Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic is one month away!

An invitation to join the launch team

Dear All,

I wanted to send out this special invitation in-between “normal” Saturday newsletters. My book Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic will be released on October 15th, which is just over a month away! I am gathering a book launch team and would like to invite you, if you are planning to read the book, to consider joining me on this journey. Here is more information, if this is of interest.

If you would like to learn more about the book, here is a link to the introduction on IVP’s website. A taste (and you can read the full introduction on IVP’s website):

In August 2022, Bloomberg broke a sensationalizing news story, confidently asserting that “women not having kids get richer than men.” There it was, set forth already in the title of the article, a bold economic argument that put a price on human relationships and human life... Marriage, the article aimed to show, cost something to women. And, of course, so did having children.

In other words, if you are a woman and your chief aim is building up wealth and personal security (as the article presumes it surely should be), then your best course of action is clear. First, do not have children, and second, maybe marriage is not a good idea either. Here is an argument for a life of singlehood (albeit presumably not celibacy), and one that conflates economic wealth and career success with that more elusive and less easily measurable goal—flourishing.

I read this article a few months before I had finalized my decision to walk away from academia, but I did read it as a married mother of three children. To be honest, it made me angry. The argument boldly put on trial women like me—married and mothers—and found our lives and choices lacking. To be clear, it did not affect my joy in my family, but it was upsetting to learn that the article’s author might look at women like me with pity mingled with outright disdain. I can only imagine what she would have said about my career change.

I must acknowledge an important point. There is often a perception in evangelical circles that church life is rigged to include and support mothers and exclude single women, making them feel lacking in much the same way as the Bloomberg article did for me. There is certainly some truth to this perception—although the precise degree varies depending on the specific congregation, theological tradition, location, and so on.

There is no denying that single women experience significant challenges, and the church should do more to support their flourishing. And yet, there is also no denying that our surrounding culture is increasingly more hostile to motherhood and family. The cultural hostility to one group of women, in other words, in no way negates the existence of similarly intense hostility to another group. …

Numbers, one could say, do not lie. Children in this day and age are expensive, which means that motherhood is as well. This makes both children and motherhood luxury goods by economic default. It seems callous and crass to speak of motherhood and children in terms of plain economics, even as this has been the implied reality since the original legalization of abortion in 1973. The legal right to abortion made having children an economic choice, and the reversal of Roe v. Wade has not reversed this deeply embedded societal belief. Arguments for abortion as a necessary measure of poverty relief continue unabated. At the same time, we know instinctively deep down—or, at least, we should know it, if we reflect—that this is not how it is meant to be. This is not how God looks at any of us—in his eyes, every single image bearer is priceless.

Nevertheless, so often in our society, we conduct this kind of pricing of human “goods” without even thinking…

What is a human life worth? Are some lives more economically beneficial to society than others? And are there not ways of estimating the worth of a life that are not economically driven at all? As a historian of the ancient world and the early church, I am reminded of the way the earliest Christians challenged the longstanding values of the pagan world around them to display a love of all humanity that was utterly radical— and costly. The early Christians’ pro-life stance included, at the economic level, a radically different and selfless use of money for the benefit of others. That we do not do so in our society today is a powerful reminder that the values of our society at large, including those of many confessing Christians within it, are values of the post-Christian culture all around rather than the church.

This is the most personal book I’ve written. I hope it gives words and tools to other Christians for understanding the radical role of the early church in creating a culture of life and for finding better language in speaking about issues of life into our own culture today.