Don't Baptize Babies
Why We Should Reserve Christian Initiation to Adults
I. Ecclesial Confusion
Last summer my wife was baptized into the Christian church—just a month before our wedding. She was raised a Unitarian Universalist (her parents being former Catholics) and absorbed the UU emphasis on social justice, community, and cultivating a religious imagination. At some point in her twenties, she realized she wanted to make religion a part of her adult life, and became attracted to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Shortly after we met in Boston, we began attending Trinity Episcopal church in Copley Square, not far from her South End apartment. A cavernous building, it boasts the Romanesque architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson and murals by John La Farge. She joined a small group for inquirers into the faith, and read the New Testament.
Eventually we moved to a smaller church in another neighborhood; we attended a Bible study, church dinners, and social events. We befriended residents of a local nursing home, and visited the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge for liturgy from time to time. The combination of the beauty of worship, the support of a community, the joy of service, and the inspiration of the scriptures led her to seek initiation into the church. Her ceremony took place on a humid August day with friends present as well as the congregation. The liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer is beautiful, and I was honored to stand as her sponsor. When the water was poured over her head, I felt a wave of happiness—and a flash of envy.
Like multitudes of cradle Christians, I’ve no memory of my own baptism. I was born into a Catholic family, my parents being Irish and Italian Americans. My folks relate how soon after I was born, my grandparents began insisting I get baptized right away. The Catholic culture of the times feared both the effect of original sin and the fate of my eternal soul should I die and join other unlucky infants in limbo (a subsidiary of purgatory, formally abolished by Pope Benedict XVI). My parents wanted to raise me and my siblings in the church anyway, so why not just join the crowd and christen the newborn? Plus it served as a happy occasion to gather the extended family to meet the latest member of the clan.
But for me, the actual person who got baptized, the event is like prehistory. It means almost nothing to me personally. I had no say in the matter nor any affective experience of the liturgy. Now as it was, I enjoyed church as a kid and liked Sunday school. Yet it wasn’t until I made confirmation as a teenager that I felt like I was choosing Christianity for myself. Most of the other kids in my class couldn’t wait to get it over with; for them and their parents, confirmation was the final step needed to graduate from the sacramental system, never to darken the church door again. But confirmation isn’t quite the same as baptism, and I’ve always felt sad that I didn’t get the chance to experience my own baptism myself.
I know what you’re thinking. Why so grum? After all, where’s the harm in baptizing babies? It’s a beautiful day and makes everyone smile as they gaze on the cute, squirming neophytes. (It’s not like male infant circumcision, after all—a truly barbaric practice.) Must I be such a scrooge about these happy occasions? Look, I love the children in my life and care deeply about their spiritual development. I was honored to stand as godfather to the son of a good friend a few years ago, a relationship I find sacred and meaningful. I love him and cherish every moment we’re together. And I don’t think that infant baptism is invalid nor believe people should be re-baptized as adults—I accept that the sacrament happens, even for a child. God’s Spirit is at work. But we shouldn’t accept a poor state of affairs if we know we can—and should—do better. Call me an inflexible purist, a hopeless idealist, or a grouch, but I believe that the tradition of initiating infants into the church—as ubiquitous and precious it may be—is bad on both theological and practical grounds.
Let’s take the theological. The New Testament presents Jesus dealing almost exclusively with adults. He blesses children and says the Kingdom belongs to such as these, but he doesn’t call them to be disciples. That would be absurd. Rather, he invites grown women and men into his company. The Acts of the Apostles showcases the tales of many people coming to faith, and they’re almost all adults. Yes, there’s the story of Paul converting his jailer, in which the man’s entire household receives baptism. But that’s an ambiguous text and the translation can greatly impact its meaning—it doesn’t necessarily imply that infants or children were part of the household, or that any of them were baptized against their will. The text could just as well suggest that they joined the jailer in accepting faith of their own accord. In any case, the dominant image of the New Testament is of adults joining the Jesus movement, not children. And they convert of their own free will.
This is the model for the church. No one, child or adult, should be coerced into belief, however benign it looks. We hang our heads in shame over the forced conversions of colonized peoples—why’s doing so to infants any better? Children have natural, deep spiritual lives, as Robert Coles teaches us. I believe this dimension should be actively cultivated, their spirituality nourished and fed by the stories of the Bible and other traditions, the practice of prayer, and the use of nature, the arts, and play to experience the Holy and know God’s presence. But when it comes to making a final choice to follow Christ—or any religion—that’s not something a parent should make for them, no matter how loving the sensibility behind it. And if you do want your kid to become baptized, wouldn’t you rather they be able to consciously experience it?
Now, consider liturgy. The sacrament of baptism is supposed to form a triad of rites of initiation, along with confirmation and eucharist. When adult converts come into the fold, we see them undergo all three sacraments at once, often during the Easter Vigil. There’s a dramatic, emotional arc to the initiation, understood as one giant experience of the Holy Spirit, in which the catechumen participates symbolically in the passion of Christ and joins the community at the Lord’s supper. Contemporary theology emphasizes baptism as an experience of the mystery of Jesus’s death and resurrection, as well as joining the Body of Christ. Ideas of a magical wiping out of original sin or avoiding eternal damnation in the hereafter have been discarded. (At least officially. I attended the baptism of a friend’s nephew a few years ago, and after the liturgy the baby’s mom kept holding up the child and, to my shock, singing, “No more original sin! No more original sin!”)
But even though this is standard practice for adults, we continue the bizarre approach of breaking up the three rites for children—we baptize infants at one liturgy, then let years go by before we complete the process with confirmation and eucharist. Huh? Such delays fracture the experience of the holy Spirit’s sweeping action in the liturgy. They also serve as tacit admissions that we’re trying to make Christians out of people who haven’t actually developed as individuals—that we’re imposing a religion on them without their having come to psychological maturity. We’re trying to mold the clay while it’s still just watery soup.
Let’s turn to the practical question. As I mentioned, many young Americans experience religious education as a painful ordeal that in no way convicts their hearts and minds. The relevancy of faith is lost on them. No sooner has the bishop’s oil dried on their foreheads at confirmation than they bolt from the church, never to be seen again. A recent study by the Pew Research Center reveals a huge drop in participation in the church by Millennials and Gen Z. More than ever, young people don’t look to religious institutions for their spiritual needs. Instead, they desire the presence of adults who take an interest in them as people, mentors who care about their ideas and feelings and who’ll accompany them on their journey. The theological and the practical thus cohere. The church should stop a practice of initiation that young people don’t want, and which is theologically unsound.
II. Reform
So, what should we do instead? My proposal is twofold: First, restore baptism to its proper place—as the first in a triad of rites of initiation, celebrated at one and the same liturgy. Secondly, we should abolish infant baptism and move the age of these rites up to that of reason. This is a moving target, but I would say that in American society, 18 years marks full maturity. That may sound high, but think about it. It’s the same age we become citizens and are considered legal adults. Yes, your brain doesn’t stop developing until your mid-twenties, but at least at 18 you can strike out on your own and make decisions for yourself. By offering baptism to people 18 and above, we could transform the commitment to the church into a decision of free, eager adults rather than an imposition on pressured, disaffected minors and oblivious babes.
There’s precedent for this proposal. It was standard practice for the church in its first two centuries; only adults were baptized in the ancient church, undergoing a three-year catechesis beforehand. And after their full, naked immersion into the baptismal waters, they were immediately welcomed to the eucharistic meal. Changes began in the fourth century, when the church experienced an enormous influx of converts–thanks to Constantine’s conversion, Christianity was suddenly in vogue. Whole families began requesting baptism, something the church hadn’t seen, including children and infants. The deeper, lengthier preparation for becoming Christian became impractical. Thus by Augustine’s time, he felt compelled to offer a theological rationale for the baptism of babies. He didn’t invent the doctrine of original sin so much as appropriate it to explain why a pre-rational person stood in need of the sacrament. Theology followed practice. But celebrating the three rites of initiation together never changed in the Eastern church; to this day, even children are baptized, confirmed, and welcomed to the Lord’s table at one liturgy.
Returning to ancient practice could yield several positive outcomes. First, it would express the liturgical and theological sensibility of modern theology. Liturgically, baptism would form part of a seamless ritual of becoming Christian, in which individual rebirth in Christ leads directly into confirmation (in which the holy Spirit completes the baptismal action) and then into eucharist (where the community welcomes its new member). This ritual flow has logic and consistency, emphasizing the holy Spirit’s activity across one action with three distinct parts.
Theologically, initiating adults would temper quasi-magical ideas of wiping out original sin and emphasize participation in the paschal mystery, immersion into the community, and commitment to following Christ on the road of discipleship. For that matter, the sacrament of first reconciliation should be pushed to a time after these rites of initiation. This sequencing would emphasize that sin applies to our reason, and separates us from God and the community we joined during the rites of initiation.
Secondly, if we raise the age of that initiation to adulthood, we could craft a more holistic religious education program for children. The church could encourage new rituals that would correlate in form, meaning, and timing with the child’s psychological development. The desire of parents to mark their child’s birth with a religious ritual—and the community’s impulse to welcome its youngest members into the fold—could be met by a liturgical blessing of the infant and prayers for the parents (the Book of Common Prayer already has this option, in fact). Such practice would highlight God’s presence in the child’s life from birth, without diluting the meaning of the sacraments of initiation (reserved for a choice made in reason and freedom).
Meanwhile, the content of religious classes for children could shift toward spirituality and personal relationship with Jesus (which, the same research reveals, people hunger for above all). Pedagogy could move from learning abstract concepts to falling in love with God and caring for others. In this respect, the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd—based on the Montessori model of education—is a sound model. Parents would still be able to pass on the faith; the formation of children would become more creative and enriching for them.
Thirdly, moving baptism to adulthood would improve the church’s faith formation of adults. As grown individuals, catechumens would be able to learn conceptual theology, which would build on their primal experience of divine love. And since they would be actively seeking and enthusiastically choosing Christian initiation, preparatory classes would feature a receptive audience right off the bat—rather than having to pull teeth, catechists could hit the ground running. They’d be dealing with adults who actively desire baptism, not kids going through the motions only to satisfy their parents.
These catechumens could study systematic theology and scripture; the teachings of the patristics on Christology, and of moderns on ecclesiology and liturgy, should not be reserved to academia, but be disseminated to all Christians. The whole preparation would aim toward appropriating the faith as an adult, and viewing baptism and the other sacraments as the beginning of following Jesus Christ as a disciple—not graduating some program so as to do anything but think of God.
For catechumens at 18 or 19, the preparation and liturgy itself could also be tailored to emphasize their coming of age and transition into adulthood in other areas (the insights of Richard Rorty on cross-cultural initiation rituals would be particularly fruitful here). Incidentally, making the act of becoming Christian more adult and serious would meet the desire some young people harbor to follow Christ in a dramatic, intentional manner, without leaving vowed religious life as their only option. They could be encouraged to learn about ecclesial movements like the Community of Sant’Egidio (my personal favorite) as viable options for living out their baptismal promises.
Christ calls us to follow him in freedom—the church can’t compel belief. And no one benefits from baptizing and confirming people who don’t actually desire it. The rites of initiation are supposed to be the beginning of a relationship with Jesus, not the end. My wife got to decide to follow Christ for herself, making the choice of her own volition, in faith and freedom. She will forever enjoy the memory and emotions of the day, gazing at the community gathered to support her on her journey with the Lord. While I have renewed my baptismal promises many times and participated vicariously in the baptism of others, I will never be able to have her experience. It’s time to make sure all Christians do.