The role of mothers in society seems to be a perpetually hot topic in the culture today. Nadya Williams, a classicist and historian who walked away from academia to be a stay-at-home mom, recently spoke with OSV News’ Charlie Camosy about her new book “Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity.” The work explores the work of mothers as well as its connection to faith and human dignity.
Charlie Camosy: Can you give us some of your personal background that would lead you to write a book like this?
Nadya Williams: It definitely is a personal sort of book. By academic training I am a classicist with a specialty in ancient military history. Also, I grew up in a secular Jewish home in Russia and Israel before moving to the U.S. in high school. Through a series of complicated twists and turns, I came to Christ as an adult. I am a mother of three children (19, almost 10, and six). Finally, I spent 15 years in academia the last three of those as a full professor of history. All of these aspects of my life intersect in this book.
The week of Thanksgiving of 2022, I read a truly appalling Bloomberg op-ed that argued that women who don’t have children get richer so it’s worth it for women to bypass marriage and family and just focus on their careers. It hit me, reading this piece, that this wasn’t the first such op-ed that I’ve read over the years. It’s become a whole genre! I knew these arguments are patently false plenty of excellent researchers like Brad Wilcox, Lyman Stone, and Tim Carney have shown actual data proving that the opposite was the case! And yet, I thought, it says something disturbing about our society that leading publications feel perfectly comfortable publishing article after article denigrating mothers and (by obvious implication) what mothers produce children.
Then, in 2023, half-way into writing this book, I decided to walk away from academia. I got to see first-hand a lot of reactions to my decision. It was striking to realize how baked in the denigration of mothers is. Really wonderful faithful Christians told me what a waste it was for me to choose to walk away from an academic career and stay home with my children.
And so, this book became, in the process, my reply an explanation why treasuring image bearers through work of care is never “a waste” in God’s eyes, and it shouldn’t be in ours. It says something terrible about our society’s view not only of mothers and children, but of human beings in general, that works of mercy and care, especially at home, seem “a waste” compared to “real” careers. It’s a proclamation that only those things for which you are paid are worth doing.
Camosy: One obviously needs to read your book for the full case, but can you give us a gloss of the key ways in which the early Christians responded to pagan Roman understandings of human dignity?
Williams: The Roman society was incredibly stratified, so some people were, to put it bluntly, considered more valuable than others. It depended on circumstances, but in general, aristocratic Roman men were the most valuable members of society and scientific misogyny permeated both Greek and Roman literature, denying women a true worth compared with men.
Enemies of Rome, furthermore, were sometimes more valuable dead than alive since military honors like the Triumph required killing a certain number of them. And then there was an utter hatred of disability and weakness for instance, the earliest Roman law code, the Twelve Tables, had a clause that the father of the family must kill a visibly disabled child upon birth. The language is chilling.
By contrast, the early Christians held that every single person was precious, priceless in God’s eyes. They lived this out in their utterly counter-cultural works of mercy and care not just in rescuing abandoned babies (something very relatable to us, as we think of pro-life work as the protection of children, born and unborn), but also in providing for widows and the poor in a society where there were no social safety nets at all.
In effect, a typical Roman would not have been bothered to see suffering all around. But a typical early Christian would have been and that is how the church spread so much during, for instance, plagues because the Christians ministered to the sick and the dying, even at cost to their own lives.
Camosy: I’m not the only one to argue that, by analogy, the consumerist West is repaganizing, recovering much of pre-Christian way of thinking about human dignity. What do you think about this idea?
Williams: Oh, I absolutely agree! This is indeed one of the underlying argument strands throughout my book that there are certain defaults baked into our way of thought today that add up to pricing human life in a decidedly pagan way.
Talking about people in economic terms classifying some image bearers as “worthless” or a drag on the economy is what I call a culture of death. Dividing people into “those who contribute to the GDP” and “those who don’t” invariably leads to saying that some lives are just not worth supporting. It’s even worse than in the Roman Empire, because people who present such arguments now try to borrow the Christian language of mercy to talk about the destruction of human life. We’re seeing this now not only with abortion but also with the debates around euthanasia or MAID in Canada and in Europe, including the UK. The language that is used echoes how someone like Julius Caesar would have talked about Rome’s enemies the ones worth more dead than alive.
So, I want us to think about what the language and culture of life would look like, which is why I talk so much in the last third of the book about human flourishing. Our words matter. I want us to examine the callous language that even Christians sometimes have absorbed from the culture around in talking about human life.
Camosy: What are some important ways we can resist these trends in our current cultural moment?
Wiliams: The big question is: how do we change culture? Yes, there is a legal and policy side to things, and I appreciate those who are working hard on that angle. But changing culture, I think, should be an essential part of this conversation, and there’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg aspect to it all: Will the culture become organically more pro-life and pro-human flourishing if we had more family-friendly laws and policies? Or will having a ground-level love for all people create laws and policies to match?
I’m a classicist and historian, so I see the power of stories historical and literary in changing culture for the better. How we talk about people God’s precious image bearers matters. My original proposed title for this book was “Priceless” because that is who we are in God’s eyes. This is why I bring in Wendell Berry in the concluding chapter of this book I think he is an example of someone who has done this well, modeling how to reflect about human flourishing and the worth of human lives (including broken and imperfect ones as all of our lives are at some points, at least!) in a world that increasingly values efficient and convenient machines over inefficient, inconvenient, weak, limited people.
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