What are Childless People For?

Down the street from my home, there are warring yard signs: a house on one side of the street has a sign that says, “Donald Trump 2024.” A house directly across from it has a sign that says, “Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala.” 

Children and family life have taken on an unexpected importance in this election. While abortion policy has predictably taken up a lot of attention, this election has sparked an even broader conversation about family policy, falling birth rates, and the meaning of children. Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s 2021 comments about the U.S. being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” quickly made “childless cat ladies” a flashpoint. It has become a rallying cry for women on the left, and a shorthand reference to the decline of family values on the right.  

Amidst the various policy proposals (an expanded child tax credit, parental leave policies, additional votes for citizens with children) hums a set of deeper cultural questions. What does it mean to value children and families? What kind of life are humans meant to live, and does it necessarily include procreation? A flurry of op-eds (and a recently published book) have asked another question: What are children for?  

Are children for the personal fulfilment of their parents? Are they for the building up of a society or the victory of a political ideology? Are they for the sake of obedience to God? Katelyn Beaty, Christine Emba, and Hannah Anderson have all explored aspects of the question.  

But there’s another question lurking behind that one: What are childless people for? 

Children are one of the “pawns of the culture war,” as Beaty put it. Childless people, especially women, are another—whether as miserable cat ladies or proud independent girlbosses. Both sides hold up single women as a symbol: of how far our culture has fallen or how far it has come.  

Both sides also tell an implicit story about the nature and meaning of human life. In one story, human life is oriented toward biological procreation, the basic unit of human society is the nuclear family, and a meaningful human life requires children. J.D. Vance’s complaint about “childless cat ladies” is that the country is run by people who “don’t really have a stake in it.” People with children care about the future of the country because they care about the future their children will inhabit. In this story, childless people fail to sufficiently contribute to our national economy or the continuation of a Christian culture. They are necessarily “miserable” people, because they live isolated and lonely lives without the meaning and purpose children provide.  

The other story says that human life is oriented towards individual fulfillment, usually defined by career success, wealth, and freedom from obligation or restraint. A social media trend, sparked by the right’s regular disparaging of childless women, features childless women (and DINKS—“double income no kids” couples) flaunting their carefree life, plentiful finances, and clean homes. Childless people have wonderful lives, this story says, because they are free from the burdens that children impose. 

While these two stories give wildly different accounts of what makes a flourishing human life, they also share some remarkable similarities. Both stories imagine that childless people exist autonomously, whether in miserable isolation or glorious freedom. Both stories assume that all humans primarily (or exclusively!) care about the needs of their immediate kin. Both stories share a similar view of the human person: that our obligations to others are chosen, not given. We do not exist as always already obligated—to our ancestors, our neighborhoods, our God—but as independent agents who may take on obligations if we so choose.  

While these two warring stories share many of the same features, the Christian story is entirely different. In the Christian story, humans were made for community with God and one another (Gen 2:18). After sin disrupts that creational community, God creates a new family, starting with Abraham and Sarah, an elderly couple with no children. Where there had been infertility, God brings new life—to Sarah, to Rebekah, to Rachel, to Elizabeth. This family of God was never entirely biological, as the inclusion of gentiles like Rahab and Ruth display. But it’s the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that most radically reshapes what it looks like to “be fruitful and multiply.”   

Over and over, Jesus redefines who counts as family: when his mother and brothers show up looking for him while he’s teaching, he says “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt 12:50). When a woman praises Jesus’ mother in the terms of the cultural belief that a woman’s greatest value lies in the accomplishments of her male children, “blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you,” Jesus responds, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” The New Testament is full of descriptions of this strange new family, bought by the blood of Christ and defined by something deeper and truer than nationality, ethnicity, or biology. 

I don’t have a cat, but I am a childless woman. While I spent most of my 20s in conservative churches that looked down on my unfortunate singleness, now I’m often in academic contexts where people will tell me how lucky I am to be “unattached.” The conservative churches believed that my childlessness meant I was sadly disconnected from true community, failing to fulfill my purpose in life. The progressive academics believed that my childlessness meant I was gloriously free to take any job, move to any new city, fulfill my purpose in life.  

Both pictures of full human life are wrong because both fail to account for the one person who lived a truly full human life: Jesus Christ. One of these stories says that a fully lived human life requires marriage and children—a standard the single man Jesus of Nazareth failed to meet. The other says that a truly full human life requires freedom from obligation and restraint—a standard the incarnate son of God failed to meet, a man who needed nothing from others but chose to become as dependent as a baby and obligated himself to the poor and vulnerable. 

So what, then, are childless people for? We are, like all humans, made in the image of God and made to glorify God and enjoy him forever. With the whole people of God, we are saved for the life of the world, given an identity and mission to bless the nations. Within the specific sociopolitical context we find ourselves in, childless people also have a unique opportunity to witness to the wild and wonderful truth that we are no longer foreigners and strangers but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household (Eph 2:19). 

In a world increasingly disconnected, isolated, and convinced that this independent state makes for a good human life, childless Christians can witness to a belonging even deeper than the nuclear family. We can display with our lives the foundational Christian belief that we are not fundamentally autonomous and sovereign over our own lives but intrinsically dependent—on God for our very breath, on the family of God to care for and correct us, and on the creation God has given. And we can display with our lives the truth that we are not only dependent on others but that it is a central—and good—feature of human life that we are burdened and obligated by others. In a world warring over the meaning of children and family—championing them as the right choice or scorning them as a burden—we can witness to the reality that a full, flourishing human life includes obligations to children you didn’t birth, elderly that didn’t raise you, and the poor and needy who cannot repay you.  

Many of my dearest friends are single childless people, and their lives have been a witness to me of how much more beautiful and fuller life can be when we are obligated to and dependent upon others. I’ve witnessed single people who don’t count their extra time and money as their own but spend it on dozens of children and mentees over decades. I’ve watched childless people open their homes to the children of their neighborhood and church, baking cookies and offering advice and cleaning scraped knees. I’ve also seen churches treat the childless people in their community like they really belong to the same family: giving them rides to doctor appointments, cooking dinner for them when they work late, offering tools or expertise when things in their home break. 

A few weeks ago, a plumbing problem caused most of the first floor of my home to be covered in a couple inches of water. I texted a friend that I wouldn’t be at small group that night, and within an hour I had received calls and texts from five other people at my church: offering help, tools, and emotional support. Single people often lament the way we shoulder the weight of dealing with everything in our homes alone, with no one else helping to make decisions or handle crises. But I was not alone, my family took care of me. 

I’ve started responding to the academics who praise my “unattachment” that I’m actually very much attached—to the few hundred people at my local church. I don’t want to see my life as open to absolutely all possibilities, but restrained by my obligations to this particular people in this place and time. Not every new opportunity is open, not every job or move is a possibility, because I have committed myself to these people.  

And I’ve started responding to the folks who ask if I have a “family” yet that I do—it’s the church ladies who teach me the Bible, the kids I bless every Sunday after children’s church, the baby that got dropped into my lap when her mom was overwhelmed. I am for them, and they are for me.