Should Catholics Get Rid of Infant Baptism?

This past week, Catholic apologist Trent Horn sat down with renowned Protestant apologist William Lane Craig.¹ Dr. Craig claimed that he had some “pragmatic advice” for the Catholic Church. His recommendation: they should get rid of infant baptism.

The entire episode is linked at the end of the article, but the relevant clip for our discussion is here 👇

I want to talk, not so much about the issue of infant baptism, but rather the reason Craig gives for “advising” the Church to abandon its practice.

Now, I’m fully aware that Dr. Craig was in a friendly conversation, not a formal debate. So we should take his words with a grain of salt. However, I think that we can observe a few things before we begin:

1. Craig is a highly influential public figure, and so what he says has more influence in the Christian world.

2. Many Christians outside the Church will say that they agree with Dr. Craig’s statements.

3. Craig has done a lot of good things for the issues around important philosophical and historical claims of Christianity, like the existence of God and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So, in light of those observations, I want to offer some friendly pushback on Craig’s advice, specifically the notion that the Church ought to abandon a doctrine for pragmatic reasons.

What did he say?

Dr. Craig recommends that the Catholics need to get rid of infant baptism because it leads to unregenerate cradle Catholics in the Church — in other words, people give Christianity a bad name because they think that once they get the dunk, their soul will never be sunk; or if they get the sprinkle their, soul will never have a wrinkle; or once they splashed their soul will never be…ok I’ll stop.

In short, Craig’s assumption is that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is not essential to the faith because people misunderstand and/or abuse it. Trent rightly responds by saying that a doctrine that is abused does not mean that the doctrine is false or should be rejected. Rather, the truth is that people everywhere misunderstand or abuse the religious teachings they claim to adhere to, including Protestants from the faith background of William L. Craig. I can think of many Protestants who have engaged in a variety of sinful practices surrogacy, abortion, IVF, divorce, have sex before marriage, and the good ole fashioned ones like stealing, gossip, and lying. All of them would say that they are “saved” because they prayed a prayer at one point in their life. But if Craig is right than this leads to some weird takes on sin found in the Bible.

For example, King David is someone who was circumcised (a prefigurement of baptism) and was “a man after God’s own heart.” He has all the qualities of a sincere believer; he’s living according to God’s commands, and he writes beautiful and heartfelt words about the Lord. Then he messed up. He committed adultery, and then used his position as the King to have the woman’s husband murdered through a government conspiracy. Pretty bad stuff. He’s not exactly repping the Kingdom of Israel in way that will have the men lining up to buy books and coffee, not to mention, getting circumcised.

Imagine going back and time with Craig during David’s encounter with the prophet Nathan. “You are the man!”, shouts Nathan, and it echoes throughout the throne room. After their exchange, Nathan walks out and Dr. Craig says “Excuse me, can I give you some advice…have you thought about just getting rid of the whole infant circumcision thing? It doesn’t seem to be working for you.”

The truth is that man’s will is fickle, and while grace is what man needs, eternal life is not about faith in a moment, but a persevering faith that endures to the end. In order for man to inherit eternal life, he must submit to the teachings that Christ himself associated with eternal life: belief, (Jn. 3:16), baptism (Jn. 3:5), forgiveness of sins (Jn. 20:22), and the receiving of his body and blood (Jn. 6:53-66).

If we took Dr. Craig back to Christ’s ministry days, many of Christ’s own teachings would have had to be thrown out or “reworded” since they were causing people to walk away. For example, when Jesus says “eat my body and drink my blood,” he lost nearly all of his disciples, with the exception of the twelve (Jn. 6:66).

Another example where this principle of pragmatic theology would lead people astray is Marriage. For example, like Baptism, Marriage is also a sacrament. Given that many Catholics suffer divorce in their marriages, should Catholics abandon this teaching as well? Are we supposed to imagine God up in Heaven holding his chin saying, “Hmmm…I really thought that these sacraments were gonna perform better. Guess we need to look for some different ways to send grace to these poor souls.”

The truth of the matter is that salvation is not a moment, but is received when we persevere in the faith. Personal conversions centered around something like the Sinner’s Prayer “work”, but only in so far as that believer is ignorant of the need to be Baptized. This exception should not be confused with the ordinary way that God has revealed himself to work in the lives of the sinner. Furthermore, scripture condemns mere belief, and so if another Christian exhorts a believer to be baptized, and they refuse, that individual’s salvation should be questioned. Otherwise salvation becomes something that is merely adopted intellectually or emotionally. Pragmatism cannot be the hinge on our theological “door”, so to speak, or we will end up believing all sorts things. In fact, we could find ourselves duped by false teachings or demonic experiences, just like Diana Helmuth.

Sacraments and Magic

We believe that the sacraments confer a real grace, not merely for pragmatic reasons, though those do exist, but because this is what Christ instituted. The sacraments are not magic, but Craig seems to be interpreting this Christian teaching as if the sacraments were magical, not from an academic perspective, but because of confused Catholics who treat the sacraments like magic. The sacraments are meant to strengthen the will, not make us heavenly automatons who never sin. Obviously, this is not the proper way to view any of the sacraments, but especially the sacrament of baptism, otherwise the Church would not have another vital sacrament, the Sacrament of Confession (Jn. 20:22).

But things get even worse if we consider the implications of appllying a “pragmatic” view to experiences with the Occult. Below is a story of a former atheist who recently rediscovered her desire for the divine through a particular set of “religious practices.”

If I'm being really honest, I was tired of God being dead. I didn't want to feel like I didn't care about the divine anymore. I wanted to admit to myself that I did care, that I did want to feel held by the divine, but getting through the shame of that is something that is interrogated throughout the book. Like, why was that so hard for me to admit?

I'm sitting in front of an altar that I've made out of a cardboard box. I have a stranger's playlist going on Spotify. My cat is on the other side of the door staring at me, and after about an hour, something happened. I just suddenly felt flooded with bliss. And after that experience, it became very difficult for me to continue to make fun of this part of myself that wanted to be connected with the divine. Shame just wasn't involved.²

Those quotes are from an article written by National Public Radio (NPR) by Mallory Yu. She was interviewing a former atheist named Diana Helmuth. Diana is a convert from atheism to witchcraft. Diana continues,

I think increasingly we find ourselves facing things that really affect us deeply that we have very little control over: climate change, housing prices, health insurance bills, pandemics, who's going to become the president. And here's this religion — this spirituality — that says, "You can have an effect on these things that feel so much bigger than you. You just need a couple of candles and some willpower."

Diana’s engagement in the occult reignited — no pun intended — her desire to encounter the divine. The only problem is, she is encountering the power of Hell rather than the power of Heaven. But if we view her experience through the pragmatic lens, we would have to concede it “worked for her.” But any respectable Christian knows that most doctrines, for the most part, are not practical. Christians practice the faith the way they believe to practice it, primarily because its true, not because of its practicality. The doctrinal truth precedes the pragmatic way in which it should be practiced; once the doctrine is established, how will certainly have to take into account the practicality of the practice.

Pragmatic Protestant Practices

You gotta love the alliteration there…

Finally, if we apply Pragmatism to Protestantism, Christians might have to abandon the entire Protestant Project altogether. For example, many “well intentioned” Protestants sided with Margret Sanger and her push for contraception, which would become the catalyst for Planned Parenthood and the infanticide that has eclipsed the Nazi Holocaust in its evil.

According to Daniel K. Williams in Defenders of the Unborn, Sanger targeted Protestant pastors to help her promote her new organization, the “American Birth Control League.”

In the early 1920s, Margaret Sanger and her American Birth Control League (which later became Planned Parenthood) challenged [contraception], and quickly won widespread acceptance among middle-class Protestants for the use of contraceptive devices. The Anglican Communion reversed course in 1930 and declared that Christian married couples had a right to use artificial birth control, and other Protestant Church bodies quickly followed suit. The Federal Council of Churches’ Committee on Marriage and the Home issued a report endorsing contraception in 1931. By the late 1930s, national committees of the American Episcopal, United Methodist, United Presbyterian, and Congregational Christian Churches had officially endorsed birth control.

…Though many Protestant fundamentalists continued to oppose contraception for several decades, liberal Protestants and Jews embraced it as a progressive humanitarian measure. By 1946, 3,200 ministers were members of Planned Parenthood’s Clergyman’s Council.³

Approximately 3,200 protestant ministers helped to get Planned Parenthood off the ground. Today, conservative evangelicals who will rail against evolution, while simultaneously requesting prayer requests for their Chrsitians, pastors and laymen, who are participating in IVF and surrogacy because they mistakenly believe they are being “pro-life” in doing so.

Had the Protestants held their ground on abortion and contraception, our nation would look very different today. Many Protestants want to say that these Christians were “confused” and “misguided”, but the only problem with this theory is that it neglects to account for the fact that there was a voice “crying in the wilderness,” trying to get American Christians to reject Sanger’s ideas. It was the Catholic Church.

As is often the case, the Church is the voice of conscience to the world, not because her clergy or laity are perfect, but because her teaching calls man to God’s divine plan. Infant baptism is part of this divine plan, not because it “works”, but because, just as the Church preserved the scriptures, so too she has protected the sacrements. So my advice to Protestants is to answer the question, “What is the purpose of Doctrine, if no one can agree on what doctrine Protestants ought to have?”

Closing Thoughts

“pragmatism” is a bad basis for whether a doctrine should stay or go. This is why I did not contend the issue of infant baptism directly. Instead, I wanted to point out that pragmatism may be a tool that leads us to be more curious about the basis for doctrines of other denominations, but it cannot be the sole basis for our rejection of those doctrines.

In the end, the reason a Christian submits to the Church of his choosing is because he believes what the Church teaches is true, whether that doctrine “works” for him is a secondary issue.

1. For those who don’t know, Dr. Craig is one of Christianity’s foremost Christian thinkers. He’s written over thirty books and published nearly 200 academic articles in the arena of philosophy and theology. He also founded the ministry, Reasonable Faith, which aimed to equip Christians to think critically about the Christian faith and to defend it winsomely. As Trent Horn pointed out, Craig’s work and character in debates have informed Christians of all traditions on how to engage critics and skeptics, especially those who doubt the existence of God or the historicity of Jesus Christ.

2. How one woman was drawn to witchcraft: https://www.npr.org/2023/11/01/1209962039/witchcraft-wicca-wiccans-witches

3. Williams, Daniel K.. Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade (pp. 13-14). (Function). Kindle Edition. emphasis mine.