In this week’s episode, Dan explores and explains the practice of infant “dedications,” in contrast with the more familiar practice of infant baptism. Why do some churches reject infant baptism, but practice infant “dedication” instead? And what does this tell us about cultural “duplication” and its role within American evangelical subculture? Check out this week’s episode to find out.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, a series in the podcast Straight White American a series in the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am your host.
Pleased as always to be with you.
Still getting back in the swing of things after being gone for a couple weeks.
Backlogged in emails, trying to dig my way out of them, but as I say, I was on vacation and didn't read emails, so I have quite the backlog.
So I am going through them.
As always, I appreciate the feedback, the comments, the ideas.
Please keep them coming.
I'd love to hear from you about general things, things related to the series, the stories that you share that are so profound and compelling, clarifications, comments about our weekly roundup or other things we do on the podcast, anything and everything.
You can be reached.
You can reach me Should you want to reach me at DanielMillerSWAJ, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
As always, we can't do this without you and thank you all so much for your support as we are an indie program and continue to put out quite a bit of content and really need your support to be able to do that.
Let's get into today's topic.
I want to hit on a phenomenon today that's, I don't know, it may be a little different from some of the things that we typically talk about.
And it's interesting, one of the things I've learned in this series is there are certain topics or themes that I would have expected to be topics or themes.
They're not surprising to me that they came up.
Uh, I hear about them from lots of people.
I know about them from my time within evangelicalism and so forth and they make sense.
There are other things that I'm familiar with that I would have thought might only be of interest to me or wouldn't get that much attention from other people but then I hear from folks About certain topics and they raise questions.
I'm like, Oh, I guess that's something to think about.
And today is one of those.
Okay.
And it's the idea of baby dedications.
I'm going to, I'm going to call this, this episode dedicated babies.
It's the idea of baby dedications within a certain kind of church context.
Okay.
And if you, if you're listening to this, you're like, what the hell is a baby dedication?
Now keep listening and I'll tell you.
Or maybe you're familiar with these.
Maybe you were in a church or are in a church that performed these, that had these.
Maybe you've been around these.
Or maybe you're like a lot of people I have heard from that have spurred me to talk about this, who have basically said, I don't get it.
I'm confused by this.
And the confusion typically lies in trying to understand the difference between a baby dedication and why there are some churches that will have, like, baby dedication services, but they don't have baby infant baptisms, they don't baptize infants, and what the difference between those things is.
And I typically hear something like this.
So I'm kind of mashing together things that I hear from different people into kind of a common refrain, and it goes something like this.
My friend invited me to their church's dedication of their baby.
I didn't know what that was, but I wanted to be supportive.
They're good friends, etc, etc.
Church isn't really my thing, but I decided I could go for a Sunday.
And we went.
And we went there and I was like, oh, this is a baptism.
I saw what was going on.
I'm like, I get it now.
Your baby's being baptized.
To which their friend responds with annoyance and maybe even just a little bit of panic.
No, no, no.
It's not a baptism.
It's a baby dedication.
And they might even say something like, infant baptism isn't really Christian.
We're Bible-believing Christians here, so we don't practice infant baptism.
Or something like that.
Or maybe it's grandparents who grew up in a church tradition where they were baptized as infants or young children.
Maybe they had their own children baptized as infants or young children, but now their children participate in a church culture that's very different, and their kids have a baby dedication.
Not a baptism.
Their children, their adult children who are now parents, might even be opposed to infant baptism, and yet they have this weird practice called baby dedication.
And again, to the uninitiated, to the layperson, looks a lot like a baby baptism, an infant baptism.
So I wanted to spend some time on this, because again, I've heard from people who are really confused about this.
But for two reasons.
One is to explain the practice, which I think is of interest and I want to explain, but it is a relatively limited practice.
This is not something that's universal.
That's not something that every kind of evangelical church does, though it's typically evangelical churches for a reason we'll get into.
But as always, I'm more interested in sort of going beyond the basic meaning to decoding this practice and understanding what it shows us kind of culturally or socially.
And I'm interested in what a practice like infant dedication does Beyond the specific religious or theological concerns behind it.
So we'll talk about that.
And it brings up an issue that I anticipate revisiting in future episodes.
And it's what I call cultural duplication.
A certain sense in which in the construction of a kind of evangelical religious subculture, there's a duplication of elements of broader American culture, quote-unquote secular culture, and so forth, and the significance of that.
And that, for me, is the more interesting element about infant dedication.
So let's start with what this is.
If you're listening, you're like, just cut to it, Dan.
What is infant dedication?
Here's what it is, okay?
And we've got to do a little bit of history here to get to this.
But, as a lot of you will know, many Christian traditions practice infant baptism.
This includes, of course, Catholicism, But it includes lots of Protestant traditions as well, okay?
And when a child is born to Christian parents, they are baptized into their parents' church community, or into the Christian community.
The practice goes back centuries, and in the West it originates within the Catholic Church.
This is why it's practiced still within the Catholic Church.
When the Protestant Reformation takes place, in like the 16th century, many of the Protestant reformers, you know, they reject lots and lots of practices from Catholicism, but many of them retain the practice of infant baptism.
And this is why, if we fast forward to now, the contemporary inheritors of those traditions in the U.S., what we call the mainline denominations, and this is most Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and so forth, lots of mainline Lutherans, Methodists, and so forth, lots of mainline denominations practice infant baptism.
Their theological understanding may be different than that of the Catholics, but it's a practice that persists across the traditions, okay?
But way back in the Reformation, there were other movements that rejected infant baptism.
There were, you know, the big-name reformers, specifically Calvin and Luther, and people like them were what was known, comes to be known in church history as the Magisterial Reformers.
It's kind of the mainstream Reformation, but there were also sort of sub-streams that came to be known as the Radical Reformation.
So-called because they rejected, in a more thoroughgoing manner, elements of, at the time, accepted Christianity and Christian practice, than did the so-called Magisterial Reformers.
These are groups like Anabaptists, English Separatists, and so forth.
Okay?
That doesn't matter for us.
What matters is this.
These groups rejected infant baptism.
They argued that baptism should only be undertaken by those who had explicitly and consciously converted to Christianity.
In other words, not babies.
Babies can't, you know, consciously convert.
And they also argued that baptism should be done by full immersion within water rather than by sprinkling, you know, sprinkling water on the head or making the sign of the cross on somebody's forehead in water or something like that.
And they argued this on the basis of what they found in the Bible.
The Greek verb baptizo means to submerge, and if you read stories of baptism in the Bible, it sounds like people were immersed in water and so forth, okay?
Within the American context, again to fast forward, The primary tradition that develops out of this radical Reformation heritage are what we call, collectively, the Baptists.
I'm going to use Baptists here with a small b. Baptists with a capital B would name specific denominations, and those are certainly included, but there are a whole range of Christian traditions that could be described as Baptists with a small b.
And they get their name from their emphasis on what they come to call Believer's Baptism.
The idea that baptism should be done only by people who profess consciously and actively their belief in Jesus as Savior and so forth, and then they're baptized.
And these groups rejected infant baptism.
Okay?
And this group of Baptists with a small B is the basis of lots and lots of contemporary American denominations and independent churches.
Lots of non-denominational churches share this broad theology, okay?
So you have these different traditions within the U.S., some of which practice infant baptism, some of which don't, okay?
This is also why the baby dedication stuff tends to happen within evangelicalism.
And here's why.
Here's how this relates to baby dedications.
And this is the part that if you're listening carefully, and I haven't lost you yet with this history stuff, here's the weird thing.
Most of the churches that practice baby dedication do so because they explicitly reject infant baptism.
Most of them come out of this broadly Baptist radical reformation tradition, and this is why this is something that takes place within evangelicalism.
These are the churches that were not part of the American mainline denominations, which means they were also the churches that emerged within contemporary evangelicalism for the most part.
There are mainline evangelical churches, but for the most part we're talking about non-mainline churches, which means they're churches that don't practice infant baptism, okay?
So you get this practice of baby dedication that arises as a kind of alternative to Infant baptism.
And this is why it's confusing for people.
That sounds fine, but if you go to a church, and especially if you're a lay person, if you're somebody who's not, you know, well-versed in theology or denominational differences and so forth, if you're like the person who gets invited to church because the people are having their baby dedicated, or the grandparent who, you know, whose grandchild is being dedicated, and you go to the service It looks, and again to a layperson, probably feels a lot like an infant baptism.
The baby and its family stand in front of the congregation, and the pastor says some things, and often charges the congregation with promising to nurture the child in their Christian faith until they come of age, and so forth.
Often, the sign of the cross is made on the infant's forehead with oil, or a little oil is sprinkled on the baby's head.
The same thing that happens in lots of infant baptisms, but with oil instead of water.
The family is presented with it with a certificate of dedication rather than a baptism certificate Everything kind of looks the same.
It looks like the same thing and this is why it's It's it's a little bit weird because you get these churches that are theologically committed to not performing infant baptisms but they nonetheless develop this practice of baby dedication and That looks basically the same.
So the basic answer to why some churches cannot conduct infant dedications is that they do not perform infant baptisms.
That's the surface level kind of meaning, okay?
But the weirdness of it, the fact that it looks like a baptism, the fact that to many outsiders it would be probably pretty indistinguishable from a baptism, that gets to the decoding that I want to do.
Going beyond the surface meaning to looking at what I think is really going on here.
And everybody who listens to this series, you know where I'm going by now, and it's this question.
If these traditions are opposed to infant baptism, why develop a practice that essentially mirrors that practice almost completely?
And I've asked this question.
As an evangelical Baptist pastor of a church, excuse me, that practice infant dedications, I asked this question.
I was one of two staff members in a two-staff member church, small church, but I was the junior pastoral person, meaning that basically I had a boss, the pastor was my boss, and I was not a fan of baby dedications for kind of these reasons.
I was kind of like, if we oppose infant baptism, like why are we doing something that looks exactly the same?
And the answers that I got and the answers that you might get if you were to talk to an evangelical pastor of a church, it sounds something like this.
They would say something about, you know, it's important to incorporate the baby and their family into the Christian community.
It's important to let them know we support them.
It's important to commemorate the birth of a child and that sort of thing.
It's important that we as a church are committed to nurturing this family and this child into faith till they can become a mature Christian.
Back to my discussion, I don't want to get drawn into all of that.
Which I would respond, yeah, sounds like infant baptism.
We could get into a whole thing on the theology of baptism.
Evangelicals often say that those who practice infant baptism believe that baptism saves somebody, that it makes them Christian.
I think that's a simplistic understanding.
Back to my discussion, I don't want to get drawn into all of that.
I've had this discussion, and this is what I was told, and it sounds like a baptism.
I think that answer is kind of silly, and I think it misses what's really going on.
I think it's only a surface explanation.
And here's what I think is really going on with this practice, and why I think it's worth devoting an episode to it, and it opens up onto a topic, as I say, that I think we'll revisit in future episodes.
Okay?
This practice, the practice of infant dedication, It demonstrates an element that has defined American evangelicalism since its emergence following World War II.
And I invite you, if you're interested in that, go back and listen to earlier podcasts we've done on the series, not in this series, but on Straight White American Jesus about the history of American religion, the religious right, evangelicalism, and so forth.
Some of those episodes, you know, our very earliest episodes talk about this.
But following World War II, what would emerge as the American Evangelical Movement begins to sort of engage with culture and to take cultural shape and so forth, and one of the defining features of this period is this practice of what I call cultural duplication.
Okay?
And one of the things we've talked about in the podcast, one of the things I talk about a lot, one of the things you might have read about or studied elsewhere, is that one of the defining features of American evangelicalism is that it has very successfully developed as a distinctive subculture.
And one key element of this, particularly within contemporary American evangelicalism, has been the creation of, say, Christian analogs to broader, quote-unquote, secular culture, to broader non-Christian culture.
And that's why we have entire industries that are built around Christian publishing, and Christian music, and Christian broadcasting, and Christian education, and so forth.
You get the creation of a distinctive subculture that duplicates or creates analogs of elements of non-Christian culture.
And I think the practice of infant dedication is a part of this.
Okay?
Why?
Because when evangelicalism first developed within American culture, the American mainline denominations were a central feature of American culture.
Now, that's not true anymore.
The mainline denominations have been in numerical decline since the 60s.
In parts of the country, they have almost no presence.
I live in New England where they're still very present and active, but that's kind of an anomaly.
But in the post-World War II period and when American evangelicals were sort of getting their cultural footing, cultural respectability was often tied in with participation in mainline religion.
And that included infant baptism.
There were generations of people who were baptized in mainline churches as infants or young children.
Who maybe weren't all that active in those churches, who didn't stay with those churches, who probably didn't practice their Christianity very often, but maybe they only went to church on Christmas and Easter or other holidays.
But participation in some of these Christian practices was largely a cultural norm, and infant baptism was one of these.
So Christian groups like evangelicals that wanted to gain a measure of social respectability, they sought ways to compete with mainline traditions while also maintaining their own religious and theological identity.
And infant dedication is an example of a practice that tries to do this.
With something like infant dedication, evangelicals could offer a practice with essentially, let's call it just the pomp and circumstance, of a practice that at the time was widely accepted as a cultural practice, but with a kind of evangelical twist.
You can be evangelical and we can give you something like infant baptism without compromising on our basic doctrines and tenets.
Okay?
And I think that this is still part of where infant dedications come from and the role that they play, especially when they communicate to an older generation.
When you get parents who are my age, or maybe even a little bit younger at this point, and their parents get a little nervous that the child hasn't been baptized because that was part of the culture they grew up with, you say, well, we can practice this infant dedication, this practice of dedication.
So on the one hand, practices like infant dedications, and we'll explore other practices that I think do the same thing of cultural duplication in future episodes, okay?
But practices like infant dedications represent an attempt to maintain evangelical cultural identity In a manner that is also culturally familiar to Americans who are not evangelicals.
Or to make it so that one can be an evangelical, participate in evangelical culture, but not feel completely alienated or at odds with broader American culture.
And that's what the practice is doing is trying to maintain that tension.
And I think that there's a real tension there.
And I think that there are other dimensions of this that are present in this practice of cultural duplication.
And these are what interest me.
One of them is this.
I think that cultural duplication like infant dedication also gives voice to, or evidence of a kind of deep seated inferiority complex.
We have that saying, That imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and there's a sense in which, you know, evangelicals imitating groups that practice infant baptism could be seen as a form of, you know, cultural flattery, as it were.
I think imitation is also an indicator of insecurity, of a lack of confidence in one's own way of doing things.
And since its earliest days, American evangelicalism has been marked by a kind of insecurity about its place within broader American culture.
So a practice like this, I think, doesn't express the sort of evangelical confidence in their own way of doing things.
I think it communicates a kind of cultural insecurity.
And the other dimension of cultural duplication I think is really significant is that it highlights the really ambiguous relation between social identity and cultural duplication.
And here's that tension.
The more a group like American Evangelicals duplicates broader secular culture, the more they try to be like that culture or recognizable within that culture, the more they run the risk of ceasing to maintain a distinctive identity at all.
And which is why there have always been evangelical critics, critics within evangelicalism, of this cultural duplication.
I was one of those with infant dedication.
I was like, you know, if we're going to be distinctive and say we don't believe in infant baptism, then let's not do this.
If we're going to do this, let's just say that in practice we actually baptize infants.
And this is a broader sociological kind of thing.
With any subculture, the more a distinctive subculture looks like the broader culture, the more risk there is that it will just be absorbed into that culture, that it will cease to be the distinctive culture that it is.
And this is a real issue that confronts American evangelicalism on a number of fronts.
And again, I think we'll visit this in future episodes.
For now, though, we need to wind this down.
So let me sort of tie some of these threads together, summarize where we are.
Infant dedication, on the one hand, is straightforward enough.
It's basically a kind of practice within Christian groups that don't practice infant baptism that's basically analogous to infant baptism.
It's a way of having a ceremony that can stand in for a ceremony that theologically you don't have.
That's all it is.
On the other hand, its significance, at least for me, it goes beyond this in that it's a practice that illustrates this idea of cultural duplication and it illustrates all the ambiguities of that cultural duplication.
It illustrates cultural insecurity.
It also illustrates that tension that the more one looks like some other cultural element, The more it risks their identity.
To stick with this, the more that somebody sits in a church and says, wow, this looks just like the infant baptism that I went to at the Lutheran Church down the street a few weeks ago, the less distinctively evangelical it seems.
Can hold that thought.
As I say, this, this theme of cultural duplication and its effects is something I've been thinking about.
It's something I think we'll revisit in future episodes.
Uh, not necessarily in a programmatic way, but it'll come up, uh, certainly from time to time.
In the meantime, again, thank you for listening.
Again, we always look forward to your insights, your thoughts.
Email me, danielmillerswag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Value any insights and input you have.
Keep the ideas for the series coming and we'll keep going with it.
