One of the more peculiar facts about contemporary religious ethical study is that it so profoundly neglects the one-third of humanity who are children. It is well established that children are the poorest group in developed and developing countries; die in disproportionate numbers from easily preventable diseases and malnutrition; often spend their days in difficult labor; are particularly vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse; tend to receive unequal health resources; often lack adequate family and community supports; do not possess equal citizenship rights; have much less of a social and political voice than adults; and so on. Yet the vast majority of religious ethicists today, around the globe and across faith traditions, take up childhood as a marginal concern at best. The field is much more interested in the other two-thirds of humanity – men and women – and often fails to attend to children even when it comes to issues that concern children a great deal, such as war, globalization, business, politics, sexuality, health care, and climate change. To cite just one example, I could not find a single religious ethicist to make an in-depth contribution to a book I recently co-edited on the subject of children and armed conflict, despite the obvious religious ethical dimensions of the subject.

There are a number of explanations for this gaping hole in religious ethical study, which I will attempt to unpack in the pages that follow. The major problem seems to come down, however, to fundamental ethical beliefs themselves. That is, while children are not denied importance and value, they are also not considered serious ethical, social, or political concerns in their own right. They are the province instead of parents, psychologists, and educators, or, worse, popular moralizers. What is more, children are less likely to receive ethical attention because they do not hold university positions from which to demand it. Such attitudes persist in the fields of religion and ethics even as other fields such as sociology, history, anthropology, and literature have increasingly recognized the study of childhoods as vital to well-rounded and critical scholarship.