Within a certain part of the American Christian subculture, it’s common to speak of people who are “baby Christians.” But what does that mean? Is it just silly? Is it just an effect of biblical understandings of the Christian faith? Or does it have more significant religious, social, and political consequences? In this episode, Dan argues that it does have these consequences, and explains why.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am your host.
As always, glad to be with all of you.
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Daniel Miller Swaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
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I want to hit a topic today about which I've received kind of a surprising number of requests.
It's one of those phrases that, I'll be frank, I always thought it was just kind of silly.
I didn't really like it when I was in the sort of Christian subcultural world that would use it, which once again is primarily I think conservative evangelical Christians.
But a lot of people have brought it up, and there are some ways in which it is a serious topic as well.
Maybe not as heavy as some that I've done in the past, though as you listen to me you probably know I don't do not heavy all that well.
But anyway, we'll give it a try here.
It's the idea of baby Christians, okay?
Now, if you didn't grow up in a certain kind of Christian context, the phrase of baby Christians, already you're like, what?
Like, what are you talking about?
What is that?
I'll tell you what it is, we'll get to that.
For those of us who did grow up in that context, some of you will be like me, it just kind of sounds silly, or it's the kind of thing that makes you a little embarrassed, like when somebody will talk about it in a different context, you're like, oh my god, I can't believe they just said baby Christian, that like makes us look like, like such lame-os, including lame-os like me who say lame-os.
But for others, right, it's a source of pain and manipulation.
And that might surprise some of us.
For those of us for whom it just feels like a silly sort of thing, to hear that that language has actually been used to sort of harm others might be something that we're not aware of.
We're going to talk about why that is.
And as with almost everything that we talk about on this series, it's also an idea that has taken on a particular political resonance in recent years.
So let's start with this.
What the hell is a baby Christian?
Well, the first thing to be really clear about is it's not a Christian who's a baby.
For number one, that's just not the reference.
But number two, within the kind of Christianity that tends to speak this way, they don't actually believe that you can be a Christian and be a baby.
These are Christians who typically believe that to be a Christian, you have to be of Particular age and ability to willingly choose to be a Christian.
So it's not—it doesn't mean that you're like literally a baby, okay?
And that's an important thing to know.
I've talked to people, again, from outside that subculture, like, is that just a word for babies who are in Christian families?
It's not.
So where does it come from?
Well, Christianity for centuries has used the metaphor of biological maturity as a way of understanding the faith.
So one's faith, one's Christian understanding, you know, what it means to be a Christian, one's Christian practice.
is understood to be something that matures or grows over time.
One grows as a Christian.
In fact, people are admonished to be continually growing or advancing in their faith, this language of growth and maturation.
And there are a lot of passages in the Bible that play on this image of growth or maturation.
That's, I think, why it's the metaphor that has the pervasiveness that it does.
One place where this happens is in the New Testament book of 1 Corinthians.
It's a letter written by a guy named Paul to a church in the city of Corinth in Asia Minor.
And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13.11, he says, When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
That's literally true.
Like, literally, when we're kids, we talk like kids, and when we're adults, hopefully, we talk like adults.
But there he's talking about Christian teachings and the Christian faith.
And earlier in the book, he had been sort of admonishing the Christian converts in Corinth And the reason is that they are being enticed by teachings that go against his, and that's why he's writing this letter and offering, I guess, a sort of deeper teaching.
And he tells the Christian converts that he had to address them as infants in Christ.
He goes on to say that previously he had fed them with milk, not solid food, because they were not ready for solid food.
The idea is he hadn't given them the kind of deeper, more fully developed Christian teachings because they weren't ready for it.
They weren't mature enough to understand it.
And he uses this metaphor of being an infant or a child in Christ, right?
And so within this framework, A quote-unquote baby Christian, that's the way that a kind of contemporary popular American Christianity picks up on this idea.
And what it usually refers to is somebody who is new to the faith, maybe a recent convert, doesn't know the faith as well, is coming out of a different background, and so forth.
And so playing on this Pauline language, They might be described as babes or infants in Christ or as baby Christians.
And the idea is simple enough.
We may not use the phrasing of baby, but we're all familiar with like activities or jobs or professions or skills where we make a distinction between those who are sort of newly qualified or lack experience.
And those who are more, you know, quote unquote, mature in what they're doing.
We even have, if you think of the trades in particular, this is you have somebody who's an apprentice and journeyman and master and so forth.
We just don't usually use the baby language.
We don't talk about baby plumbers or baby college professors.
We talk about assistant professors and we talk about Apprentice plumbers or something like that, but we get the idea.
And that's the basic fundamental idea behind this language of baby Christians.
So that's the basic idea.
A baby Christian is a Christian who is typically relatively new to the faith, has a lot to learn, doesn't fully understand the faith, and so forth.
Okay, basic idea.
But if you're listening to this series, if you've listened to it for any period of time at all, you know that my interest is not in just the basic meaning or background of these kinds of things.
I'm interested in what the language does and why people use this language, the social effects that it has.
So, what is the effect of labeling someone a baby Christian?
What work is this label doing for the people who use it?
That's what I'm interested in.
And on the most basic level, obviously, labeling somebody a baby Christian simply means that more mature Christians have a responsibility to help them mature in their faith.
This is one of the key ideas.
Helping them to better understand the faith, helping them to better understand expectations for their behavior, what it is to live as a Christian, what it is to think like a Christian, and so forth.
But here's what's sort of harbored in that that I think is easy to overlook, and this is one of the things that when I work with clients with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, people who are overcoming religious trauma and coming out of different religious backgrounds, this is what I hear from them, this aspect.
Where it also implies a fundamental power imbalance.
Those who are already mature in their faith, they hold an implicit authority over less mature Christians.
And sometimes it's an explicit authority.
We think of clergy, think of pastors, think of the people who run the churches, or churches have like an elder board or something like that, or rankings of different kinds of clergy.
The idea is that those clergy ought to be mature in their faith.
And the higher ranking that clergy member is, the more authority they hold over others, the more mature in their faith they should be.
Right?
So that power imbalance is built in.
But I think it's in the metaphor, aside from ecclesiastical structures and so forth.
And it's just the same way in a parent-child relationship or an adult-child relationship.
We do know that adults, we hope, Again, are more mature than children and have a kind of relationship of authority to children.
That's in the metaphor.
That's part of it.
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Now, in this series and in the podcast, we say all the time, right, that religion generally, and Christianity specifically, it's about a lot more than belief.
Americans think of religion in terms of belief, but it's about more than that.
It's about how we are in the world.
It's about what we approve and what we disapprove.
It's about whom we should love and whom we shouldn't and how we should love.
It's about what we should value.
It's about what we should desire.
It's about What should bring us joy?
It's about what should cause us to feel fear.
It's what should cause us to feel disgust.
It's a fully embodied, perceptual reality.
That's what religion is.
It programs us down to our bodies.
There's another kind of metaphor or image that dominates a lot of Christianity, and again, well-established in the biblical text, which is why it's so significant in Christianity.
Part of a maturing of a Christian, then, is to experience the world as a Christian, not as a non-Christian.
So, to feel the world properly, to perceive it properly.
people in "the world do." Part of a maturing of a Christian, then, is to experience the world as a Christian, not as a non-Christian.
So to feel the world properly, to perceive it properly, again, to feel, to approve of certain things, to disapprove of other things, to be drawn to certain kinds of people, to be repelled by other kinds of people, and so forth.
So this language of maturation, a sign of maturity, is to perceive the world as one ought to perceive the world.
So there's a kind of social programming that goes down to our very bodies that is fed by this metaphor.
And this is one of the mechanisms by which Christian churches produce members who will maintain the practices and standards of the church.
You are trying to duplicate a certain perception of the world.
It's also why, and this question comes up, this is something I've been talking about in Straight White American Jesus, probably literally from our first episode, our first series of episodes, certainly, which is why are social groups like conservative American Christianity or evangelicalism, which is why are social groups like conservative American Christianity or evangelicalism, why are they hard to There are people in these groups who don't fit the stereotype, who want to change them and so forth.
Given that this is true, why don't they change more readily?
Well, one of the reasons is because of this process, right?
This language, one of the things this language does is it makes it so that if somebody comes up and says, well, look, I get it, like I'm supposed to To think that gay people are bad and they're going to hell and so forth, but I know a lot of queer folk and they're nice and they have the same struggles that we have.
And other than the people to whom they're attracted, I think they're basically like us.
Maybe we shouldn't be judging them this way, or maybe we need to rethink how we interpret the Bible or whatever.
Rather than somebody saying, oh wow, you're right, we should do that, well, you know, you're not thinking like a mature Christian.
If you don't see and feel the wrongness of this kind of person or this kind of activity, and I choose queer identity as just one of myriad examples, if you don't feel the right things about that, if you don't think the right things about that, it's a sign of your immaturity.
So rather than Representing a significant challenge to the identity of the in-group, it can be dismissed and categorized as childish, as an idea put forward by somebody who really clearly is not a grown-up Christian yet, is not, as it were, ready for prime time, shouldn't be listened to, and so forth.
Enough that if they persist in that, they'll just be kind of shunted into the out-group.
So that's part of the work that this does.
There's a lot of A lot of social leverage that can come through this seemingly pretty basic metaphor of being a quote-unquote baby Christian.
All of which means, okay, that to mature in Christian faith is to affirm and uphold the status quo.
It's to affirm the way things have been done.
It's to affirm our beliefs as the right beliefs, our practices as the right practices, our institutions as the right institutions.
And the last thing to say here is that there is a generational dimension to this.
The baby Christian thing I said is about being a new Christian, but there also is a sense in which young Christians, chronologically young, so children, teens, you know, adolescents, are often considered also sort of immature in their faith.
And the idea being that they need to be brought up into the faith so that when they become fully functioning social adults, when they're married and they have kids and a job and they pay their taxes and so forth, they will also be fully functioning Christians.
This is why churches devote so much time, energy, and resources to teaching and ministering to young people.
If you look at the programming of a lot of these conservative churches, hour for hour, often there's more programming for children and teens than there is for adults.
Why?
Because they know that they are impressionable.
They know that if they want to maintain the Christian identity, they need to try to drill it in and make it a habitual part of their life at that age.
They also know that other things are competing for their attention.
So this is often an explicit strategy to recognize that those are the years during which people are most impressionable, and they need to capitalize on that, on developing baby Christians into mature Christians.
So this language of baby Christians, more than just being a silly metaphor or a goofy way of talking, really gets at important dynamics of maintaining social identity, policing the actions of people who share a particular social identity, seeking to replicate membership in that political identity—excuse me, that social identity, which can be a political identity, getting ahead of myself.
The last point I want to raise, though, is the way that this language of baby Christians Gained a very public, very political nuance in the run up to the 2016 election and the nomination of Donald Trump as the GOP candidate.
So we can remember back, I know this seems like a long time ago in some ways, but it feels like yesterday to me.
Trump is trying to win the nomination.
More and more and more of his moral failings are coming into public light.
He's trying to ingratiate himself with the conservative Christian constituency, but it's clear that he doesn't know the language, he doesn't go to church, he can't talk the talk, and he certainly doesn't have a lifestyle to support this.
And you had Christians who were supporting him, but I think we're having a bit of a legitimation crisis of, How do we legitimately talk about why we are supporting this guy who goes against everything that we have said for years we as Christian voters are about?
I've written about this in the past.
I've talked about it in, again, early episodes in this podcast.
But if people remember, you know, the 2000 election and the 2004 and that time period when the GOP was the party of so-called values voters, that you had to have good Christian values to be a good president, a good leader, and so forth, and Trump blew all that out of the water.
So how do you square that circle?
How do we as conservative Christians feel good about supporting this guy?
Well, along comes James Dobson to the rescue.
And the way that he did this is he described Trump as a quote, baby Christian.
You can Google that, you can look that up, you can see the response to that, but that was the language that he used.
And what it did is, in this case, it sort of became this magic wand that could be waved over this, because this gave those conservative Christians a way to say that, yes, Trump really is a Christian.
And they could explain away his many moral failings.
He's still learning how to be a Christian.
He deserves grace and forgiveness for his past mistakes.
We're all human.
We're all fallen and so forth.
It became this way of accepting Trump despite the obvious gap that opened up between him and the kind of Christian morality to which the GOP had previously appealed.
In this case, the baby Christian rhetoric was used as a license then for Trump's immorality, for his cruelty, for his inhumane policies, etc.
And the consequences of this have been obvious.
By incorporating Trump within conservative Christian movement, what I think this rhetoric did, this kind of sleight of hand, is it released all the worst impulses within that movement.
And stripped away any veneer that it was a movement based on, you know, Christian values or so forth to where you get the real visibility of what we're now calling Christian nationalism in the United States.
This language was a big part of it, right?
Had a big notable figure like James Dobson not come along and found a way to render Trump palatable to Christians in a language that evangelical Christians could understand, I don't know that he wins their vote.
I don't know that he wins the nomination, and history would have been very different.
So, the language of baby Christians, to kind of wrap this up, it's a lot of things.
It's silly to many, and it is kind of objectively silly to talk about people as baby Christians.
But it's also a way of maintaining social control over wayward Christians, and this is, again, that source of pain for so many people as they explored pathways or raised questions that were not accepted within their church communities, and they were dismissed or castigated or socially marginalized on the grounds that they were being immature, that they were not mature Christians, right?
It's a way of replicating the membership necessary to maintain the evangelical movement, which right now is not happening successfully for evangelicals, but that's part of what this language is intended to do.
But on the flip side, it has also developed, and I think that this is a real shift, it can also be a way of licensing the base impulses of conservative political and religious ideology and ideologues in the shape of what we call Christian nationalism.
So the language of baby Christians does a lot, does more than it might seem, does more than might be apparent reading something like 1 Corinthians and hearing Paul talk about, you know, infants in Christ.
Gotta wrap this up.
Have to say goodbye.
As always, thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us.
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For everybody else, please keep the ideas coming, keep the feedback coming.
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So thank you and please be well until we meet again.
