This week Covenant will host a series of essays that address a cluster of realities: a drastically falling global birthrate; the reduction in the number of children in our larger society; and the relative disappearance of children in our churches. Our writers do not mount a systematic treatment of these realities, let alone propose a focused response. These are, rather, a modest set of thoughtful, if personal, reflections in the face of a changing cultural landscape regarding children and the church.
Yet these essays are all vigorously Christian in the theological sensibilities that inform them, buttressed by and serving a profound faith. Indeed, if there is a common thread in the essays of this series, it is that children matter deeply to God and form an essential part of God’s providential work of creation and redemption. Not children alone, of course; yet also, “just children.” Children and the gospel are inextricably linked, the former contributing to the gospel’s essential shape and destiny in the world, and the latter providing its hope precisely by enwrapping the lives of children into its heart.
The statistics, which will be reiterated in the next few days, if known at all seem hardly taken seriously. The past 70 years have seen a decline in fertility from 5 children per woman to 2.2 in 2021. “Replacement levels” are marked at around 2.1 births per woman, and over half the countries of the world now stand below that level. South Korea has a birthrate of 0.72 per woman, an almost incredible statistic for any nation hoping to perdure. But in the United States it is only 1.66. Economists in particular have begun to outline the almost unsustainable pressures this is beginning to put on the labor force and healthcare.
As for children’s numbers within the larger society, within the U.S. children were 36 percent of the population in 1964; in 2022, they accounted for 22 percent. Some social effects of this are straightforward: the need for schools and teachers is declining; and knock-on effects of this for universities and non-lucrative disciplines like philosophy, literature, history, and art history are only already emerging, as whole departments are being eliminated for lack of students.
More subtly, children are less visible because there are fewer children around, and with this change comes a host of real, if hard to quantify, shifts in how we perceive the world. The church? The near-disappearance of baptisms in the Episcopal Church (the bulk of which were always of children and which tracks with many other denominations) — an almost 75 percent decline in less than 15 years — speaks for itself. Children are simply absent from most churches on most Sundays.
Does any of this matter? The word natality — as in “pro-natality” and “anti-natality” — is mostly a latecomer to normal English usage. By the 19th century it had become a synonym for birthrate. Twentieth-century German philosophy in the line of Dilthey, Heidegger, and Arendt borrowed the term for a more existential purpose. (For those interested, a fine book by Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude [2010], traces some of this development.)
The term now referred to a “condition,” parallel to “mortality,” that defines human existence in an essential way. However recent this new connotation, the religious and specifically Christian resonance of the word goes back to its English origin as meaning simply birth. Fifteenth-century printer William Caxton noted that natality was a direct translation of the French nativity. Nativity: a reality that opens the modern interest in the concept to something yet more metaphysically rich, the being and person of Christ Jesus.
The modern philosophical interest in natality as a condition — that we are beings who are born is thus, for the Christian, bound to the essentials of our faith: to be born is an essential part of what it means to be created by God, and is therefore an essential aspect of what it means to be alive with God in a way that is true. To deny or to withhold birth is, as a Jewish tradition long held, a form of murder and is linked to the primordial sin of Cain, indeed of the whole human race’s destructive alienation from the Lord God King of the Universe.
That the promised Messiah, the Savior of the human race, is also born, and within the most constrained limits of such generation, is not so much the righting of a flawed condition as it is its transfiguration in a revelatory light. This Christian claim is also why the modern “anti-natal” movement within philosophy and its more popular versions of “We don’t want to have children because” [because the world is bad, because I am master of my freedom; because children are a burden oppressively foisted on the marginalized] strikes the Christan mind (or should) as a head-on attack upon the center of our hope.
Christians are, in their scriptural vison of children, stoutly unsentimental. One might, for instance, reflect on Psalm 8. “O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.”
Children proclaim strength, the strength not of human beings but of God in the face of all that would subvert that divine life. Children are utterly theocentric in their witness. As for the strength they proclaim, the Psalmist adds: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. … O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!”
Children are witnesses to the strength of God, because they are caught up, in their very creation and birth, as essential elements in the coming of the son of man; of, indeed, the Son of Man, the Messiah, who is both Son of Man and Son of God and who subdues the nations, brings justice to the poor, and destroys wickedness. They form the intricate web of his generation. This is not an abstract matter: the Messiah comes as a human being, born, raised, laboring, and bound to parents, family, and his community. Jesus, the Christ, carries all that, on which our life depends, in his birthed flesh. He establishes, in his body, the reality of human life, “little lower than the angels, yet crowned with glory.”
That is both the great gift of God’s love given to his creatures; it is also the way God’s love comes to us and transforms us. Children are both “given,” invented as it were, in this coming of Christ Jesus the child — that was an essential aspect of his incarnate life. Children are also, therefore, essential to the fulfilment of Christ’s coming: one cannot be an adult — including the One who dies on a Cross and is resurrected in glory and shares that gift with us — without first being a child; there is no race of Adam, and hence no Second Adam, without the life of children.
In a straightforward way, children are part of the great generational link that both constitutes the “children of Adam” — all of us — as well as constituting, as the very first verse of the New Testament puts it, “the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1); that is, our redemption. Children are the objects and instruments both of divine love at work, a cosmic conjunction without parallel, which is simply a way of saying that they constitute the grace of God apprehended and received in thanks for the Lord’s creatures. God’s mercy and grace, in this world, resides in the coincidence of Natality and Nativity.
All the essays that follow touch this thread somehow in social analysis, in personal practice, in memory, in bafflement, in hope. They move from the living room and chancel into the metaphysical order of creation, and penetrate into the heart of God. Whatever the world’s spreading drought of children may finally mean, at the least today it marks an urgent divine call back into the life of Christ.
The Rev. Ephraim Radner, PhD is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. The author of over a dozen books, Dr. Radner was previously rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado. His range of pastoral experience includes Burundi, where he worked as a missionary, Haiti, inner-city Cleveland, and Connecticut.