Is “Childfree Christian” an oxymoron?

My short answer to that question is “no.” Before I get into the details, I’d like to share a little about my background… a sort of “resume,” if you will. I’d rather not have someone accuse me of being an ignorant fly-by-night who hasn’t read her Bible.

I probably went to church for the first time within a week or so of being born into a Christian family, and I accepted Christ as my Savior when I was four years old. Dad read Bible stories to my siblings and me every night before bed, and we were all regular church-goers – Sunday school, morning and evening worship services on Sundays, prayer meetings or youth group meetings on Wednesdays. To top it off, my parents enrolled me in Christian schools where I spent thirteen years getting a solid academic and spiritual education. I memorized countless Bible verses, completed rigorous studies of both the Old and New Testaments, and attended doctrine classes.

And yet somehow, through all of that, though I observed that it was “normal” for most people to have children, I never had the impression it was morally wrong to not have them. Nothing in all of my Bible studies, all of my school lessons, all of the sermons I heard, ever struck me as an imperative to procreate. The blessing, “Be fruitful and multiply,” in Genesis had no effect on me as I considered the billions of people on the planet and determined that humankind had already answered that call. Instead, I concluded that the Bible does not forbid being childfree, nor does it necessarily promote it.

There are so many things I would like to tackle in this blog about this subject, but I think it would be best to discuss them in several separate posts. I’ll leave you with what I believe to be the most powerful support of being childfree from I Corinthians 7. Here, the Apostle Paul focuses on sexuality, marriage relationships, and God's call to serve. Paul, as a single man, encourages other Christians to remain single (verses 7, 8, 26, 38, 40) in order to “free [them] from anxieties” (v.32) and to enable their “undivided devotion to the Lord” (v.35). He does acknowledge that this is not a command from God but is Paul’s own opinion (v.25), and he encourages the believers to take the path to which they were called, whether that be marriage or the single life (v.17). Because Paul equates singleness with abstinence from sex, this would naturally lead to being childfree. Indirectly, Paul’s message thus encourages Christians to remain childfree so that they can devote their attention to serving God.

I realize that Paul doesn’t go so far as to encourage married Christians to remain childfree, but this is not surprising since birth control options were limited in Paul's day. He does, however, condone a couple’s decision to abstain from sex for a period of time for spiritual reasons (v.5). There is nothing to say that pregnancy prevention couldn’t be one of those reasons.

And of course, let’s not forget that Jesus, the center of our faith and the one who we are to emulate, was also childfree.