Faith and Vitality Among the People of God
Combatting the culture of sterility
But Jesus called to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” —Luke 18:16
I did not pick up Tim Carney’s new book, Family Unfriendly, to have my mind changed. That had already happened.
Six years ago, I felt an enormous shift in my thinking as I held my first son. Like so many of the people Carney interviews throughout his book, I thought parenthood was a choice individuals were free to make as long as it did not place any burdens on others. Once my wife and I started having kids, however, I suddenly realized the impracticality of my worldview. A presidential candidate once said it takes a village to raise a child. It turns out she was right.
Whenever our country talks about family policy it is mostly in the form of an economic debate. We discuss our country’s declining birthrate in terms of the net effect on GDP or how high daycare costs are for would-be parents. These economic concerns are valid and the debate over meaningful policy changes worthwhile, as Carney’s book demonstrates. There are real political changes we could pursue to make our society more family friendly, most especially in the realm of urban planning (more on that below).
However, as Carney points out, mere economic thinking is not enough:
[P]olicy and economics are not the primary determinants of birthrates. No economic reality will restore our desire to build families or the belief that its doable. No policy suite will reverse our Baby Bust. It’s not even as straightforward as religion, either. It’s something broader. It’s culture. Our culture needs to change (167).
There are some who aren’t even concerned about declining birthrates but actually celebrate it, thus proving Carney’s point that we are fundamentally dealing with a cultural issue, not an economic one or political one even.
As someone in ministry, this is both exciting and sobering. I have no policy or economic expertise. I could not hope to contribute any solution to family unfriendliness if it were simply a matter of dollars and cents (Perhaps other than helping direct a little diaconate money to the new mom and dad in our church which is still a good thing to do). But the problem ultimately being one about culture affords me the opportunity to provide some solutions. Despite what Carney says about the problem being broader than religion, the simple fact is that the culture is downstream from the cultus. What our society believes about families is inextricable from the problem of family unfriendliness, and I’m in the business of beliefs.
So what is the religious analysis of our family unfriendliness?
Religious War
In a speech that some people now believe cost him his job at Fox News, Tucker Carlson described the change he was seeing in our politics as something beyond the ordinary:
That’s a debate I’m familiar with. But if you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying? Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice, obviously. It’s not about, oh, a teen girl gets pregnant, and what do we do about that and victims of rape. I get it. Of course, I understand that, and I have compassion for everyone involved.
But when the Treasury secretary stands up and says, “You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.” Well, that’s like an Aztec principle, actually. There’s not a society in history that didn’t practice human sacrifice. Not one. I checked. Even the Scandinavians, I’m ashamed to say. It wasn’t just the Meso-Americans, it was everybody. So that’s what that is.
Well, what’s the point of child sacrifice? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, that’s a theological phenomenon.
And that’s kind of the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.
In other words, the debates between Republicans and Democrats, Left and Right, Harris and Trump mask what is, at its core, a spiritual war between good and evil. That is not to say one side wholly represents one and one side the other. Far from it. Rather, it is simply an acknowledgment of what Christians have known for a very long time: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
The evil force we face today is primarily an ideology—prevalent on both sides of the political aisle—that purports to set humans free to live lives of unencumbered happiness but actually enslaves them to fear and guilt.
Carney is right to call it “a culture of sterility.” Our hyper-individualist culture promises sterilization from the burdens of tradition, religion, and any kind obligation. No wonder parenthood is unattractive to so many. The ultimate good in our culture of sterility is complete and total independence, and children are the ultimate strain on our independence (they are anything but sterile either as the last diaper I changed can attest to). But Carney is right, “independence can never be an end in itself, and holding it as an ultimate good is a formula for unhappiness” (261).
In fact, it is those things that obligate us to others—religion, tradition, and family—that give our lives meaning and purpose. Our culture has done its best to strip us of these things and made us miserable in the process. Faced with the limitless possibilities liberation has to offer, humans still do what humans always do. They fall short. They make mistakes. They sin. Without any theological accounting of human depravity, or God’s grace for his corrupted but ultimately good image-bearers, the culture of sterility is forced to reckon with its own unpleasant conclusion that humans messed things up and there’s no going back. Stuck in such a mire of hopelessness, extinction sounds all too logical.
What Can The Church Do?
The church’s primary responsibility is to speak the life-giving words of the Gospel into this culture of sterility: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Its mission places the church in the position of being an antidote to the culture. We are salt and light in a dying and dark world (Matthew 5:13-16). On the question of family friendliness, the church can do a lot to promote family formation both theologically and practically.
Theology of Family
At the very beginning of the Bible we read God’s mandate to humanity:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:26-28).
The above passage is sometimes called “the cultural mandate”—a summary of God’s calling and expectation for men and women who uniquely bear his image in creation. As one can see from the text, culture-making (or having dominion) goes hand in hand with population growth. The two are inseparable. Contrary to the warnings of “population bomb” conspiracy theorists like Paul Ehrlich, God designed creation in such a way to accommodate more and more humans. All the best scientific data bears this out. We have not starved to death or run out of other natural resources even as the world’s population has skyrocketed.
Scripture paints the picture of a God who lavishly provides for his creatures (Psalm 145:15-16; Matthew 6:25-34). We must trust his provision and sovereignty and heed the cultural mandate to be fruitful and multiply without fear of scarcity.
Still, we live East of Eden, in a world beset by the ramifications of human sin. We do not live without hope, however, for God is constantly at work to redeem his people and his creation. Throughout Genesis, we read about the holy, transcendent, Creator God who nevertheless condescends to broken people personally and makes himself known, particularly through covenants—first with Adam, then Noah, and perhaps most importantly Abraham.
In Genesis 17, God establishes his covenant with Abraham:
Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojourning, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:3-8).
In this passage, we see God graciously promise to bring about the eventual fulfillment of the cultural mandate. God will bless Abraham (who, with his wife Sarah, is old and barren at this point) with children who will also share in God’s covenant blessings with the children they have and so on and so forth as they grow from a sojourning band of tribesmen to a sophisticated culture of kings and rulers.
The Apostle Peter recognizes that the covenant pattern of blessing continues in the New Testament church:
And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself (Acts 2:38-39).
In Christ, who Paul says is the promised seed of Abraham (Galatians 3:16), God has redeemed a people to himself to renew the original purposes of humanity: to glorify God by cultivating his creation and bearing his image throughout the world.
What does that mean for us?
Quite simply, it means God’s normative means of growing his church is through the family. God made man and woman for one another and established lifelong, monogamous marriage to safeguard and steward children as they raise them in the admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).
Saying that pattern is normative does not disqualify the childless from God’s covenant community. We remain on this side of glory, and all of creation, including our bodies, groans under the weight of sin (Romans 8:22). Still, God has united us all together—parents and non-parents alike—in the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit has knit us together and made us one.
Those who are members of the Presbyterian Church in America experience this oneness in childrearing during baptismal vows. Though the parents of the baptized infant have a unique duty to steward the child God has given them, the whole church vows to help the parents in that calling. Thus, being without children or the incapacity to have children of your own does not ostracize you from the cultural mandate; it just gives you a different role in God’s normative pattern.
I realize that what I have articulated may sound strange to many American evangelicals who are regularly bombarded with the prerogative to evangelize non-believing adults. Evangelization is vital and commanded by Jesus himself (Matthew 28:19). It is there in Peter’s words at Pentecost quoted above. However, we miss something fundamental about creation and God’s covenantal character if we treat children and families as incidental to God’s redemptive purposes.
Framing family formation in this way will go a long way to forming a culture of vitality in our churches that is strong enough to withstand the culture of sterility that surrounds us.
Church Practice
Moreover, there are many practical steps the church can take to encourage family formation.
In his book, Carney spends a significant amount of time interviewing members of the Kemp Mill neighborhood, a mostly Jewish community in Silver Spring, Maryland. Members of that community are both incredibly faithful and fecund, Carney says, averaging more children per family than nearly every surrounding zip code.
The example of Kemp Mill and other religious communities proves that faith and fertility go hand in hand. When Protestant churches articulate a positive theology of family like the one I have described above, we can reasonably expect to see more children in our pews.
But the reason for Kemp Mill’s family friendliness goes beyond doctrine. Property, especially its proximity to houses of worship and other houses full of children, is also a factor.
Protestant churches have largely abandoned the parish model of ecclesial community. There are several explanations for that which include car-centric urban planning and a consumeristic approach to worship. And while we ought to be careful of confusing correlation with causation, it is simply a fact that Americans were having the most children per family in a time when those families were walking to church.
Family friendly churches will do more than offer excellent child programming. They will also creatively imagine ways to be the geographical hub for their community. Perhaps this means looking for church property in locations where homes are adjoining, available and affordable. That may eliminate the possibility of building a megachurch complex, but it could set the stage for planting multiple smaller campuses whose community lives revolve around the regular liturgies of the church.
There are also ways to encourage family formation at the individual level. Many Millennial and GenZ couples rank adequate housing and financial security as necessary prerequisites to having kids. While perception may not always be reality, as Carney demonstrates, the truth is many young couples have given up their hopes for big families as they have given up their dreams of home ownership.
While churches cannot, and probably should not, be in the business of buying homes for their members, they could take a new approach to the tradition of parsonages. Historically, a parsonage was housing provided by the church for the clergy. Church could put a new spin on this old practice by procuring small, single-family homes close to the church for young members who would like to start having kids but could use some temporary financial assistance.
The church could offer free housing or significantly discounted rent in exchange for basic administrative or groundskeeping work for the church. This would put the young couple on a stable trajectory for family formation and, eventually, financial independence. Such an idea is just one example of what churches could do to create family friendly cultures while providing members a safety net for the many unexpected and unforeseen challenges to family formation.
Though the future of families in our nation looks dark, there is still hope. As Tim Carney so excellently documents in his book, there are countless communities out there raging against the dying of light.
For Protestants, our identity as a culture of life must be one that graciously challenges the culture of sterility through our faith in a future promised by a good God who loves us and loves our children.