Abraham is chosen, God says, because of his capacity as a father. “For I have known him,” God says in Genesis, “because he will command his children and household after him to keep the ways of God to perform justice and righteousness” (Gen. 18:19). Abraham is set apart by his capacity as a father. And his dream as a father, of course, is not merely to have biological progeny, but to transmit his faith, as well as the God that he has discovered in Mesopotamia, the God who accompanied him to the Holy Land, to transmit knowledge of that God to his child. That is how a covenantal community is actually born.

Moses says at the end of his life, describing the covenant between God and Israel, that “not only with you do I make this covenant, but I make this covenant with those that are here this day in the presence of the Lord our God, and with those that are not here this day” (Deut. 29:14–15). 

If you raise children and if you have five children or six children, you know that a lot of your time goes into that. And if we really do expend so much effort and so much sacrifice in the way we raise our children, it’s because we believe that it lies at the very heart of the obligation between us and our Creator. Without the ability to raise our children as we see fit, covenantal communion between generations is not possible. Therefore, I would locate the freedom to raise our children at the very heart of religious liberty itself.

An interfaith panel discusses parental rights.