Document Type
Article
Abstract
Contemporary attitudes toward children are, in many ways, social and theological products of the early nineteenth century. Like their Victorian predecessors, modern Americans sentimentalize and celebrate children, but they also entertain some fundamental doubts about their true nature. Indeed, recent anxieties about children, following a chain of bloody schoolyard shootings, have brought some old theological questions, raised in debate a century and a half ago, into sharp relief. While most American parents today do not worry whether their smiling babe is destined for an eternal lake of fire, the growing popularity of v-chips and parental-control software suggests an active suspicion of some kind of “lower nature” at work even in young children. Can an infant really sin against God? The stereotypical view of Calvinist divines has them all nodding their heads in a ringing “yes, indeed.” As evidence, there is Michael Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom,” a lengthy and luxurious seventeenth-century description of the eternal punishments awaiting the unsaved. Among the hordes of the suffering are children who died in infancy, not yet converted and still indelibly stained with the original sin of Adam, crying out from the lake of fire.
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004057360005600405
Publication Date
1-2000
Recommended Citation
Bendroth, Margaret, "Children of Adam, Children of God: Christian Nurture in Early Nineteenth-Century America" (2000). University Faculty Publications and Creative Works. 1121.
https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/calvin_facultypubs/1121