Illustration of a childless couple blending in to the light, surrounded by families

Dialogue

Childfree for the Planet?

Illustration by Dadu Shin

Spring/Summer 2023

By Trish Tillman

Some of the world’s religions and spiritualities have made environmental sensitivity a central tenet of their beliefs in recent years, while others have addressed the looming issues of climate change and environmental disaster more or less grudgingly after an escalating push from their membership. Minimizing wasteful consumption, sustainable development, and recycling are eco-friendly measures that fit in with the ethos of many faiths, but not having children, or having fewer children, presents a problem for certain belief systems, even though it is often held up as one of the most effective measures to reduce our carbon emissions.

Roman Catholic Christianity and Gaudiya Vaishnavism both contain a perennial emphasis on the figure and the role of the mother and on traditional family structures. Can one be childfree for the planet and simultaneously be a good Catholic or a good Vaishnava? I chose Catholicism and Vaishnavism to discuss because I am personally familiar with both of them: I was raised Catholic and have also studied it academically; and I am currently involved with the ISKCON Gaudiya Vaishnava community in Potomac, Maryland, and have been studying the historical texts of Gaudiya Vaishnavism for a number of years.

When I say Gaudiya Vaishnava, I mean the followers of a relatively new sect within the larger family of Vaishnavism, or devotees of Vishnu/Krishna. This overarching family of beliefs has flourished in India at least since early medieval times. Gaudiya Vaishnavas follow the bhakti-yoga teachings and inspiration of the visionary and saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu who was born in Bengal in 1486, and whom devotees consider a divine avatar. In the West and in the present day, the most obvious Gaudiya Vaishnava manifestation is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, often referred to as the Hare Krishna movement, founded by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.1 The Hare Krishnas are a colorful and fascinating new religious movement known for their lively public kirtans, or call-and-response mantra chanting, and a number of scholars have scrutinized them, even though they were only founded in 1966.2

The iconography of motherhood is beloved in both Roman Catholic Christianity and Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The Virgin Mary in Catholicism is simultaneously an emblem of chastity and of motherhood, as well as a mediator who often intercedes before God to seek mercy for the wandering faithful. In his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, published August 15, 1988, Pope John Paul II restated and affirmed the teachings of the ancient Council of Ephesus, which revered Mary as theotokos, God-bearer. Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu who speaks the message of the Bhagavad Gita, effectively has two mothers in the Puranic stories surrounding him: Devaki, his birth mother, who gives him away to save him from an evil uncle who wants to kill the infant; and Yashoda, his foster mother, who raises him peacefully in the idyllic village of Vrindavan.

In a famous episode, the toddler Krishna acts mischievously and steals butter, then allows Yashoda to pursue and catch him, like any baby, despite actually being the Supreme Being, by which Krishna displays “the transcendental attribute of coming under the control of His devotees.”3 Yashoda is an example of a sincere and pure devotee, motivated by motherly love, who has obtained this special mercy of relating to God in an intimate fashion. In ISKCON, especially in its earlier days, it was a practice to call all female devotees other than one’s wife “mataji,” respected mother. In a similar vein, Swami Prabhupada emphasized the importance of caring for one’s children, telling disciple Arundhati devi dasi in a personal letter that her duties of deity service at the temple were not so important as her duty of caring for her young son.4

Catholicism and Vaishnavism resemble one another in a quite different way, in that they both have an apocalyptic turn. There is a strain in each tradition that sees our present era as part of a steadily worsening, wicked age of history, which will culminate and conclude in a period of chastisement and purification. Catholic apocalypticism in the mid-twentieth century often mirrored popular speculation about a coming nuclear war that might sweep humanity back to the Dark Ages, or worse; the Second Vatican Council was convened in October 1962, the same month as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For discontented traditionalist Catholics, who took issue with many of the reforms instituted by Vatican II, the social changes wrought by the 1960s and subsequent decades were proof of the declining morality of the world, and Catholics losing their faith served only to confirm this. Protestant groups in the United States have tended to be known more for their millenarian tendencies, but the late twentieth century also saw this new pattern in Cathol-icism. Traditionalist Catholic academic Frederick D. Wilhelmsen fervently wrote in 1968, “We live now in the Last Age, insists St. Augustine, and an aging world, hurtling like an arrow toward Apocalypse and Judgement, cries out for Redemption.”5

In the Srimad-Bhagavatam, where one can find much of Vaishnava belief, mystical teachings, and traditional stories, the physical universe is said to constantly cycle through four yugas, or ages, each of which lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. From Satya Yuga, through Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga, and finally to Kali Yuga, humanity’s intelligence, morality, and lifespan is said to decrease in each epoch. At the end of Kali Yuga, Vishnu will reappear as the avatar Kalki and ride throughout the earth, killing evil leaders and restoring righteousness so that the whole cycle will begin again. The Srimad-Bhagavatam teaches:

In Kali-yuga, wealth alone will be considered the sign of a man’s good birth, proper behavior and fine qualities. And law and justice will be applied only on the basis of one’s power.6

The proponents of the new Hare Krishna movement in the United States had only to look to their society’s materialism, conspicuous consumption, and deification of excess to find present-day examples of Kali Yuga.

While humanity once feared a sudden and fiery apocalypse, today a more excruciating death from climate change seems a more likely scenario. There are two main types of rationales for choosing not to have children, or to have fewer children, for the environment. One is the more optimistic reason that, according to a well-publicized 2017 study, having one less child is by far the most effective way for an individual to reduce their carbon emissions. Other measures, such as driving a hybrid car, eating a plant-based diet, and avoiding one transatlantic flight per year, were around one-fiftieth as helpful as having one less child.7 In countries that have higher consumption of resources per capita, including the United States, each additional child has a much higher impact than a child born in countries with low consumption. Oftentimes, the rhetoric of population control focuses, in ways that shade into racism, on hypothetical “teeming masses” elsewhere, when we should be examining our own choices first.

The other, more pessimistic, reason is that prospective parents feel hesitant to usher lives into a world only to suffer its collapse. In the past decade or so, the growing consciousness around climate change has contributed to making the decision not to have children more normative, though voluntarily childfree women still report stigmatization and judgment about their choice from family, friends, and even casual acquaintances.8

In the past decade or so, the growing consciousness around climate change has contributed to making the decision not to have children more normative, though voluntarily childfree women still report stigmatization and judgment about their choice from family, friends, and even casual acquaintances.

Though Catholicism and Vaishnavism both promote traditional families, at the same time they have vital traditions of celibacy, monasticism, and giving up family life. This renunciation is typically undertaken for spiritual reasons, so that the practitioner can focus solely on prayer and penance without the distraction of being responsible for their loved ones. Is there any crossover to be found between being childfree for spiritual reasons and being childfree out of ecological concerns? Certainly, Catholic and Vaishnava renunciates were not always embraced by their societies for their bold choice; there is an antinomian, even cold-hearted element, to some accounts of Catholic and Vaishnava mystics giving up family life for spiritual reasons. In the early days of the Hare Krishna movement, some fathers of families would abandon their partners and children to become a sannyasi, which Srila Prabhupada soon discouraged.

The groundbreaking scholar of women’s history and religious history, Jo Ann Kay McNamara, emphasized in Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia that giving up marriage and family life in the patriarchal society of the late Roman Empire would have seemed unnatural, threatening, and an inversion of gender roles. Early Christian history is brimming with accounts of consecrated virgins whose families reacted vehemently, even violently, to their decision to serve God alone.

As McNamara points out, early ascetics—male and female—often did not simply remain celibate but went out into harsh wilderness environments like the deserts of North Africa as a sign that they were divorcing themselves from a society that, they believed, had become hopelessly corrupt. For these Christian renunciates, the depredations of the barbarians upon Rome were another sign that the empire had sinned and incurred the wrath of God. Their celibacy had a constructive, as well as purgative, aspect, as the desert quickly became populated with little monastic communities that would form a new network, “Cities of God” springing up as the empire’s urban environs fell into disrepair.9 During the Cold War, Walter M. Miller Jr.’s 1959 novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, envisioned Catholic monastic communities in the deserts of the American southwest in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, explicitly connecting these two eras.

Turning one’s back on one’s natural family of origin in favor of larger spiritual and humanitarian goals also has many parallels in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, notably in the life of its founder, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, as retold by Bhaktivinoda Thakur.10 The teenaged Chaitanya, Bhaktivinoda writes, was a prodigy known as one of the best Sanskrit scholars in his area of Bengal before he manifested his mystical and ecstatic tendencies. He was married twice; after his first wife, Lakshmidevi, passed away from snakebite, he married Vishnupriya, at his mother’s request. After he took his first spiritual initiation, the scholar was reborn as a devotee, and those who had known him before “were astonished at the change in the young man. He was then no more a contending naiyāyika, a wrangling smārta and a criticizing rhetorician. He swooned at the name of Kṛṣṇa and behaved as an inspired man under the influence of His religious sentiment.”11

Chaitanya began to organize his signature mass kirtan parties around Bengal but was met with opposition from Bengal’s Muslim rulers and from jealous brahmanas. This led Chaitanya to a conclusion that would become a theme in the modern Hare Krishna movement:

[Chaitanya] declared that party feelings and sectarianism were the two great enemies of progress, and He saw that as long as He should continue to be an inhabitant of Nadia belonging to a certain family, His mission would not meet with complete success. He then resolved to be a citizen of the world by cutting off His connection with His particular family, caste and creed, and with this resolution He embraced the position of a sannyāsī.12

Sometimes wives and families are simply portrayed as obstacles to spiritual progress, as in Prabhupada’s introduction to Teachings of Lord Chaitanya, where he writes: “in conditioned life we are shackled by iron chains in the form of beautiful women.”13

To give up one’s family, or the hope of having a family, is portrayed as a severe decision, but also as one that confirms the renunciate as a servant of all humanity who is not bound by particular considerations of ancestry, caste, creed, nationality, or ideology. Interestingly, Chaitanya’s second wife, Vishnupriya, is regarded in many Bengali Vaishnava traditions not as an obstacle or a temptation to be overcome, but as an active participant in Chaitanya’s mission, and as an ideal devotee. She is described in some hagiographies of Chaitanya as an incarnation of Bhusakti, the Earth Goddess. After Chaitanya took sannyas, Vishnupriya lived with Chaitanya’s widowed mother, spoke little to anyone, and spent most of her time meditating on the names of Krishna, and many of Chaitanya’s followers also revered her during her lifetime. As devotion to Chaitanya grew over the centuries in Bengal, some communities began to view Vishnupriya-Chaitanya as a divine pair to be worshiped together in images and hymns, like Radha-Krishna and Sita-Rama.14

These renunciatory mystics have sometimes been viewed as the seeds of spiritual inspiration that have the potential to revitalize an entire society. Other historians and theorists have taken a less sanguine view of religion’s role in climate change. In 1967, Lynn Townsend White Jr. laid the blame for mankind’s disregard for nature squarely at the feet of what he saw as Christianity’s extreme anthropocentrism, which he called the most egregious in any belief system.15 In his estimation, only solitary Christian mystics like St. Francis of Assisi had a more balanced view of man’s place in the larger cosmos and did not see humanity as rightful conquerors and exploiters of lesser species.

In a more practical sense, those who are ecologically concerned can take issue with Roman Catholic Christianity’s prohibition on the use of contraception by the faithful. American Catholic historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler detailed in Catholics and Contraception that the early- to mid-1960s saw a stir among the Catholic faithful as they began to challenge the Church hierarchy on this point. A father of five young children whose wife was having stress-related mental health issues asked in a letter to a Catholic newspaper, “Cannot one sin by having a child?”16 Dr. John Rock, a devout Catholic as well as a professor at Harvard Medical School, helped to develop the first oral contraceptive and firmly believed in the morality of his stance.

The widely anticipated 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae did acknowledge the possible dangers of overpopulation, exhaustion of natural resources, and poor living conditions but still described the use of “artificial birth control” as a grave sin. This left observant Catholic couples who wanted to limit the number of children no recourse other than abstaining from sex during periods of known fertility. Disappointed by the ruling, many Catholics either left the Church or quietly disobeyed on their own.

In the wake of the 1960s, the antimodern, traditionalist wing of the Church doubled down on eschewing contraception, and having many children became a mark of identity and even defiance against both Protestants and liberal Catholics. The Population Research Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, just down the road from the ultraconservative Christendom College, claims that overpopulation and climate change are myths, and that, if anything, people around the world are having too few children.17 For many traditionalists who envision a culture war between modernity and faith, having large families is seen as a winning move in that culture war, presumably because this produces more believers who will one day play a role in taking back Western culture from the forces of secularism and relativism.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Swami Prabhupada would agree with traditionalist Catholics that society was going down a bad path of materialism, atheism, and militarism. At other times, he held out hope that, if humanity accepted Krishna consciousness, disaster might be averted.18 But most Gaudiya Vaishnavas have accepted the increasingly dire ecological warnings, and the tradition has produced models of believers actively seeking to live in eco-friendly ways. Some of the rural communities that sprung up in ISKCON’s early days, like New Vrindavan in West Virginia, and Gita Nagari in Pennsylvania, were founded as alternatives to a materialistic way of life, and were populated both by renunciates and families.19 More recently, Govardhan Ecovillage in India, founded by the prominent ISKCON guru Radhanath Swami, has self-consciously sought to be a model for sustainable development and green tourism. Sometimes, as in the case of the Krishna Valley ecovillage in Hungary, there has been tension between the emphasis on the community as a model of sustainable living, generally the paradigm more appealing to non-devotees, and the community as a holy dham (a holy abode) that is the echo of Vrindaban in other lands.20

Most Gaudiya Vaishnavas have accepted the increasingly dire ecological warnings, and the tradition has produced models of believers actively seeking to live in eco-friendly ways.

Pranada Comtois, a writer on bhakti-yoga, disciple of Swami Prabhupada, and longtime member of the ISKCON community in Alachua, Florida, cautioned me against an overly sanguine view of these eco-communities. She pointed out that members of these communities will have different levels of clarity about their responsibility for the planet, and that many Hare Krishnas consider their vegetarian lifestyle as having fulfilled their debt of concern to the environment.21 Certainly, vegetarianism is one easy commonality between the Hare Krishnas and many in the larger environmental movement.

As for contemporary Hare Krishna attitudes on having children, these vary. Rukmini Walker, another Swami Prabhupada disciple and activist in ISKCON on women’s and interfaith issues, admitted that “this age doesn’t seem very propitious to raise children in” because of the intense pressures from external society, as well as because of the turmoil and change within ISKCON itself. Nonetheless, she spoke of many devotees’ eagerness to have children, saying that some had even repurposed the Catholic “rhythm” method, not to avoid having children but to aim to have more!22

The ISKCON of the present day, in which Rukmini, Pranada, and I are active, faces the interesting challenge of an organization with a lineage from the mystic Chaitanya and the renunciate Prabhupada, which previously showed a heavy prejudice in favor of celibate males, but now the majority of its members are people with normal jobs and families, or “householders.” Programs for major Vaishnava holidays at temples often include parallel children’s programs, and temple rooms often have an air of liveliness during worship, with children playing or participating in kirtans. Some accomplished kirtan leaders in present-day ISKCON started to play traditional instruments and chant when they were just children in the movement. The presence of children seems wholeheartedly encouraged, as it is an aspect of the Hare Krishna movement restyling itself as more mainstream, with something to offer for people at every stage of life.

At the same time, Prabhupada and early ISKCON strongly disapproved of abortion and of sex for purposes other than procreation; the practice of abortion in the United States was deemed one of the egregious signs that we indeed live in Kali Yuga. Although Prabhupada may have been forward-looking in his attitudes toward women,23 he did not extend this same permissive spirit toward the sexual revolution that was brewing in the US as the Hare Krishna movement was founded. Similar to practices in Catholic Christianity, many devotees have nodded at these teachings but followed their own judgments rather than religious dictates in planning their families.

Roman Catholicism and Gaudiya Vaishnavism contain some surprising parallels in their teachings on celibacy and renunciation, their eschatological worldviews, and their conceptions of the relationship between the community of the faithful and the larger society. At their best, practitioners in both traditions are recognized not only for their mystical accomplishments and contemplative depths, but for their care and concern for others. Vaishnavas do not strive for moksha, or impersonal liberation, but for bhakti, selfless service to God and to others. In these systems, to be childfree can be a method to free oneself up for more unencumbered service.

However, the dark side of childfree life choices, whether for secular environmental reasons or for spiritual renunciation, can be dismissiveness toward other lifestyles, nihilism, and a deliberate refusal to invest any hope in this world. If the practitioner is entirely bent on escaping, or on leaving no other souls behind them for which they can be held responsible, this is not likely to lead toward the coalition-building and collective changes in behavior that everyone agrees are necessary to address our current reality of climate crisis and species extinction. Spiritual practitioners who choose to remain childfree have to walk the mental tightrope of recognizing the seriousness of our situation while at the same time acknowledging that, if climate change is a communal problem, it will require a communal effort in which people of many different lifestyles respect one another as we work toward solutions or mitigation.

Notes:

  1. I refer to the Hare Krishnas and Gaudiya Vaishnavism somewhat interchangeably, but I recognize that there are many other Gaudiya Vaishnava groups and lineages, particularly in West Bengal.
  2. Francis X. Clooney, Kenneth Rose, Steven J. Rosen, and Graham Schweig, among others, have written on Gaudiya Vaishnavism in comparison with Christianity.
  3. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Srimad-Bhagavatam, 10.9.19, “Purport,” Bhaktivedanta Database, vedabase.io/en/library/sb/10/9/19.
  4. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Letter to Arundhati, July 30, 1972, Bhaktivedanta Database, vedabase.io/en/library/letters/letter-to-arundhati-9.
  5. Wilhelmsen envisioned a mystical union of sinners across the ages who were lost without divine intervention.
  6. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Srimad-Bhagavatam, 12.2.2, “Translation,” Bhaktivedanta Database, vedabase.io/en/library/sb/12/2/2.
  7. Damian Carrington, “Want to Fight Climate Change? Have Fewer Children,” The Guardian, July 12, 2017.
  8. Debra Mollen, “Voluntarily Childfree Women: Experiences and Counseling Considerations,” Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 28, no. 3 (July 2006): 269–84.
  9. Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Harvard University Press, 1996), 64–70.
  10. Bhaktivinoda Thakur was a Bengali spiritual teacher, writer, and guru in the late nineteenth century who was instrumental in reviving Chaitanya Vaishnavism, arguing for its continued relevance, and introducing it to the West.
  11. Bhaktivinoda Thakur, prologue to Teachings of Lord Chaitanya, vedabase.io/en/library/tlc/prologue/.
  12. Ibid.
  13. Srila Prabhupada, introduction to Teachings of Lord Chaitanya, vedabase.io/en/library/tlc/introduction/.
  14. Santanu Dey, “ ‘Locating Viṣnupriyā in the Tradition’: Women, Devotion, and Bengali Vaiṣṇavism in Colonial Times,” Religions 11, no. 11: 555.
  15. White, a medieval historian, made this indictment in an influential 1967 lecture, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.”
  16. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Cornell University Press, 2004), 219.
  17. See the Population Research Institute’s website, www.pop.org.
  18. Swami Prabhupada, “Preaching to America: Part 1,” at Berkeley, July 15, 1975, Bhaktivedanta Database, vedabase.io/en/library/spl/2/46.
  19. Christopher Fici has called these alternative communities, founded because their members discern an upcoming ecological crisis, anticipatory communities.
  20. Judit Farkas, “Eco Valley or New Vraja Dham? Competing Emic Interpretations of the Hungarian Krishna Valley,” Religions 12, no. 8 (2021): 622.
  21. Interview with Pranada Comtois, April 7, 2022.
  22. Interview with Rukmini Walker, April 8, 2022.
  23. Jyotirmayi devi dasi, “Women in ISKCON in Prabhupada’s Time,” in The Emergence of Women’s Voices in ISKCON, ed. Pranada devi dasi (Bookrights Press, 2020), 173.

Trish Tillman is a writer, yoga teacher, and adjunct history professor at University of Maryland Global Campus. Her favorite topics of inquiry include comparisons of Eastern and Western devotional traditions and studies of the ongoing tension between tradition and modernity. 

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