Guest Post: Childbearing and American Social Religion: Your Thoughts Requested
Long time reader and friend of Vox Nova, Adam V, who has his own blog, Adam V’s Blog, has written this post for the readers of Vox Nova. Please consider what he is saying and try to think with him the issues he has brought up. Thoughtful responses would be appreciated.
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Has anybody ever had a day that caused them to ask deeper questions about why things are the way they are? I turned 29 two weeks ago, and my birthday turned out to be one of those days. People were constantly pointing out that I didn’t have children. And so I spent the bulk of my birthday explaining to others why I do not have children. For these last two weeks, I have been wondering why so many people asked me, and why people’s reaction to my answers were so uniform. To help me get at some of what’s going on here, I was wondering if Vox Nova readers could help me think through some of this.
When I’m asked why I do not have children, directly or indirectly, my answer is pretty standard. My wife, an accountant, is on the road a lot and I have a job that requires me to work evenings. So when my wife is home its not unusual for me to be gone three or four evenings. This means that a lot of the time we aren’t around each other to try to conceive children.
But for many people this answer is inadequate. What usually follows from here is an awkward and uncomfortable mixture of information (the “too much” variety), personal history and impromptu spiritual direction. The information and life story can be forgiven, I suppose—While I never solicit it, the advice is usually as uncomfortable for the conferee and it is for myself—it’s the spiritual direction that simultaneously baffles and infuriates me. I originally suspected that I kept encountering this due to the circles I ran in, but the longer I was married the more broadly it happened. And I have been genuinely surprised by how widespread the belief that a lack of children is a signifier of an inadequate spirituality is. One of thing I noticed is that occasionally other people will seem anxious about it, but anxious “for me.”
Where does all this come from? My suspicion is that this all has to do with something I call American Social Religion.
American Social Religion is a complement to American Civil Religion, and represents the compromises adherents of monotheistic faiths need to make in order to operate within capitalist/liberal democratic society. These compromises can vary from relaxed attitudes toward usury or to personalizing religious devotion by stripping it of its social aspects.
I suspect “Social Religion” was brought about by the transition of monarchies into liberal democracies. The ancient belief that leadership is a direct result of a special blessing from God dispersed as political power became more dispersed. Over time this theme of blessing changed from recognition of divinely granted office, authority or use to being synonymous with “fortune.”
In this setting we see that the emphasis on “family” is a key component of American Social Religion. Media outlets maintain whole networks related to family, huge sectors of the economy market directly to children and to “families” as a unit. But childless married couples are never included. Childbearing is the societal transition that ushers married couples into the completeness of “family” and full participation in the capitalist economy. This confusion of religious and economic benefit of childbearing creates a situation where the lack of children, after a “honeymoon” period, causes suspicion or anxiety among others.
At least this is what I’ve come up with. I’m putting this out there for two reasons. 1) I wonder if people have had similar run-ins and 2) I am curious how you see the social drapery around child bearing and rearing. Positive? Negative? Let me know in the comments.
Comments are closed.
Just wondering if you got married in a Catholic Church. If so, you vowed to be open to children. That’s what I would be thinking. Gee, I thought he was Catholic.
Faith,
Being a married Catholic does not mean the person will have children. But I think your comment highlights the problem Adam is raising. Why do people like you immediately think ill of someone, as if they are unfaithful?
My grandmother used to say,”Babies make better grown-ups.”
When I had our first child, it changed so much about how I viewed my life. I became much less selfish. I had thought I became less selfish when I got married, but that paled compared to the selflessness that came with babies. Lots of other issues in which I had fairly mild opinions began to matter a lot more to me.
Perhaps that is why people ask and encourage you to have children.
Thank you Bruce. That’s certainly why *some* people do. But its not the reason why many others are concerned. It didn’t make the final cut of the post but some of the spiritual advice we have received is pretty far out there.
I married at age 36 and have 3 children, the last my daughter born 21 months ago when I was 45 years old.
Faith might well ask me why I didn’t have children until I was old enough to be a grandmother.
Adam, for the sake of your marriage, you shouldn’t ask for others’ experiences or advice on this one. Ever.
You will have to be detached from outside opinion and confident in your wife’s love, which is what marriage and parenthood require.
Harry,
You are correct. Promising to have children and being able to do it, don’t necessarily follow. But it is part of the vow. I understand it as vowing to be open to children, meaning you plan to have them. If biologically that proves to not be the case, so be it. But you still were open to having them.
Children not fitting into a lifestyle, isn’t a good reason. I have to question, why did they get married. Their life style is very typical of our modern culture, which is why people live together and not marry.
Faith
First, I am not “Harry.”
Second, you are still judging things which are not yours to judge. Why do you feel you have to judge? What is the point? Does it make you feel superior to be so smug? Seriously?
What does it mean to be “open” to children? Does it mean one must be trying to have them? That is what it sounds like you mean, which is not what being open to children means.
SAF, You didn’t marry until you were 36. I wouldn’t ask you why you didn’t have children because you weren’t married for a while by the time you were 29.
It’s not same.
You are correct about being detached from outside opinion. I hope the writer is detached from outside cultural pressure to achieve money and position as the measurement for success. But his assertion that their careers aren’t conducive for children, lead me to doubt that.
Faith
So, would you say a soldier about to be sent off to war shouldn’t marry if he knows he will be away from his wife for years? That, for example, as a career which isn’t conducive to children. But would you really say he shouldn’t marry?
Faith, I too hope that Adam and his wife are not unduly swayed by cultural pressure to put anything before their family’s route to sanctification. That includes pressure from outsiders on blogs. We, too, are culture.
Given the evidence of his blog post,we should assume that they know Catholic teaching. They should assume that our comments are not needed.
Sorry Henry,
Here’s the vow:
The exchange of vows consent—The marriage can’t happen without the declaration of consent (Catechism #1625 – 1631).
“(Name) and (name), have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?”
“Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?”
“Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?”
The exact wording is “accept.” I define “accept” as “being open.”
But I’m open to other interpretations.
Faith
Nowhere does that say “will you seek to have children, and have as many as possible.” Once again, I would highly recommend you stop judging — and wonder why you feel you need to judge. Circumstances can make a couple not have children. It doesn’t make them not open to children, nor does it mean they shouldn’t get married if they won’t be able to be with each other much. Once again, you have not answered why you think a couple must be seeking children and doing all they can to have children, and if their situation makes it so they are unlikely to have opportunities, they should not get married?
Faith, the way I look at is if, during marriage preparation, I ask a couple if they are open to life, and they answer “no,” then what I need to do is seek to discern what they mean by that ‘No.’
If what they mean is that they don’t plan on having children for, say, the first three years or so, then they need to figure out how there going to go about doing that. But if I ask them what they envision doing if the wife does became pregnant, and they say, “Well we’d have it, obviously,” then that would suggest to me an openness even if it doesn’t correspond with what they would hope or intentionally plan.
If they said “We’d have an abortion,” then we’d need to have a slightly longer conversation.
But I think most couples can be, and are open in good concscience, even if they don’t necessarily want to have a child immediately.
“Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?”
“Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?”
Faith you are reading the word “accept” as though it was the word “deliver”. No couple can make such a promise, nor would it be reasonable for the Church to ask such a thing of them, as one of them may in fact be infertile.
Further, I am providing you now with the appropriate section from our Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the church:
“PART TWO
CHAPTER FIVE
THE FAMILY, THE VITAL CELL OF SOCIETY
234. The judgment concerning the interval of time between births, and that regarding the number of children, belongs to the spouses alone. This is one of their inalienable rights, to be exercised before God with due consideration of their obligations towards themselves, their children already born, the family and society[528]. The intervention of public authorities within the limits of their competence to provide information and enact suitable measures in the area of demographics must be made in a way that fully respects the persons and the freedom of the couple. Such intervention may never become a substitute for their decisions[529]. All the more must various organizations active in this area refrain from doing the same.”
As you can clearly see, the choice of how many children, and that included zero children, belongs solely to the married couple. If an opinion is requested on the matter it is not rude to offer one.
Henry,
Do you realize you attacked me? Read your first post. “Why do people LIKE YOU…”
Henry, I was answering his question. He wanted to know WHY people thought like that. Geesh! Talk about judging!
I, of all people, wouldn’t think ill of Adam. I’d be a hypocrite. I was married at 24 and didn’t have my first child until I was 30. So I got the same attitude that Adam intuits. That’s where I am coming from.
And that child that I had when I was 30 is now 30 herself, married and chooses to not have children because it doesn’t fit into her lifestyle, concern regarding over population, doesn’t like children, and on the whole admits that she’s too selfish. That’s also where I am coming from.
Hence, when Adam want to know why people ask him why he doesn’t have any children, I gave him one answer.
He asked. I answered his question–not what I think of him–not what I judged him to be like–not the definitive reason—–just answering his question.
Faith
Your first comment was rude. “Gee, I thought he was Catholic.” That is rude. You have then continued to push a vision which suggests people should be actively seeking children or else not get married.
Faith, I was also asking about the cultural forces behind some of these attitudes. I notice you seem to think leisure or security or both is one of them (but from the perspective of people not having children). I am trying to get at why people act scandalized when they find out persons who have been married–for whatever reason–do not have children.
Hello everyone. Thank you for your responses so far. Before I continue, I’d just like to thank Vox Nova for agreeing to run this, and for the helpful feedback their contributors I received. I’m sorry to be only getting back to this now. Its one of the evenings I have to work.
Faith: I think you have misread the post. We are not intentionally avoiding pregnancy. In fact we want children a great deal, but our employment obligations keep us from each other, so logistically it just doesn’t work out. I should stress we are not intentionally avoiding children. Although, your response is not terrible different from the conclusions other people have drawn.
I didn’t put this out there for public consumption, but I work in the Church. I understand why this conclusion might have been drawn, so I find comments about “money and position” to be entirely rizzable.
Amen!
Adam,
I feel like I never planned for any of my children and I have three boys. Maybe people ask initially because they have children themselves, and know how much children can light up your life. I ended up having my children in my 20′s. If it’s meant to be it will happen for you. If it isnt meant to be then it won’t. I wouldnt worry too much about why people ask what they do. People sometimes want to live though others and so they ask you questions and they want you to be like them. When they feel you are not exactly like them, it can sometimes make them get suspicious of you. It’s really rooted in thier own insecurity inside of themselves. Like why do we all need to fit the same mold? Why do we all want to be so like one another? It’s weird. Why do we feel threatened when we come across a person who marches to the beat of their own drum? Why are some people afraid to do just that themselves? I think people just want to feel like they fit in somewhere, and by affirming that they are like others, it helps affirm their place in the world. Personally for me, I already know I don’t fit in. I’m fine with it. I love jam bands, and I’m a female. I don’t have a single female friend that loves the kind of music I love,and you know what? I don’t even care. Just be confident in who you are in your life, and shrug off people’s touted questions.
You know I think Phish’s studio work is really underappreciated.
Ahhh I love Phish’s studio work. I just saw Trey Anastasio this Friday night in Pittsburgh. I wasnt going to go, but my husband wanted me to go. So glad I did. I hadnt been to an indoor show in a very long time, and just to see how he manages to move the light show around to get people jigging around and up and dancing. It’s truly an artform. There is art and then there are artists that really can discover how to move people and create a mood by use of lighting and even the tone of his guitar. I could go on… :)
Adam –
I do not understand what you can possible hope to get out of this exercise.
Did you even discuss with your wife before you posted this?
IMHO if you and your wife really want children – get busy and stop making excuses. It will not get any easier. But honestly they way I read your post you really do not want children at this time – why post such personal stuff on a catholic blog when you know you will not like most of the answers you will get.
Very puzzling post for VN.
If you knew my wife you’d know she’s fine with these sorts of conversations. Really I was hoping to steer these concerns to broader questions about the intersection of religion (specifically Catholicism) and American social expectations.
Except for the fact that you work with the Church, I don’t know whether the question posed would get to the intersection of Catholicism and American social expectations.
America continues to be a mostly protestant country, although it is moving toward secularism.
People are too nosey, but that applies accros culutres, as a couple of cmments pint out. And associates frequently strike up awkward conversations, from asking about having children to gaining weight to having the stomach flu to talking about Charlie Sheen’s lifestyle.
Although it’s certainly not uplifting, it’s also not a sign of the apocolypse or anything…
Sorry for the typos. I’ll try to do better.
The more I work with people and talk to people the more I find that people have serious reasons for avoiding children, at least temporarily.
If I don’ know someone well, I can do nothing but give them the benefit of the doubt. If I know someone well, then, often enough, it will come up in conversation. Often people are struggling with something very personal. It does not do us any good as a child friendly community to presume things about people who don’t have children. It is especially hurtful when people who are desperately trying to have children are at the wrong end of a “How Catholic can they really be?” comment.
Many people have commented that at places like, say, homeschooling meetings, those with smaller families feel condescended to. Discerning when you are called to add to your family, and dealing with issues like infertility, are incredibly personal. Unless you are very close to someone it is best to steer clear.
Adam, For what it’s worth, it is between you, your spouse and God when or if you have children. God knows what is in your hearts and in the hearts of those who intrude into others lives without being invited. I see this as an opportunity to clearly speak your truth that it is none of their business. The existential crisis of freedom or lack thereof seems to be in play here. To gain one’s freedom one must take a stand and speak one’s truth, in this case the truth is, it is none of their business.
This begins to define who you are and what you value as your guiding light, those who do not know you or God Who knows you.
I wonder. Is anybody reading the second half of the post?
I read it, I just don’t necessarily get where you are going with it. You state that Over time this theme of blessing changed from recognition of divinely granted office, authority or use to being synonymous with “fortune.” (Yes Kings wanted sons and sons and more sons and it was important)… However, if you are laying it on those times, as to the foundation of how capitalism is running rampent through American family society, I just am not sure I totally agree. I think that man has indulged himself in greed. Man always has done that, and probably always will. That is why everything is marketed towards the family unit. They want your money. I know you realize that, but you could also look at times where families didnt have the extra money all the time to indulge their children in things like IPOD touches and video games and what not. I am not so sure I agree with you also, because these days, I feel that many people don’t even need a traditional family. Couples have children and choose not to be married. Single mothers who make a good salary will have a child and forgo even considering a husband for the child.
I have not read all the comments, but I wanted to write down my initial response. It blows.me.away. how people can comment on something so private. It is really no one’s business. And I sympathize with you,
Adam, and I hate to tell you, it doesn’t get better. When I was married and trying to have children, I was “only” able to have one child. I miscarried two others and I had to *defend* having “only” one living child! I had always envisioned having a large family so one day when I was trying to assuage my sadness by saying, “Well, I guess I am in good company, Mary only had one child” when a devout Catholic woman immediately stepped in and told me, “Don’t say that! That was Planned Parenthood’s slogan for a long time!” Wth??
At some point I had to ask myself why “only” came up as a descriptor for my daughter! She is my biggest blessing; the best thing that has EVER happened in my life. How dare I insult God by saying “only.” The whole thing is just outrageous and obnoxious on so many different levels!
Adam, regarding your hypothesis about *why* people ask these questions, I have to say that this conversation is not uniquely American. The reality is that people marry to have children and the question about having kids or not having kids is an ancient one that we can find when we read the Bible. It is not only only others’ expectations we have to deal with, but our own as well. We still link marriage with children and I suspect that linkage, which is already weak, will continue to weaken the more secular our society becomes. But I assure you, if you travel to a 3rd world country in the middle of nowhere, people will find it curious as to how you can be married with no children. Each culture places its own excuses for these types of things.
I have no doubt that these are issues that have come up across history and different cultures. I just wonder if there isn’t something uniquely “American” at play here. Like its a shadow of broader narrative about “success” or some such thing. I shared this post with an “athiest, hedonist, San Fransician” friend of mine he told me that it comes up where he is as well. Nobody wants kids themselves, but they think its weird that nobody else has them.
You need to get better friends and acquaintances. Or better yet, stop hanging out with a bunch of crazy judgmental Catholics who feel they need to be up in everyone’s business. When religion gets involved in the marriage bed, both religion and the marriage bed suffer. Priests aren’t going to raise your kids, and neither are the “orthodox Catholics” busybodies who feel they need to be up in your business.
And 29 is still pretty darn young. The only people who should be pressuring you to have babies are your parents and only because they want grandchildren. Everyone else needs to stay out of your life.
I suspect, actually, that this line of questioning has very little to do with American Social Religion. Why? The most direct answer would be to attend to the history of literature, where one can see, among other things, that the presumption was that anyone living as man and wife would be having children. The absence of children would only be held to arise from: (1) the physical separation of the spouses (which was, by the way, why there were historical periods in which soldiering was considered incompatible with marriage), (2) their not engaging in conjugal relations (I’m trying to keep this discussion chaste!), or (3) a failure (despite engaging in conjugal relations) to beget/conceive. Now, #1 was experienced both by society and by the couple as a hardship, and #2 was considered possibly holy (if done for the sake of attending to God more fully) but more probably morally worrisome. The final category, #3, was considered especially a reason for sorrow. This idea is quite ancient, is expressed in the Bible itself, and I see no reason to regard its continuation in modern America much of a wonder. Indeed, it could have come either wickedly (by way of gossip or sinful curiosity) or virtuously (through genuine concern for the couple) that members of one’s community would raise questions about the presence/absence of children.
What I can note is that some of the reaction you receive may be because you are Catholic, and at least in its ideals, if not materially in Europe, America, and Australia/New Zealand, Catholicism is seen as somewhat remarkable for holding to this view (which was once quite generally held). In much of modern America, as in the West in general, not having children is both a statistical and a cultural norm. Unhappily, this is also because of the widespread acceptance of artificial birth control, so that one simply presumes of any married couple that (a) there is conjugal congress, but that (b) there is no reason to presume there would be any children.
Even so, there are varieties here. Quite a few years ago, while I was an undergraduate, one of my mother’s students in elementary school asked me (I was then 19 years old) whether I had any children. I replied that I did not, as I was not yet married. When I told her that I had none, she looked at me in astonishment, baffled that any man at 19 would not already have at least one if not more children, whether or not he was married. I do not judge her presupposition, although it clearly came from her living in a social/cultural/economic world quite different from mine. Still, we would generally think that her view was not representative of the majority American one, which would have presumed that I was sexually active without having any children nor any immediate plans of marriage, and even then holding off the having of children until later.
I think the social religion aspect that you’re looking at may be trying to over analyze something very basic: a lot of people are just plain too nosey. If it’s any comfort, coming from the other side of having got married “very young” (or so everyone told us) at 22 and had children right away, and had them closer together than we expected — if you have children quickly and frequently people ask all sorts of probing questions about that too.
Part of me wants to say that in the last couple generations people have lost any sense of what it is not polite to ask about or talk about — but honestly, that may just be that I myself come from an extended family which was very conscientious about privacy. From reading and such, I get the impression that a lot of people have always been way up in other people’s business about when a couple is going to have children, how many and why or why not.
FWIW, it’s not a strictly Catholic or American thing either. At my previous job I had a lot of recent immigrant Indian co-workers (mostly Hindu, a few Jain) and they said they always got all sorts of very invasive questions from relative back home about when they were going to have children, how many children, what they were doing about it, etc.
So no, I don’t think it’s a matter of social religion which has become more prevalent in liberal democracies. While this is dying away, there’s still a residual social expectation of, “They got married. Now they’re having sex! Maybe they’ll have babies!” which is pretty common to all cultures. Though if we make it as far as much of Europe seems to have, perhaps that residual understanding will go away.
Also, when you say:
Media outlets maintain whole networks related to family, huge sectors of the economy market directly to children and to “families” as a unit. But childless married couples are never included. Childbearing is the societal transition that ushers married couples into the completeness of “family” and full participation in the capitalist economy.
Trust me, if/when you do have children, you’ll suddenly find that there’s a whole set of social (and economic) interactions which you’re suddenly excluded from or at least barely tolerated in. People love to be all probing about when a married couple will have kids, but once a baby (much less a toddler) is on the scene, a lot of people realize they’re really rather only see the parents if the baby is safely stowed somewhere. That’s why there tends to be a divide between those who have kids and those who don’t in social circles, even more so than the divide between those who are married and those who aren’t. It’s just different circles, and it’s probably fairly natural and inevitable.
Darwin, the last paragarph is a good point. But isn’t it lamentable? Are we called to be reconciled to each other? I wonder how culture could be adjusted or recreated to change this.
I did not address the second part of your post regarding how all of this came about. I want to address the influence of interpersonal neurobiology specifically addressing the function of mirror neurons which were discovered in primates about 13 years ago and their role in relationship to movement. That has expanded to their role in human relationships and how this system observes and responds in potentially every activity of human experience. It was discovered that even if we do not perform the actions ourselves that we observe in others the premotor cortex and inferior parietal areas would activate in response to the observed action of another and would also anticipate intention for future behavior expected for the particular event. Mirror neurons were also discovered in the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus and the insula all of which play significant roles in comprehending feelings, intent and language. Another interesting finding is that when people listened to sentences describing actions, the same mirror neurons fired as if the observers were performing the actions themselves. This has important significance when I think of the post on violent rhetoric.
Consequently, we are a basic mixture of responses programmed from infancy that give us our basic attachment to our parents and the expectations we face in the social system we belong to. Our sense of self and others will constantly be unconsciously acted out in our social encounters. Our feelings, thoughts and actions take place before we become aware of them consciously. It is no wonder why Christ said “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” The only way out of this primitive mechanistic social reality is to develop self-awareness through a mindful practice beginning with compassionate self-observation and if one is Christian prayer to the Holy Spirit for Wisdom. So Adam, I do not mean to sound harsh, but the system you describe is a system that is not built on empathy and self-awareness, rather, it is built on transgenerational primitive mechanistic responses to the existential crises of human existence and the reactive response of attempting to control the behavior, thoughts and actions of others in order to calm the underlying sense of fear inherent in all of our relationships.
Wow. I’m going to mull this over some this afternoon Ronald.
I forgot to mention Adam that we are also wired to give and receive nurturing which enables life to thrive. Any animal can have sex and produce offspring. All mammals have the instinct to nurture those offspring and protect them. Is this instinct an instinct for love? Human beings are consciously aware of these instincts to bond to that which is loving and to reject that which is not loving. Other primates may also be aware of love vs not love.
Marriage is where we reveal what is not loving in us and has not been loved to the other in an unconscious attempt to be loved and heal the harm of earlier experiences. We are most vulnerable in marriage because of the commitment of a life together and the expectations of what it means to love another person.
I disagree that it is primarily to produce children. Marriage is primarily one avenue to learn how to love and heal each other’s wounds, to be aware of and stop the transgenerational pain that began tens of thousands of years ago, to create a new generation of human beings who are open and safe to be with, whether or not we have children. The hope is to awaken in our marriage to love and not be indoctrinated into a past that is filled with ignorance.
Henry–it is completely uncharitable for others to judge you just because you don’t have children. There are obviously many reasons why a couple might not have children that do not implicate any unfaithfulness, and no one can presume to attribute the unfaithful causes to you, nor is it their place to scope that out. I do think that it is not completely unnatural for someone talking to a married person to ask about children, and the question “why,” in itself, could be part of a legitimate communal conversation (not interrogation), depending on the context, the tone, and the direction of the discussion. But it’s their tactlessness in where that conversation heads, and where they think it can legitimately go, and their failure to recognize their own presumptious conclusions that becomes the problem. The cultural causes you cite contribute to those improprieties somewhat.
Matt
If you are a couple who wants children, but can’t, constantly having people pester you about them and acting like, well, are you really Catholic, is NOT the answer or way to treat people. Sometimes the thing is to let people be.
And sorry for not quite understanding that Adam is the speaker here, not Henry–do I have that right? I agree that pestering is not appropriate–it’s not part of an acceptable “context, tone or direction” it would not be based on an inquiry in the midst of a true caring relationship between the questioner and the questioned, and people need to realize that a couple without children might be susceptible to pestering. I’m not recommending pestering. I’m just saying that a question about children is not intrinsically evil.
…and, any questioning or its context that could come across as “acting like, well, are you really Catholic” is exactly the kind of tactlessness and insensitivity that I am condemning along with you.
Matt
Yes, this is Adam’s post. And it is good we are in agreement.
I knew a guy once, among a group of Catholic men who knew each other fairly well. He had a very verile (albeit benevolent) personality and was wont to approach other guys in the group and ask how many kids he has, and then upon hearing fewer than say one every two years, to ask what the problem was. It caused some tense moments. At the same time, the guys generally worked it out with him and among themselves, because there was some background trust. I also know some people who are deeply personable; they are the kinds of people who you talk to and you immediately believe that this person cares about you at a fundamental Christian level though in a natural way not an obsessive way, and is truly interested in where you are at in life and with the Lord. Some rare people like that could, in contexts they disern carefully, ask “why” to a person in a marriage with no children, and it would come off without any judgmental tone, but as a question that made the questioned-person really believe that this person cares why and cares that it may be painful to them. But most of the time inquries like this are much more delicate.
Spiritual narcissism has no insight and it is solidified in the identity of the person making the judgment of another. If you challenge that person then you become the negative object to the other person. All religious and non-religious groups are narcissistic in nature because we are basically narcissitic in our identity formation and we are attracted to others who have similar narcissistic beliefs. If we were self-aware we would be empathetic towards others who appear different. Empathy requires putting oneself in another’s position and not attempting to force one’s position on the other. Empathy wants to understand the other’s life story while narcissism wants to indoctrinate the other into his life story. Empathy evolves from love and narcissism from fear.
It’s all in the hardware of the brain. If you do not understand how the hardware operates then you are controlled by it while thinking you have free will.
Henry,
You are correct that the Church nowhere tells the married couple that they will have as many children as possible. However, canon law says, “For matrimonial consent to exist, the contracting parties must be at least not ignorant that marriage is a permanent partnership between a man and a woman ordered to the procreation of offspring by means of some sexual cooperation.” Can. 1096
and Vatican II said,
“By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown.” Gaudium et Spes 38
This suggests that there is a lot more to being “open” to children if they happen to come along. It suggests that procreation is the reason for marriage in the first place.
Ben
That is a nice, Protestant proof-texting response, which ignores a great deal of material the Church has on marriage. First, canon law is discipline, and it would be prudent to remember that. Second, you ignore many other aspects of marriage mentioned in Vatican II, let alone in the history of the Church. Would you say, for example, those saints who married but never had sex were somehow unfaithful to their marriage vows? Really?
The CCC points out: 1654 Spouses to whom God has not granted children can nevertheless have a conjugal life full of meaning, in both human and Christian terms. Their marriage can radiate a fruitfulness of charity, of hospitality, and of sacrifice.
In other words, even without children, the full meaning of married life can and does exist.
1. Any inquiry into the personal family situation of a married couple (why no kids, why so many kids, why not pregnant, why pregnant again, etc.) by someone who does not have a right to know is completely out of line and inappropriate. It is a personal decision between the couple and God, and there are a myriad of reasons behind a couple’s particular situation.
2. I have to echo DarwinCatholic’s take on this, because I think he’s on the right track. The reason is that people are nosy and are gossips. Every culture has such people. It’s not limited to American Civil religion or American Christianity. In fact, I believe it’s probably worse in non-American civil societies, because American civil society/religion has a tradition of personal privacy which tempers the sinful tendency to be nosy. Contrast that with other cultures: Muslim, Hindu, primitive tribal, European orthodoxy, etc., where the couple’s lives are less private and more communal. And the reason behind the nosy-ness is obvious: marriage necessarily means a couple having sex with the possibility of babies.
3. Media outlets maintain whole networks related to family, huge sectors of the economy market directly to children and to “families” as a unit. But childless married couples are never included.
Yes, there are some sectors directed to families, but I tend to think the exact opposite tends to be the case. Huge sectors of the economy are marketed to those couples who do NOT have children. The most obvious example is simply renting a hotel room. Marketing for trips, flights, cruises, museums, movies, shows, etc. are mostly directed at the childless couple who has the money and time and leisure to spend on those. And when there are “family specials”, “family” is inevitably defined as only 2 adults and 2 children — A 3-child family is out of the question.
I agree and I disagree with your last point, Thales. I disagree in that I think those things are marketed to people who happen to be childless married couples, when they could run the whole gamut of relationship.
I agree that “family” is often limited to two or three people. I know several larger families that are frequently frustrated by this. But I feel this sort of plays to my point. A certain view of family has been “reified” and that reification is both guarded and generated by social and economic forces.
Henry,
I can’t believe you are citing tradition as a defense. Prior to the Second Vatican Council it was the perennial teaching of the Church that procreation was the primary end of marriage, and that the sanctification of the spouses was the secondary end.
Way to go proof-texting your response right back to me!
Ben
It was? The what about the saints who vowed to never have children and yet were married? Seriously, the Church’s teaching on marriage is quite more complex than the over-simplification you have provided. Marriage is seen, for example, of making sure people are not alone — it is good not to be alone. Seriously, tradition IS a defense because tradition has far wider views of marriage than the narrow view many have of it today.
I think you are being unfairly critical of ben. It is certainly true that the Church upholds, as exceptional examples, i.e. by way of exception, the “chaste marriages” of virgin saints. The chaste marriages of the virgin saints were not cases of marrying for another reason than procreation (e.g. for companionship). Rather, generally the marriage was compelled for one or another familial or social reason. The saint, however, consecrated her virginity to God. Since consecrated virginity anticipates in this life the good all of the blessed will enjoy in the life to come, the good of procreative union is subsumed and set aside in favor of this other, in traditional language higher good. Likewise, more ordinary marriages for companionship were entered into by persons of more advanced years, where there would be no (natural) expectation of childbearing.
So, ben is essentially right in holding out procreation and childrearing as primary, albeit not exclusive, ends of marriage per se. It is not proof-texting for him to have done so.
Dominic
If marriage is not exclusive to child bearing, then we must keep that in mind in discussion of marriages with people who do not have children. That is the point. There can be many reasons a couple does not have children. If they are abstaining from sex, would it be wrong? I mean, isn’t that what people point out is going on with NFP which makes it ok? That there is nothing wrong with abstaining?
Moreover, we can look at how Sts Joachim and Ann were mistreated – because they too didn’t have children. Catholics should know this story well, because it should protect people who don’t have children, to help explain why people shouldn’t go prying and acting so uppity at a couple who don’t have children. We don’t know why they don’t have it, and it is not our business!
And btw, there are many traditions about marriage, more than the Augustinian one in the Church.
What haunts most discussion and experiences of childbirth (or not) in the modern West is the prevalence, even among Catholics, of the use of artificial contraception. As I noted earlier in the thread, in the past, there would be three reasons (generally) for the absence of children in a couple, two unhappy (the couple were unable to be together because of physical separation or there was a physical incapacity/limiting factor for one or the other) and one either suspect of virtuous (the couple did not “come together as man and wife). The latter could be virtuous, in the past, generally in light of a higher calling (e.g. the Pauline periodic abstinence for the sake of prayer or the case of consecration of virginity in heroic cases). Modern Catholic teaching allows for the use of more detailed knowledge of conception to allow for the reasoned spacing of births as well. This latter, of course, still presumes and is oriented towards the having of children (if possible). It is also, by the way, why childlessness was a hardship not just b/c of mistreatment, but for Ss Joachim and Anne themselves, since they wanted a child.
Of course, I would agree that prying and self-righteousness ought to be excluded from the charitable relations between persons!
Also, nothing in what I said requires or presumes a (so-called) Augustinian tradition of marriage. Augustine himself was transmitting much that was general and traditional anyway, but even so, the centrality in Christianity of marriage and childbirth and child-rearing is as much Byzantine or Oriental Orthodox or Celtic or Coptic etc. as it is north African.
It seems to me that in the Adam-and-Eve version of the creation, Eve is created as a companion for Adam, not as a means for him to procreate. Although the story doesn’t explicitly state that there was no sexual relationship between the two, it is strongly implied (and I think usually assumed). The other creation story is the “be fruitful and multiply one,” which says nothing about companionship.
Whether or not a married couple has children is between the husband and wife. I know of a case where the husband’s family was constantly nagging the wife to get pregnant, and the husband was impotent. People should mind their own business.
There are legitimate explanations why a husband and wife might not have children, and illegitimate explanations. Because of the private nature of the question, no one but the husband and wife really knows what the real explanation is, and therefore no one one but the husband and wife really can judge it. We can discuss the question of marriage and children, as an abstraction, all we like, but we are never going to come to any just conclusions about any specific cases, so we should not be passing any judgments. Yet, there is a certain mentality prevalent with a certain kind of Catholic, that the number of children is the measure of how “Catholic” a family is. These people, if they happen to be blessed with good reproductive health, are the ones with ten or more children, because that is how many children one will get, if one has good reproductive health, and believes that procreating the maximum possible number of children is a moral imperative. There are too many people, simple-minded people, who think that the circumstances of their own little lives are universal principles that can be applied to the lives of others. There are selfish reasons to have no children. There are unselfish reasons to have no children. There are reasons beyond personal control resulting in having no children. There are gray areas in between all of these. There are no easy answers. The people with the easy answers are usually fools. If Adam wants to have a child, and he is not having a child, then maybe it is because he is making a pusillanimous effort, or maybe he is making a heroic effort, and is still failing despite it. Who can say? The Church can give us rules to play by, and can cheer for us from the bleachers, but ultimately, we are in this game alone, and have to face the consequences of every move we make, alone.
Openness to life in marriage has nothing to do with this American Social Religion thing you speak of. The American social religion is individualism, if anything, and individualism is the force that is most diametrically opposed to children.
Children interrupt everything, most notably the individualistic ethic. Children are proof positive that we are dependent on one another. Children are the persons that will pull us out of ourselves when nothing else will.
SO I guess I think you have it exactly backwards.
Also, there’s teaching of the Church to consider, as other commentators have mentioned. In marriage, you need a grave reason to practice NFP.
Re: “social religion” – the sacrament of Holy Matrimony is a public act (think “banns of marriage” and so forth) so I don’t think honest questions or discussion within the Christian community about its ends (procreation) as taught by the Church should automatically be judged offensive. Decorum should be observed, of course.
But my admittedly limited experience leads me to think, perhaps erroneously, that US Catholics are quite sensitive about others asking them about having children because they are not very comfortable about asking themselves whether they delay having children for serious or selfish reasons. When others ask them about it – innocently, clumsily or whatever – an overreaction sees it as an accusation rather than sharing concern within the Christian community, which is what one charitably ought to assume, perhaps erroneously.
One of the benefits of NFP over hormonal contraception is that the spouses have to communicate and have conversations with one another other more or less continually as to whether they are open to the life-giving love of their marital embrace.
My personal experience is limited, as all personal experience is, but nevertheless, my personal experience is that direct interrogation about how many children a husband and wife may have is an infrequent occurrence. I have heard people make comments to the effect that other people, in general, who have too few children must, therefore, be disobeying the Church. I have never personally received insulting insinuations on the subject, nor have I ever witnessed anyone else personally receive such, in person. I do not count anything that happens on the computer. I do have a policy, however, of not to associate with self-righteous gossipy types, and that may make all the difference. I recommend this policy to everyone. If anyone were to err so gravely as to personally insult me, or someone else in my presence, in such a way, they would likely find my response quite traumatic, and would not likely repeat the error. Fools are a plague on us all, but there is something to be said for refusing to suffer them.
That seems like a legitimate and reasonable approach, although it doesn’t directly address Adam’s question about whether or not the cultural emphasis on families with children reflects an American “social religion” as some kind of democratic residue left after the transition from the model of the divine power of monarchs.
I take it you think not.