Christian Parenting

Wisdom and Perspectives from American History

David P. Setran

• Verlag: Eerdmans
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467465410
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: History of Christianity

What can the past teach us about what it means to be a "good" Christian parent today?

Today's parenting guidance can sometimes feel timeless and inviolable—especially when it comes to the spiritual formation of children in Christian households. But even in the recent past, parenting philosophies have differed widely among Christians in ways that reflect the contexts from which they emerged.

In this illuminating historical study, David Setran catalogs the varying ways American Protestants envisioned the task of childrearing in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Comparing two main historical time periods—the colonial era and the Victorian era—Setran uncovers common threads, opposing viewpoints, and the cultural and religious influences behind the dominant parenting "postures" of each era. The implications of his findings matter for today's big questions about parenting:

• Should children be viewed as basically good, in need of protection from corruption, or as fundamentally sinful, in need of moral correction?
• How should parents address misbehavior?
• Should a parent's primary role be that of teacher, disciplinarian, or nurturer?
• What importance should be attributed to devotions and prayer, church involvement, Sabbath-keeping, home decorating, and fun family activities?
• What consideration should be given to gender? Should boys and girls be raised differently? Do mothers and fathers have essentially different responsibilities?

As he surveys these historical perspectives, Setran reflects on the legacy and future of Christian parenting, concluding that the Protestant heritage encourages the importance of intentional devotional practices, the development of close parent-child bonds, and the creation of godly household environments. In the end, he argues that all of these historical values are critical to the full expression of Christian parental love. This is a love that teaches because it wants to help children understand true goodness; that admonishes and restrains because it wants to protect children from whatever keeps them from true pleasure and joy; that fosters strong relationships so children might experience the lavishness of God's love; that models Christlike sacrifice and guides children into the arms of their Creator.

PART I

Colonial Christian Parenting: 1620–1770

CHAPTER 1

The Parent as Evangelist

Raising Up a Godly Seed

This should be their first and chief Care for their Children, that they may be a godly Seed to serve the Lord.

—William Cooper, God’s Concern for a Godly Seed¹

When the congregants of the Brattle Street Church gathered for a day of fasting and prayer on March 5, 1723, they joined to seek “the Effusion of the Spirit of Grace” on their children.² Along with other days set aside for prayer for the “rising generation,” this meeting was devoted to helping Christian parents make commitments to pray for their children, to raise them up in the faith, and to set up their houses to “be a Bethel, a House of God; wherein His Fear and Worship shall be maintain’d, and in which He may delight to dwell.”³ Listening to their two renowned pastors, William Cooper and Benjamin Colman, these parents would have heard a near perfect articulation of the goals of Christian parenting in colonial New England. Cooper, using Malachi 2:15 as his text, began by calling parents to “seek a Godly Seed,” raising up their children to be doctrinally sound, holy, prayerful, and committed to church and Sabbath observance. Cooper noted that Satan would “do all he can to hinder” this work, using his “Arts and Stratagems” to “debauch, corrupt, and spoil” Christian children so that they would become his “seed” instead. Since parents were involved in warfare against the devil, he concluded that they must “be stirred up to counter-work him” through godly parenting.⁴ If parents were faithful in this task, their children would grow to “propagate their Godliness” and to continue a lineage of faith across the generations.⁵

In the second sermon of the day, Colman, drawing from 1 Chronicles 29:19, called on parents to pray for their children to receive from God a “perfect heart.”⁶ Citing David’s prayer for his son Solomon, Colman reminded parents that their children were eternally lost and hopeless without a “new heart” and that they must pray for God to “sanctify ’em to himself, and fill them with his Holy Spirit and keep them by his grace, and bring them to his glory.”⁷ Since these children belonged to God through a baptismal covenant and were only “lent” to parents for a time, fathers and mothers were charged as stewards to instruct them, to pray for them, and to seek their salvation. If they did this, Cooper and Colman suggested, parents could be confident that their children would “arise to fill your places in the House of God among us, and at the Table of Christ; be faithful to the Cause of God … and be known to be the Seed which the Lord hath blessed.”⁸

The goals set forth at this day of prayer—particularly the desire for a “godly seed” with a “new heart”—nicely articulated the vision of Christian parenting among New England’s key spiritual leaders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They recognized that a godly society would require not only a healthy dose of religious zeal but also a plan for long-term generational continuity. While economic trials certainly played a role in families’ decisions to leave for America, pastors were quick to remind New England parents of their primary purpose. “Why came you into this Land? was it not mainly with respect to the Rising Generation?” asked Eleazer Mather. “And what with respect to them? was it to leave them a rich and wealthy people? was it to leave them Houses, Lands, Livings? Oh no: but to leave God in the midst of them.”⁹ Since New England’s spiritual legacy depended on the ability of parents to raise up a “godly seed,” family discipleship emerged as a central lynchpin of leaders’ hopes and expectations for the future.¹⁰

Such a perspective reflected the urgency—and anxiety—of leaders who recognized how fleeting their godly experiment might be without intentional Christian parenting. Since they drew regular comparisons between themselves and Old Testament Israel—sharing with these biblical ancestors a common “errand into the wilderness”—biblical case studies of generational decline served as powerful warnings against parental neglect.¹¹ John Cotton reminded mothers and fathers to take “tender care that you look well to the Plants that spring from you, that is, to your Children, that they do not degenerate, as the Israelites did.”¹² According to Colman, failure in Christian parenting would mean the failure of the entire community project and the loss of God’s favor. “Consider also, what will become of Religion in this Land, if our Children and young People don’t prove a godly Seed,” he warned. “It will fail and sink; God’s truths will be lost or corrupted. The Work of God, in planting New-England, will fall to the Ground…. They will be a Generation of God’s Wrath; will pull down his Judgments upon them; and drive away his Presence upon which their Prosperity depends.”¹³ Since families were the “nurseries of all societies,” these early colonial pastors certainly understood what was at stake in Christian parenting. “Ruine families, and ruine all,” Eleazer Mather concluded. “So on the other hand, keep God there, and keep him every-where.”¹⁴

While the church obviously retained a central place in New England society—both geographically and symbolically—most agreed that the dispersed homes in local communities would be the primary settings in which children would be directed toward salvation and spiritual growth. In fact, Cotton Mather went so far as to say that it was the family, not the church, that would be the primary means of salvation among children in the new world. “If Parents did their Duties as they ought,” he suggested, “the Word publickly preached, would not be the ordinary means of Regeneration in the Church, but only without the Church, among Infidels.”¹⁵ In England, seventeenth-century Puritans highlighted the importance of household religion far more than their church-centered Anglican and Catholic counterparts.¹⁶ In New England, this theoretical commitment became even more of a practical necessity as frontier conditions and the scarcity of local churches, ministers, and schools forced parents to assume responsibility as the primary educators of their children.¹⁷ Pastors certainly contributed—they catechized, visited homes, led days of fasting, and promoted voluntary associations of young people. Yet parents were often reminded that this was their primary calling. As Cooper put it, “This should be the Care of Ministers. They should labour the Instruction and Conversion of Young Ones to God…. But in a very particular manner this should be the Care of Parents for their own Children.”¹⁸

This commitment to family religion sparked an outpouring of advice—mostly printed sermons and lectures—for Christian parents in colonial New England. Between the early seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, authors broadly identified with the Puritan movement on both sides of the Atlantic dominated the publishing industry when it came to works on Christian parenting.¹⁹ The works of Puritan and nonconformist British authors—widely read by New England leaders—stood alongside a growing collection of homegrown sermons and lectures from American Puritans such as the Mathers (especially Eleazer, Increase, and Cotton Mather), Isaac Ambrose, Samuel Willard, Deodat Lawson, and Benjamin Wadsworth. The works of other New England pastor-theologians in this era such as Benjamin Colman, William Cooper, John Barnard, Joseph Belcher, and Jonathan Edwards, though not technically Puritans, also had a deep influence on those concerned about raising up their children in the faith. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was an enormous literature on Christian parenting that possessed a distinctly New England flavor.

The Shape of the Colonial Family

Pastoral advice literature was directed toward parents whose households looked very different from contemporary American versions. First of all, these families were often quite large. According to most estimates, the average mother in colonial New England could expect to give birth to between seven and nine children, delivering at regular intervals every twenty to thirty months.²⁰ Since most continued to bear children into their forties, parents often had children in the home quite late in their lives, certainly into their sixties if they lived that long.²¹ In addition, the range of ages in the home could be quite large; it was not uncommon for families to have an infant and a child preparing to marry in the household at the same time.²² Since women in New England tended to marry in their late teens or early twenties (about five years earlier than women in England), and because they were generally healthier within more stable families, these households often included more children than their English counterparts.²³ While the desire for large families may have reflected economic realities, particularly the need for able-bodied agricultural laborers, it also pointed to the fact that colonial Christians saw children as cherished gifts to their households, to the larger community, and to God’s kingdom. As Colman effused, “A Mother with a Train of Children after her is One of the most admirable and lovely Sights in the Visible Creation of God…. Children are among the Choice Favours and Gifts of Providence, and we should have a high Sense of the Gracious Favour of God to us in them.”²⁴

While families were larger and more stable than in England, child death rates were still quite high and shaped New England families in significant ways. According to historical estimates, even relatively healthy communities like Andover and Dedham saw infant mortality rates of 10 percent during the first year of life.²⁵ In addition, approximately one-fourth of all children in such locations failed to make it to their tenth birthdays, while a third or more died prior to their twenty-first birthdays.²⁶ In other areas, such as Boston and Salem, death rates were much higher—sometimes two to three times higher—as a result of diseases such as smallpox, measles, mumps, diphtheria, whooping cough, and scarlet fever.²⁷ Such figures were also greatly elevated during epidemics, such as the 1677–1678 smallpox outbreak that decimated as much as one-fifth of Boston’s population and the diphtheria epidemic in 1736–1737 in which 802 of the 948 deaths in New Hampshire were children under the age of ten.²⁸ Of his fourteen children, Samuel Sewall buried eight under the age of two. Cotton Mather lost eight of his fifteen children before the age of two, and one soon after.²⁹ As historian David Stannard indicates, since the average married woman gave birth to between seven and nine children, “a young couple embarking on marriage did so with the knowledge that in all probability two or three of the children they might have would die before the age of ten.”³⁰ Or as Anne Bradstreet, who lost several young grandchildren, poetically mused, “O bubble blast, how long can’st last? / that always art a breaking, / No sooner blown, but dead and gone, / ev’n as a word that’s speaking.”³¹

These large and vulnerable New England families operated quite differently than the smaller and more isolated units that would emerge in the nineteenth century. In an era devoid of many specialized institutions, homes served multiple social roles as businesses, schools, vocational institutes, churches, houses of correction, hospitals, nursing homes, orphanages, and poorhouses.³² Families, that is to say, were responsible for economic production, children’s education, religious practices, vocational preparation, and the care of a wide range of individuals in need of physical care or reformation. While many of these functions would later be taken over by other institutions, in the colonial era they were typically consolidated within the home. Historian John Demos refers to the family in colonial New England as “a little commonwealth,” a centralized and functional society that was responsible for the holistic care of its members and the larger community.³³ Within such settings, family members all worked together to contribute to these common tasks, providing many teachable moments along the way.

Because of these many functions, families in colonial New England were more “permeable” and “fluid” than those of later generations. Children, especially sons, often spent considerable time in other households. Though less common than in England, lengthy apprenticeships, in which sons were “put out” into the home of a master in order to learn a trade, were still popular. Such arrangements began no later than the age of fourteen and often a good deal earlier, continuing normally until the age of twenty-one.³⁴ In these arrangements, the master played a parental role, providing care, education, and religious training for the apprentice, who was “legally and culturally a ‘child’ of the household for the duration of their residence.”³⁵ Recognizing the perils associated with living in a different family, pastors often warned parents to choose such homes on the basis of godly values rather than mere economic benefit.³⁶ “Parents care is not to be confined to the time wherein Children are under their immediate gover...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In Search of the “Good” Christian Parent
• Part I: Colonial Christian Parenting: 1620–1770
• Part II: Victorian Christian Parenting: 1830–1890
• Conclusion: The Legacy and Future of Christian Parenting
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography