How the Church Can Face a New Global Crisis: Childlessness. With Matthew Lee Anderson

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Matthew Lee Anderson

   The hardest thing, I think, for childless couples to hear is that the sorrow that they have on the basis of their childlessness, that God has not given them this gift, does not free them from the obligation of rejoicing with those who rejoice. Cultivating joy for other people's gifts of new life, I think, actually allows for the possibility of fraternal and maternal relationships emerging in those types that are not fatherhood or motherhood, right? So this child's gonna have their father and their mother, but if you cultivate joy for your friend's child, you can act in a motherly and a fatherly way towards that child and support and contribute to and help the family flourish. While also, I think, fulfilling those dimensions of what God has called you to do.

2. 01:02

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

3. 01:25

   Michael Horton

   Well, I have the privilege of having conversations with Matthew Lee Anderson, who is professor at Baylor University in ethics and also is part of the ethics program at Oxford University, did his DPhil there. And it's great to have you on, Matthew.

4. 01:43

   Matthew Lee Anderson

   I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

5. 01:44

   Michael Horton

   Yeah. Now, your specialty is in Karl Barth's ethics, right?

6. 01:50

   Matthew Lee Anderson

   Yeah, manner of speaking. My dissertation involves Karl Barth. I don't think of myself as a pure Barth scholar. I think the people who do that are on a different level, but I interacted a lot with Barth’s. I developed his theory of procreation, effectively, tried to answer antinatalist objections. People, moral philosophers who think that we shouldn't have babies, I tried to develop a Barthesian account of why we should have babies.

7. 02:16

   Michael Horton

   There's a lot of talk about that in the news these days, right? That in the cities especially–

8. 02:21

   Matthew Lee Anderson

   Yeah.

9. 02:23

   Michael Horton

   There aren't many children around in the future.

10. 02:25

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yeah, you have declining birth rates basically everywhere on the globe. It doesn't really matter how developed the country is. As countries get more developed, the birth rates drop. We've seen that for ages at this point. Certainly in America, there's growing concern about declining birth rates, and it is urban. Urban contexts are not very family-friendly, as people with families who live in those contexts know. And so we are moving into a situation where people have less familiarity with children, they have less comfort with babies. I travel more than I should, and I feel like I see fewer babies on airplanes than I did 10 years ago even. And so, you know, there is growing discussion about what we're going to do, how we're going to approach an aging population, how we should think about procreation in light of some of these shifting social dynamics.

11. 03:17

    Michael Horton

    Obviously, this is one of many issues where you—where there are questions of what is incumbent on Christians, what Scripture requires. We can't tell people you have to have more babies, right? Or can we?

12. 03:36

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yeah.

13. 03:37

    Michael Horton

    You think on the authority of God's word, you could tell people?

14. 03:41

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Well, I was just thinking about when I was writing my dissertation, I was sitting in a coffee shop in England, and I was listening to a woman talk with her friend about a mutual friend who was being pressured by her pastor's wife to have another baby? And this woman, in her charming British accent, said, “one does not have another baby to please the vicar's wife.” And I'm sitting there writing away about why people should have more babies. And I thought, is that a legitimate reason to have another baby? And what's going on where the pastor's wife is pressuring the young woman to have another child? I think you're right. I think it's not the sort of thing that we can say “you should have more babies.” It's an area that requires a great deal of discernment. There's always contingencies, you know, very practical, granular features of a situation that go into those sorts of decisions. And so I don't think Christians can just say broadly there's any sort of moral obligation to have more babies. But I think we can say things like, as a general rule of thumb, how many babies should you have? Well, you might think about how many babies do you think you can support and then add one more. Right. So a rule of one more stretches people. It sort of prompts them to rethink the types of things that they're committed to, what sort of comfort level they're expecting, what sort of material comforts they want for their families, what sort of upbringing they want for their children, and what the goods are of a robust, large family life. And I think those are the sorts of exhortations that Christians can get to on these issues.

15. 05:21

    Michael Horton

    And, and even if we can't prescribe a particular number, there are better reasons and worse reasons, right, to not have children?

16. 05:31

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yeah, yeah, there are certainly better and worse reasons to not have children. So I think, you know, if we're thinking about procreation and the church, we can think like, what should the church say about these things? I want the church to preach the whole counsel of God, and to not necessarily emphasize or accent certain features of it in ways that would be responsive to social situations. Because one thing that I worry about is in doing that, we distort, we create false emphases. So in a situation where we have declining birth rates, emphasising too much the goods of procreation, I worry that it has a distorting effect. And what happens is bad reasons for having children start to emerge. So socially, politically, there's these discussions that people are having about why people should have babies are intertwined with questions of immigration and nationalism and all these sorts of things. It's—historically, it's not really gone well when countries have encouraged people to have babies, because usually the reasons for doing so are not reasons that I think Christians would want to endorse. And so I think Christians need to think very carefully about what are the reasons that we're giving people to procreate? How can we affirm the good of procreation, but within the context of the gospel, where we're acknowledging the realities of infertility, we're acknowledging the realities of childlessness that's unwanted, and we're offering hope to those people that's real and that's grounded. Ultimately, children are not going to—flesh and blood does not inherit the kingdom of God, shall we say, right? Like, it's—children are not the—

17. 07:15

    Michael Horton

    This isn't the cult of children.

18. 07:16

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    This isn’t like—we can't, we can't have cult-like behavior around children are our future. Children are not quite the church's future. The church's future is being children of God. And that has to be the main thing that the church says. And so we have to be able to support procreation and create communities that support procreation without descending into some of these bad ways of thinking about it.

19. 07:44

    Michael Horton

    How do you argue—you've been doing this for a long time—thinking about it also for a long time. What arguments would you give to someone who says, well, you know, actually the, the, the Earth is overpopulated, we're living on diminished resources, we're destroying the planet, Mother Nature is gonna really have a tongue-lashing for us?

20. 08:09

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Those sorts of arguments are very popular. And, you know, I teach in a university. I think my students don't feel those sort of anxieties, but I've talked with a lot of college students who do feel climate anxiety. In other contexts, not Baylor, some students will use the language of climate trauma. And for them, it is a real question whether or not they should procreate in light of those concerns. It might be too late if you adopt the story about climate and overpopulation. Like, actually, the damage might already be baked in. And so you deciding to not have a child might actually not have the effect. Like, you're—that's not going to stop this. I think there's also a lot of—there's, there's some shenanigans that go on within those arguments about how carbon gets counted and how carbon usage gets counted. Basically, I, I don't think the math works out in the way that many of the people who make these arguments think that it works out. But ultimately, I think, like, there is a kind of personal concern that people need to realize if you decline to have children, you have to ask this question: who's going to bury you at the end of your life? Who are going to be the people who put you into the ground? And that's just not a question that most of my students are thinking about, nor should they in one way, right? Like, we don't want young people walking around having quarter-life crises, you know, thinking about who's going to bury me? The point of youth is feeling optimism and joy. And, and that's fine. But if you're going to make those sorts of long-term decisions about your life and say, I'm not going to have children during the time when you are most likely to be able to have children, you do need to think about what the end of your life, you know, and so I think that many young people have not considered who's going to bury them. And to me, that's a question that should haunt them. Some of the problem here is we have isolated a lot of our elderly people. We have quarantined them into nursing homes, and they're not a part of our— much of our ordinary lives, especially once you get onto a college campus. College campuses are places that are devoid of babies and the very elderly. And—

21. 10:42

    Michael Horton

    And then adult communities that are devoid of babies and young people.

22. 10:47

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    That's right. And if you have that sort of thing, then, then if you're young, you're not thinking about the burdens of old age and how difficult it's going to be for you to live as an elderly person on your own. And I think that that makes it easier to think like, well, I shouldn't have children, or I'm not going to have children. Because you haven't really counted the costs there. You haven't seen the costs. So I think a lot of the attraction to this view comes from those sorts of social forces and not actually the arguments about climate themselves.

23. 11:26

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24. 12:23

    Michael Horton

    What do you say to people who might hear what you're saying as judgment? Because you've already said, yeah, there are plenty of cases where people can't have children, or they—it just doesn't happen. There are reasons. How do you help people who are maybe hearing what you're saying as a judgment on them for not having children? How do you respond to them?

25. 12:51

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yeah, it's a great question. The stigma that people who have wanted to have children who can't for whatever reason feel is very real, the pain, the heartache. A lot of our churches are set up in such a way that they do rightly, appropriately in many contexts, but in other contexts, not rightly reinforce the good of having children. Just as a rule, I don't think I would go to a church that aggressively celebrated Mother's or Father's Day. I think that that's a practice within our churches that is in certain respects antithetical to the whole scope of the gospel.

26. 13:32

    Michael Horton

    The new family.

27. 13:33

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yeah, right. Because, because the church is like the new family, right? Family bonds within the church are diffused and separated and not based on biology. And the church affirms the good of biology and procreation. So it's not a negation of that, but it points beyond that. And so I wrote an article for Christianity Today years ago. It's one of my favorite articles. So I'll just tout it here. But I wrote an article on the witness of infertile couples in our churches.

28. 14:07

    Michael Horton

    Hmm.

29. 14:08

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    And one of the things that I think that we need is couples who are childless, who wanted to have children, who bear witness to the good of hope, who, by their lives, remind all of the couples who do have children that their children are gifts from God.

30. 14:32

    Michael Horton

    Not to be taken for granted.

31. 14:33

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Not to be taken for granted, not to be put on a pedestal or idolized, you know, not to sacrifice their future for the sake of, right, but are gifts of God and are fundamentally God's. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. And I think that sense of hope is what childless couples have to win. They have to cultivate, they have to, they have to fight for it. It is really hard because the church is a place where people are called to mourn with those who mourn. And I don't think that churches have done a very good job of that with childless couples. At the same time, the church is a place where people are called to rejoice with those who rejoice. And the hardest thing I think for childless couples to hear is that the sorrow that they have on the basis of their childlessness, that God has not given them this gift, does not free them from the obligation of rejoicing with those who rejoice. And cultivating joy for other people's gifts of new life, I think, actually allows for the possibility of fraternal and maternal relationships emerging in those types that are not fatherhood or motherhood, right? So this child's going to have their father and their mother. But if you cultivate joy for your friend's child, you can act in a motherly and a fatherly way towards that child and support and contribute to and help the family flourish while also, I think, fulfilling those dimensions of what God has called you to do, right, as a human being who is in one respect going to be either a father or a mother, whether it's biologically or non-biologically. So I think there's lots of ways in which cultivating joy can open up new possibilities for types of relationship with other children within the church that we just haven't thought about. Sorry, this is a really long answer.

32. 16:46

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, no, this is—

33. 16:47

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    I obviously care about this a lot. But the last thing I would say is I really don't think that churches should slide all of those people into adoption. I think that that's a mistake. I think the pressure to say, oh, you, you don't have children, you should adopt. I really dislike that. I think that that social pressure is very unhealthy, because it raises the question, what is adoption within the church? Right? And If the Lord has, you know, not given children to a couple, that does not entail that the Lord is calling them to adopt, right? Adoption is its own vocation. It's got its own logic, its own grammar. So it needs to be, I think, decided on independent terms from whether you're childless or not. So anyways, that's the—

34. 17:36

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. What are some of the other issues surrounding the child birth rate that concern you?

35. 17:44

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    That's a good question.

36. 17:46

    Michael Horton

    That's why I asked it.

37. 17:49

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    It's very hard talking about the value of procreation in a world where birth rates are declining as a male. So let's just, let's just own that, right? So one of the things that concerns me is that there's a disproportionate burden in procreation between men and women, right? The male's part in that process is not that onerous. Now, I actually think that there's ways in which men who support women through the process of gestation and labor actually do real work. So I actually don't—I think we can discount the male's role in all of that too much. It can be emotionally burdensome. It can be, like, tiring. It's real work to support a woman in the midst of that, but it's also not the real work that the woman is doing. And I do worry that in talking about the goods of procreation, that one, one of the collateral effects of this would be a kind of reduction of women to childbirthing people.

38. 18:56

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

39. 18:56

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    And we see this in certain fringe corners of the internet, I think, where people are really anxious about declining birth rates and they don't want immigration and they've got lots of, I think, really diseased, unhealthy ideas. And one of the things that they effectively do is reduce women to hosts for more children. That, I think, is morally noxious. It's morally repugnant. We have to be able to think well about what women offer—gestation, labor, being mothers. Only women can do that. It's a wonderful calling. It's an extraordinary gift. It's a, it's an immense sacrifice. But within all of that, they're persons and they're more than all of that as well. And I think we can't lose sight of that. We've got to have a vision for women that affirms all of that but goes beyond it.

40. 19:52

    Michael Horton

    More identity markers, more callings.

41. 19:55

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yeah.

42. 19:56

    Michael Horton

    Than birthing.

43. 19:57

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    That's right. So that's one major issue. I mean, I think we're going to see—two others would be declining birth rates, aging population, euthanasia. One way in which we're going to solve this is just by killing off the old, letting them kill themselves. I think that's coming—

44. 20:13

    Michael Horton

    Close to that.

45. 20:13

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    We're getting very close to that. And then, you know, the advancement of other artificial technologies, artificial wombs. We're trying hard to do that. People are desperately trying to figure out how to make babies in labs at a more efficient rate than ordinary procreation. And so I think all of that is a challenge as well.

46. 20:34

    Michael Horton

    As if efficiency were the most important thing. Do it on an assembly line. If you can crank them out—

47. 20:41

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Assembly line babies. What could possibly go wrong?

48. 20:44

    Michael Horton

    Right. A lot of these issues revolve around your view of the body. Practically every issue in your wheelhouse all comes down to the body, doesn't it? Our view of the body. What does Christianity in particular have to say about the body in the midst of all these ethical quandaries?

49. 21:07

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    There's a real, you know, softball for me.

50. 21:11

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, that's really not—

51. 21:13

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    In three minutes.

52. 21:14

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, it's just a short answer.

53. 21:15

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Short answer. It seems to me what Christianity has to offer an account of the body is on the one hand, an affirmation of its, not only its dignity, but its glory. That Christ, in taking on flesh, and dying and rising again, not only affirms that the body is good, but that its goodness is undefeated and glorious. The recovery of the language of glory for the body, I think, is really important, that it shines. That it's suffused with a beauty and a radiance, and it draws the eye, that you can't not look at the body when it's in its glorious condition. And I think that Christianity has a way of affirming that whilst also honoring the fragility, the limits, and offering a way to explain the trauma and the sorrow and the brokenness and the hurt that we feel in our bodies. We're never more aware of our bodies than when we're in pain. Pain turns our bodies into a type of object. We'll say, “my arm hurts,” you know, like it's—our bodies feel strange when they're in pain. So they feel different from us in certain ways. But what the cross allows is for the recovery and reorientation of that pain and that sorrow that we feel in our bodies and a way of giving it meaning and significance, but then also giving it glory such that all of the scars are not things that we should be ashamed of, but things that we would delight in. I think a lot about—there's the Roman practice of showing your wounds as a way of authorizing what you did in battle. And it shows up in Shakespeare a lot, like Henry V, his famous speech, we will strip our sleeves and show our scars. We'll be able to show here are the marks on our body of where we fought in battle, and the wounds of our bodies will become that. They will be places where we will just show, these are the wounds that I got on my way to sanctification, and all the things that I did in my body that I was ashamed of, where I felt fear. And like, that actually becomes the very thing that I am most proud of, that I'm most eager to show. Christianity, I think, has a way of glorifying the body without allowing us to ever escape it because it hurts. And I think that that's—I say it's a hard question because it's genuinely how I became a Christian was this issue. I'd become a Christian when I was in—how many times does one become a Christian? I don't know. But I, you know, like I had one conversion when I was in middle school. But then when I was an undergraduate in college, I spent 30 hours reading Plato's Symposium and wrestling with Plato and the question of the value of the body. And at the end of it, I could only see that Christ resolved this problem in a way that no one else could. And it was at that point that I was like, I could never go back. There has never been a doubt in my mind of the truthfulness of Christianity after that one moment. To me, it just all comes down to the body. Like, this is the whole sum and game of the Christian faith.

54. 25:04

    Michael Horton

    The resurrection.

55. 25:05

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    The resurrection.

56. 25:06

    Michael Horton

    Jesus got raised and—

57. 25:06

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yep.

58. 25:07

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

59. 25:07

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    And it's all good. It's glorious.

60. 25:07

    Michael Horton

    Call it all off. Yeah. Well, it's been great talking to you about these things. I think that there's a lot more we could go into, and hopefully we'll get other opportunities to do this. Matthew, thanks for coming on the program.

61. 25:21

    Matthew Lee Anderson

    Yeah, thanks for having me on.

62. 25:27

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