The childishness of the childlessness controversy

A failure to realize what is being said

Having children is truly a gift from God. This is not a position which has, historically, carried much controversy within the church—from the earliest workings of the Lord in the Hebrew tribes in the desert to the modern day, the example and gift of the child has been held up as the sweetest example that God gives us and orders us to cherish. If you have been blessed with the thankless task of post-midnight feeds, childhood illnesses, or even worse, you will be well aware that the sweetness of the love of a child carries with it the harrowing duty and responsibility that comes with the choice to love one who cannot offer anything back to you. A high example of the selflessness that comes in the empowered love of both reason and will working together. It is not simply a will to love the other, storge [στοργή] in Greek terms, but that combined and strengthened with the rationality that comes with the divine shock of “no!” that precedes the Second Greatest Commandment¹. It is not the case that we merely want to love the child who pushes back against the world, but also that we are divinely commanded to love the child (Matthew 18:10)—even in those moments when children make themselves the most unlovable object.

It is clear from Christ’s mission that children are important—but have we understood why children are important?

Sadly, a lot of the “chatter”² around the status of children in the modern day is neither properly affirmative nor properly polemical. As with all great debates (and this isn’t one of them), the discourse has divided itself into two camps that are seemingly bizarre from the outside perspective—”pro-natalists” against “anti-natalists”, neither of which represent the position of the common man nor a genuine Christian response. American politics, as is so often the case, has whipped up a frenzy around this strange little controversy with throwaway remarks that lose their proportionality³ and root themselves as “key political issues” that are entirely alien to the concerns of everyday life and the cares of yesteryear. “The Crowd” and “the Anti-Crowd” are split up into interesting subsections of extremity, where abortion, euthanasia, and the general sanctity of life are drawn into a question that has spun out of control. Almost in real-time, my reader, we have seen the formation of a “vortex”⁴. Children, the purported object of our inquiry, are secondary to the actual issues pushed forward—birth rates and bodily autonomy. How we long for the days when philosophers—even pop-philosophers!—will remember to answer the question they have been asked!

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The curious “debate” that I allude to, if this is still not clear to you, my reader, is one of childishness about childlessness. Desperate to maintain “replacement level fertility”, many “Right-facing” talking heads have become obsessed with the idea that the fall in birth rates in our limited-resource planet means that all civilization shall fall. This has been greeted with an equally ferocious voice of dissent from the “not-quite-as-Right-facing” liberal contingent, who view bodily autonomy and identity politics as the sacred boundaries that we cannot cross. As is so often the case in these delicately balanced issues, it seems that the “pro-natalists”—a bizarre collection of Christians, right-wingers, and a possibly imaginary collective of those who would like to see the capitulation of “the West”—has become like Luther’s peasant that S. K. was so fond of alluding to; an “over-corrective”, an absent-minded appeal to radical positions:

“...the world continues to be like the drunken peasant who, helped up on one side of the horse, falls off the other side.”⁵

In abandoning the “rootedness” of a⁶ Christian basis for thought, the pro-natalists have been whipped up into “the Crowd” which stands for nothing but technical thought. Like the liberals and the Marxists that these victims of the “vortex” tend to oppose (at least in rhetoric, if not in action or reflection), the only thing that matters to these people is the increase in the birth rate; the traditional and religious values that apparently underpin these perspectives become secondary, become relative, to the overall rationale—God’s Word becomes secondary, becomes relatively related to, in favour of an insecure and seemingly odd absolute relation. And we shouldn’t be surprised by this, my reader; these talking heads, these would-be managers of “crowd-formation”, are simply a reflection of “the demand of the times”⁷.

“The demand of the times” is an unusual thing—often, it is undiagnosable by those who are swept up in it. Adopting Jacques Ellul’s infamously pessimistic notion of “the Technical Society”⁸, we might say that the subject in the liberal democratic society holds no actual values aside from expressions of technicality: the “totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity”⁹ is extended beyond the usual sectors of economic and scientific inquiry, leaving us now in a position where the human body becomes an objective object of science that does its best to dispose of the finickity inconvenience of subjectivity and human desire.

Jacques Ellul, like a Kierkegaard who didn’t collapse into anti-natalist conclusions

As “technique is not an isolated fact in society... but is related to every factor in the life of modern man...”¹⁰, this should also come as no surprise to us, my reader—the “profound tension” of the technician diagnosing the space they occupy in a particular technical system requires a kind of reflection that is beyond the capabilities of the unexamined life. The “pro-natalist” becomes obsessed with technical solutions to make the line of a graph go up; the liberal becomes obsessed with technical solutions to making abortion and birth control more clinical and obfuscated to those who have an interest in those things being clinical and obfuscated; the Marxist becomes obsessed with technical solutions for forming pseudo-political parties that are primarily aligned with the goal of arguing with other Marxist pseudo-political parties—the unifying factor here is the obsession with technique towards a particular goal that does away with aesthetic, ethical, and religious values that those poor souls that form “the Crowd” previously held. For the Christian anarchist, this notion that the absolute relation to the absolute ought to be replaced by a fastidious and fanatic relation to the increase in birth rates is unacceptable and shows deeply disordered thinking. Indeed, this concerning contingent is merely a reflection of economic slavery—yoked in the dual failure to establish the self qua self, the “Right-facing” group is obsessed with the abstract object of productive society and the liberal group¹¹ is obsessed with the continuing possibility to consume. If we are not slaves to God, we simply become slaves to something else.

Suppose the optimist in me should creep out and the Marxian biases of my youth shine through: why not view this as an opportunity for a rational reorganisation of the economy according to a plan that promotes aesthetic, ethical, traditional, and religious values? Per Hauerwas, the fall of birth rates and an overall population, economics and politics could become the study “that discerns the best use of the unlimited gifts of God, rather than the just distribution of the limited resources of the world”¹²—we could do away with obviously unnecessary aspects of the technological society, such as evolutionary psychology, project managers, opinion-piece journalists, LinkedIn users, channel managers, data scientists, and other middle-management professional class types¹³. This is not to deliver economic dicta to you, of course; merely to question the usefulness of this capitalist epoch when we remember that God is one who has continuously cleared away that which is undesirable and unnecessary when its time has passed—slavery, monarchy, capitalism? Possibly. As Dooley reminds us of our dear Melancholic Dane:

“Kierkegaard is convinced that if only each human being could be helped to become conscious of himself as standing “before God,” [then] instcad of anonymous, irresponsible masses, thcre would be persons personally related to the personal God, a God of justice and love who demands the transformation of society and provides resources for its renewal. Such people... would become critical and constructive citizens of the state, not fanatical devotees of the State.”¹⁴

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As such, let’s offer a Christian response that remembers the question does not only concern the aesthetic number of births every year. Again, per Hauerwas, when reflecting on the usual facile reasons people offer for having children, such as avoiding loneliness (get a dog!) or giving life meaning (a consumerist mindset, where different objects are required for value to appear):

“It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story [that started with Christ’s life and mission and ends in salvation] to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God’s creation (a fact we would not know without this story).”¹⁵

A Christian response to falling birth rates is not one of panic—we are on a journey towards something more, towards the eventual reconciliation with God in eschaton, which we are already promised and gifted. If it is true that not one iota can be added to God’s plan, then a frantic expression of technical thought—that we must multiply without ceasing!—towards the end of this journey is not a Christian response at all; it is a sign of the faithlessness in God’s promise¹⁶ that we shall see salvation and that we are already gifted it sola fide. The desire for the numerical replaces any possibility for all kinds of love—a love for one is a richness and need for one; a love for all is a richness and need of infinity¹⁷, but neither of these matters can become a matter of an equation. Therefore, these numerically obsessed, frantic “crowd-behaviours” forget the two Greatest Commandments when it comes to talking about children: firstly, that children are a gift from God and, therefore, that having children is an expression of love for God and God’s reciprocal love of humanity; secondly, that having children requires us to love the children qua actually existing individuals that unconditionally deserve the love of God and the love of the other—you, my reader, who encounters the child as another you¹⁸. To reduce this to mathematics quite clearly reduces any possible conclusions to a mere parody of Christianity; a relative relation to God in favour of the absolute relation to sheer number.

And, of course, that is not to say anything about the notion of celibacy—highly prized for those who prioritise the imitatio Christi and take Paul’s words seriously in 1 Corinthians 11:1. A dialogue from S. K.’s The Instant, no. 6:

“Had the Apostle Paul any official position?”
No, Paul had no official position.
”Did he then earn much money in other ways?”
No, he didn't earn money in any way.
”Was he at least married?”
No, he was not married.
”But then really Paul is not a serious man.”
No, Paul is not a serious man.¹⁹

One might wonder, my reader, had S. K. not been so wrapped up in his terror over the responsibility of having children to the point of anti-natalism, itself a sign of a disturbed and harrowing childhood of loss and pain, he might have added:

“Had the Apostle Paul any children to contribute to the economy?”
No, Paul had no children of his own flesh.
“He very clearly had no interest in his community or the lives of others then.”

Apparently so, my dear sophist interlocutor. Maybe it is time for a “theology of children” that does away with these childish notions of capitalist irrationality, spiritless aestheticism, and the faithlessness of postmillennialism.

1. Works of Love, p. 141, S. Kierkegaard

2. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 87, S. Kierkegaard

3. "Kierkegaard, Lippmann, and the Phantom Public in a Digital Age", J. P. Haman, from Journal of Religious Ethics, p. 15

4. “Armed Neutrality, or My Position as a Christian Author in Christendom” in The Point of View, p. 134, S. Kierkegaard

5. JP III 1846-1847

6. Please note, my reader: a Christian basis. I am under no impression that there is a single the Christian basis for thought.

7. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 8, S. Kierkegaard

8. First explored in his landmark The Technical Society

9. The Technological Society, p. xxv, J. Ellul

10. Ibid., p. xxvi

11. I refuse to call these people “Left-facing” for the exact problems we have seen with Biden’s America and will see with Starmer’s Britain.

12. “Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer”, S. Hauerwas and S. Wells, from The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, p. 6, ed. S. Hauerwas and S. Wells

13. Presuming the targets here are those who occupy the same intellectual space as the liberals and the Marxists, the idea of an economic-political assault on the professional-managerial class would be greeted with the outrage caused by the talking heads being removed from a position where they operate as talking heads.

14. Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility, p. 19, M. Dooley

15. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, p. 33, S. Hauerwas and W. H. Willimon

16. See parallels with Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 68n, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie, where our love becomes accidental and contingent.

17. Works of Love, p. 67, S. Kierkegaard

18. The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, p. 25 S. Kierkegaard

19. “Short and sharp”, from The Instant, no. 6, August 23rd 1855, from Attack upon “Christendom”, p. 181, S. Kierkegaard