Things are not as they should be. Now what?
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity by Nadya Williams. IVP Academic, 2024. 240 pp., $26 (paperback)
In Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic, Nadya Williams offers what is ultimately a response to a foundational Christian question: Who is my neighbor? Her focus on mothers and children spirals out to include all vulnerable people, which turns out to include all people, because they bear God’s image. The book is so wide-ranging it could be several volumes. Its focus includes women and children, vulnerable persons more generally, the ancient Mediterranean world, and prolife ethics. Readers are left with a challenge to more deeply sense how much God loves and treasures every human life.
The book’s analysis of contemporary culture is tethered to the ancient Mediterranean before and after Christianity, showing the reader how to live in the way of Jesus not simply by imagining Jesus as a good individual but by studying the historical context of Jesus and his first followers—who, like us, sometimes get it right and sometimes fall short. By learning about how they incarnated the Gospel in their time and place, especially in their treatment of women, children, infants, and other “useless people,” we expand our capacity to discern how to “speak life into a culture of death.”
The book is organized in three parts. The introduction begins with Williams describing her decision to leave a career as a professor to homeschool her three children. She describes women who prioritize family as being put “on trial,” the target of intense hostility. She also employs an economic frame to describe how everything—commercial goods, time, and persons—is valued in an intensely capitalistic and individualistic society. The issues then narrow to an incisive question she threads throughout the book: “Are there not ways of estimating the worth of a life that are not economically driven at all?” In a society that so highly values profit and economic growth, what is the value of those who do not produce—fetuses, babies, mothers, the infirm, the disabled, and the elderly?
Part One describes the American body politic as cancer-ridden, having absorbed “pagan values about the worth of human life.” Williams describes maternal and fertility health care, child raising, and the challenges of holding motherhood and creative work together. Her arguments seem located at the logical extremes of common cultural practices: obstetric care, birth control, employment, and public schooling. She critiques, for example, parents who celebrate sending their kids back to school at the end of the summer, concerned that we “reduce children to products on the assembly line,” sending them off like products to be molded. In all cases she points out ways the culture encourages people to prioritize self over family and pleasure over commitment.
Part Two offers a rich historical exploration of the ancient Mediterranean world, showing how the values and lifestyles of the early Christians offered life within a broader context more focused on death. In documenting the ways Christians valued daughters, mothers, and babies, she concludes that “it is difficult to overemphasize just how revolutionary the idea of the imago Dei was in antiquity and continues to be within all philosophical systems of world history.”
Part Three draws the contemporary and the ancient together, admonishing Christians to make good on their pro-life values: “We claim to be a people who are pro-life, but American Christians’ witness on issues of life, outside support for pro-life legislation, desperately needs improvement.” This part shifts from history to political commentary to personal narrative to metaphors of trees to a Wendell Berry story. It can be hard to follow. The general point rings true, but readers will have to discuss amongst themselves how to apply the book’s admonition to their communities and lives. It wasn’t clear to me whether the book’s thoroughly pro-life ethic would also call for Christians to reject birth control, mothers working outside the home, infertility assistance, and public schooling.
The book’s central point beautifully paraphrases the teachings of Jesus with echoes reaching back to the creation story in Genesis 1-2: “The idea that every single human, regardless of life stage, age, status, health, or physical or intellectual (dis-)ability level, is priceless and precious and unspeakably loved in God’s eyes.” It extends a line of Christian thought over the last half century showcased by Francis Schaeffer’s discussion of abortion in How Should We Then Live?, which regards America as living out a “death wish” that can be analogized in the fall of Rome. It also echoes Ron Sider’s call to evangelicals to be “completely pro-life.” Schaeffer, Sider, and now Williams each deliver an admonition to the church that is incisive and unsparing.
It all leaves me longing for a little breathing room. When justice is explicated with demanding rigor, the inevitably imperfect human being needs an equally thorough offer of mercy.
Christian families in America today overwhelmingly rely on birth control to manage family size, two-parent employment to survive financially, and public schooling to both educate children and make employment viable—all of which keeps the household afloat and sometimes even happy. Painful, then, Williams’ question: In a world where technology allows for a “mother to be a worker first and a generally fully autonomous person, what is the difference between a mother and a surrogate these days?” The working mother is essentially a surrogate, birthing a child that is raised by others. The mother “may technically parent her children, but she is not fully their mother in a traditional formational sense.”
Williams describes an idealized past in which women gave birth to children and then were fully their mothers, a fullness that relied on a husband, siblings, and a functional household. This past is interrupted by modernity, science specifically, with technology that allows for abortion on demand, genetically customized children, and employment outside the home.
Any anthropologist will tell you that the human past—and present, for that matter—is comprised of myriad cultures that develop norms and values to support families in many forms and in states ranging from thriving to very unwell. In all cultures there are parents who are deceased, mean, nonfunctional, or absent. In all cultures there are adult women who cannot bear children, or who would like to have few or none. There is no ideal past against which to measure present declension. Family life has always included economic and familial pressures that exist alongside personal desires—including a woman’s creativity and giftedness straining against the seemingly endless needs of family during child-raising years.
This deposits us at the important theological juncture between truth and mercy. The truth is plain: Every person is made in the image of God, but our world encourages us to pursue money and self-aggrandizement at the expense of loving God and neighbor. Another truth is also plain: When it comes to how we spend our money and our time, God’s followers are often, in practice, following the culture. How can we respond to the painful reality that things are not as they should be—and not just “things in general” but we ourselves?
I’d like to home in on one very specific element of the book that is illustrative of the whole: Williams’ discussion of Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape. Phillips, a feminist, describes the lives of women artists, specifically their ways of solving the “mind-baby problem,” which is the tension between a woman’s desires to be creative and also to mother. I’ve read this book three times, a sure sign that, as a mother of three who also writes, I have skin in this game!
Williams focuses on Phillip’s description of artist Alice Neel. Williams offers just a brief summary of Neel’s mothering: Neel abandoned her daughter, inferring a link between maternal abandonment and the daughter’s eventual suicide. But Neel’s life included so much more than this. An accomplished artist, she also was a mother of four children by four different fathers. With all that she had to offer, she raised them (or, in her daughter’s case, allowed others to raise them) in ways that put art first, children second. My favorite sentence in the book is her son Richard’s summation: “Every single one of us has to deal with what we’re dealt, and the people we are exposed to. And it was a gift to have her as a mother.” In the many artists’ lives described in this book there was harm caused to and by women, harm that affected children living and also those unborn. But there were gifts as well, which were given and received alongside and in the midst of flaws, harm, and misplaced priorities.
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic is, at points, very exacting. And there is, to be sure, benefit in a precise articulation of the good. But even better is a vision of how truth and mercy can coexist, perhaps even symbiotically, in this world where good intentions sit alongside failures of courage, and where relationships display both blessings and scars. This vision comes through strongly in Williams’ portrayal of early Christians who stood out as moral exemplars but who also fell short, and less so in her portrayal of contemporary American culture.
Williams winsomely reaches the conclusion that “whatever our failings are at times in treasuring others, Christ always treasures us. . . . The knowledge of this love should empower us to embrace a culture of life in a world that too often chooses death.” For those committed to a prolife ethic, this book will expand and deepen the rigor with which they enact their values. I hope it will inspire a deeper mercy as well.
Jenell Paris is Professor of Anthropology at Messiah University in Grantham, PA.
Image: Ara Pacis, 13-9 BC, detail of relief, Rome