Inconvenient and God’s Delight

We live in the era of the individual, a time when the common wisdom is to make choices based on what feels good. Understanding ourselves and setting out to live in accordance with our personalities and gifts can be a great thing — but that’s often not the end. Instead, as author Nadya Williams explains, such a self-centered perspective can lead us to devaluing anyone that we deem inconvenient. Such people take up our time. They make messes. They hinder productivity. They get in the way of our ambitions. Often, those people are kids. 

In her new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, Williams challenges rising hostilities against motherhood and family. She spoke with Common Good about God’s love for his image bearers, rejecting an assembly-line approach to life, and the profound blessing of living in a way that deeply respects all humankind.

What are some of the ways that American Christians may be — even unintentionally — devaluing mothers and children? 

My argument in this book, in part, is that we are increasingly living by values that are post-Christian. Just this month in Vanity Fair Magazine, an author who self-identifies as Christian, wrote with significant disdain about the “Ballerina Farming of America.” It’s a hit piece on a couple specific high-profile moms with many kids. The argument is not very original; it’s typical of the many other such pieces I’ve seen over the past several years. There are some variations on the theme, but these kinds of articles usually convey the general point that having many kids is terrible and backward — that the ultimate joy for the modern woman is to be found in her career. I wrote my book in part as a response to this conversation.

The message of articles like this, unfortunately, seems to be sinking in. Marriage rates among Christians are down, just as they are in the general population. And the percentage of childless Christian marriages keeps going up — just as in the general population. The problem is, the more “normal” it appears for every space, including the church, to be child-free, the easier it is to devalue mothers and children. And, of course, the post-Roe world (and the post-Dobbs world too) simply convey the message that any woman’s child is her problem and her choice. The implication in such language of autonomy has also seeped into the church, even as this idea of individuals as atomized units is very post-Christian. As Christians we are, rather, members of one body. 

You write, “There is no denying that single women experience significant challenges, and the church should do more to support their flourishing. And yet, there is also no denying that our surrounding culture is increasingly more hostile to motherhood and family.” What might it look like for Christians to hold these truths in tension? 

It begins with actively recognizing the imago Dei within every single person. As Christians, we have this basic head knowledge of the nature of human beings as image bearers of God, but we don’t always act like it. Living this truth out begins with delighting in every person with whom we interact — which can be difficult. Kids, for instance, can be loud and messy — which makes it easy for childless people to feel uncomfortable around them. In fact, some days the noise and the chaos stresses out kids’ own parents (I’m a pretty extreme introvert with sensory issues, so this is a challenge). Then, adults also — whether single or not — can at times seem difficult or inconvenient. The messiness of children is, more often than not, literal, but the messiness of adults is emotional and heavy in other ways. 

But Jesus’ interactions with broken people, though, show what it is like to see each person as a person first — an image bearer, beloved of God. And so, the goal for Christians is to interact with every person, whatever age or marital status, with this same kind of delight that Jesus brought with him when visiting, say, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. I have seen intentional community groups and similar church fellowship activities do this really well, bringing people of all ages and life stages and conditions together. But it does take real effort and intent — both from individual Christians and from churches.

Ultimately, I see our culture as hostile to human beings, most of all, and the hostility that both single women and mothers experience reflects the larger that privileges the efficiency of machines over the shortcomings and inadequacies of image bearers. But God affirms our goodness in our finitude, and God delights in the weak.  

In your book, you explore how our productivity-obsessed culture prods us to put ourselves and our children on “an assembly line.” Stepping off of it, you write, “requires us to admit, first and foremost, that maybe the assembly-line approach to raising image bearers is not God-honoring or, as even secular mental health experts would say, healthy.” What might that admission look and sound like in our lives? In other words, how can Christians reorient their perspective away from the assembly line and toward God’s vision for human flourishing?

This is going to be very personal and different for each family and parent. In my family’s case it meant deciding to homeschool our children. I grew up in a secular immigrant household that exemplified the assembly-line approach — the gospel of academic success. Ultimately, I saw the promises of this false gospel fail as an adult. Yes, academic success is great, but it isn’t everything, and it alone won’t fulfill us — just like even the best jobs in the world will not fulfill us. And so, pursuing human flourishing for my husband and me meant trying to live a little more slowly of late. Our kids don’t do sports. We spend a lot of time reading together — as a family or individually. We don’t own a television and very rarely watch movies. We just try to treasure time together as a family and with other friends, both those from church and also from the community. 

The more time we spend with other image bearers in situations that allow us all to delight in each other, the more encouraging it is for our souls. 

Many of Common Good’s readers are pastors and ministry leaders. How would you encourage them to engage with their church members about topics like fertility, disability, and surrogacy — issues that are simultaneously deeply scientific, ethical, spiritual, and personal?

These topics seem so heavy and modern, and yet our struggles with these issues merely show that there is nothing new under the sun. I keep saying this over and over of late: We must all become better theologians. Theology can’t be just that thing that really wise people in seminaries study and write about in don’t-drop-on-your-toes-sized books that only scholars read. Rather, we must all be immersed in the Bible and in solid teaching about it. Responding wisely to all of the issues you list here requires both a solid grounding in theology (understanding God’s nature) and anthropology (understanding who we are vis-à-vis God and vis-à-vis other people). 

Because God unconditionally delights in each and every single one of us, regardless of our ability or disability status, for instance, we can mourn disabilities and the suffering they cause without seeing the sufferer as anything less than God’s image bearer. As for some other issues, the question should be: Does this disrespect the nature of this person as God’s image bearer? Sometimes, as in the case of surrogacy, I think the answer is a very clear yes. It is even clearer with the sort of surrogacy proposed a couple of years ago in whole body gestational donation — the idea of using brain-dead patients as surrogates.

Whenever a scientific advance means disrespecting the nature of human persons as made in God’s image, then we should not be afraid to walk away. There is such a temptation to worship science and technology as a sort of new god, but my academic focus was on ancient military history, and I always come back to this: The vast majority of innovations, in military technology especially, have all involved more vicious and effective ways of killing people. Science, in other words, has never been an unconditional friend of persons. Rather, at times, it has been an increasingly more powerful instrument of sin.

How can Christians — whether as individuals or churches — better embrace a true pro-life position that isn’t merely political or rhetorical? 

It comes back to the imago Dei and seeing unconditionally the personhood of every single individual. Our relationships are, first and foremost, local, and this means they are rooted in our communities and churches. Political and rhetorical grandstanding generally is very hypothetical and outward facing. But in our communities and churches, we can serve people in beautiful ways. I think of the meal trains that churches habitually set up for new moms or families in crisis. I think of ways Christians serve each other in small ways every week — visiting shut-ins, giving rides to those who are not able to drive themselves, inviting people to home prayer services and Bible studies. All of these activities require us to look at another person or several people and see them as persons, as treasured children of God. 

We can also support the work of extraordinary people who are going far beyond what most of us can do in resisting the culture of death, a post-Christian culture that openly tells us today (just as the pagan culture did before the advent of Christianity) that a person’s worth is relative, to be determined by the beholder and by the situation. So much of this daily pro-life work of serving image bearers physically and spiritually falls to pastors. And then there are such institutions as pregnancy crisis centers.

The default post-Christian solution when faced with inconvenient people, for whom care is expensive, is to eliminate them — whether through abortion or euthanasia (which is growing in Canada and in parts of Europe) or by abandoning them to face their struggles alone. But the way of Christ has always called us to see the least of these, to care for them, and when needed, mourn for them precisely because they, too, are God’s delight. 

 

This interview has been edited for clarity. Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity is available from IVP Academic.