Redefining 'Fruitful'

IN MY 20s, I came to the unsettling conclusion that God was calling me to have a baby. Familiar with Frederick Buechner’s declaration that vocation “is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” I believed that my visceral yearning for children pointed toward my deep gladness. How my desire for children would meet the world’s great need, however, was far from clear, particularly in my small urban church where people routinely made great sacrifices in response to poverty and injustice.

In my progressive circles, childbearing can also be cast as ethically questionable, contributing to overpopulation and environmental degradation. In 2006, Katharine Jefferts Schori, then the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, summed up this view when she told an interviewer that “Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. ... We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.” More crudely, proponents of a growing “childfree” movement dismissed parents as self-absorbed “breeders.”

I was also leery of claiming a call to motherhood because within some strains of Christianity, a woman’s vocation to motherhood is assumed, regardless of her circumstances or predilections. Many evangelical and Catholic Christians uphold the traditional nuclear family of husband, wife, and children as the God-ordained bedrock of society and the church. Writing for the Family Research Council, Dr. Andreas J. Kostenberger of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary writes, “The Bible defines ‘family’ in a narrow sense as the union of one man and one woman in matrimony which is normally blessed with one or several natural or adopted children” (emphasis in original). I feared that by claiming motherhood as my vocation, I might inadvertently support a limited vision that idolizes traditional families and sees childbearing as every woman’s primary calling.

Even Pope Francis has harsh words for those who choose not to procreate. As reported by the Catholic News Service in June 2014, Pope Francis stated that among “things Jesus doesn’t like” are married couples “who don’t want children, who want to be without fruitfulness.” Such couples are convinced, he argued, that by remaining childless they “can see the world, be on vacation...have a fancy home in the country...be carefree.” He warned that such couples are doomed to a bitter, lonely old age. The stereotype of childless adults as embittered hedonists is so widespread that writer Meghan Daum titled her recent anthology of essays by childless writers Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.

Recent biblical scholarship and the witness of childless Christians, however, provide a refreshing counterpoint to extreme voices from both left and right that misconstrue the biblical narrative and what motivates those who choose to remain childless.

A biblical view of family and procreation

In their recent book Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton University Press), Candida R. Moss of the University of Notre Dame and Joel S. Baden of Yale Divinity School challenge traditional interpretations that privilege procreation as a divinely mandated endeavor for everyone.

Moss and Baden argue, for example, that the command to “be fruitful and multiply” is about the establishment of a people, not unlimited procreation for individuals. “The blessing to be fruitful and multiply is not given to all humans for all time,” Baden told me in an interview. “It is bound to its context.”

Moss and Baden parse scriptures concerned with procreation—the curse upon Eve to know pain in childbirth, matriarchal infertility stories, Paul’s views on celibacy and marriage, and hints of the afterlife—to argue that bearing children is simply not mandated as a central endeavor for God’s people, now or in the world to come. Furthermore, they argue that the New Testament fosters a radical view of family that is, in their words, “malleable and expansive.”

Stories about Jesus’ birth and early years provide a dynamic model of family that is not based on biology. Baden explained that, “given the circumstances of Jesus’ birth—that he was raised by Joseph who was essentially an adoptive father, and that Mary served as a surrogate for a child conceived outside of normal reproductive processes—and Jesus’ later statements that undermined familial obligations, it is difficult to sustain a view that the gospels privilege biological parenthood and ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ modes of procreation.”

Jesus challenged the primacy of biological kinship in word and deed, as when he forbade a follower from burying his father (Matthew 8:22), and in another instance, after asking “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” declared that “Whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:48-50). John’s gospel includes a scene in which Jesus, hanging on the cross, instructs the “disciple whom he loved” and Jesus’ mother Mary to treat one another as family. Moss and Baden argue that Jesus thereby “unshackles familial ties from biological foundations.”

Pauline theology also undermines the primacy of biological family by privileging celibacy over marriage, and values marriage more for controlling sexuality than for procreation. Moss and Baden argue that Paul, like Jesus, emphasizes the creation of a “fraternal community” and “proposes a model of family and union with God that exists outside of the structures of biological procreation.”

As Baden summarized, “In the gospels and the early church, where we might expect to find an interest in biological offspring, we find instead an emphasis on fostering a family of believers. Jesus was essentially saying, ‘We do family differently now.’”

Redefining family and fruitfulness

The term “childfree” conjures similar terms, such as “smoke-free” or “fat-free,” that connote rejection of something dangerous or unpleasant. But often those who choose to remain childless do so from within a positive framework, affirming fresh ways of defining family and fruitfulness, rather than a negative framework in which they escape the “burden” of children.

Writer Erin Lane “never dreamed of having babies the way other women did. I knew I wanted something different from a traditional nuclear family.” In their 10 years of marriage, she and her husband have engaged in what she terms a “ministry of availability.” Without children, they have the flexibility to step in to babysit when friends need a night out, or to volunteer at the last minute. They are now preparing to welcome foster children into their home.

“It has become important to frame our decision to be childless as a positive thing,” Lane explains, “as an affirmation of the value of relating to children in different ways. We also want to be clear that we’re not taking in foster kids to be brave and noble. We’re doing it because we want to.” She goes on, “I do very much want to be in relationship with children. The incarnation—God coming to us in the form of a baby—gives us an upside-down vision of the wisdom we can discover in vulnerability. Children, so in touch with their own neediness, can help us embrace our own.”

Kat Benson, who requested a pseudonym because of the sensitive nature of childbearing decisions, likewise casts her childlessness as making room for other kinds of fruitfulness. “My husband and I are both called to the life of an artist, to creating things through art. We’re both also very nurturing people,” Benson says. “Through our acting classes and other creative projects, we nurture and mentor so many people. It’s a whole other way to influence the world.”

Having no children has led Benson to rich alternative experiences of familial relationships. “For example,” she recounts, “for a time I made weekly visits to New York City for career reasons and stayed with a friend who was going through a difficult time. It turns out I was exactly the person she needed. I had the flexibility to make a long-term commitment to a friend for whom I could act as family when she desperately needed support. I could have never done that with children at home.”

“My own family has been very complicated and difficult,” Benson continues. “I’ve come to see family in a much broader way. I love my family, but I’ve learned to look elsewhere, to friends who serve as family for me, to get some needs met in a way I can’t in my own family. There’s so much freedom in that. The point of all of this is love—learning to love and accept your family members, what you and they can and cannot do.”

While infertility is a very different experience than chosen childlessness, redefining what it means to live a fruitful life can bring a measure of healing for infertile couples. As Karen Swallow Prior wrote in a 2014 piece for Christianity Today about her infertility, “That term, infertile, may be medically and technically appropriate, but it’s not a word I would use to describe my life.”

The call to childlessness

Just as I frame my childbearing decisions as vocational, the childless Christians I spoke to say their decision arose from desire coupled with a sense of vocation.

“When I start to notice that things about me don’t really fit with what other people are doing and thinking,” explains Lane, “that’s a hint that I might be looking at a calling from God. I began to notice that I didn’t have a deep desire for children, and also that being childless would enable us to support other families and children in particular ways. We are available to respond to the community’s needs in a way that parents often cannot be.”

Benson explains that, “I have never had a desire for my own children. But it’s more than just a lack of desire. I am certain that having kids is not what I was meant to do on earth. I can intellectually put reasons around my reaction, but my bottom line is a visceral feeling that this was not my calling.”

Commenting on the increasing social acceptability of childlessness, Lane emphasizes that, “Culturally, we’re in a place where we think it’s no one’s business what we do with our bodies and our lives. That’s just not true, particularly for Christians who have an allegiance to God and our faith communities. I want to frame this decision more as a positive thing affirming a different way of being fruitful in the world.” Reproductive decisions are personal, but not necessarily private; they are intimate, but not irrelevant to the common good.

As people who believe that all are made in God’s image, and in a God who defied cultural norms to welcome children, Christians must affirm the inherent goodness of children, rejecting the cynicism that dismisses children as little consumers gobbling up the world’s resources.

Likewise, we must push back against what Dale Martin, in his book Sex and the Single Savior, calls the “idolatry” of “American churches [that] have so identified themselves with the modern, heterosexual, nuclear family that people without such families feel less at home in most churches.” Martin argues, as Moss and Baden do, that the biblical narrative simply does not support the popular notion that nuclear families centered on procreation constitute God’s preferred model for human life. Instead, Martin argues, “there are many more resources in Christian scripture and tradition to criticize the modern family than to promote it.” Martin suggests that God invites us to “retrain our imaginations both to see the inherent evils in the modern idolatry of marriage and family and to develop visions of alternative, eschatological, forward-looking communities.”

Raising my three children, whose chatter and clutter daily challenge my craving for quiet and order, has taught me far more than any charitable endeavor about what radical hospitality and love look like. For other Christians, childlessness allows for transformative experiences that are only possible because they aren’t raising children. A “malleable and expansive” biblical vision of family invites us to end our preoccupation with forces accused of undermining Christian family values, and instead rejoice in and support the many ways that God calls us to live fruitful lives.