As it happens, the past 12 months have birthed several books that reveal the crisis of motherhood and the family in America at this time when birth rates are below replacement rate — among those best worth reading, I could name Timothy Carney’s Family Unfriendly, Brad Wilcox’s Get Married, Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children, and more. The questions I investigate in Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity are thematically related to theirs, but I approach the problem from a perspective that is historical and theological. Why? Because the attacks on motherhood right now reveal a theological problem, and theological crises demand theologically rooted responses.
In the increasingly post-Christian culture in which we dwell, mothers and children are devalued in thought, deed, and policy in ways remarkably similar to their treatment in Roman pagan culture. We are increasingly living in a world where people have forgotten the beautiful truth of the imago Dei — that every single person ever created was made in the image of God — and are choosing to live as though it is not true.
In this world, we see regular attacks on the worth of children and mothers who bear them and care for them in the media and in policy proposals. Consider, for instance, the repeated arguments from both liberal and conservative circles that mothers who choose to stay home to raise their children are a drag on the economy — and that motherhood hurts women’s careers. In these pronouncements, the economy and career are respectively elevated above family and children. The latter, in the process, become nonessentials, promoting the former to the role of primary-order goods.
Such attacks, though, are not to be considered in isolation. It’s not just that our society is unfriendly to mothers, children, and families more generally, as economist Tim Carney has argued. Rather, the attacks on the value of mothers and children are part of a larger problem; they are a canary in the mine, showing the erosion of valuing the lives of all image-bearers in a post-Christian world. This is why the promotion of anti-family views is related to the promotion of euthanasia in some countries, even if not in the United States quite yet.
In policies promoting “reproductive rights” or in those promoting “death with dignity,” the worth of people comes into question, evaluated often in financial terms. Are you “paying back” to family and society at least as many resources as you are consuming? By such utilitarian criteria, some people are invariably found wanting. By such logic, what is the point of bringing to birth and then keeping alive a child with Down syndrome? Likewise, what is the point of providing essential medical care for someone chronically ill? Or someone very old? The post-Christian perspective sees that such a person brings nothing of value to the community and does not deserve the waste of precious resources required to keep her alive. But such a view is nothing new. It is, in fact, very old.
Appropriately, then, both Vergil and his Greek counterpart, Homer, merit discussion in the matter. The epic stories they tell about the Trojan war and the founding of Rome offer poignant answers to a counterfactual question: What if the imago Dei were not true? Who are we, if not made in God’s image? And what does this mean for our worth? These are questions of relevance for Christians reading the ancient epic masters who lived in a world where, or so they believed, people existed in a hierarchy. In that hierarchy, a ranking of human beings, some were more valued and treasured than others. Others, at times, were worth more dead than alive — such was the case, for instance, with civilians in war. In most contexts in antiquity, men were more valuable than women.
The Greeks since time immemorial — certainly from before there was a Greek alphabet to record such tales — told myths of the Trojan War, that great war that ended the age of demigods and ushered in a more boring historical age of lesser men. In those tales, though, there are also the mothers of the heroes, usually normal mortal women, albeit beautiful ones, who give birth first to demigods and then to that next generation of more ordinary men.
Their significance, nevertheless, is very much secondary in the myths. This results in a paradox in our literary sources. Mothers and wives are called to be faithful guardians of the family hearth, but as various Greek and Roman pagan writers over the course of antiquity repeat, they are nothing but mutilated or defective males, created as a curse upon mankind (with emphasis on the “man” part), and not even real parents to their children (only the fathers are).
In this world, Christianity burst into the scene with a radically different anthropology — one that affirmed the priceless nature of every single human being for just one reason: because humanity was made in the image of God. Jesus spent his time on earth with the weakest, the sickest, the poorest — the ones who were worthless not only in the eyes of the Romans but of the Jews too. That is the anthropology that we need to recover today. Two thousand years of Christianity taught us to hate genocide and to treasure “useless” people.
In his 1990 essay collection What Are People For?, Wendell Berry argues for gentleness — for treasuring people in their lowly and weak humanness in a world that he rightly sensed was becoming increasingly mechanized and opposed to that very weakness. That is, at its root, Jesus’ vision for humanity, a vision that the early church brought to a cruel world around it. And it is a vision of love, so simple yet so revolutionary, that we should continue to embrace.