About the author: Jane Barter is a Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of Winnipeg. She has published two books of Christian theology: Lord, Giver of Life (Wilfrid Laurier Univeristy Press, 2007) and Thinking Christ (Fortress Press, 2011). She is editor of the forthcoming Christology volume of T & T Clark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology. She also has published extensively in the area of political theology.
Despite the rather obvious fact that we were all children once, the figure of the child is an ever elusive one. When we speak of children, we tend to speak in platitudes—of an abstract innocence or purity; of those who are especially vulnerable to harm and therefore must be protected from the world. But most of all, when we speak of children we speak about the future—of a futurity in which children will inherit the earth, and thus we attach our hopes and our anxieties to them as though they were securers of a redemption that we can only glance at from a far distance. Take, for example, the placard from “1 Million March for Children,” a so-called Parental Rights group targeting LGBTQ+ inclusive education: “We march for their innocence and their future.” But whose innocence and whose future are they attempting to secure?
Spend any time at all in a mixed gathering of children and parents, and you will find all sorts of parental anxieties and aspirations projected upon the child. When my daughter was young, I sat through soccer games where mothers of pre-teen girls worried about their daughters’ “baby fat” and whether they might be delivered from this affliction soon. Collectively, we imagine ourselves to be protecting children from the harms of the world so that one day they may be upstanding and attractive adults who will secure for posterity the kind of dreams that the parents have not managed to attain. As queer theorist Lee Edelman puts it: “the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”[1]
The problem with such a view (which is so ubiquitous that we hardly take notice) is that our understandings of success and failure are often deeply flawed. Such is the case with the so-called Parental Rights movement, which aspires to a future that is at the same time nostalgic in its conformity to 1950s-style gender binaries. It is futurity in which men and women are distinct so that they may be fruitful. The Child becomes the means of securing not only the future but the future’s future. It is a dream, in other words, of immortality and redemption. It is the safeguarding for posterity a legacy grounded in heteropatriarchy, blood, and race. Queerness is an immediate threat to this project because it interrupts such compulsory social reproduction.
There are several ironies to Parental Rights as a project. First, and most obviously, as any parent of a teenager knows, the more we try to force our agendas upon the child, (thankfully) the more resistant they become. And second, the securing of the future’s future is thwarted by the very culture that Parental Rights groups seek to reproduce—especially its habits of mass consumption—which threaten to annihilate the possibility of a future of any kind. In their veneration of the Child, the Parental Rights movement seeks to curtail children’s freedom and condemn them to a future that is ever more precarious and unlikely.
In theological language, the problem with the Child (as an abstract innocent) is that it rests upon a poor eschatology. It reduces the child in all their inexorable singularity to a means for parental ends, despite the piety that often accompanies this appeal. Further, it speaks to a mode of redemption that is merely the overruling of our personal and societal finitude. Children must not only be fruitful and multiply; they must be fruitful and multiply us—our values, culture, and aspirations.
If we were to think about the child through a radical eschatology, everything changes. The future that we seek is not secured by our fecundity but through a promise that has already been given. Such a futurity is not built on the backs of children’s conformity to parental dreams and gendered expectations but is already given in the in-breaking of grace through the child who has secured posterity for us, Emmanuel, God with us. Post Christum natum, the fifth commandment—to honor father and mother (Exodus 20:12)—and the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) cease to be unconditional commands (CD III/4, 2). Salvation is no longer secured in “the propagation of race” (CD III/4, 2) but in its interruption. Barth writes:
On the other hand, obedience to Jesus Christ can mean for certain people men [sic] in certain situations that the end of earthly history brought about in Him, the fact that even in its continuance it can only hasten towards its end, acquires as such direct, practical and independently authoritative significance…. [I]t will be the significance that they are taken out of the whole history of the parent-child relationship to which the command applies, and are called to a being and action in which they have left behind the whole problem of this history and the relevant commandment, and before them stands the Lord Himself and He alone. There is no necessity, but obedience to Jesus Christ can mean that certain men can find themselves claimed, engaged, and committed by His special calling in a very different sphere, i.e., in an immediate relationship to Himself in which they must accept their commitment without regard to the fact they are also children of parents. They will not act in this way because they do not honour their parents but because, as children of parents, they are now called to bear witness to the unique grace of God in Jesus Christ which manifested as the kingdom which has already come in its perfection and which hastens to its future revelation and consummation. Such men are made free in this sense, and the possibility which they must gratefully use is one which does not oppose or disregard the child-parent sphere and its problems yet obviously confronts it independently (CD III/4, 2).
Thus, the child of parents becomes freed to be other than one who is compelled merely to produce and reproduce, to honor and (eventually) be honored. No child needs ever be born in order to fulfill history, because redemption is not more of the same history, but is earthly history’s judgment and its end. As Barth writes:
Between God and man there stands the person of Jesus Christ, Himself God and Himself man, and so mediating between the two…In Him God’s plan for man is disclosed, God’s judgment on man fulfilled. God’s deliverance of man is accomplished, God’s gift to man present in fulness, God’s claim and promise to man declared. (CD II/2, 1)
There is much that can be said here about the Parental Rights movement from the perspective of a radical eschatology. It is a movement which fails to take seriously the failures of parents and their often-violent disregard for children’s freedom. As Barth writes: “There are weak, foolish, flippant and tyrannical parents. Indeed, even the best parents have their limitations and their failings, and sooner or later, consciously or unconsciously, these must become obvious to even the most compliant child and give it reason to pause” (CD III/4, 2).
Those who claim to protect the future Child are the very ones who are threatening the lives of queer and trans youth in the here and now. We ought not march for the Child’s innocence and their future but for youths’ present flourishing, which is often threatened by parents’ weakness, foolishness, and tyranny.
The gift of the child is not vested in their innocence or any future they may promise. The gift of the child is their irreducible singularity, their unique calling by God to be other than what we may project upon them. In this way, queerness reminds us of the freedom that is the kingdom of God, which is not based upon social reproduction or necessity but upon gratuitous and new forms of kinship and of flourishing (Luke 11:27–28; John 3:1–21; John 19:25–29). I will leave the final words to Lee Edelman, an unlikely ally to Christian theology, but one who captures uncannily the radical disjunction between the future we project and the future we have already been given:
And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.[2]
[1] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 11.
[2] Edelman, No Future, 31.