might confront each other in court.

Job 9:16-17:

Even if I summoned him and he responded,

I do not believe he would give me a hearing.

He would crush me with a storm

And multiply my wounds for no reason.

Obviously, Job has a personal reason for his animosity against God, but he sees beyond himself and constructs an argument against God that considers the miserable conditions that the poor find themselves in.

Job 24:5, 7, 10, 12:

Like wild donkeys in the desert,

the poor go about their labor of foraging food;

They lie all night naked, without clothing,

And have no covering in the cold

By the mountain stream they are soaked

And unsheltered they hug a rock

From the town the folk groan,

the dying breath of the fallen cries out,

yet God pays no attention to their prayer.

The ending of the Book of Job is a tad bizarre. God speaks to Job out of a storm and asks Job if he has ever walked on the bottom of the ocean and if he knows the timing of mountain goats’ reproductive cycles. God also points out that ostriches can outrun men even when riding their favorite horses. After going on like this for a while, God asks Job to answer him. Here’s the big exciting climax both Job and the reader have been waiting for! But instead of arguing his case, Job folds.

Job 42:3:

I have uttered what I did not understand

wonders beyond me that I did not know.

Job seems persuaded by God’s display of power, but for a reader today, the ending can fall flat. The examples God points to demonstrate His superior knowledge and power just aren’t that compelling anymore. I can find out about mountain goats’ reproductive cycles and the bottom of the ocean using the internet. My car is faster than an ostrich. Combine this with the fact that Job’s arguments never get answered, and it’s easy to feel unsatisfied by God’s response. So that’s why you get G. K. Chesterton’s hot take that “even God was tempted to atheism in the book of Job.”

If the reader is completely satisfied with God’s response to Job, then the anti-intellectual interpretation makes sense and there isn’t much reason to dwell on the arguments Job raised. The tendency of my own tradition is to ignore Job’s arguments and instead, mostly treat the Book of Job as if it were just the first two chapters and the ending—where Job is perfectly pious—with a brief stop at the verse that shouts out the resurrection and is included in Handel’s Messiah. The reason I don’t subscribe to the anti-intellectual interpreation is that the Book of Job lays out Job’s argument and the problem of evil so well that it seems like the authors want you to consider it. If we just ignore Job’s argument, we miss the meat of the book and what is at stake in belief.