A Note To Readers: I usually only talk about my spiritual faith in fairly oblique terms here, if at all, and I’m very content with that. My clumsy stumbling in the Jesus story doesn’t mean that my writing is necessarily Christian, although spiritual themes and references frame or interact in much of what I produce. The same could be said for many other writers of all faiths or of no particular faith.
That said, this next series of posts were written with the progressive Christian subculture (with which I often socially interact and am in some ways part of) as an audience. And they’re about abortion. These posts are not meant to alienate pro-choice readers or readers who aren’t Christian (obliquely or otherwise). For my part, and as I’ve said in another post, I identify most with the anxious Gethsemane Christ and I don’t mean these posts as proselytization missives or political statements as such.
Part 1: Scientific Ontologies, or Three Guys Walk Into a Bar and Talk About Abortion
This first part was first published elsewhere in February after a wing special at one of my favorite bars and is reposted to frame the context in which these thoughts emerged.
I’ve been thinking for some time about how pro-life people of good will and intention might frame their case in progressive terms. With regards to protecting animals, for example, the progressive view is that which recognizes and protects animals who can’t protect, defend or speak for themselves. When computers gain sentience, the stance we’ll call progressive will be that which argues robustly for individual rights for thinking machines. So too for human clones.
A few thoughts, which will be developed more fully later, follow.
1) Pro-lifers (especially Christian pro-lifers) need to abandon theological ontology as a touchstone of their argument. The argument as to when life begins is fraught with religious claims not likely (and probably not able) to be resolved in a pluralistic national polity, and that’s a good thing.
2) The right-to-life argument should be made from an appeal to science. Let’s throw the religiosity right out of the public discourse and pretend for a moment that science involves no value judgments. Let’s then build an argument for fetal rights from the scientific understanding of the developing fetus as genetically other viz-a-vis her parents.
3) The argument, then, should not be based on defining when life begins, but rather on defining scientifically when a new individual with human potentialities is formed. Can a developing fetus (or zygote) with DNA different from her mother be in any way rightfully considered an extension of that mother? If not, the right to privacy basis of legal abortion is undermined.
Part II: An Emerging Ethic of Life
In this election cycle, talk about an emerging evangelical political center abounds. Much of the discussion is about how conservative and liberal Christians can work together to realize Christ-commanded essentials and their corollaries : care for the poor, for example, and its extensions regarding access, justice, health care and so on.
Along different but related lines, I’ve been wondering about understanding the pro-life movement in progressive (or, one could argue, even libertarian) terms.
It’s intuitive, at least to me, that pro-life Christians (even if they’re “conservative” on other issues) would find natural allies within the ranks of Christian progressives, because you’d think that while there may be disagreement on things like just war and pacifism, politically active Christians of certain strains would have some natural convergences around their dedication to protecting the most vulnerable. I haven’t seen much evidence, though, that this is actually happening, Frank Schaeffer’s recent essay (“Why I’m a Pro-Life Obama Supporter”) aside.
If anything, missives like Schaeffer’s underscore the point: there is no progressive Christian cohesion around abortion as a crisis of rights, ethics, and ontology even though such cohesion does exist on other ethic of life issues. The Christian Left is, for example, increasingly normative and vocal about their stance against the Iraq war, much to the mistrust, I’m sure, of some conservative or traditionalist pro-lifers. There’s a more monolithic view about social reform as well, exemplified by the emerging truism that Obama will do more for the downtrodden in general than, say, any Republican, and he will do so in a way, the argument goes, that will reduce the reasons for abortion in the first place. This mitigates his decisions to vote against the Infants Born Alive Act, the narrative claims, because his approach to the field of issues is nearer to the seamless garment ethic of life that Christian pro-lifers claim to support.
Anti-war (I’m not an out-of-hand pacifist), anti-death penalty (I am), pro-environment (I am) and pro-life Christians, then, should stop trying to change abortion policy and start trying to change other social policy, the center is saying. This is essentially the “legal, safe, and rare” argument first proffered and recently affirmed by Bill Clinton.
What Clinton missed in his campaign-trail comments a few months ago (“tell the truth, I was the president that reduced abortion the most”) was that if there’s nothing wrong with abortion, that is, if it ought to be legal based on the nonhumanity of the aborted, why should we care whether or not it’s rare? I can understand wanting something like war, which clearly involves combatants we define as “human” to be rare, but why abortion? Put another way, American slavery was predicated on the notion, codified in the Constitution, that blacks were not human persons. Progressive Christians lead the charge against that vulgar definition. Can you imagine if they’d appealed to socioeconomic arguments and concluded that slavery should be legal but rare? Today that’s unthinkable, and rightly so. Abolitionists refused that convenience. To borrow an image from the contemporary Christian pacifists, they concluded that the answer to “Who Would Jesus Enslave?” was “no one.” Who would Jesus abort?
The center is right about paying more attention to other social issues and large social policy, but that does not excuse us from the abortion discussion.
Part III: A Hermeneutic of The Least of These
I think a tenable, amicable opposition to abortion from a place of progressive faith and progressive politics can and needs to be articulated by people from both parties who may disagree about other ethics of life issues. In this emerging discussion, Christian moral opposition to abortion needs to take its cues from some of the more radical appeals to Christian ontology (“Who Would Jesus Bomb?”) rather than from failed and wrong-headed attempts at imposing Christian deontology (“the Bible says x, so we must do y”) onto our nervous and rightly protected Constitutional pluralism.
The difference between ontology (being) and deontology (duty) in this exchange is largely one of moral suasion. The bumper sticker “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” takes for granted that readers have some visceral understanding of Jesus and his ethic and, whether they know it or not, it forces them to consider the repercussions of war from a hybrid understanding (the pacifists’ and their own) of Christian ontology through the common vision of Jesus as a moral person. Even people who dismiss WWJB as a strawman proposition are forced to carry on this dialectic more fully than are unsympathetic readers of proof-texted biblical commands.
That said, the ethic of life must also include a vigorous defense of the living poor. That doesn’t necessarily mean we must always elect Democrats; another regrettable strawman is the proposition that Republicans (even Christian ones) just don’t care about the poor, a point to which Senator Obama alluded in his acceptance speech a few nights ago. It does mean, though, that pro-life Christians with conservative political affiliations must work harder to show that their concern for the unborn doesn’t stop at the uterus. Strawmen are appealing for a reason. Though reasonable people will disagree until the eschaton about whether the government or private sector is better suited for making poverty history, pro-life Christian conservatives need to assert in action and deed that their ethic of life really is precisely that and pro-life Christian liberals need to own the fact that a vote for an avowed pro-life Republican isn’t always or necessarily a vote against this ethic among the born.
We can also disagree, it seems to me, about the pacifism and just war theory, and still agree about abortion as a crisis of ontology as was slavery before it. We can agree, most likely, that preemptive war is as wrong as is the strain of thought justifying the abortion of the potentially unwanted and uncared for (I’ll call this preemptive euthanasia).
If we choose, with Jesus, the hermeneutic of the least of these, our political choices come into focus; we either vote with pro-lifers with whom we may disagree on other issues, or we force Democrats to come to terms with their own lofty rhetoric and extend the audacity of hope to the most vulnerable. In both cases, the tents do seem to be widening. Many Republicans have warmed in impressive ways to the Millennium Goals and to finding better solutions to helping the working poor and share the common wealth. Democrats have made overtures toward pro-life people of good will in ways we’ve never seen before. It’s important that Bob Casey Jr, a high-profile pro-life Democrat, was tapped to speak in Denver years after his late father was famously denied that some honor because of his pro-life views.
In my political economy, voting for a candidate publicly committed to affirming that the unborn are the least and most vulnerable human persons and deserve protection as such is the biggest and most radical kind of politics going. I say this fully aware that the GOP relied (often cynically) on well-meaning pro-life evangelicals as a firewall for 30 years and fully wary that Democrats may make similar use of well-meaning (and perhaps guilt-ridden) anti-war, pro-environment, common weal mainline Christians and former evangelicals for 30 more.
Will John McCain be as big a friend to the poor as Barack Obama? Maybe yes and maybe no, but people of faith should be making that point moot in their service, giving, and living. So should we be making the question about fetal personhood redundant.
Moral suasion comes before all great political change, and if pro-life progressives throw our support entirely to one side or the other without somehow making both parties feel our provisional anxiety and waning patience, we will have lost something important. Voting is a feature of our dual Christian and civic deontologies, but persuading our neighbors and leaders to embrace a compelling, liberating, elevating and radically progressive ontology is as well.
Part IV: The Fetal Gospel
Under [Don] Jones’ mentorship, [Hillary] Clinton learned about Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich—thinkers whom liberals consider their own, but whom young Hillary Rodham encountered as theological conservatives. The Niebuhr she studied was a cold warrior, dismissive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. “He’d thought that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered in,” Jones explains. “But the effect of those two world wars and the violence that they produced shook his faith in liberal theology. He came to believe that the achievement of justice meant a clear understanding of the limitations of the human condition.” Tillich, whose sermon on grace Clinton turned to during the Lewinsky scandal, today enjoys a following among conservatives for revising the social gospel—the notion that Christians are to improve humanity’s lot here on earth by fighting poverty, inequality, and exploitation—to emphasize individual redemption instead of activism.
That was from this Mother Jones article. This post isn’t actually going to be about Clinton, but the part about the Christian reformers is important.
Regarding Tillich, bear in mind that the progressive Christians of the abolition and suffrage era (the first real Christian activists) always predicated their social vision on individual redemption, aggregated, to be sure, but individual to start with. This is worth mentioning because in the current political climate, there is certainly much value to the “changing hearts” paradigm vis a vie fetal rights and abortion, and I see that paradigm branching in two equally important ways:
1) Public education and debate focusing on the ontological (philosophical and scientific) arguments for fetal personhood; that is, winning people’s hearts by winning their minds, and
2) Changing the public perception that fetal rights advocates don’t care what happens to children once they’re born. That’s a strawman that can be overcome with the kinds of things people of faith should be doing anyway (ie, making poverty, including poverty of spirit from cyclical disenfranchisement), history.
While the 19th century Christian reformers were motivated out of personal religious experiences with roots in the frontier circuit and Second Great Awakening, they also understood that Christian ontology had truth to speak to power in systemic ways. There’s were always two-front movements geared toward changing policy by changing hearts on one hand and changing policy by sound appeals to reason and fundamental principles of freedom (also a feature of their Christian ontology) on the other.
Because ours is a pluralistic society where freedom is valued as transcendent even outside of religious circles (though for many otherwise non-religious Americans this transcendence is, of course, itself religious, isn’t it?), it’s not necessary that we agree on who or what we call the author of our liberty (for the ever-deft Jefferson it was both nature and nature’s God) to come to sound conclusions about fetal rights. The American metanarrative, to an extent, does its own converting. For fetal rights advocates, changing minds and hearts is, then, about connecting ontological dots and pledging a sincere ethic of life to the born.
In the end, as I’ve said previously, I don’t believe in politics. I believe in conversation and in the need to serve each other, born and unborn, beyond conversation.
