nursing in church
Every few months, it seems, the X-fka-Twitter discourse regarding nursing in public resurfaces. “Prudes!” “Exhibitionists!” “Lactivists!” The highly charged and usually unjustified accusations fly fast and furious. Within the church in my context, purity culture has added a further layer of complication to the melee. I remember my naive first-time-expectant-mother self, chatting on a Sunday morning with other parents about how I would definitely just nurse my forthcoming firstborn right in the service. Definitely I would, an older mom said, but of course I would use a cover for the sake of her middle-school-aged son. What? I was too surprised at the logical leap to make a coherent answer.
Now of course personal preferences and comfort levels will differ—for mom and baby both—as will social norms. But I bristle at the assumption that the act of nursing should never, ever be seen. Historically and globally, this has not necessarily been the case, and I believe a strong argument can be made that we all lose out when nursing is hidden away. I won’t rehash here ideas about the de/sexualization of breasts or the practicality of learning to nurse by example. Those points have been made, again and again, by better writers and more experienced mothers than I. What I will do is offer a few purely theological reasons, in the form of rhetorical questions, that nursing in public should be an option.
How often do we really grasp what Peter means when he says that “[l]ike newborn babies,” we should “crave spiritual milk”? How did Peter know the way that newborns crave milk? Would anyone who’s not nursed a baby, or seen it done, really understand the simile?
How often do we witness this kind of icon, so to speak, of God’s maternal care? If we don’t really know how a nursing mother acts with her nursling, how can we propose to understand Paul’s model of pastoral gentleness?
The point is that we need the witness of all the parts of the Body—nursing mothers and babies by no means the least—to help us see more fully the image of God.
Those are great questions, indeed.