Mothers, Children and the Body Politic: Pursuing Flourishing

Mothers, Children and the Body Politic: Pursuing Flourishing October 8, 2024

Today’s post is about former Anxious Bench Contributor Nadya Williams’ new book with IVP, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. The book officially releases on Oct. 15, and you can get your own copy here as well as on other sellers’ sites. My thanks to Nadya for the advance copy that made this post possible!

What is the value of a human life?

This is the framing question that Nadya Williams’ new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity seeks to answer. Williams, of course, does not wish to assign a dollar amount to human life, rather arguing that life is priceless, as humans are a reflection of the imago Dei.  The book’s title (and several of its early chapters) are about motherhood and children, both problematically valued and assessed in ancient Greco-Roman and in modern American culture. However, Williams’  book itself is far more wide-ranging in considering the question of human flourishing, both in the examples from the ancient world that it pulls from and in the contemporary issues it touches on. As she puts it in her conclusion, the story of the book is that of the struggle to fight our human sinful nature and cultural norms to care for the weak, helpless, and vulnerable in response to the call to love embodied in the imago Dei (221).

Pairing discussions of Roman military texts (112-121), the Iliad (53-54), the Oresteia (91-94), and Plato’s Symposium (97-98), to name just a few of the ancient sources that Williams employs throughout, with discussions of contemporary issues in modern America like abortion (Ch. 2), genetic engineering and schooling (Ch. 3), and medically assisted death (170-175), might surprise any number of readers. But the juxtaposition of these societies with such wide chronological and geographic divergence emphasizes one of Williams’ key claims in the book: that the utilitarian disordering of perceptions of humanity that plagued the ancient world is markedly similar to that of our own era, and the answer to both is a countercultural Christianity that values all, without exception.

Williams’ chapters on the ancient world point to the utilitarianism that marked social hierarchies in Greece and Rome, which judged the value of a life on their contributions to the military success of the state (discussed at greatest length in Chapter 6, “The Useless Ones: Devaluing Civilians in War and Peace). This led not only to a devaluing of children, but also of single women, older individuals, or anyone less than ideally male-bodied. Out of this militaristic and utilitarian system of value grew a tension between valuing mothers merely as vehicles for producing future soldiers and not seeing mothers at all. As Williams shows, the modern world is marked by a similar utilitarianism, skewed not towards the military success of the state but instead towards profit margins and capitalistic gains. Individuals (whether mothers or children) who step off modernity’s assembly line are seen as threats to society’s wellbeing and to the bottom line; with profit as the metric, a dollar amount can be assigned to and traded for a human life (somewhere around $10 million, according to a 2020 NPR story and the US Federal Government).

The solution to both ancient and modern utilitarianism is the imago Dei: valuing humanity not through cultural metrics but through the eyes of God. This is what Williams points to the early church as doing, through Jesus’s consistent ministry to the least of these, through developing pastoral care manuals for individuals classified as “worthless” by their societies, or through seeing and meeting the needs of the people that culture chose not to see (137-155). For modernity, Williams points to a few specific areas where a similar emphasis on human life and human flourishing would offer a corrective to utilitarian discourses around motherhood and children specifically. But it seems that the broader point of the book is important to remember here: what Williams points to as a devaluing of motherhood (emphasis on youth, perfect bodies, and production within a career) seems to be a broader issue of debasing humanity through reducing them to Pygmalion-like beautiful images (but in the modern version of the myth, beautiful images that create profit). The manifestations of this problem look different for mothers and those struggling with infertility, for children and the elderly, for those within and outside of the church– but the core of the problem remains the same.

Reading this book while pregnant with my second child, it struck me at multiple points that the specific iterations of disordered values Williams identifies look a little bit different in each area of my life. Having been single, married, and a mother within evangelical spaces, I can confidently say that the labor of pregnancy at least is seen and valued highly within evangelical culture, certainly more than the work of singleness or childlessness. But in my vocation and workplace, pregnancy is rendered as invisible as possible, a hindrance to the timing of academic life that must be managed, while the labor of teaching and formation (either of my own children or of the college students that I work with) receives far more support and recognition than it does within the church. Williams’ own experiences come through in various places throughout the book– similar in some ways to mine, but with different nuances from her different academic and social and church contexts. Conversations with friends– some struggling with infertility, some balancing work and motherhood, some staying home with their children– have all highlighted people, spaces, or conversations that made their work and efforts feel diminished, derided, or simply unseen, within and outside of the church.

So, with such a multifaceted tangle of specific permutations of a broad cultural disordering, what is the path forward? Williams proposes, in her conclusion and in conversation with Wendell Berry, a rerooting in place and people, local engagements and solutions that meets the disordering of systemic devaluation of people head-on through prioritizing holistic human flourishing of bodies and souls. As she argues, “We need to restore this countercultural valuing of all humanity in our own world. While this means not thinking of human life primarily in economic terms, it also means recognizing, as the early church did, that we sometimes must redeem others at a cost to themselves. Cost-benefit analysis is not a Christian approach to thinking about human beings” (13). And if we are to truly move away from a utilitarian framework for engaging with questions of personhood and value, we may need to make, as Christian institutions, radical decisions that make no financial sense around things like parental leave, healthcare costs, family leave, or cost of living raises. If the goal is to see all people as those bearing the image of God and to enable their flourishing, the same standards for “good policies” cannot apply within Christian spaces and within secular ones.

In reading Williams’ book, another conversation partner throughout the text, Perpetua, gives a glimpse of another part of the solution that Williams spends less time directly discussing. Williams brings up Perpetua, a North African Christian martyred for her faith in 203, several times throughout her book– first in her chapter on creativity and motherhood as an example of the ways in which motherhood often fuels writing, and throughout the final section as an example of what a more holistic understanding of human flourishing in line with the imago Dei might look like. Perpetua was indeed an author and a mother, a consolation to those around her (particularly to the pregnant Felicity) as they awaited their deaths. But importantly, Perpetua did not identify herself first and foremost as any of those things. Her identity, as far as she tells us in her own words, was that of a follower of Christ, living into the individual vocation of witnessing to the Gospel in the specific way that He put in front of her. Perhaps this is the bigger picture that Williams points us to– rather than attempting to engage with culture on its own terms of “value” and “use,” as a church, we should focus instead on encouraging all individuals to live out the Gospel, to do the work (of motherhood, of singleness, of creativity, or of whatever else) that is set in front of us. By seeing all individuals as image bearers and by engaging those within the Body of Christ as Christ-followers first and foremost, rightly ordered value of human life, including mothers and children, will follow. We will not “win” a conversation about any of the social issues Williams identifies through engaging with culture’s own frameworks or terms, but only by shifting where we place our identities and the identities of others.

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