A THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION FOR CHILDREN
Adrian Thatcher
1. THE BACKGROUND
When, in the late 1990s, I was writing my book Marriage After Modernity[1], I became increasingly aware of research findings regarding the relative well-being of children of divorced parents compared with the children of so-called ‘intact families’. One study in Britain in 1993 prompted A.H. Halsey to observe
that the children of parents who do not follow the traditional norm (i.e., taking on personal, active and long-term responsibility for the social upbringing of the children they generate) are thereby disadvantaged in many major aspects of their chances of living a successful life. On the evidence available such children tend to die earlier, to have more illness, to do less well at school, to exist at a lower level of nutrition, comfort and conviviality, to suffer more unemployment, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered.[2]
Many similar studies with similar conclusions were becoming available in the United States.[3] I noted that the plight of some children in northern and western societies was that they were ‘victims’ of their parents’ fickleness which was itself capable of being analysed by means of an excessive economic and moral individualism.[4] Many of the concepts and features of the theology of liberation, forged in the poverty and oppression of the South, appeared applicable to the plight of many of the children of the North. A ‘preferential option’ for children seemed justified. Just as liberation theology began with ‘the marginalized’ and sought the transformation of their existence, so many children in rich countries appeared marginalized and the transformation of their existence became an urgent matter.[5]
Reading the pre-publication manuscript of Honouring Children: the human rights of the child in Christian perspective convinced me still further that a theology of liberation for children is due.[6]The legal perspective of that fine work is liberative in intention and tone. For example the language of rights is said sometimes to require our ‘looking to the needs of those who are in no position either to assert or to waive their own rights, such as the very young and some of the very old and those of the handicapped, the disabled, and the oppressed who have no voice of their own’.[7] Rights assist with ‘more support for the vulnerable’.[8] Many children’s rights are said to be ‘about protection and support’.[9] Indeed the insistence on the rights of children provides precisely the kind of protection and support that any liberation theology would seek for its victims of oppression.
2. THE THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION
A promising way of piecing together a working understanding of a theology of liberation is simply to consult the excellent Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, and find out what the core concepts, issues, and applications actually are. We learn there that it starts with ‘practical measures for human betterment [which] have embraced theologians as co-workers in practical expressions of Christian commitment’.[10] It ‘is distinctive in its emphasis on the dialogue between Christian tradition, social theory and the insight of the poor and marginalized into their situation, leading to action for change’.[11] A ‘preferential option’, originally for the poor, ‘represents today a point of orientation for the pastoral activities of the Church and an important guideline for being a Christian’.[12] Theology, we are reminded, is ‘critical reflection’ on practice, and theologians can expect a guilty conscience if they are preoccupied with the intellectual challenge of the European Enlightenment, that is with unbelief, at the expense of the moral and spiritual challenge of those ‘“non-persons”, those who are not recognised as people by the existing social order’.[13] ‘Structural sin’ shows
how personal evil can be simultaneously strengthened and disguised by social relationships. A particular economic structure (a historical system of relationships between people) can easily create a series of situations which make necessary – and thus apparently reasonable – that conduct which favours one’s own greed or that of one’s family at the expense of the life and dignity of many others’.[14]
But this concept of structural sin or ‘sinful structures’ awaits application in the Northern context where ‘social relationships’ include relationships between parents and children; where the ‘historical system’ increasingly incorporates non-standard forms of family life; where the raising of children by single parents becomes ‘necessary’; where greed may be an unspoken reason why many couples avoid having children at all, and where ‘the life and dignity’ of many children, including the unborn, is seriously at risk.
3. THE NEGLECT OF CHILDREN IN THEOLOGY
Another key concept in the theology of liberation is the ‘hiddenness’ or ‘disappearance’ of those awaiting liberation, be they women, or slaves, or the poor. One of the most disturbing features of contemporary theology is the hiddenness of children. Marcia Bunge writes ‘Until very recently, issues related to children have tended to be marginal in almost every area of contemporary theology’.[15] But that is true of historical theology as well. Feminist theology wants liberation for women, but says almost nothing about children. Sexual theology, lesbian and gay theology, queer theology colludes with the invisibility of children. It would take a major investigation to inquire into the reasons for this history and practice of child neglect, but some idea of these reasons will underline the need for a particular theology of liberation for children to succeed.
First, the sheer ‘power-over’[16] of patriarchy, requiring obedience from children ‘in all things’ (Col.3:20). From the household codes of the New Testament to biblicism of the present day, patriarchy models the child-parent relationship as one of submission: it is more about control than nurture. Second, the doctrine of original sin and preoccupation with the supernatural remedy for it, is hardly conducive to child-friendly ecclesial policy-making! Third, the tradition displays an awkward ambivalence towards children. If Clement of Alexandria is to be followed, the child is ‘the apex of Christian perfection’.[17] If Aquinas, the medievals, and their nominalist successors – the British empiricists - are to be followed, the child is ‘pre-rational, a tabula rasa to be schooled into the responsibilities and possibilities of adulthood’. If Augustine and some Protestants are to be followed the child is ‘the prey of original sin and the fruit of the base sexual instincts, a reminder of mortality, and a distraction from the spiritual life’.[18] These models, the apex of perfection, a pre-rational lack, and the sinful fruit of original sin, do not provide a promising conceptual blend, nor a secure foundation for a theology of childhood. Paul and Luke discourage having children by discouraging marriage, while the author of 1 Timothy thinks that having children is how women overcome the gendered consequences of the fall of Eve (2.15) and how young raunchy widows are to deal with their renascent desires (5.14).
Three other possible reasons for the neglect of children in the tradition are the changing category of childhood;the absence of the category of experience; and the use of childhood as an extrinsic metaphor for adult innocence. So, fourth, Philippe Ariès argued that the concept of childhood did not exist at all in the medieval period and only finally arrived among the lower classes of society in the twentieth century.[19] So earlier theologians may not have conceptualised childhood thoroughly because the concept of childhood did not exist to be given attention. Fifth, contemporary theologians are divided over the inclusion of experience within the sources of theology. ‘Scripture’ (but not how to read it), ‘tradition’ (but not traditions) and ‘reason’ (whatever that is over and above thinking straight) are usually accorded the status of being revelatory sources of theology. While empiricism embraced the evidence of the senses as a secure source of knowledge in the seventeenth century, there has been no such move in theology until the late twentieth century, when the experiences of exclusion, oppression, poverty, or discrimination were rightly claimed as a source for doing theology. A theology for children has to listen to the experience of children.
Sixth, the use of children as an extrinsic metaphor for bringing into speech aspects of the adult relationship to God can end up demeaning children further (and making adults very smug). Yes, we are all children of the Heavenly Father, but unfortunately we are not innocent. Yes, we are weak, but unfortunately we are still going to use what power we have as deviously as we can. Yes, we are dependent, but unfortunately that’s not going to interfere with the ruthless exercise of our autonomy. And so on. There is of course dominical warrant for regarding children as ‘models of entering the reign of God’’[20]. Did not Jesus say ‘Whoever does not receive the reign of God as a child will not enter it’? (Mk.10:15) But exegesis of Jesus’ sayings about children have too often emphasised the convenience of children to model specific attitudes or qualities of adults to God, that the children themselves, intrinsically and in their own right, have been passed over.
4. A THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION FOR CHILDREN
A theology of liberation for children is able to address this theological child neglect. It can help to correct the tradition while developing it at the same time. Before stating what such a theology might look like, there is a disclaimer to be made. Some childhood researchers concerned with the impact of divorce on children have framed the concept ‘narratives of harm’.[21] While they raise no objection to research into the various harms done to children, they distinguish between harm and ‘harmism’. Harmism, it is claimed, ‘delights in the sad stories and dismisses the others as unimportant or as distortions of the “real” truth’.[22] It is easy to see how the church will be accused of harmism. A priori views about the desirability of traditional family forms, coupled with the predisposition to believe that divorce always causes harm to children, are doubtless features of Christian family apologetics. But careful theology does not need to buy into this type of harmism. And it may wonder whether harmism may equally be a device used by some social theorists to talk down some of the more unpleasant harms suffered by children precisely through the breaking up of families.
First, a theology of liberation for children will begin with real children. In Honouring Children a series of scenarios involving real children in real suffering is introduced, precisely in order to show how ‘concepts of rights, responsibilities, virtues, etc. … are relevant to the lives of real children’.[23] Theology can use this method too. Second theology can listen to children, but in order to do this it needs, third, to see children as young persons and agents. Several of the adult models for children, and Christianity is heavily implicated in their production, are grave impediments to listening to children, since what will be heard may already be misconstrued. Why? Because the child subject who speaks is already likely to be misrepresented by the model of the child that the adult interposes. Over the last two decades sociologists are ‘said to have rediscovered children’.[24] That means they have overcome the distortions of seeing children as, for example, ‘unfinished products’, ‘embryonic adults’, ‘projects’[25], and so on. This heavy baggage, still freighted around in teacher training institutions where it has a status higher even than holy writ, presupposes that children are, definitionally and from the first, ‘marginal beings’ who ‘are not only different from adults but inferior to adults’.[26] Anyone can see that this heavy baggage is there to justify the heavy socialization they are in any case going to get. The ascendant model now is to see children ‘as creative social and moral agents with the strengths and capabilities to shape their own childhoods. Under this new paradigm children are transformed from unfinished projects under adult control to fully social persons with the capacity to act, to interact and to influence the social world.’[27]
Theologians can work very cheerfully with this new paradigm. There is a rich theological anthropology available to it. Liberation theology has always been in some debt to sociology, and the current sociology of childhood, while generally far from being Marxist, brims with insights for theologians to utilize. This is, of course, what theologians expect, because they know the Holy Spirit has never confined herself to churches and to academic theology. Theology adds paradigms of its own: the child as a child of God, and the child as the paradigm of the reception of God’s reign
Fourth, Jesus identifieshimself with children in a series of sayings in the synoptic gospels. (Mk.9:33-7; Mt.18:1-2; Lk.9:46-8) “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mk.9:37) As Gundry-Volf explains ‘Jesus’ teaching about receiving children as the mark of true greatness places children at the center of the community’s attention as prime objects of its love and service, and requires of all who would be great in the community to serve children.’[28] We postmoderns discuss problems of identity ad nauseam. These simple words of Jesus illuminate those discussions. If you want to know who God is, look in the face of this particular child. If you want to know who has the highest rank in the reign of God, it is the one who cares for children.
Fifth, analyses of structural sin have a peculiar relevance to the failure to flourish of children. I have chosen four areas of application. The first and most obvious area is in the macro-analysis of poverty and the distribution of wealth, but I want to press it home in the very different areas of school curricula, promiscuity and chosen childlessness. One must ask whether the curriculum oppresses children. Frequent testing of children is not good for children, nor is it good for their learning (since they will be taught to pass the test, not to know anything important). In the early 1980s there was substantial agreement within the philosophy of education that to become educated was to learn to become a person.[29] Children are certainly learning to be competitors, consumers (this includes being given second hand product knowledge for the consumption of religions), certificated practitioners of skills, and eager participants in a market economy that will soon enslave them in debt. The heavy socialization called education also turns out to be a massive indoctrination into social and moral values that are rarely formally articulated or questioned. This is oppression.
Many children are oppressed by the sexual irresponsibility of their parents. In a culture where heterosexual love has come apart from marriage, and marriage has come apart from parenthood,[30] and increasing numbers of biological fathers are more influential on their children by their absence than their presence, many children are still conceived unwanted, despite the armouries of contraception available everywhere. But the contraceptive paraphernalia of late modernity that divorces us from our fertility should not block the deeper meanings of the body.[31] Aquinas’ three reasons for holding that the sin of fornication was mortal, amazingly hold good today. He argued that intercourse ‘between two people who are not committed to one another is outside marriage, which is for the good of the child’.[32] Second fornication was ‘contrary to the love we should bear our neighbour, for… it is an act of generation performed in a setting disadvantageous to the good of the child to be born. He then compared the sin of gluttony with the sin of fornication, concluding that while an occasional culinary indulgence within the duration of a good life was scarcely a sin at all, casual sex between fertile men and fertile women was a mortal sin because it might affect the entire life of the possible child who might be conceived, and because the knowledge of the possible consequences were available beforehand.
Thomas’ advice is: don’t have children if you can’t be committed to them for life; treat the not-yet-born as if they were your neighbour to whom the Great Commandment already applies; and put children’s lives before the satisfaction of your own desires. This is a refreshing methodological approach to sex, because, unlike most sexual theology today (and what passes for it), it puts children first.
Controversially, a fourth area of the possible application of the concept of structural sin is chosen childlessness.[33] While avoiding the excessive natalism that has come to represent official Roman Catholic thought about children, a case can be made for explaining some of the reasons why prospective parents, including married Christian parents, don’t want children. Are they too busy? Too career-oriented? Too house-proud? Too colonised by inordinate individualism, or by the secular version of the work ethic that has returned to haunt us? Too alienated from their reproductive faculties to express them? There is a sense in which Pope John Paul II may be right in calling contraception and abortion ‘a veritable structure of sin’.[34] Contraception can help to produce what he called a ‘contraceptive mentality’ that is linked with, in particular, the ‘consumer mentality’. While I don’t expect the suggestion to be well received, I wonder whether the pervasive consumerism and individualism that is secular life in the West is seeping into our most intimate lives, and its victims are now the unborn.