Why does political theology need children? What would happen if we centered children or childhood when we write about religion and politics? This symposium brings together scholars who usually think about political theology without children and scholars who think about children but not usually about political theology, to see what happens.
Children seem to have nothing to do with politics—they don’t vote, they don’t run states, they don’t declare war. Even when we think politically about children, their perspective is almost always missing from our debates—of whether or not they have the right to be born, whether or not they should be allowed to read certain books, whether or not they should go to preschool for free. Indeed, when we want to exclude certain communities from politics—Indigenous peoples, Blacks, women—we liken them to children in their incapacity to reason.
Theology is more interesting in children– they symbolize hopeful futures, they are innocent, free of sin, and they were created in the image of god (indeed, we are all god’s children). But to a certain extent, they are not fully human. They symbolize hopeful futures because they are pure potential, waiting to be realized.
On the other hand, teenage children have always been more political, less apathetic or bourgeois, than grown-ups. Both Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai were 15 when they entered the world stage as leaders and activists. Figures who have been central to theopolitical thought—St. Augustine, Walter Benjamin—reflect on their own childhood as an integral part of their theorizing. Therefore, at best, we can say that political theology is ambivalent about children and childhood. It may be productive to interrogate this ambivalence itself.
Children give us immense joy, but they are also hard work. We have to do everything for them but sometimes we also have to resist the urge to help them, so that they can become independent. They grow up too fast, but also, often, way too slowly. When they rebel against us, it is a sign that we have raised them well. Could we treat our political theological categories similarly? Could we want for them this flexibility, or mutability, this growing independence from us who created them?
This growing independence from us who created them is key. What I learn from the scholars gathered here to think and write about political theology and children is that children—and our relationship with them—are the key to our morality. If Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero is right when saying that the only ethical question is “who are you?”, that once I assume that I know you I commit violence against you, then children keep us ethical (at least they have the potential to keep us ethical). I’m thinking about my own children. Unlike my relationships with adults, whom I know better the longer I know them, when it comes to my children, I actually know them less and less the more they grow. If at infancy I knew them as well as I knew myself, because they were still a part of me, part of my body, then the older they grow, the more independent they become, so they become more mysterious to me. If I want to know them, I have to ask, and ask again: “who are you?” and hope that they answer.
The authors gathered here think about children and how they can keep us on our toes when it comes to our morality. How can violence make our education system more democratic? How can the figure of the child help us imagine a future without prisons? Without the heteropatriarchal family unit? Without slavery? Without male domination? How can they help us collapse the boundaries between the personal and the political? To imagine a decolonial future?
