Catholic Natalism: Peachy Keenan on Faith, Family, and Fighting Cultural Decay

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the world of Catholic natalism with special guest Peachy Keenan, author of "Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War." In this enlightening conversation, Peachy shares her journey from secular upbringing to devout Catholicism, offering invaluable insights on raising a large family in today's challenging cultural landscape.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] HEllo. My name is Simone Collins. I'm here with Malcolm and today a very special guest as well.

I'm so excited. This has been months in waiting. We are joined by Peachy Keenan. She is the author of Domestic Extremist, a practical guide to winning the culture war. Her substack you can find at peachykeenan. com. And in addition to regularly sharing top drawer hot takes on Twitter and her handles Keenan Peachy she's actually working on a new media startup called Lost Riviera, which maybe we'll hear about at the end, but Peachy, welcome.

Peachy Keenan: Thank you so much, you guys. It is so great to finally be here. We were scheduling it for such a long time and to see your smiling, happy faces. Well, you,

Malcolm Collins: you were speaking at the pronatalist conference and you were the funniest speaker there. So I am thrilled to have you on. Although I have to say some of our fans recently have also said my wife is really funny.

And I, I, that must be incredibly gender disconfirming for you. Because you know, the [00:01:00] stereotype is, is women, women aren't that, that humorous.

Peachy Keenan: That is, except for the women on, who are kind of like more right leaning, I feel like they are actually very funny and that's why they're kind of drawn into this, I think.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, I had a specific question that I wanted to focus on with this episode. Okay. So, there was a report that came out and looked at the fertility rate of the American native born Catholic population. And, and, and so for For those who don't know, P. G. Keenan is, I think, sort of the number one Catholic pronatalist in terms of like anyone I'm seeing.

And it came out and said that the average fertility rate was 1. 64 in the United States. Now, that's pretty bad considering the report was done in 2008. It was called Religiosity and Fertility in the United States, the Role of Family Fertility Intentions. When we look at Europe, The average Catholic majority country has a fertility rate of only 1.

3. And in Latin America, we've seen a rapid fertility collapse as well in the Catholic majority countries. [00:02:00] Now there have been studies and we know what's causing this. Catholics actually have exactly the same fertility rate once they're married as any other highly religious individual. But they get married much later than all other Christian denominations.

And so I wanted to brainstorm with you. Why do you think this phenomenon is happening? And how can we fix it?

Peachy Keenan: I've got all the answers right here. Hold on. Yeah. You have 30

Simone Collins: seconds. Go.

Peachy Keenan: Well, I'm going to just take a step back a little bit from that. I'm a Catholic convert, but I didn't, you know, I'm not just sort of one of these sort of regular, normal, normie American Catholics who kind of goes to mass at Easter and Christmas and like has two, 2.

5 kids, like that's not me. I'm more, I definitely joined the like more fundamentalist traditionalist Catholic sect, okay, because honestly, like I was coming from a very secular nothingness, you know, like actually like my mother was like a committed atheist. And when I was going to do it, I was like, okay, I'm, I'm in, [00:03:00] I wanted to like do it, actually do it, like actually do the real thing.

I want to be authentic. You know the authentic Catholic experience. Okay. And so I found this like, you know, group of, you know, our little like Catholic cult. There's these bubbles that are in various cities in America. You can find them. They're very based parishes where it's not watered down. They're not, they're not mimicking the Pope.

They're not saying, you know, who am I to judge their judging and they are okay. It was

Simone Collins: just great

Peachy Keenan: in a healthy way. Okay. They are like, if you listen up and you're like, oh, that you, it will lead you to good places. It will lead you to all this.

Malcolm Collins: Social pressure towards positive action. Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yes, exactly. How it's always been.

That's

Malcolm Collins: very old Everyone is supposed to be able to do whatever makes them feel good whenever they feel like doing it and be affirmed for believing whatever they want to believe about themselves. There's no way that could lead to any sort of psychological damage. Exactly. [00:04:00]

Peachy Keenan: All you

Malcolm Collins: have

Peachy Keenan: to do is like walk down any street where I live and you'll see the consequences of that.

Right. I, yeah,

Simone Collins: you're in the, Malcolm, you know, she's in Southern California, right? So like

Malcolm Collins: in LA, so one, we're going to have to get to why you're living in LA before this, I want to hear that, but I want to hear about your marriage story and your conversion story. Cause did you convert before you got married, after you got married?

How did you think about this when you were dating your now husband? Hmm. I got, I

Peachy Keenan: converted 10 years after we got married. I had already had four children. Whoa, we, yeah, so when we got married, both of us were, you know, basically former, former kind of liberal, basic nothings who had kind of found our own way to kind of more conservative political thinking, I think because of 9 11 and because of all the like failures of Republican presidents and all these things.

And we just kind of became like kind of radicalized really for both sides. And but I was when I met [00:05:00] my husband, I was so still, I was sort of politically conservative, but I was still socially liberal. That's how I had grown up. I went to the Ivy league. That was just what was, you're just absorbing. You weren't a savage.

I was, yeah, I was civilized. I was at the, I was at all the cool parties and everyone around me was. You know, a card carrying pro choice feminist. So of course I was also, but it was for all of us, it was very skin deep, you know, we, we, we didn't think much about it in that era. It was politics. Wasn't identity in those days, it was like, you thought about it once a year on election day, or if it came up in a class, like you didn't think about like my reproductive rights, like that was not even a thing.

Really, although, you know, people were definitely exercising those reproductive rights all around me. And so I met my husband and he had already been red pilled. And so when we first started dating, we were like in the process of, you know, I just moved to New York city and it was very like romantic.

And then we were kind of, you know, falling for each other. [00:06:00] But in the process I was discovering like very alarming things about him. Like he was a Republican. Oh no. Exactly. My parents were Republicans, but I had never met a Republican, like in my peer group. ever was open about it. He, he liked guns. He had a gun.

He had been in the military. I was like, all of these things were sort of like red flags to me and my like feminist bubble of like Oh no, like what will my girlfriend say?

Simone Collins: