LET THE CHILDREN COME: REIMAGINING CHILDHOOD FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE

Religious Education, Spring 2004 by Mercer, Joyce Ann

LET THE CHILDREN COME: REIMAGINING CHILDHOOD FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE. By Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore. In the Families and Faith Series, J. Bradley Wigger and Diana R. Garland, Eds. San Francisco: Jossey Bass/John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2003. $24.95. ISBN 0-787-95665-1.

It seems that whatever Bonnie Miller-McLemore writes about, ultimately the subject is parenting. This book is no exception to that pattern, in spite of its title suggesting that children and childhood are its main foci. This does not imply that children are absent from the text. To the contrary, the book offers a rich and extensive review of three common but problematic cultural views of children: children as innocents, as depraved, and as victims. It moves toward a constructive proposal for replacing these inadequate perspectives with a more nuanced view of children who are fully respected as persons, valued as gifts, and viewed as agents. But, as Miller-McLemore herself puts it, "this is a book about how adults think about children . . . and how adults should think about children" (xxv, italics in original). Thus her survey of historical shifts in various perspectives on childhood takes place in the service of the book s core agenda concerning adult interactions with children rather than for descriptive purposes alone. In so doing, Miller-McLemore helpfully advances the contemporary conversation on children as subjects of theological discourse, by moving it out oi the realm oi mere description and into the arena of ethical action, and by keeping in close focus the claim that children cannot be understood in a vacuum apart irom those who care ior them. Still, there is a certain irony in the book's emphasis on parents, in a book that also critiques the field of theology for its adult-centeredness.

Like many other scholars writing on childhood from various fields of study over the past few decades, Miller-McLemore notes significant shifts in meaning undergone by the notion of childhood in history. Some of these shifts relate to changes in the economic status of children from their role as assets in a preindustrial and farm economy, to that of being an economic burden with psychological rather than material value to their parents in postindustrial societies. Other shifts concern the moral or religious status of the child from a pre-modern view upholding the smfulness and depravity of children along with that of adults, to a modern and postmodern view of children as innocent and perfectible, a view that Miller-McLemore says robs children of their agency and eliminates the possibility of constructing childhood in religious discourse by replacing moral and religious language with psychology. Against these perspectives, she suggests the notion of "knowing children," a nonromanticized and unsentimental perspective that can return moral and religious complexity to the discourse on childhood. The book then turns to address the ways two particular disciplines, psychology and religion, have "reinvented childhood." One of the most helpful contributions of the book comes as Miller-McLemore puts into new perspective the critiques of religion as condoning child abuse, rooted in the writings of Alice Miller, that have dominated the literature since the 1980s. Honoring Miller's "corrective" of Christianity in her foregrounding of the needs of children, the book notes that Christianity also brings an important corrective to psychology: children's needs do not exist in a moral vacuum, to be met at all times without critique. As Miller-McLemore claims, children's needs have to be shaped by parents, not simply met, as Alice Miller's increasingly acerbic work uncritically purports.

Chapters on Christian faith perspectives provide less in terms of new insights, but offer readable and interesting versions of how children variously appear in Christian tradition as sinful or as gift. Miller-McLemore reads the Markan texts on children in terms of children's marginal social status and against romanticized views of children. Chapters on feminism survey various camps within feminist thought and feminist theology in relation to children: a "social justice" group concerned with issues of procreative/reproductive choice and rights; a "motherhood" group concerned with the way maternal knowing reshapes understandings of God; and a "common good" group concerned with addressing the damage wrought by liberalism's overemphasis upon individual rights and personal choice in relation to ethical demands to care for children. One of the real strengths of the hook is Miller-McLemore's identification throughout its chapters of the problem of "collective indifference toward other peoples children" that occurs with current constructions of childhood. In its final analysis she calls for a reconceptualization of the care of children as a religious practice and a community discipline. In an epilogue, MillerMcLemore sharpens her focus on the concern for "other peoples children" and the religious/moral dimensions of care of children, in reflections on encounters with children and families in Nicaragua: "The issue is therefore not simply what the wider community owes parents and children hut also what families owe the wider community. Children, in other words, are not an extension of the parents self; instead they extend the family toward greater commitment to the common good of which children are a crucial part. Caring for children can actually tie adults into life in a new way" (168).