Last week, our household came down with hand-foot-and-mouth disease. Quarantined during an unseasonable heat wave, I sweated through a fever while dabbing ointment on the baby’s weeping blisters.
This was an apt time to begin historian and Christianity Today contributor Nadya Williams’s new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. “The devaluing of children,” she writes forcefully in the introduction, “is inextricably connected to the disdain our society conveys for the work of mothers.”
Doing that work—drawing oatmeal baths, dosing infant Tylenol—I felt gratitude for Williams’s insistence that my baby and I mattered, even flushed and enfeebled, needing so much and producing nothing. “Evaluating the worth of motherhood and children in economic terms,” Williams writes, “they are guaranteed to come up wanting.” But the doctrine of imago Dei means that we are valuable nevertheless. Sores and all.
By Williams’s estimation, our societal disregard for God’s image in mothers and children has a far-reaching impact. It means that we see pregnancy as a sickness to be prevented or solved by means of birth control or abortion. It means we reduce our children’s existence to an “assembly-line life,” obsessing over educational achievement and resisting the reality that “children, like all people, are unpredictable individuals and are not made for the convenience of their parents.” It means we force new moms back to work too early, pitting their careers against their children.
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic begins by describing contemporary problems. But disdain for mothers and children, Williams demonstrates, was also characteristic of antiquity. Drawing on myths, literature, and histories from Greek and Roman writers, she describes a past in which women were sexually exploited, infants were left “exposed” on “village dung heaps,” and anyone who couldn’t achieve military victory on the battlefield was a second-class citizen by default.
It’s Christianity, she argues, that changed all of this—that gave us the human rights we take for granted, that blessed the meek and lowly instead of kowtowing to the powerful. “It is because of two millennia of Christian valuing of human life,” she states forcefully, that “we do not delight in the suffering of the weak.” Both the life of Christ and the writings of the church fathers demonstrate that “the church is responsible for caring for the bodies and souls of the neglected and the abandoned at all ages and life stages, because their lives are priceless.”
It’s a compelling argument, albeit a familiar one. What’s novel here are Williams’s through lines between the past and the present, some so bold they seem drawn in thick marker. Just as “the practice of exposure of infants” emphasized a “utilitarian commodification of infants and children as things,” she argues, so today “we see … the common practice of aborting children with Down syndrome.” Back then, the spoils were concubines and slaves. Now, they’re stock options. But in both systems, the people who matter are the ones out winning—not the baby with the viral infection, not the mother with sweet potato in her hair. Do we really, Williams asks, want to return to that brutal pre-Christian era?
Some of Williams’s assertions—that sending kids to school is a “severing of bonds” echoing the child’s separation from the mother’s womb, for instance—will be “agree to disagree” for many readers. (She acknowledges this.) Some of her evidence for cultural phenomena—the posters in her ob-gyn office, a new housewives show that she hasn’t watched—is thin, even if she understands the phenomena correctly.
But even readers who disagree with Williams’s strong stances on surrogacy, contraception, or working mothers will appreciate the connections she makes, which are compelling, creative, and challenging. And the basic point stands: People matter because they’re made in the image of God. When we forget that, a lot goes awry.
Gradually, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic becomes less about mothers and children and more about that “body politic,” all those “neglected and … abandoned at all ages and life stages.” Here, Williams turns her attention to single women and widows, the sick and the lame, victims of war and euthanasia. Flitting from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ healings and excerpts from the martyr Perpetua’s journal to the fiction of Wendell Berry and Augustine’s City on a Hill, she fleshes out the “doctrine of the imago Dei.” Part of its legacy, she argues, is a disposition to encourage “love for every human being, hurt or whole—man, woman, child—regardless of age, gender, social or marital status, wealth, ability or disability.”
Agreed, of course. But I wish Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic hadn’t ended up quite so broad, hadn’t veered from its initial focus on these two subsets of “the least of these.” By the end, those bold through lines have gone fuzzy around the edges, petering out in an encouragement to volunteer in the church nursery.
Perhaps the focus on mothers and children ended up feeling too narrow to sustain an entire volume. But I get the sense that Williams has more to say, if only because this subject—the value of moms and kids amid late capitalism and declining fertility rates—is so personal for her.
Williams shocked friends and colleagues by giving up a tenured professorship to homeschool her three children. She did so in conscious defiance of the prevailing view that an educated woman “could never be truly fulfilled or happy if her life sphere were restricted to the domestic life.” But it’s clear that motherhood, by dint of the book’s existence, can coexist with the life of the mind. Writing mothers need not think of themselves as “writers first” in order to write well; in fact, “their motherhood, writing, faith, and faithful service to those around them” are “interlaced in ways that cannot be easily disentangled.”
Once again: Agreed. This long aside doesn’t account for the mothers whose employment, by economic necessity or otherwise, takes them away from their homes into hospitals and restaurants and construction sites. But it does resonate with at-home desk workers like me, typing one room over from a napping baby. (He’s all better now.) Williams warns me that I write and parent in the face of social conditioning to “place [my] work—creative or merely corporate—ahead of [my] children.”
Sometimes, that conditioning matters not a whit. Sometimes, the baby asserts himself as an image-bearer. Sometimes, there’s no writing. That is, sometimes, hand-foot-and-mouth pays a visit. As Williams puts it in her analysis of Perpetua’s journal, “Motherhood is always a call to suffer, in ways big and small.” In that sense, mothers aren’t just people for the church to protect. They are people for the church to learn from.
Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.
