Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:1 (Spring 2022)
Article: Parental Rights: A Christian Natural Law Primer
Author: Andrew T. Walker

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 100

Parental Rights: A Christian Natural Law Primer

Andrew Walker

Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a Contributing Editor with CBMW, Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions, and a Fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The next frontier of the sexual revolution is parental rights. That might initially sound hyperbolic. Governments are not, after all, removing children from their homes in any sort of systematic way.

The problem, banal as it may seem, is that the intellectual superstructure is already in place to chip away at parental authority over children’s lives. This may not result in the immediate removal of children from Christian homes, but instead the denial of Christian parents to oversee the development and upbringing of their children as they see fit. Instances throughout the culture exist that, though not frequent, should be enough to cause Christians to shudder about the prospects threatening parental rights.

In Ohio, a child was removed from a home (and placed with grandparents) where Christian parents did not affirm the child’s gender transition.1 Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet caused a national uproar for suggesting there ought to be a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling, a popular educational option that shelters children from state-sponsored secular progressivism.2 In 2013, MSNBC journalist Melissa Harris-Perry set out the bald assertion that it is a mistake that

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 101

American society has thought of children as the exclusive province of parents. She declared: “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”3 As of this writing, a national controversy has erupted where celebrities and intellectuals across the nation are defending the rights of Florida public school teachers to indoctrinate students ages Kindergarten through third grade on issues of sexuality and gender.4

I would be remiss not to mention the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling. Though focused on same-sex marriage, as Christian philosopher John Milbank has observed, the logic of same-sex marriage’s legality is to blur the distinction between the legal and natural definitions of family, thus handing significant power to the state to define the boundaries and make-up of family life. Same-sex ...