Is Christianity about kids?

No. Why did my family think it was?

Looking back, I’m not sure we knew what the teachings of Jesus involved. Phrases like “Love one another” (John 13:34) were strange and remote. Our Christianity was about kids. “Family values” — that was us. We thought the Bible was centrally concerned with the nuclear family, which involved, along the way, regulating sex, policing gender, governing ‘marriage’ by rituals and heavily encouraging ongoing childbearing.

Did any of that need Jesus? Did it ever respect the unique qualities of each person? I always knew my parents just saw me as the new model of them, even if I was somebody else.

We weren’t extreme. The way we saw the Bible, you could drink alcohol—a little bit. Dancing was fine, when married. Women didn’t need to wear ‘head coverings’. Long hair was more than adequate to show their lower status. They couldn’t be clergy, of course. That was for men.

Men versus women—always.

Every conversation did have to have some attack on ‘the homosexuals’. Why did they not want to have kids? Why are “they” so evil? This was Childbirth Christianity, our religion of reproduction.

Kids were the dividing line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Every conversation involved them. They centered the meaning of life. They set the boundaries of consciousness.

If you were alive, you were either a child or focusing on them.

When I decided to look into the teachings of Jesus for myself, I realized with shock that his first, foundational teaching was a call for the destruction of human family as a system of meaning.

I looked at words I must have seen before.

Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say goodbye to my family.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:61–62)

Don’t even say goodbye.

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

This was a radical teaching against biological family, clan and community, as “traditionally” understood. This was something new.

“Following Jesus means, first, leaving home,” as the Bible scholar Leif E. Vaage observes. The disciples are to leave families. No looking back. Come now.

Jesus gives them new names, ripping them out of family lineages, shredding genealogies. No longer is the child an extension of the parents. The child is a new being, independent and self-defining.

Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter). (John 1:42)

Peter goes back to being ‘Simon’ whenever he has slipped back into old thinking, as in Luke 22:31. He is again ‘Simon, son of John’ when his love for Jesus is in doubt, in John 21:15.

It’s like Peter kept going back to the “son of John”—kept losing track of “Peter.” His new, higher self flickers in and out of existence. After awhile, in the narrative of Acts, it flickers out.

Dale B. Martin notes: “Jesus refused to identify with his traditional family and instead substituted for it the eschatological community that shared his vision of a new, divinely constituted family.” This is the key to Jesus’ teachings: a new family replaces the old family.

The old family fought back.

When his family heard this they went out to restrain him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” (Mark 3:21)

As Richard Bauckham says, they “misunderstand his mission, seek to curtail it, and are in effect disowned by him (Mark 3:21–35).”

Jesus disowns his family. He rejects the family as a mode of control and silencing, with their accusations of mental and spiritual problems when you don’t agree with them. He has a new family now, as in Matthew 12:47–50:

Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside wanting to speak to you.” To the one who had said this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” And pointing toward his disciples he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

In John 2:4 & 19:26, he addresses his mother as ‘woman’ after she was part of the plot to have him seized.

He goes on to shred motherhood, disregarding it completely as a source of theological meaning.

As he said these things, a woman in the crowd spoke out to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts at which you nursed!” But he replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” (Luke 11:27–28)

The ‘word’ is himself. He is saying: listen to me.

Enormous efforts continue to be made throughout the gospel narratives to control him through his family.

Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And aren’t his sisters here with us?” And so they took offense at him. (Mark 6:3)

This is an effort to restrain Jesus, to situate and define him through family connections and therefore know him that way—instead of through himself, his actual, immediate presence.

I realized that Jesus was more interesting to me than what my family had called ‘Christianity’, the kid religion. As they couldn’t see him, they couldn’t see me. We had both been invisible, being only ourselves.

One of my favorite biblical figures is Peter’s wife. We know of her existence only because Peter’s mother-in-law is healed (Mark 1:29–34; etc.). But the wife is never seen.

This is often how Christians prefer women, but Jesus makes frequent notice of women. He seems to prefer them to men—and who could blame him? The women understand him; the men do not.

But Peter’s wife is different. She does not register as a spiritual presence. She becomes, then, invisible to the narrative.

In Matthew 19:12, Jesus seems to suggest that Peter, if a faithful follower, become a “eunuch.” Is that what a wife would like? A few lines later, in 19:27, Peter says, “Look, we have left everything to follow you!”

Jesus never tells Peter to “work on his marriage.” Jesus has prompted Peter to leave his marriage.

Jesus says nothing in favor of having kids. Children are not a “blessing” in the New Testament teachings. A blessing is a specific theological event, and no scriptural reference enables Gentile people reproducing biologically to understand that activity in such terms.

Yes, back at the beginning, God prompted humans to “be fruitful and multiply.” But in the New Testament, everything has changed. ‘Fruit’ is now spiritually produced.

Jesus says “by their fruits you will know them,” but Matthew 7:20 isn’t speaking of examining children.

The “bearing fruit” in John 15:16, likewise, refers to how you live your life. To bear fruit is to contribute to the world around you, which is to say, to love.

“Procreation has no significance for Paul at all,” says Daniel Boyarin. This is a basic observation about the epistles in general. There are almost no references to the activity of having or raising children.

Paul notes in 1 Timothy 5:4, that biological family is a place for Christians to “put their religion into practice…” This puts no focus at all on biological parents. The entire Christian community might be part of this activity.

Parenting is not a source of spiritual meaning, and the biological family, if clung to, becomes a problems. We’re here to care for the larger Family of God (cf. Gal. 6:10; Eph 2:19; 1 Tim 5:8).

I tell you the truth, unless you turn around and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven! (Matthew 18:3)

In this higher family, we all have the same status: adelphoi, siblings. We are all simply children—children of God. In New Testament theology, we are orphans and adopted (John 1:12; Gal 4:4-5, etc.).

That means our original parents have died.

Observe this quiet violence in 1 John 3:2: “Dear friends, we are God’s children now . . .” You’re not anyone else’s child, if you’re God’s. Though the word translated ‘friends’ here is agapētoi, which is much stronger than ‘friends’. This word means ‘beloved ones’, or ‘lovers’.

Note that kollaó, which means to be ‘joined with’, is used both of marriages (like “joined to his wife” in Matthew 19:5), and of the interactions of all believers (i.e. Acts 9:26, 10:28, 17:34, etc.).

We learn to interact with each other in a new family that is formed spiritually. This is the Jesus teachings. It’s not about kids.