Reactionaries and the Right to Have Children
+ what I have been up to + around the web
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When a society breaks into fragments, how can we repair it?
I have been bothered by one version or another of this question for some time now, and increasingly dissatisfied with many of the answers on offer among people on the right.
One plausible answer is to identify the source of the fragmentation and oppose it, explicitly and emphatically. Consider: the modern world has blurred the differences between the sexes, so the appropriate response is to make much of the distinction. We might spend a long time contemplating the glories of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’ and come up with conferences and books and teachings that help others see the same.
This sort of reaction is understandable, yet is liable to creating its own distortions. It is common across the world for young males to enter manhood by proving their masculinity—but once done, it is done. A society where norms are constantly being discussed, and men are constantly being compelled to question their own masculinity, is one that will invariably induce anxiety and the corresponding artificial demonstrations of bravado. It will only produce the artifice of healthy manhood, and not the reality.
And approaching social problems head-on also tends to misdiagnose, or at least obscure, the more powerful forces that are nearer the root of the real problem. There are theories that minimize the salience of sex for social life, to be sure, but they are only following practices and economic systems (and especially economic systems) that have attempted to render sex invisible and unnecessary. If people wanted to really oppose the dissolution of gender norms, they might contemplate practices that would counteract the all-consuming logic of choice that undergirds our economic system.
What do we need, then, to create a healthy and constructive alternative to the ‘lordless powers,’ as Karl Barth named them, which would eclipse and obscure the knowledge of God and his good creation?
We need more than emphases or fragments—we need a whole, which both opposes the breakdown we are considering but also reveals how we are implicated in it. We need not just a framework that unequivocally affirms the reality and glories of the sexed body, but is capacious enough to disturb our preconceived notions of it.
I have in mind this bit from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, which comes near the point:
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
Whether we buy Chesterton’s story that the Reformation broke up the unity of the virtues or not, his underlying critique that goods become distorted when they are dislocated seems right.
I had this problem in mind in my essay for Plough on the “right” to have children, which was published just before Christmas. I am extremely sympathetic to those on the right who wish to promote procreation. Yet such narrow exhortations often seem to this reader to be reactions, which take a symptom of our decadence in the turning away from procreation and try to address it head-on, all the while being complicit within the deeper logics that have brought our society to this juncture. As I wrote in the most spicy bit:
Christians are not immune from these mixed messages. In certain circles, there is a stigma on childless couples who have apparently disobeyed the putative “command” to procreate in Genesis 1:28. For a great many people, the burden of childlessness is a cross not of their own making. Those who prate about how young people are turning away from children are often the same people who filled those young people with upper-middle-class expectations, and demanded they get the college degrees to meet them, adding physical and financial obstacles to family formation. It is not surprising that a generation of Protestant Christians who had no patience for the celibacy of Jesus in their theology of marriage now have no accounting for the (biological) childlessness of Jesus in their theories of procreation. Meanwhile, many churches have been silent about IVF while our society has trapped a million embryos in ice to await Judgment Day; the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, has said nothing since IVF was introduced.
The essay goes on to sketch, in the briefest of ways, an alternative. Yet while I think it reaches broader and deeper for both a diagnosis and exhortation than straightforward essays to shout “yay babies” in the face of our growing anti-natalism, it is still only a partial effort. We need deeper diagnoses of our problem than I am equipped to offer, and more robust and imaginative practices of resistance than I am capable of engaging in.
I encourage you to read the essay, and I welcome your comments.
Things I Have Been Up To
In case you skipped the above, here’s another link to my essay on IVF, the right to have children, and the Christian household.
There is now a second edition to Oliver O’Donovan’s extraordinary book Begotten or Made? The price is much cheaper than before. I wrote the introduction to it, and I have to say that I think it is helpful for understanding what Oliver is up to in the work.
I will be in D.C. on February 8th for what promises to be an amazing conversation on forgiveness with Claude Alexander, Liz Breunig, and Fleming Rutledge. If you are in town, do come out and say hello.
It is perhaps self-indulgent, but I posted the list of books I read the second half of 2022. Reminder: reading is part of my day job!
Around the Web
“Today, though, my sense is that Jesus himself is less culturally central, less necessary to religious entrepreneurs — as though where Americans are going now in their post-Christian explorations, they don’t want or need his blessing.” — Ross Douthat reflects on Bad Religion ten years after it was published. His point here is one of the many reasons why I love reading Ross, as it is such a simple observation, but one that is both true and poignant.
This is a great essay on Turgenev and translation, which tempts me to read him again for the first time since my undergrad days.
Yuval Levin on how to curb the culture-wars is self-recommending.
Fred Sanders has thoughts on retweeting compliments, and why we should not do it. I went through a phase where I did do so for various reasons, but Fred has me thinking that those days should be over.
Currently reading: Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus, by Thomas Ward. This is the fruit of decades of thinking about and teaching a very difficult philosopher, and it shows: it is masterfully written, with elegant prose and wry humor that has, at times, made me laugh out loud (and not only, I think, because I know Tom). All this I anticipated. What I did not expect: it has been devotionally valuable. It really is a gem.
The Penultimate Word
“Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? . . . No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.” — Benedict XVI
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