Childlessness and Chronological Snobbery in Christian Culture

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“There is a great difference between rejecting something you have known from the inside and rejecting something (as uneducated people tend to do) simply because it happens to be out of fashion in your own time. It is like the difference between a mature and traveled man’s love for his own country and the cocksure conviction of an ignorant adolescent that his own village (which is the only one he knows) is the hub of the universe and does everything in the Only Right Way. For our own age, with all its accepted ideas, stands to the vast extent of historical time as much as one village stands to the whole world.” – C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

I’m pretty sure it was C.S. Lewis who originally coined the term “chronological snobbery”, (which is basically, as John Piper recently explained, “the arrogant notion that the ideas of our own day are better than the ideas of a bygone day just because the ideas are in our day. Chronological snobbery feels that things are truer because they are newer. And so it is both irrational and naïve.”) And I can think of few better terms to describe the state of increasing childlessness that we find in our culture today. Not only is the culturally predominant view of family one that is totally counter to any resemblance of biblical authority, but, even within Christian circles, our doctrines of marriage, sex, and children have been violently severed from both their Scriptural and historical moorings. Many in the Church today begin their consideration of the family (if they really ever consider it at all) awash in a sea of unchecked and unchallenged cultural assumptions – ranging in everything from the idea that children are mere accessories to marriage, to the acceptance of the epidemic use of permanent sterilization methods (vasectomy and tubal ligation) after a couples’ arbitrary “child quota” has been met. These assumptions have foundations, no doubt, but they are not Scriptural. But unfortunately many Christians don’t seem to mind.

Expediency and cultural acceptance under the guise of “stewardship”, “responsibility”, or “Christian liberty” has become the accepted family planning “norm” of our day. Today, long before a child is ever even considered in the mind of their parents, they must first successfully maneuver our self-imposed, culturally conditioned obstacle course of exceptions. “We’d love to have children…” Except during our first year of marriage. “Oh, we’d love to have children…” Except during grad school. “We’d love to have children…” Except while I have this low paying job. “We’d love to have children…” Except we’ve already had two. And on and on they go, eventually betraying the truth – We’d love to have children, yes, but we want them on our terms, and in our timing. Technology has allowed us to banish a great many inconveniences from American life (disease, famine, patience, the unknown) – and so we see no problem wielding it now for our own benefit, ridding us of any burden of “un-planned parenthood”, and rendering every child a “wanted” child (which just so happens to be one of the tag lines of the infamous abortion provider, Planned Parenthood). We want our children “planned” or we don’t want them at all.

I believe there are two issues that have helped to propel our childless vessel to where it rests today, amidst a culture who is blinding groping for the very meaning of marriage itself, and that has found itself up to its wallets in the blood of millions of aborted children. (Of course, the primary engine for any rejection of Truth – be it biblical families or belief in the literal Creation – has its ultimate root in sin, and a rejection of Christ as Lord over all.) First, I think it is undeniable that the rise of Industrialization began to heavily undermine the complimentary blessing of children around the turn of the 19th century. Although Scripture is crystal clear that children, in and of themselves, are a “heritage from the Lord” – we know from experience that in certain contexts they can carry with them a complimentary blessing of work (which is especially evident in the pre-Industrialized age). With the rise of widespread industry, many families (Christians included) saw the complimentary blessing of their children’s ‘ability to work’ fall by the way side.

But in our own time, we have a culprit of our own to consider. As many children were wrongly valued for their “workability” in the pre-Industrialized age, so now, a great many children that are born today have been conceived out of an abiding notion of “self-actualization.” Couples that do weigh the positives and negatives of children (as if they were buying a new car) only decided to pursue children if they feel it is “the right time” in their pursuit of life. Ashamedly, the primary concern for a vast majority of couples considering either abortion or birth control is financially centered at worst, or highly financially influenced at best. Oh yes, in this understanding, children can still be valued – but only in so far as they score well enough on the couples’ “cost-benefit analysis”. Whatever complimentary blessing that once accompanied a child prior to our generation has been replaced with an apparent complimentary curse. Those still willing to call children a gift, lament that they are a costly one, and one that should be taken in prudent moderation – if taken at all.

Indeed, in our chronological snobbery and technological idolatry, we have bowed the knee to an image of the family that rejects (in both heart and deed) the blessing of children in marriage, and have exchanged our heritage from the Lord for four-wheelers and SUVs. And that, my friends, is a crying shame…

‘BH

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