Christians Who Get the Childfree & Those Who Don't
Because most of Americans are Christian, one could assume that there are lots of childfree Christians. During and after interviewing people for Families of Two, I have found this to be the case. Most do not see being childfree as at odds with being Christian. An example of someone for whom this is true and who articulately blogs about it is I.Am.Free.
Other Christians have a harder time reconciling their religion and lack of desire to have children. The gospel instructs them to be fruitful and multiply, and if they don’t they are shunned from their church at best; at worst they feel they will die in a state of sin because they chose not to procreate.
Still others don’t suffer when it comes to the idea of being Christian and not having children; they relish in attacking those who make this choice. One Catholic Christian is Mark Shea who has referred to the childfree as a “movement” that is the “archetype of evil.” Most recently, he slammed the childfree in his piece about the 50,000th baby born at Holy Family Hospital of Bethlehem when he titles it “More Bad News for the Childfree Movement.”
The childfree aren't a movement; at best they are a community of like-minded people. It seems to imply we are a group of people that society should be worried about. Saying it is bad news to us that the 50,000th baby is born at this hospital implies we hate children and are against children being born.
Shea not only does not understand the childfree, he seems intent on making those who make this choice as wrong and bad as possible. Why? Because his beliefs are the right beliefs. His church is the right church. His God the right God.
There are rants by the childfree on discussion boards and the like, to be sure. But on the anti-childfree side, Shea writes with venom. He goes beyond a lack of understanding of the childfree; he wants them to be seen as nothing short of evil.
Society still has a way to go when it comes to fully accepting the choice not to have kids, and attempts at this kind of positioning just makes acceptance that much further off.
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