A new father's story

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1997 by Peter Pfarrer

Recently, while making the rounds of right-wing radio, I came upon James Dobson's Christian show, Focus on the Family, as it presented an hour-long "Tribute to Children." It was made up of taped phone messages from parents (mostly mothers) thanking and complimenting their children, sharing anecdotes from their family lives, and praising God for the blessings he had bestowed upon them. Along with the program's sappy musical background and overt religiosity, I resented the self-congratulatory tone that permeated the program. It seemed another example of the religious right's manipulation of the family as a political tool.

Christian radio is saturated with "family talk," but its depiction of the family is deliberately restrictive. Focus on the Family, for example, would have you believe that all healthy American families are anti-choice, distrustful of government, and, well . . . Christian. The idea that supporters of abortion rights, universal health care, and gay marriages might also refer to themselves as pro-family is simply not entertained. When such issues are broached at all, Dobson's folksy voice tightens up with alarm as he begins to warn of "the enemies of the family." What about the obvious fact that Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists also love their children? Let's just say it's not a hot topic on Christian radio.

After listening to broadcasters like Dobson indirectly segregate the world into "Christians who love their children" and the rest of us, I have to wonder what they would make of my feelings for my twenty-month-old son, Jacob. If I called in, would Focus on the Family air a salute from me to Jacob? Probably not. My professions of love for him would undoubtedly conflict with the program's agenda. Truthfully, even liberal believers might find my views peculiar, because, while religious people regularly turn to their children as evidence for and examples of God's benevolence, fatherhood has only confirmed my naturalistic and atheistic leanings. To be blunt, my son has certified me as a humanist.

How to explain such a position? Well, I could start with the intimate look at raw physicality that the birth of a child provides. While labor and delivery might take place in a sanitized white hospital room, they are messy in ways that only nature is capable of. The blood, the stretching and slipping of skin, organs, and even bone, the resiliency of both the mother and child's bodies in the midst of their struggle -- these realities ground the experience of birth in the realm of biology. It is a decidedly natural event. The child itself, shaking and crying as it is physically severed from its mother, reinforces this sense of rock-bottom reality; there is no doubt that the child is a material being, however animated. When I held Jacob in my arms just moments after his arrival, counting his fingers and crying out in joy to my wife, it was the eyes of a living, breathing person who looked up at me, not the eyes of an angel.

The emotional intensity of delivery seems similarly earthbound. I can't begin to address the pain my wife Robin experienced during labor. However, as a sympathetic partner, I can speak to the primal surges of fear and frustration that accompanied it and, in our case, the overwhelming sense of happiness and relief we felt at our son's healthy entrance into the world. In an attempt to capture the intensely emotional nature of this experience, people routinely refer to birth as a miracle, but, of course, it is actually as regular as rain and as natural and instinctive as the emotions that attend it.

I heard a minister recently gushing over the presence of "the spirit" in the delivery room where his daughter was born. "I looked down at my child, and I felt the spirit move through me," he said. "There was a miraculous and mystical connection." I resisted the urge to interrupt his sermon by asking, "In other words, it felt great, right?" Who doesn't feel an outpouring of emotion at the birth of his or her child? The incentive to rejoice in our offspring's existence has been fine-tuned to an exquisite degree by millions of years of natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists have argued convincingly that the love we feel for our children is instinctive and ancient, formed by Darwinian forces over millennia in order to ensure the safe passage of our genes from one generation to the next. In his book The Moral Animal, Robert Wright provides a thumbnail sketch of how this process might work:

Suppose a single ape gets some

lucky break -- gene XL,

say -- which imbues parents with an

ounce of extra love for their

offspring, love that translates into

slightly more assiduous

nurturing. In the life of any one ape, that

gene probably won't be crucial.

But suppose that, on average, the

offspring of apes with the XL gene

are 1 percent more likely to

survive to maturity than the offspring

of apes without it. So long as this

thin advantage holds, the fraction

of apes with gene XL will tend to

grow, and the fraction without it

will tend to shrink, generation by