Reply to Wilcox

Allow me to say how grateful I am both to the JAAR for enabling this most fruitful dialogue and to Bradford Wilcox for providing my essay such a thoughtful and engaging response. Nothing could better illustrate the kind of hermeneutical circle between social scientists and religious ethicists that needs to take place today around the vital issues of fatherhood and, more generally, the nature of religion in contemporary society.

I would like first to address Wilcox's important question about the connection of fatherhood to marriage. This question is explicitly bracketed in my essay. I have explored it elsewhere (Wall 2002, 2006). Since the 1980s, Christian ethicists have contextualized fatherhood within marriage almost exclusively. But it is also important to explore the religious ethical meaning of fatherhood as an experience and vocation in its own right. Such has long been acceptable on questions of motherhood.

My view on marriage is that the modernistic soft patriarchal ideology is counterproductive when it comes to cultivating children's larger social capabilities. It reifies the private sphere and sharply divides fathers' private and public identities. It has no more success than egalitarian marriages in resisting today's historically unprecedented rates of divorce. And, as Wilcox's own analysis implies, its strength lies less in ideology than in drawing families into the public world of churches. The traditional Christian "goods" or purposes of marriage since Augustine—procreation, fidelity, and spirituality—apply to fatherhood and motherhood equally. A truly childist marriage ethic, critically retrieving Christianity's complex marriage traditions, would strengthen both fathers' and mothers' responsibilities (however different) as private and public at once. It would encourage without idolizing in-home attachments. But most importantly, it would provide a simultaneously bottom–up and top–down institutional nexus for the cultivation of children's emerging participation in society.

Second, my view of the male problematic is that it is not ultimately the best way to frame the issue. Although Wilcox correctly associates this Aristotelian problematic with the practical theology of Don Browning, he does not note that Browning himself uses it to support a broader ethics of "progressive familism," whose egalitarianism Wilcox's response criticizes. Biology should not be essentialized or made normative, but function instead as one point along a larger hermeneutical circle that also includes history, traditions, culture, narratives, relations, ideals, and ultimate concerns. Fathers' supposed practical and emotional "distance" from childhood is not, in fact, the central issue in biblical, Greco-Roman, agricultural, and many other kinds of families, where male roles are intimate and primary. Today's disengagement of fathers from the home is due principally to a powerful separate spheres ethos that emerged out of industrialization. In the United States in particular, it is deepened by a masculine culture of market competitive individualism. The male problematic is also too easily combined with a troubling Romantic assumption that motherhood is somehow effortless and not problematic.

Christian childism argues that what is most fundamentally "problematic" about fatherhood is not biology but, as symbolized in Adam's fall, humanity. From the point of view of children, mothers too are large and authoritative, and mothers who follow God's example of adoption (Rom. 8:15) are even non-gestational. God is not gendered in reality, only symbolically. The more profound and dignifying issue for fatherhood is its call, in the image of humanity's one Creator, to create the vast range of human differences into more inclusive communities of love.

Despite these differences, Wilcox and I clearly share the central concern of connecting fatherhood with its larger religious meaning and social good. Around this center in children may the hermeneutical circle continue to grow!