By Laura Rector
In 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution against New Age Globalism that criticized the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The resolution made it and other human-rights documents sound like cultic instruments that would destroy the United States.
In recent months Baptist leaders flamed against the document again, urging senators to oppose the treaty as a threat to parental rights and American sovereignty. Every U.N. member nation except the U.S. and Somalia has made the rights document law. That seems strange if it in fact would destroy the “sovereignty of nations.”
So as a Baptist Christian, I have to ask, “Why are Baptists encouraging the U.S. to stand alone with Somalia?”
Growing up in my family’s Southern Baptist church, “For God so loved the world” and “Go ye therefore throughout all nations” were the guiding refrain that shaped my Baptist upbringing. I knew John 3:16 and the Great Commission from elementary school onward, not just as words, but as lived realities.
Every Wednesday night I attended Girls in Action, where I learned that God loved all nations and that he wanted me to help him love everyone by praying for people in other countries and serving them.
As a young adult serving in student mission projects, I learned that people in other places also were praying for and helping me. Over a decade later, I still get e-mails encouraging me in the Lord from friends I met as an International Mission Board summer missionary.
For me, being a Baptist Christian always meant being a global Christian. Global connections were cool long before words like “globalism” entered our vocabulary. Mission Friends, Girls in Action and Acteens taught me that.
Therefore I view the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child not as a threat but as a tool that can be used to help my Baptist witness. It advocates for children to be raised under the guidance of their parents. It protects children from being used as victims of sexual exploitation. It says children have the right to survival, education and self-expression.
Those are things Baptists can and should get behind.
Child expression, for example, with adult guidance, is what put the “action” in Girls in Action, a group long sponsored by the Woman’s Missionary Union. Baptists think it is important for children not to simply learn about their faith but to “own” it. Being a Baptist child has never been about simply obeying an adult religion.
Critics of the UNCRC who insist that it could take children away from their parents misunderstand the document because they misinterpret child expression and participation as sole autonomy. They worry it will take away parents’ rights to educate their children the way they choose or guide their children in faith.
More than 190 other countries have recognized, however, that the CRC is not about taking something away from parents. Rather, it’s about giving something to children.
The goal, for example, isn’t to take children out of existing educational structures like home schooling that are working for them. The goal is to help children who don’t have access to an adequate education.
It’s to help children like Simone Williams, a Baptist child who recently won a local essay contest in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Would you stand by silently and watch as someone took your baby and threw it in the dumpster?” Simone asked her community. She then wondered why we are “throwing away” our children in an ill-funded American school system that’s leaving this generation behind previous ones.
The CRC would help children like Simone to advocate for a better education alongside her parents. More importantly, it would help children in places where they are receiving no education. The goal isn’t to harm home-schooled children.
Giving one group basic human rights doesn’t necessarily mean taking away the rights of others. Recognizing the worth of African-Americans and ending Jim Crow Laws in the Civil Rights Movement, for example, didn’t take away anything from whites except bigotry. Rather, it healed broken communities.
Recognizing the rights of children doesn’t take away rights from parents, either. If anything, it gives parents yet another tool to advocate for their children and to make the world a better place for all.
As a Baptist Christian — and as a global Christian — the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child seems an important step in loving my global community.
Children are not a left-vs.-right issue. They are not a Democrat-vs.-Republican issue. They are not a CBF-vs.-SBC-vs.-independent vs. whatever-kind-of-Baptist-you-are issue.
Children are part of the world that “God so loved” in John 3:16. We should advocate for the CRC to help them.