Book Review: The Wedding Bible

Title: The Wedding Bible 

Author: Cherri Cain

Date: 2026

Publisher: Cain Global

Quote: "Everything about Hartwell feels like stepping back in time, and I can't decide if that's comforting or suffocating."

Here is yet another push from those clinging desperately to Social Security for young people to ignore the reality of an overcrowded population in a sagging economy and have babies, more and more babies, because only perpetual population growth can keep Social Security going and life without Social Security is...unthinkable.

Think it, this web site growls. Littering a crowded world with surplus babies is a horribly selfish thing to do to either the world or the babies. We have to redesign Social Security to fit a stable population, which we can hope to achieve by refusing to replace existing population numbers, allowing a good steep population decline. No need for horrible Japanese or Canadian efficiency to kill off us oldies. Simply don't have babies to replace us when we do leave this world. Meanwhile, consider: most people are ready to change jobs long before they've done one job for thirty years, but most people do not thrive on a "retirement" lifestyle of sitting around watching television and watching themselves rot. People in their seventies and eighties can still be useful to society. Social Security needs to be preserved to provide a safety net of disability pensions for all who need those, not "retirement." 

Consider how Social Security might be kept going as a disability pension plan, something people don't mind paying into in order to support those in need even though mostll towns, but  people never need it. Then, if you dare, be one of the few, the proud, the unretiring. 

Admittedly that's an easier choice for a writer than it is for, say, an overnight truck driver. Admittedly, also, it's a choice people have no business talking about before the age of fifty-five.

So...meanwhile, for a general audience, we have "romance novelettes" like this one, with pretty decorations and script chapter headings and lots of Southern charm and lots of Christian references, in which a young church lady decides to abort her career because her late grandmother left her a Bible full of little notes reflecting her prayers that Emily will come back home and marry one specific hometown boy. 

Plenty of people, male and female, young and old, would be happier leaving the cities and living more simply in small towns or on farms. It's a popular fantasy and actually works for some people. However, in this novelette Emily's decision is presented in a misleading way and makes Emily seem to be what C.S. Lewis called "a moron and a parasite." Her healthy sense that throwing away her career just to flop into bed might not be a wise decision needs to be taken seriously, not dismissed as "fear" of "love." Very few people are afraid of love but any reasonable person would want to take longer than it takes a physical attraction to run its course, to be sure that what person is feeling is love. A reasonable person would also want, before throwing away the job in the city,, to have a reasonably satisfactory and reliable job in the small town. Hometown hero is a nice young man--now what's Emily going to do if he's hit by a train a week after the baby's born?

This sweet romantic fantasy can be enjoyed as a fantasy but it's based on ideas that are false, that are being pushed toward young women by people who know these ideas are false but push them for selfish reasons. When today's young people have more babies the chances are that those babies won't even grow up to find jobs from which they will pay into Social Security, but selfish old people want to believe that they will.

Enjoy this fantasy if it appeals to you. And reject the lies on which it's based.