Child Control: A Eulogy for Charles Provan
Michael Bray
Dec., 2007
A champion of truth died on 11 December, 2007. We express our gratitude to God for Charles Provan’s influence against population control (contraception). He advanced Biblical arguments in support of fertility and against efforts to thwart the divine blessings of children in a book entitled, The Bible and Birth Control (1989). In this role in life, Provan served his countrymen and all those who benefited by his exhortations.
One man who has proclaimed his thanks to Provan is Pastor Matt Trewhella. (There is, we think, no single person in the last two decades who has exerted a greater influence against abortion in America than he along with his Missionaries to the Preborn. They have marched throughout the land displaying pictures of the “American Holocaust” at colleges, street intersections, and many other venues.) Trewhella sent out the following general eulogy the day after Provan’s death:
Dear Friends of the Preborn,
Yesterday we learned that our friend and brother, Charles Provan, crossed over the river and went home to be with the Lord. This is a great loss to Christ’s kingdom here on earth – though it is Chuck’s gain. Chuck was the author of the books The Bible and Birth Control and The Church is Israel Now. Both books had a huge impact on my life.
If it were not for his book addressing the use of birth control, nine of my eleven children would not be here today. His book was what the Lord used to convince us NOT to use birth control. We saved money for two and half years after reading his book in order to undo my vasectomy. One year later, my son Jeremiah Stonewall was born! And the Lord continues to bless us ever since!
There is no doubt in my mind that there are literally thousands of children alive today because of Chuck Provan who otherwise would have never been conceived and born. Once he spoke at an Unlicensed Church Conference that our church hosted. Two pastors just at that one meeting had vasectomy reversals because of what they heard!
Chuck was unassuming, but he was a wealth to the Body of Christ. He was a pleasure to talk with and a well-read historian. Military history was a particular forte of his. We will greatly miss him and the huge influence for righteousness that he had in the earth.
Chuck died yesterday morning, Tuesday, December 11th. He was suffering from the flu. He had a kidney transplant four years ago, and the doctor’s believe his body simply shut down. Chuck and his wife Carol have nine children still living. They could use a word of blessing and encouragement at this time.
If you would like to send them a card/gift, you can write to them directly at:
Carol Provan
410 W. Main St.
Monongahela, PA 15063
May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!
[Here endeth the letter from Rev. Trewhella.]
National Ramifications
The folly of contraception born from the refusal of God’s blessings and sovereignty in the life of the individual is not without national consequences when such selfishness and Godlessness are widespread in a nation.
Columnist Don Feder warned of devastating consequences of depopulation in the civilized west in a speech entitled “How to Take the Chill Out of Demographic Winter” which he delivered to the New Generation Church, Riga, Latvia on November 15, 2007. Drawing from the work of Philip Longman he noted that population growth rates were below replacement level in most western countries. “No European nation has anything approaching a replacement-level birthrate,” he said. The United States, on an average, is about at replacement level. He observes that the variation from state to state corresponds with church attendance: “Fertility rates can be explained by a simple formula: Those who have faith in the future have children. Those who don’t — don’t.”
The nation in the worst prospective condition is the formerly Communist-dominated (i.e. civilly Godless) Soviet Union:
This catastrophe in the making can be most clearly seen in Russia. What Lenin, Stalin and Hitler failed to accomplish, the Russian people are doing to themselves. You might call it auto-genocide.
In Russia, the fertility rate is 1.17 (down from 2.4 in 1990, a decline of over 50%). Russia is losing three-quarters of a million people a year. Its current population of 145 million is expected to be reduced by a third by 2050. In Russia today, almost as many children are aborted as are born alive (1.5 million to 1.6 million).
The Russian people occupy 17 million sq. km, the largest land mass on earth. By comparison, the United States has 9.6 million sq. km. and a population of 303 million — in other words, a little less than half of Russia’s land mass and more than twice its population.
Where will the Russia of 2050 find the soldiers to guard its frontiers? Where will it find the workers to operate its factories and mines, to grow its crops and run its hospitals and schools?
Russia is pressed from the South by Islam and from the East by China. (Chinese settlers are currently colonizing Siberia.) If it exists at all, expect the Russia of the future to be significantly downsized.
Even Vladimir Putin sees the handwriting on the wall of the nursery. The Russian Federation is paying families a bonus of 250,000 rubles (the equivalent of $9,200) for a second child and for each child thereafter — in a nation where the average monthly wage is $330.
In the Russian region of Ulyanovsk, 550 miles East of Moscow, September 12th is Day of Conception. Families that have children 9 months later on Russia’s National Day can win anything from cash prizes to cars and refrigerators.
Mr. Feder, a Jew who holds the Scriptures in relatively high regard, offers a refreshingly sober warning to his Latvian listeners which is universally appropriate as are the Scriptures:
God is just. In Leviticus, after giving His law to the Children of Israel, as set forth in Deut. 30:19, God tells them: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you. I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.”
You choose life, you get life — including descendants. You choose death — in the form of population control, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, secularism, consumerism, unthinking environmentalism, selfishness and a live-for-the-moment ethic — and you get death, including no descendants.
A Breach with our National Christian Past
Social, ethical, and legal illicitness of birth control was the norm for our country (as for the western world generally) until the turn of the century. “Liberation” forces were well in motion in America following the upheaval of the Civil War, but the winds of change sometimes bring destruction of good institutions as well as those “peculiar” and evil ones. Radical voices for “freedom” from the “oppression” of traditions including marriage and the sexual restraint for single people resulted in the unanimous reactionary passage of the federal “Comstock law” of 1873. The law represented an effort to shore up conventional standards which were perceived to be under attack (and were, as history has since borne witness). The law represented American culture as it was. In part, it said:
All persons are prohibited from importing into the United States, from any foreign country, any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing, or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast, instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion. [our emphasis]
The “Comstock Law” was formally passed as an “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” Over the next three decades “24 states enacted their own versions of the Comstock Act, many of which were more stringent than the federal statute. The Comstock Law itself was recodified and reenacted several times in the twentieth century, and prosecutions for violations of the federal statute continued even as Americans became increasingly diverse and tolerant.” The Supreme Court continued to uphold the Comstock Law into the 1960s.
During this same period of national concern over sexual libertine tendancies, the American Medical Association reflected the same concerns expressed by the Comstock Law. “The AMA voiced concern about abortion, not only because of the danger to women, but also because of the possibility of a woman overlooking the duties imposed on her by the marriage contract.”
1930 is a landmark date when at its Lambeth Conference the Anglican Church passed a resolution in favor of birth control. The rest of Protestant Christianity began to relax their prohibitions as well, and as the churches abandoned the Truth, so the nation lost the light to guide its path.
Charles Provan addressed the core family issue of our time with the Scriptures, and he influenced one of our greatest Christian messengers to repent from an anti-human (contraceptive) lifestyle to produce many more children of God. As he shined a light for those who have eyes to see, may the reformation of individuals lead them and their churches to raise their voices for the reformation of public standards: the repudiation of our apostate federal courts and the restoration of our states’ codes.
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