#414: 'Prophetic' Childlessness?

Why Christians shouldn't be childless for the environment

After a recent talk about procreation—spoiler, I’m for it!—I was asked about whether our impending ‘climate catastrophe’ might ground a vocation of childlessness. Such a vocation could take one of two forms: it could be a reason to commit to celibacy, or it could be a refusal to procreate within a marriage. 

My initial response was to try to be as generous as possible in not foreclosing the ways of God, and to avoid issuing a definitive or absolute “no” to the idea. While you might be shocked to hear it, I actually am attentive to the limits of what sort of judgments we can make about the moral life, and am extremely reluctant to issue unqualified denunciations of forms of life that are, in principle, permissible. 

Yet there are strong reasons to be skeptical of such an idea. In the first place, the communicative significance of childlessness is entirely ambiguous—which dulls any type of ‘prophetic’ witness it might have. It is just as likely that people will assume that childless couples in the future wished to advance their careers or enjoy upper-middle-class lives as they think childless couples wanted to preserve the environment. And no one will be able to tell the difference, unless people wear t-shirts explaining, which one can’t do every day.