[1] Christian ethics of children1 - as opposed, say, to the
study of children's spirituality or faith formation - has
traditionally asked profound questions about the larger meaning and
purpose of child rearing and the relation of children to
society. Deep roots of these questions lie in Jewish concerns
with creation, pro-creation, and offspring; New Testament interest
in Jesus' birth narratives, special ministrations to children, and
images of Christians as "children of God"; and also extensive Greek
discussions in Plato and Aristotle about children in relation to
nature, households, and government. The Christian tradition
around children has taken many lively twists and turns, disputes
emerging, for example, in the Middle Ages between Augustinians
based on the Confessions and Thomists from the Summa over
children's sinfulness versus goodness. Reformers like Luther
and Calvin disagreed over the relative moral obligations owed
children by the church and the state. And deep differences
emerged in modernity, not just between Enlightenment thinkers like
Locke, Kant, and Rousseau, but also between theologians like
Edwards and Schleiermacher, over children's nature, spirituality,
and capabilities.
[2] In contrast with this rich tradition, Christian ethicists of
the past 150 years have had relatively little to say about
childhood of a systematic or sustained nature. Children have
arisen as secondary concerns within larger discussions of business,
war, biomedicine, the environment, sexuality, marriage, and women,
but rarely in and of themselves. Christians, like other
ethicists, often assume that children belong to the private sphere
alone, perhaps suitable for empirical study by historians and
psychologists, but beyond weighty public debate. But this
privatization of childhood itself represents a problematic larger
cultural shift fueled by an Enlightenment individualism that values
rationality and agency over vulnerability and dependency, as well
as a Romanticist division of society from the "separate sphere" of
the sanctity of the home.
[3] Children today, however, face a whole raft of unique and
profound social issues. Thirty-five thousand children
globally die every day from easily preventable causes. In the
United States, children in the last three decades have become the
poorest segment of society, have the least access to health care,
and experienced seismic and well documented increases in ill
health, drug use, depression, suicide, and homicide. Children
also face significant declines in the stability and existence of
their parents' marriage, time spent with parents, protections from
the power of mass media, and other forms of social
capital.2 Children have
arguably become, in many ways, the new "other" in the public
sphere.
[4] The last decade or so has begun to see several emerging
voices in the Christian ethics of children that constitute
promising early signs for the possibility for a more sustained
ethical discipline to develop. Interestingly, almost every
one of these voices agrees broadly on the ethical problem: that
children's vulnerabilities are increasingly instrumentalized and
commodified under a contemporary social culture of autonomous
individualism. But the questions asked of this problem, and
the solutions offered, differ significantly.
[5] The earliest voice, from the late 1980's, might be called a
"communitarian" one that opposes individualism by re-imagining
child rearing as the transmission of larger social, civic, and
historical values. Beyond the simplistic ultra-conservative
discourse of "family values," this "top-down" approach began to use
teleological theories from Aristotle and Thomas to ask what
children need, as fellow fallen creatures, to become responsible
participants in communities. For example, Stanley Hauerwas
argues against contemporary "permissive" child rearing for an
alternative Christian ethics of "initiation of children into the
moral beliefs and institutions which we value."3 Gilbert Meilander
claims that "parents [should] commit themselves to initiating their
children into the human inheritance and, more particularly, into
the stories that depict their way of life. In so doing they
shape, mold, and civilize their children."4 And in a slightly
different way, Jean Bethke Elshtain proposes "a revamped defense of
family authority" so that child rearing can overcome superficial
self-actualization by "inculcating moral limits and
constraints."5
[6] A quite different Christian ethical approach subsequently
emerged, however, in the 1990's, that I would label broadly
"liberationist." While it is also worried about the negative
impact of market utilitarianism (hence it is not to be confused
with "libertarianism"), this "bottom-up" view asks instead more
deontologically oriented questions about children's economic,
cultural, and social justice in the face of their oppression.
Children are innocent and so vulnerable within contemporary market
forces that they need special systemic protections and
superabundant love. For example, Adrian Thatcher proposes a
new global "theology of liberation forchildren" that can
prophetically resist their increasing social
marginalization.6 Pamela Couture
somewhat similarly argues that "the central work of pastoral or
congregational care is care for the most vulnerable persons in
society, poor children," and this care fosters "the kind of
resilience that continues to share responsibility despite
overwhelming odds, gains, and disappointments, a resilience that is
tenacious because it arises from God's grace."7 And in a
different vein again, Herbert Anderson and Susan Johnson claim that
"when we say 'it takes a village to raise a child,' we mean that
two competent parents are not enough for the task of childrearing;
we also need to develop supportive environments that are
economically viable."8
[7] Finally, an even more recent approach has developed around
what I would call a "covenantal" ethics of childhood, although to
my knowledge this term is never itself used in this context.
This "dialectical" view mixes teleological and deontological
concerns by asking how mediating social institutions - like
marriage, family, and the church - may support children's
integration into their social ecologies. For example, Don
Browning argues for "the revival and the reconstruction of the
institution of marriage as a crucial new imaginative response to
the forcesof technical rationality," primarily in order to resist a
growing absence of fatherhood.9 Mary Stewart Van
Leeuwen advocates a "social partnership" model of child rearing
that uses the covenant of marriage to help "putchildren first,
without putting women last, and without putting men on the
sidelines."10 And closely
related is a Catholic recasting of Pope Pius XI's "principle of
subsidiarity" to argue that specialized family child rearing
responsibilities need to be protected but also "furnished help"
(subsidium) by larger social institutions like church and
state. Somewhat similarly, Lisa Cahill argues for viewing the
family as a "domestic church" in which children's private
capacities for compassion and love may be "gradually extended
… to larger and larger communities."11
[8] While each of these kinds of approach is asking important
questions, I confess that my own proclivities run more toward a
joining of the latter two. I have argued elsewhere that
childhood needs to be understood as a broad cultural and political
problem concerning the reproduction and re-creation of society
itself.12 This means that
we need to rethink social institutions - from family and marriage
to church, community, the professions, and the state - to better
and more rigorously support children's emergence as creative
contributors to the world. But it also means recognizing
children's unique social vulnerability and making profound
structural changes to economic and political systems that treat
children marginally. The church has not only a vital caring
role in children's day-to-day nurturance and development in
families, but also an often untapped prophetic role in calling
society to justice regarding those who cannot do so themselves.
[9] But rather than trying to answer the many complex issues
raised by these differences in approach, I think it is more
important at this point in the only just emerging cultural
conversation to try and clarify some of the key questions that
might prompt a sustainable, fruitful, and public ethical
discourse. To this end, I would like to conclude by taking
suggestions from the models of pluralistic hermeneutical debate in
thinkers like Paul Ricoeur and David Tracy to propose a more
broadly integrated disciplinary agenda.13
[10] First, it is necessary to begin, especially today, with the
ontological question of what children are when they come into this
world. This question has too long been dominated by
Enlightenment views of children as only pre-rational
proto-adults. It has also been obscured in Christian ethics
by the somewhat different abortion question of when children come
into the world. Children's commodification will be resisted
only by learning to investigate fundamental issues of children's
original innocence versus original sin, goodness versus evil, being
blank slates or brimming with inborn potentialities, spirituality
and embodiedness, passivity versus agency, vulnerability versus
capability, and so on. Religious thinkers are particularly
well situated to ask such questions because they have to do with
primordial human origins. How one answers them makes an
enormous difference in how one thinks children should be treated
and raised.
[11] Second is a teleological question of what, therefore, given
childhood's starting point in the world, child rearing should
ultimately hope to accomplish, its social purposes and aims.
Religion is again significant because it is in part through child
rearing that societies aspire for a transcendingly better
future. Should children grow up into contributors toward
common goods or independent-minded social critics, healthy
individuals or altruistic lovers of others, stewards of particular
traditions or reformers of the larger world? And how should
one define and critique differences in social expectations
connected with gender?
[12] Third is a more deontological question of where the
obligations and responsibilities should lie for moving from one's
ontological starting point to one's teleological aim. Gender
is again important today because child rearing responsibilities,
both in the home and elsewhere, continue to follow an industrial
model of falling chiefly upon women, indeed arguably increasingly
so, a longer tradition of male responsibility having been largely
forgotten. But there are also vital questions of the relative
ethical obligations toward children of parents versus society,
schools versus churches, extended family versus communities, and
business, mass media, and the state. Religious ethicists
should not confine themselves to the spheres of church and family
alone, because children's lives in our complex and global world are
impacted by a vast array of social forces and institutions, all of
which require a fresh and more integrated critique.
[13] Fourth and finally are practical questions, questions of
phronesis or "practical wisdom," concerning the means by which
these adults and social institutions should help bring children's
formation about. If Christianity finds redemption in the
activities of this fallen but not entirely hopeless world, then
practical questions are not just afterthoughts but part of the
ethical dialogue itself. For example, what symbolic and
theological languages could help parents to be simultaneously
loving nurturers and limiting disciplinarians? Should parents
stay (or get) married for the sake of their children, and should
the institution of marriage generally be strengthened for the sake
of children's overall well-being? How should children be
considered in marriage education, couples therapy, and divorce
law? Is the present school system up to its changing social
and cultural tasks? How can churches play a role as
children's public advocates? Should children have greater
rights from the state to health care, representation, and
protection from poverty?
[14] Some such disciplinary mosaic of questions is needed today
if Christian and other ethicists are again to treat childhood as
the serious public concern that it is. Religious thinkers
have the opportunity, based on their complex traditions, to resist
children's increasing cultural marginalization and lead the way in
addressing what will become one of the major social and global
issues of the twenty-first century.
© January
2004
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 4, Issue 1
1 A version of this essay was first given as a paper at
the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November
2003, at the inaugural session of a new Consultation on "Childhood
Studies and Religion." Thanks are due to Marcia Bunge and Bonnie
Miller-McLemore for organizing this session.
2 During the relative affluence of the last census in the
U.S., in 2000, 16.9% of American children under 18 - or 12.1
million children altogether - lived below the rate of poverty
(United States Census Bureau, "Census 2000," available on Census
web site, www.census.gov,
P60-210, pp. vi and ix). Approximately 10 million children have no
form of health insurance (Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornell West, The
War against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms
and Dads [New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998], p. 250).
Children spend on average 10 hours a week less time with their
parents than they did in the 1970's (Victor R. Fuchs, Women's Quest
for Economic Equality [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1988], p. 111). Children are now more likely than not to live some
of their childhood apart from one parent (Sara McLanahan and Gary
Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994], pp. 2-3, and Frank
F. Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin, Divided Families: What Happens
to Children When Parents Part [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991]). Children now have a 33% chance (up from 5% in 1970)
of being born outside of marriage (David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, "The State of Our Unions 2000: The Social Health of
Marriage in America," report of the National Marriage Project,
Rutgers University [2000] [see web site at marriage.rutgers.edu],
p. 33). The Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2000 "Kid's Count Data
Book" reports that the teen birth rate in the United States in the
late 1990's was twice that of any other developed country, about 6
births per 1,000 females ages 15-19 (p. 28).
3 Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a
Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 173.
4 Meilander, "A Christian View of the Family" in David
Blankenhorn, Steven Bayme, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, eds.,
Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family
(Milwaukee, WI: Family Service America, 1990), 133-48, p. 143.
5 Elshtain, "The Family and Civic Life" in Blankenhorn, et
al., eds., Rebuilding the Nest, 119-32, p. 131. See also Elshtain,
Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 326.
6 Thatcher, Marriage after Modernity: Christian Marriage
in Postmodern Times (New York: New York University Press, 1999),
pp. 132-70.
7 Couture, Seeing Children, Seeing God: A Practical
Theology of Children and Poverty (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press,
2000), pp. 13 and 16.
8 Anderson and Johnson, Regarding Children: A New Respect
for Childhood and Families ( Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 1994), p. 18.
9 Browning, Marriage and Modernization: How Globalization
Threatens Marriage and What to Do about It (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), p. 7.
10 Van Leeuwen, "The Signs of Kuyper's Times, and of Ours"
in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Stanley J. Grenz, Mardi Keyes, and Mary
Stewart Van Leeuwen, Women and the Future of the Family (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), pp. 75-92, p. 91
11 Cahill, Family: A Christian Social Perspective
(Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), p. 16.
12 Wall, "Animals and Innocents: Theological Reflections
on the Meaning and Purpose of Child-Rearing," Theology Today 59.4
(January 2003), pp. 559-582; and "Let the Little Children Come:
Child Rearing as Challenge to Contemporary Christian Ethics,"
Horizons, forthcoming.
13 See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1992) and "Love and Justice" in
Ricoeur Figuring the Sacred (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1995); and Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian
Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
The following four dimensions also parallel Aristotle's "four
causes" (formal, final, material, and efficient); see Aristotle,
Physics II.3 and elsewhere.