Playful fathering: the burden and promise of Horace Bushnell's Christian nurture

Fathering, June, 2003 by David H. Jensen

Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture yields both oppressive and liberating strands for a contemporary interpretation of fatherhood. The work's critique of American individualism, its thoroughly relational understanding of human beings, and description of the family as a web of organic connection offer promising lenses for a post-patriarchal understanding of fatherhood. At the same time, Bushnell's relational anthropology is plagued by an understanding of the mother as protector of hearth and home that eventually proves oppressive to all members of the human family. Embedded within its pages, however, lies a potentially illuminating reflection on the significance of playing with children. This emphasis on play might prove helpful in expanding a view of fathering beyond duty and toward delight, grounded in the God of creation who delights in all God's children.

Key Words: fatherhood, motherhood, children, theology, play

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Horace Bushnell's classic text, Christian Nurture, first published in 1847, continues to exert a profound influence on the American religious imagination. As a rich exposition of the spiritual lives of children, it fed the growth of the Sunday school movement and continues to lie at the heart of many popular conceptions of children's growth and development. Heralded and lamented after its publication for its seating indictment of revivalism and American individualism, its developmental approach to Christian education, and its reconstruction of the doctrine of sin, Christian Nurture has generated a substantial body of secondary literature in the 150 years since its appearance. Most of this scholarship has focused on Bushnell's reconstruction of orthodox Calvinist positions on sin and salvation, his preaching, or his contributions to religious education. Though a smaller body of work has grappled with Bushnell's understanding of children, the family, and motherhood, no scholars, to my knowledge, have addressed directly his conception of fatherhood. (1) This is a conspicuous lack, since Christian Nurture, in the words of Blanche Jenson (1982), "was not written as a manual for ... a Sunday School curriculum," but as "a book for Christian parents" (p. 21). Since part of Bushnell's motivation in writing this work was to address fathers, and to give voice to his own joy in parenting, further efforts at uncovering Bushnell's understanding of fatherhood are critical if we are to give Christian Nurture a fair read. This essay represents one such attempt and claims that Bushnell's organic conception of the human family yields ambiguous results for a contemporary interpretation of fatherhood. His thoroughly relational understanding of human beings--though promising in its recognition that the well-being of each member of the family (and society) is bound up with the well-being of others--is also plagued by interpretations of motherhood that prove oppressive to all members of the human family. Bushnell's organicism, in other words, fuels the fire of 19th century patriarchy. From these ashes and the closing pages of Christian Nurture, however, emerges a potential post-patriarchal interpretation of fatherhood: a meditation on playing and laughing with children that expands a view of fathering beyond duty and toward delight, grounded in the God of creation who delights in us.

Though he is often celebrated as the American father of Protestant liberalism, Horace Bushnell's biography and writing defy the categories of theological typology. Few of Bushnell's treatises fit neatly into the contours of systematic theology. A gifted preacher, Bushnell falls into the American tradition of a public intellectual, speaking out on controversial themes, drawing on a wide range of theological streams and influences. Carrying out his vocation as pastor in a Congregationalist church in Hartford, Connecticut, Bushnell typifies in many respects both Yankee establishment and the emergence of the middle class in the mid-19th century United States. He writes chiefly to urban audiences of relatively stable means. In the pages of Christian Nurture, for example, he assumes that children are not laboring on the farm or in factories, but have sufficient time and space to play and rest in the safe confines of the family home. Margaret Bendroth (2000) describes Bushnell's theory of Christian nurture as giving a "new, specifically Christian rationale to middle-class parents in search of their children's salvation" (p. 502). Though he spent most of his life as pastor in Hartford, Bushnell did travel to Europe, traversing England and the Continent for nearly a year (July 1845-May 1846, just prior to publishing Christian Nurture). During this visit, he first came into contact with emerging trends in Protestant liberal theology connected with Friedrich Schleiermacher (Mullin, 2002). Bushnell's biography, in other words, yields an audience much like himself--middleclass Northerners, content to let children "be children" at home, influenced by waves of Enlightenment and Romantic thought rippling across the Atlantic.