Our society devalues children and mothers, a new book says. How did we get here?

A year ago, Nadya Williams made a decision many of her colleagues didn’t quite understand: She decided to walk away from a tenured position as a professor. The reason appeared even more baffling — after 15 years as a professor, Williams would stay home and focus on homeschooling her children.

This personal experience informed the questions Williams is wrestling with in her new book “ Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity ,” which comes out Oct. 1. The book explores the various ways that modern society and institutions have come to devalue human life, and the lives of mothers and children in particular. A Christian scholar of the classics, Williams approaches the subject by examining how pre-Christians and Christians have viewed human life.

“It is only through the recovery of the valuing of all human life, so deeply countercultural in our world, that there is a chance to change the broader culture, at least in some circles,” Williams writes. “How we talk about human life has the potential to reshape the current conversations that have largely stalled.”

In other words, we need a new way of being “pro-life” in a nation where Americans are sharply divided over abortion.

Our culture is hostile to motherhood and family, Williams argues, and that has shaped the culture’s utilitarian view of human life, largely determined by a person’s economic contributions. (Williams had originally proposed the title “Priceless” for her book, she told me.)

The book’s overarching theme is rooted in the belief expressed in the Latin words imago Dei – which means “in the image of God” — the idea that every person is created in God’s image and possesses innate and infinite dignity and worth.

After earning a Ph.D. from Princeton, Williams taught classics and ancient history at the University of West Georgia. Williams grew up in a secular Jewish home in Russia and Israel and converted to Christianity when she was 30, when a friend, who later became her husband, gave her a stack of Christian books to read. She was especially drawn to the writings of the Rev. Tim Keller , the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, who died last year.

Williams and her husband, who is also a professor, homeschool two of their three children in Ashland, Ohio, where the family lives. Williams is also the author of “Cultural Christians in the Early Church” and writes for Current, Plough, Christianity Today, Fairer Disputations and other publications.

In a recent conversation, she talked with Deseret about the societal problem of viewing motherhood in economic terms and how we can restore the countercultural value of humanity and dignity for all people. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Deseret News: Tell me more about your decision to leave academia to be home with your children. It seems like a very difficult decision to make. Why did you do it?

Nadya Williams: It was difficult. In academia, if you walk away from a tenured, secure position, you’re told you may never get it again. My university had a new president and suddenly I was in a department of like 50 faculty instead of 20. My job became really miserable and it made it a lot easier to walk away and see the priorities. I asked myself: Do I want to be in a soul-sucking job or do I want to be with my children? We had already been homeschooling — my husband is also a professor. No one was sleeping ever, but it was worth it.

It sounds cliche, but I had this realization that babies don’t keep and they grow up quickly. And — yet another cliche — I thought about what priorities in our lives are eternal priorities. I turned 40 and I began asking: What am I doing with my life? What is most valuable and what isn’t? All of these things kind of came together to combine to this ultimate realization that I can make better decisions for my family and for those eternal priorities. And in that context, walking away from a miserable, secular, academic job made the most sense.

DN: You write in your book about “the problem of devaluing motherhood and children in every sphere of modern life.” How did we end up here?

NW: There are seeds of this in the 19th-century industrial revolution — the idea that you are what you produce and the idea of machines that never need to sleep and rest. Then, suddenly these expectations are being applied to everybody, including women and even children — the idea that you are just a worker and that’s all that matters.

Another important seed is the movement around birth control and abortion rights. I keep thinking about it in relation to technology and what (the British writer) Mary Harrington has written about the birth control pill being the first transhumanist technology. It’s fascinating to think about the idea we’ve created, perhaps without most people realizing it, that a healthy body is a body that cannot have children. Egg freezing, too, is being advertised to young women as a form of self-care — it’s another example of this idea: You’re a good factory worker, so get back to work and don’t have babies now when your body can do this, but freeze some eggs so maybe when you’re 40, you can think about it.

There is the idea of valuing a human life in economic terms, whether somebody’s life is worth it. It’s very crass and it keeps extending into a variety of settings and it adds up to this glorification of work: If you’re not working, if you’re not contributing to the GDP, then you’re not worth anything to society. And so in that regard, suddenly anyone who is not a perfect person is going to be worth less, or worthless.

DN: You write that the dream of being a mother no longer exists for the younger generations.

NW: Yes, and you even see this in the children’s books. For example, in Richard Scarry’s 1968 collection “Best Story Book Ever” is Patricia’s Scarry’s “The Bunny Book.” It’s about a baby bunny who dreams to grow up to be a “daddy rabbit.” It’s not just mothers, it’s about the expectation of what’s normal for everybody. Language has so much power in shaping the cultural imagination of what we think is normal. You have generations that used to think that the normal thing was to get married, to have babies, and we seem to have shifted away from that.

Now, if you talk to a 20-year-old college student, what’s normal is you wait a while, you build a career; eventually, maybe you’ll meet somebody, but you don’t have to. It’s no longer the path to self-fulfillment. In a way, I understand that. Especially in the church, statistically there are a lot more single women than single men in the church, and those demographics play a role. And we do need to have healthier, more thoughtful language around singles in the church.

But there is this loss of cultural imagination around families. For instance, if you have multiple kids, you go into a grocery store or like any space with a lot of kids, people give you weird looks because we’ve lost this imagination of what it’s like to have families.

DN: What can we learn from early Christians about valuing human dignity and life?

NW: It’s fascinating to look at the ancient world before Christianity and the parallels that we have now with the increasingly post-Christian society. For example, in the book I look at Julius Caesar and how he talks about the Gauls as the enemy. It’s such unimaginable cruelty — the idea of some people who are worth more to him dead than alive. So today, when we look at the conscious language in talking about the worth of certain people, it centers around the question of do you bring something to society or not? Is your life worth living? And that language a lot of times comes up in conversations about disability, screening for disorders like Down syndrome.

I’ve been really disturbed by what is emerging in Canada with the expansion of the Medical Assistance in Dying law. This kind of callous language around life that shows a lack of valuing of it. And that is what the early church had that was so revolutionary that we don’t even realize anymore — this idea that every single human being is priceless in God’s eyes, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, healthy or sick in any way, whether you’re able, as a result, to contribute to the GDP, regardless of your socioeconomic status.

DN: There is often a tension between mothers’ creative pursuits and their role in caring for children. How should women approach these two important pursuits that are often so difficult to combine?

NW : I think a lot of it comes in knowing your identity and rooting your identity in God rather than earthly institutions. For me personally, it has been humbling, because so much of the modern life is about control. Even the whole tension with creativity and motherhood, it’s really a tension about control, because we want there to be a schedule — “here’s how things are getting done, here’s my time for X, my time for Y, my time for children, my time for writing.” All neat and dusted.

Except neither creativity nor children obey those rules. Sometimes the muse strikes, and sometimes you have no good ideas. Sometimes you have days when children are just wonderful, and they will just play, and be so happy and cheerful. And there are days when everybody is melting down from the moment they got up. All of these things are just such powerful reminders that we’re not in control. And in a way, it’s been so liberating to realize this. I keep repeating this to myself: God is still good, even if I never get to write or publish another thing again.

It’s that sense of vocation and identity: What am I being called to do? But it’s also realizing that my family needs me regardless of what else I’m doing. You’re always going to be irreplaceable for your family, which isn’t the case with everywhere else.

DN: You offer a more expansive interpretation of what “pro-life” means.

NW: I like thinking of it not just as pro-life, but pro-human flourishing. That may be a better language because when we say “pro-life,” a lot of times it gets reduced to talking just about whether you support abortion or not. It’s just the beginning point — supporting life for everybody, that everybody made in God’s image deserves life.

Whereas a human flourishing point of view is: What kind of life do they deserve? People deserve to be encouraged to grow up and be the individuals that God has called them to be, which means that they’re not not just cogs in a machine or a baby that is forced to grow up into the image that only parents have in mind for that child, but the idea that you really do get to become the person that God wants you to be.

A lot of times, depending on where you look, there’s this pitting of either mothers are under attack or single women are under attack. It’s both, and the two are related. In the book, I talk about the ministry of Jesus, and what I found really surprising was that we don’t really hear stories of Jesus going into somebody’s home and caring for their baby. But we do hear a lot of stories of Jesus spending time with single women who were living difficult lives and being present with them. He exemplified what’s like to value people for who they are instead of looking for their productivity. In Jesus’ concern for the singles, we see a reminder what being pro-human flourishing is.

DN: What can we all do to foster a culture that values life?

NW: As I was writing the book, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had just begun at that point. And now the war in Israel (and Palestine) is going on as well. And obviously war destroys that possibility for individuals, for countries. The destruction of land uproots people and is the cause of generational trauma. It’s easy to feel despair around things that are going on overseas. There is often that sense of powerlessness. And we should mourn, we should pray, we should feel that outrage, we should donate money.

But I think about my own community — there is plenty of suffering, there are plenty of situations that require our intervention. For each of us living in a particular community, there are ways to serve like reaching out to neighbors and doing little things that don’t seem so big and glamorous. It’s a humble life of supporting others. And it’s so beautiful.