“People often ask me whether the series ‘Forgotten God’ on VRT Canvas has had an effect on parish life,” says Pastor Andy Penne of the Holsbeek parish district federation. “Since the programmes were broadcast on TV, not a single family in the four parishes has asked to have their child baptised. One family hesitatingly sent me a message: we’re going to postpone the baptism for the time being. Among the first communicants and confirmations, there are even some who have let us know that their child would not be participating.”
So, a question: is that a good thing, a bad thing or a nothing?
Image: Bethany, where Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist.1
Baptism is an act of faith, by parents for their child. It cannot in any way be construed as an act of faith by the child. But, it’s an act of faith; in what?
In the king? The state? Society? The church? God in Heaven above? Well, surely, in a little bit of all of that? Or is it an act, by a child’s parents, of faith in themselves?
At baptism, or christening, the pastor describes a cross in water on the forehead of the infant as a sign of its membership of the Christian community. It’s nice, but it’s a little presumptuous. After all, what if little Alice and Johnny want to be Muslims when they grow up? Oh, no chance of that: we will bring them up in the correct faith. And that sounds already like the wrong faith.
Jews derive their religion from the distaff side, for no better reason than because the mother is the only parent of a child that you can be anything like certain of. I’m Christian, not because my mother and father were, which they were, but because I was baptised. I was baptised a Christian and grew up a Christian and was more or less reared as a Christian. But what became clear to me as I started out in my own life as a member of the Christian church is that it doesn’t matter a hoot what church you’re a member of, or even whether you’re a member of any church at all. Because all roads lead, not to Rome, but to Heaven. Unless you want to take the by-pass to somewhere else.
Mennonites and anabaptists believe that the decision to be baptised should be delayed to a more mature stage in life. Usually, baptism among them occurs mid-teenage, at 15 or 16, or even as old as 25. Now, I’m not a Mennonite and I have little experience of their way of life (I wrote about them here, if you’re interested) but I agree with their approach. However, anabaptists were persecuted in the 16th and 17th centuries, hunted like witches in Salem, and burned at the stake, like Dirk Willems. Which is why they emigrated in the wake of Menno Simons and Jakob Amman to the United States to establish their free societies of anabaptists.
Why would you burn a man at the stake for preferring to baptise his children when they’re in their mid-teen years? Well, Pastor Andy Penne pretty much says it: because choice lends freedom, and freedom is demurral, and demurral is independence. Penne’s parishioners are slowly learning that it is no longer not the done thing to demur on the baptism and confirmation of children. How they then bring their children up is outwith my ken. Maybe the kids roam the streets like rabid animals; maybe their parents tell them what’s right and what’s wrong. Like parents should and like parents do. When they send a convict to prison, do they ask whether their parents baptised them, or whether their ma slammed meth?
It wasn’t so long after the Christian martyrs had been fed to lions in Rome that their creed became the religion of Rome; Rome, that mighty empire that ruled most of the known world. Rome, which held sway from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Rome, destined to become the cradle of the Christian church. And of Christian power. A power that would likewise rule the world and, what’s more, a power that would end up being abused, across the world.
An unbaptised person cannot be buried in consecrated ground. That’s the rule. And, in an age when infant mortality (up to the age of five) was over the 50%, no one wanted their child to be buried in the commonality’s municipal graveyard, like some Mozart. They wanted their children buried in their family plots, mausolea and temples. Best is after the font in a real church. No one in those days postponed the baptism for the time being. It was as fast as the ceremony could be performed, in order to assure the child a safe passage to Heaven, as and when the occasion would arise.
Baptising a child might assure the child God’s grace in Heaven, but it would also assure the parents the church’s grace here on Earth. The latter was undoubtedly more important to some than was the former. Which is sad: this act of faith on behalf of the child was so often turned to an act of pride by the progenitors, and that is not what baptism is.
The Lord Jesus Christ was baptised by John at the age of 30. It is not beyond contemplation to perform Christian baptism at an age way beyond infancy. But the attraction of an infant baptism is surely the occasion: the hats, the gifts, the cake (often the top tier of a traditional, tiered wedding cake, so soon after the union was the expectation of offspring). All these rites and customs, from the virgin whiteness of the bride’s dress, to the almost unseemly haste of the first-born’s baptism, are all set down in tablets of social tradition that seem like mortar holding the stones of our society together as a firm bastion against radicalism. And, as they are, the society that puts up these bastions is corroding its very fabric from within, with acts of pride, greed, covetousness, and powermongering. Baptism becomes a façade, enacted at the cost of the infant, who runs the danger of becoming but backdrop to the parents’ show. It’s a view.
There used to be an obvious practical side to baptism: the pastor’s enquiry, “Name this child.” For, the church, acting as the state, held the registers into which the child’s name would be entered. Everyone needed a name—Napoleon in particular made that patent—and no child could have a name until they were baptised. Nowadays, the state dispenses with any need for baptism: just a declaration of the child’s name is of any interest. But then, in most places, the state is nowadays no longer the church.
When the state is a church-led state, infant baptism therefore binds the child to the state. The infant secures consecrated burial if it dies early (or, more accurately, when it dies); it is reared in the ancient traditions of the family, which are surely traditions in which a family should rear its offspring even without church membership. But leaving church membership to choice, with no compulsion, with no attraction and no premium benefits, means a child who may just become a free-thinking individual.
Any new religion, like the Mennonite faith, which advocates leaving to the child a free choice of communion with God, will imply responsibility for the parents of children born within that society and for their society itself. The delayed baptism is founded in a philosophy that communion is a joining with God based on the volition of the individual, and not of the individual’s family; Mennonite parents place God central to their lives, which is why they are then duty-bound to show to their offspring the virtues and benefits of such belief. They must commit themselves, not to rites and catechisms, not by telling the child God will do this and God will do that, thus abrogating their own parenting responsibility, but to showing the way, living the word of God in daily practice. Not at church services or in grand parades of pride, but in digging the Earth, in harvesting its fruits by back-breaking labour, in dealing in fairness with their fellow man, in treating all with equality; in enduring hardship and shunning luxury; in giving all they can and receiving nothing in return but their fellow men’s and, ultimately God’s, love; in loving as they would be loved; and in bestowing love above and beyond the limits that other men and women impose on themselves that render them lacking of patience, incapable of forbearing, indulgent in rancour, hungry for revenge; and unwilling to engage.
If you can keep up an act like that for 15 to 25 years, then that is no act: that is an embrace of the word of God. And any child brought up in such a free, loving environment would anticipate their baptism with joy.
But at no time would they be under the influence of organised state church and thereby bound to the state’s military, lucrative and political ambitions. They would freely love God, but through no intercession or intervention or interference. Their communion would be perfect and untrammelled.
Nobody wanted that less than the organised church. And that is why the organised church, be it Roman Catholic or, in England, Anglican, executed anabaptists: burned them at the stake, hounded them out of the country, for daring to love God without the intercession of a state-commanded priest. For the effrontery of denying the state their children as tools of their policy. The Anglican church executed Catholics for failure to swear oaths to Henry VIII. And it executed anabaptists for refusal to subject their children to the might and power of a king. And, unrepentant, it told a Commonwealth to swear an oath to a king in 2023; as if it had forgotten its disregard for what an oath even is, back in 1535.
The established church would have it that they, and they alone, were the intercession for the people to interact with the deity. And those who advocated otherwise had to be destroyed. For, a free-choice youth is a danger to military power and a danger to state and church alike.
Many are the martyrs whose tales are told in the 17th century Dutch compendium Martyrs’ Mirror; who died for their faith; for their love of God; for their love of their enemy; for their rejection of the State as standing in the place of their God. Mennonites do far more than make a stand for Jesus: they make a stand against the manipulation, corruption and abuses of organised religion. They deserve our vast respect for that; for ours would be a vastly different world, if only it were run by them.
By I, Producer, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6620561.