“By New Radical standards, we moms aren’t Christian enough unless we’re serving at a soup kitchen in the inner city or adopting orphans from Ethiopia.”  That is a stark, but accurate assessment of the implications of New Radical thought for Christian mothers. I would add that marriage and family precludes most Christian fathers from “radical” life as well.

In a piece responding to the controversy over the “New Radicals,” titled “Suburbia Needs Jesus, Too,” Andrea Palpant Dilley offers a mother’s perspective, pointing out that fixation on big, dramatic acts as the way to “really” follow God disqualifies most Christian mothers from a meaningful Christian life. (Read the article that started it all here) To say that real life happens in the dramatic moments of fighting injustice or feeding the hungry on foreign shores discounts the value of the quotidian, mundane realities of life for most mothers.

This “stereotypically male way of thinking that often values the dramatic over the mundane and loses sight of people who engage the greater good through the invisible monotony of home-making, childrearing, and other unseen acts of service,” she writes. Dilley explains although both men and women have a deeply ingrained desire to contribute meaningful work to the world, women are more biologically and traditionally in tune with the significance of the “mundane good.” She continues: “By New Radical standards, we moms aren’t Christian enough unless we’re serving at a soup kitchen in the inner city or adopting orphans from Ethiopia.”

That is a stark, but accurate assessment of the implications of New Radical thought for Christian mothers. I would add that marriage and family precludes most Christian fathers from “radical” life as well. Although in evangelical circles we frequently hear married life discussed as an identity defining “calling” for women in the form of child rearing and homemaking, we don’t often hear of how having a family fundamentally shapes the identity of men.

Read More