I recently saw a commercial for a bank that I suppose is now characteristic of the genre. It celebrated financial stability as the freedom to do whatever you want when you want. Whether what you have in mind is a bucket-list vacation or starting a family, this bank, the commercial promised, would help you fulfill your dreams. The notion that starting a family is something certain people elect to do if they decide that it will make them happy has become such a commonplace that it largely escapes notice. It must be noted, though, that while the commodification of the human child is assumed in America today, it is a historical oddity.
The tributaries of the looming demographic collapse of the developed world, which is finally being brought into public consciousness through the work of demographers such as Paul Morland, are many. But as Louise Perry notes, affluence is the single best predictor of a country’s fertility rate: “Once a country crosses the threshold of $5,000 USD in GDP per capita,” Perry continues, “it starts the journey towards sub-replacement fertility.”
The part of our world positioned to avoid this collapse is the area of sub-Saharan Africa that extends from the coast of Mauritania in the west to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the east. Without a social safety net, parents in these countries rely on their children to care for them in old age, and they have large families because they still face the prospect of losing some of their children before the children reach adulthood. The developed world has traveled far from this perspective in which it once shared.
This was brought home to me when I dropped my eldest child off at college a couple of months ago. There were sessions for parents as well as the students, banquets to enjoy and speeches to hear. What had once been a simple drop-off had become an extravagant exercise in meaning-making that invited the incoming students to leave their families behind and enter the adult world as individual economic units. This was a bit odd for my Taiwanese wife, for whom the logic of attending college is still rather straightforward: you send your kid to college because your kid needs financial stability to take care of you in your old age.
Such a perspective is a relic not only in America but also in an east-Asian culture that has rapidly modernized and now boasts such low birthrates that countries such as South Korea are set to have 93-98 percent fewer childbirths in 2100 than they do today. “No disease or invading army has ever managed to destroy a country so thoroughly,” Perry observes. In Japan, one of the burgeoning new business markets is the fumigation of apartments in which the bodies of the elderly dead have rotted there for so long that conventional cleaning methods are grossly inadequate (Morland, No One Left, 26).
It would be wrong to reduce the premodern perspective that my wife shares with sub-Saharans to economics. What they share is an appreciation of the integral place of the child within the family and the larger community. My wife had a great-uncle she never met. This uncle and his siblings grew up in abject poverty. When his younger brother, my wife’s grandfather, managed to marry and beget a child—miracle of miracles!—this uncle gladly embraced a celibate life and worked long hours as a cab driver to provide for his brother’s growing family, something he did until his death.
For this uncle, it made perfect sense to make the child of another the center of his life, given the frailty of mortal existence. He understood intuitively that the arc of human life begins with conception, passing through childhood and adolescence into marriage, child-rearing, and death. In his culture, people did not presume that the right to enjoy the fullness of this arc belonged to everyone. But it was taken for granted as belonging to the community nonetheless, in the lives of those members who had been given over to its times.
These individuals were seen as privileged, as we see in the case of Elizabeth, who rejoices that her disgrace has been taken away (Luke 1:25). The married were also pitied by solitaries such as Paul, who was deeply saddened by the hardships that would inevitably befall those who were swept up by the hardships that accompany procreative life (1 Cor. 7:7). Whether married or unmarried, early Christians understood that, as they followed the celibate Rabbi who was also the Bridegroom of a Bride with many children, they were to devote themselves to building up this household of faith, which included households with children.
The New Testament is largely silent regarding child-rearing and children’s catechesis, but this silence should not be taken in an anti-natal and ultimately gnostic direction. The New Testament does not spell the end of the genealogically tethered Old Testament promises to Israel, but instead their extension into Gentile communities.
Like New Testament scholars, Church historians have had to dig to find solid evidence regarding these matters. Church liturgies give us some clues, and one such liturgy is the “Churching of Women.” The rite is very old, and it was retained from Medieval Catholicism by Lutherans, Anglicans, and Methodists.
The Roman rite draws heavily upon the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The updated Book of Blessings states that “through the delivery of the blessed Virgin Mary, Thou hast turned into joy the pains of the faithful in childbirth.” Here the experience of the Virgin is a divine affirmation of motherhood. And we might say more: lingering behind the churching rite is the great mystery that through childbirth God gives himself to his Church and to his world.
Within Anglicanism, the rite was initially cast in a traditional Levitical mode as the occasion to restore the new mother to ritual cleanliness and thus to the eucharistic community. It became the rite of “Thanksgiving for Childbirth,” which marked the end of the new mother’s seclusion. Wealthy women would sometimes be carried to church on sedan chairs, and the rubrics instruct the priest to invite her to sit at the front so that all might give thanks to God for her preservation. After the service, the new mother would make social calls and her family would often host an extravagant party for members of the parish so that her neighbors, like those of Elizabeth, could share in her joy (Luke 1:14; 58).
Mothers who were “churched” were newly welcomed into the Church well after their newborn children, who had been speedily received through the rite of baptism. In churches in which women are no longer churched, the rite of baptism must do double duty as a celebration of birth and new birth, and it is worth asking whether it can do so effectively. In a baptism service I recently attended, the child was presented not by godparents but by parents. This practice was accompanied by a sentimental moment that seems to have been the centerpiece of the liturgy. With hushed tones in the background, the couple paraded their little treasure up and down the aisle to a chorus of ahhs and ooos. “Goodness! Aren’t they lucky!”
My thoughts went out for those who had no children of their own. Even more, I wondered about the promise we had all made before God, which was tucked away somewhere in the liturgy. I grow nervous when I know that I will probably never again see the child I am promising to come alongside in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. But in this case, I wondered even if the members of the family’s entourage had noticed what they had just promised under oath. The commodification of the child, it seems, had been baptized.
I am quite happy to celebrate the good fortune of a new mother within the liturgy, thereby claiming this good fortune for the Church. When churching is administered as a natural complement to the baptismal liturgy, the baptismal entry of the child into the community is rightly ordered. In this case, the Church offers one liturgy to celebrate the gift of life and one to celebrate its spiritual complement. Such a church elevates a particular woman, there is no doubt, but only insofar as she is God’s chosen vessel who has given the Church its future in the form of a child.
We have labored for too long under the assumption that the elevation of the woman could be achieved through an anti-natal program. It has done so in part out of compassion for the barren woman. But it has also failed to see that the answer the Church has always had, in the Incarnation, provides the only viable solution to the problem of procreative inequality, a problem that is embedded not merely in the reality of human birth but in the reality of created difference. For it is only in the Incarnation that we can behold the gift of a particular child to a particular woman as a gift for all humanity, so that he might be “the firstborn of many brothers and sisters” (Rom. 8:29).
Christ came to earth and offered himself so that, as Psalm 22 puts it, “future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn” (30-31). The Church participates in Christ’s life and mandate as it promises to raise its children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The gift of life and new life that God offers to the world in the Word made flesh are embraced and received in the gift of the child who is welcomed into the Church. The Church that no longer has any children to baptize finds that it has no faith to offer the world.
The future of the Church in the West will be determined by its ability to overcome its host culture’s anti-natalism—not merely because such anti-natalism may soon leave them both with No One Left but because it is a repudiation of the gospel that founds the Church. Christians who can have children should. And Christians who cannot have children should bind themselves to those who can in the promise they have both made before God.
Disinterest in these imperatives is fueled by the modern commodification of the child, a commodification that only the Church has the power to resist. The liturgies of churching and baptism provide the qualities the Church needs to articulate its resistance. The churching liturgy celebrates the mother’s role in bringing new life. By bringing this celebration into the Church, the liturgy ratifies the truth that infant baptism broadcasts: this life must be claimed by the Church as its own. This signals what, from our modern point of view, is the great scandal of the baptismal liturgy as historically practiced: it is the godparents, speaking on behalf of the congregation, who name the child and offer her to the Church.
The parents play no special role in the service, and this invitation to relinquish their precious little possession is harshly dealt. Having been taken from them by the Church, the child experiences inevitable death in the waters so that in life and death he might be an offering unto God. If the sin of distracted congregants has been to fail to take the promise they make before God seriously, the sin of parents has been to refuse to allow their parental designs to drown with Pharaoh in the waters. Post-baptism, parents often erect boundaries around their nuclear families and devote their lives entirely to helping their children climb the ladder of worldly success. This longing for what had been left behind places them among those whose lives waste away as they cry out, “in Egypt ‘we did eat bread to the full’” (Ex. 16:3).
The plummeting number of baptisms in mainline churches is predictable given their established anti-natal and anti-evangelistic theologies. This collapse must be received penitentially as Divine judgment. It may also be a mercy, God’s compassionate intervention to cut short the customary blasphemously flippant oath-taking. But if the baptismal rite asks parents and non-parents alike to turn away from this sin, it also breaks down the wall that divides them, just as it overcomes the primordial barrier that separates Jew and Gentile as alike under sin (Rom. 3:19). As gospel proclamation, the liturgy charts a way in which parents and non-parents might both “go and sin no more” (John 8:11). The child in this case is a most remarkable gift, for she provides each member of the body the opportunity to offer the service of God, for which each person was originally called out of Egypt and for which Jesus offered himself as our Passover lamb (1 Cor. 5:7).
This mandate asks parents to follow Jesus’ lead by reimagining what it means to say “mine,” just as it asks non-parents to reimagine what it means to say “yours.” For it was Jesus himself who said, “Here are my mother and sisters and brothers” (Matt. 12:48-50).
The Rev. Dr. David Ney is a native of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, and a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. He currently serves as associate professor of Church history at Trinity School for Ministry, in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
