The Least of These

Abortion has been in the news as the Republican Party debates a constitutional amendment banning all abortions and Rep. Todd Akins squirms in the spotlight glaring down on his assertion that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant.

I’ve set myself the goal of thinking and praying my way through important political issues of the season. This is one I’ve been dreading - but here it is.

I’ll start with a confession: as a young parent I participated in the March for Life. Our church at the time was the headquarters of N.O.E.L., National Organization of Episcopalians for Life, and our rector, John Howe, was the founder.

Several years in a row, I drove to church with our youngest child, loaded her and a stroller on a bus, and drove into D.C. to affirm my belief that fetuses are people, deserving of our protection.

Life was simpler then. Solutions seemed possible.

I still believe that fetuses are people, deserving of our protection, but I’m less sure that marches and slogans are the best way to make that point, and I’m not sure that overturning Roe v. Wade would take us where we want to go.

For me, this is a topic where justice, mercy, and humility collide, and I find myself grieving, repenting, and wishing I lived in a time that allowed sackcloth and ashes. I’d go find some.

Here’s what I grieve:

• Political rhetoric that makes light of the experience of rape, that dares to suggest that some rapes are more worthy of sympathy than others.
• Junk science masquerading as fact that somehow ignores the experience of an estimated 32,000 women with rape-related pregnancies each year.
• The flurry of punitive and mean-spirited laws promoted, in some cases passed, with no clear justification: how many men who voted for transvaginal ultrasounds had any idea of what that might be like?
• Attempts to limit access to contraception, cut food aid to mothers and children, limit early education.

Lennart Nillson, Life Magazine cover, 1965

But my grief goes deeper.

• I grieve the death of over 54 million babies in the years since Roe v. Wade. Call them fetuses if that makes it less painful, but I know my own kids had personalities long before their due dates. 
• At the same time I grieve the death of all the women, most of them far too young, who have lost their lives in illegal abortions. When I was first married, my neighbors, sweet aging sisters sharing a West Philly row home, pointed out a house across the street where they said an illegal abortionist had plied his trade for years. “Women died in that house,” they told me, sadly. 

Do we go back to the days of illegal abortions? Do we go on legally ending 800,000 lives a year?

Or do we stop and wonder why our culture puts so little value on life, finds unexpected babies so disturbing, has so little room for the unwanted, born and unborn?

The late Hispanic activist Grace Olivarez said:,

"Those with power in our society cannot be allowed to 'want' and 'unwant' people at will.... I believe that, in a society that permits the life of even one individual (born or unborn) to be dependent on whether that life is 'wanted' or not, all its citizens stand in danger." 

Just yesterday a seemingly innocuous column in The Economist described “the mommy track: the real reason women don’t rise to the top of companies:”

Brett Ryder, The Economist, August 25, 2012

[T]he biggest obstacle (at least in most rich countries) is children. However organised you are, it is hard to combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours and the “anytime, anywhere” culture of senior corporate jobs. A McKinsey study in 2010 found that both women and men agreed: it is tough for women to climb the corporate ladder with teeth clamped around their ankles. Another McKinsey study in 2007 revealed that 54% of the senior women executives surveyed were childless compared with 29% of the men (and a third were single, nearly double the proportion of partnerless men).

Many talented, highly educated women respond by moving into less demanding fields where the hours are more flexible, such as human resources or public relations. Some go part-time or drop out of the workforce entirely.

And others, if a Slate article from last fall is to be believed, limit family size with abortion.

Here’s another note from the Economist column:

“Putting women in the C-suite is important for firms, but not as important as making profits; for without profits a company will die. So bosses should try hard to accommodate their employees’ family responsibilities, but only in ways that do not harm the bottom line.”

What I grieve most deeply? Somehow we’ve moved from being a culture that valued children and families and believed in protecting them, to a culture that puts profits first, as an inviolable priority, while the human needs of people are a distant, diminshing second.

Mary Meehan, an antiwar activist in the sixties, self-described liberal feminist, has been writing about abortion for over thirty years now. Last summer, she explained “Why Liberals Should Defend the Unborn”:

“Defending those who cannot defend themselves has long been the pride of the left. When no one else would do it, liberals and radicals stood up for the little guys and the little gals: day laborers and domestic workers, abused children, African Americans and other minorities, elderly patients with dementia, the poor, the unloved and unwanted, the down-and-outers. The unborn are the most defenseless members of the human community. Others can cry out for help, and some can defend themselves, but unborn children cannot.”

Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggeman describes two kingdoms: the Pharoic kingdom – empires of power worlds of oppression, violence, anxiety, myths of scarcity that keep us all in line. (His examples? Ancient Egypt and Babylon, corporatist America.)

And then there’s the prophetic kingdom, the kingdom of God – world of promised plenty, empire of welcome, place of peace where all are wanted. The challenge, as a follower of Christ, is to make the prophetic kingdom visible, while surrounded, held captive, by the kingdom of Pharoah.

Abortion is sign and symbol of the Pharoic kingdom: violent response to those tiny usurpers who would steal our rights, upend our systems, spread our scarce resources even thinner, trip us on our way to the top.

But it’s only one sign of the kingdom, just one more symptom, set beside scapegoating of the poor, imprisoning the addicted, stockpiling weapons, arming ourselves against intruders.

Wendell Berry, in Common Dreams, laments:

We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore “domestic violence” and think that our society can be pacified by “gun control.” Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.

One does not have to know very much or think very far in order to see the moral absurdity upon which we have erected our sanctioned enterprises of violence. Abortion-as-birth-control is justified as a “right,” which can establish itself only by denying all the rights of another person, which is the most primitive intent of warfare. Capital punishment sinks us all to the same level of primal belligerence, at which an act of violence is avenged by another act of violence.

What the justifiers of these acts ignore is the fact—well-established by the history of feuds, let alone the history of war—that violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.

Meehan Reports

Will you see me again at a future March for Life?

I’m not sure. Although I'm interested to see that the march continues to grow, with a younger, wider demographic every year.

From what I read of history, any attempts to impose the kingdom of God through political power end badly. And yes, lives are lost every day that abortion is legal, but the losses accrue, not from permissive laws, but from our misguided values and priorities and the belief that somehow we’ll be better off if we can rid ourselves of those we don’t want, think we don't need. We have no idea what we're losing, no idea the lasting harm not only to ourselves, but the children we do choose, and the culture we leave them.

So how best to affirm the kingdom I believe in?

I’ve been wrestling with that in the years since those marches two decades ago. I believe I’m called to live in a way that puts people over profit, that affirms children, families, life together over stuff, reputation, privilege. I look for ways to stand by the most marginalized in my own little world, to let them know that to God, to me, they are valued, worthy of time, help, resources, respect, and love.

And when it comes time to vote?

I’ll be looking for candidates who have a big picture view of the value of people, the value of family, the value of the least, the smallest, born and unborn, wanted and unwanted.

This is part of a continuing series on politics and faith: What's Your Platform?

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

Hijacked?

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like unto the Leaven
Hidden in the Lump, Yelena Cherkasova, Russia

Listening to the radio while organizing boxes in my basement, I was intrigued at the way discussion of a new book, You Lost Me, about young Christians leaving the church, segued into discussion of evangelicals and right wing politics in the North Carolina primary. Minutes later, the broadcast turned to the recent debate in which Newt Gingrich was asked about his alleged request to his second wife for an open marriage.

George Barna, respected Christian leader and founder of the Barna Group, announced this week that “After a lot of study, soul searching, and prayer,” he is endorsing Newt Gingrich for president, and has agreed to lead Gingrich’s “Faith Leaders Coalition,” the Gingrich campaign’s outreach to the Christian community.

You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church ... and Rethinking Faith, describing the departure from the church of more than half of those in their twenties, is by David Kinneman, Barna’s successor at the Barna Group. The new book, and a previous work by Kinneman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks of Christianity ... And Why It Matters, make use of a three-year Barna study of sixteen to twenty-nine year olds. The results of that study demonstrated, with painful clarity, that the majority in that demographic view Christians with hostility and disdain.

Here’s the critique:

* antihomosexual 91%
* judgmental 87%
* hypocritical 85%
* old-fashioned 78%
* too political 75%
* out of touch with reality 72%
* insensitive to others 70%
* boring 68%

Surely George Barna has at least heard of Kinneman’s books? Knows at least a little of their content?

The overwhelming grief for me, in this season of angry partisan rhetoric, mudslinging and attack ads, is that the sorry reputation of the Christian church is pulled through the mud along with the candidates. And that Christian leaders, pretending that there is one, correct, “faith leaders” point of view, hurry that process along.

“Are outsiders asking us to stay out of politics?” Kinneman asks in unChristian in a chapter titled “Too Political.”  “According to our research, not exactly. Many outsiders clarified that they believe Christians have a right (even an obligation) to pursue political involvement, but they disagree with our methods and our attitudes. They say we seem to be pursuing an agenda that benefits only ourselves; they assert that we expect too much out of politics; they question whether we are motivated by our economic status rather than faith perspectives when we support conservative politics; they claim we act and say things in an unChristian manner; they wonder whether Jesus would use political power as we do; and they are concerned that we overpower the voices of other groups.” (165)

Kinneman quotes one young man, Brandon, an agnostic, active in the Republican party: “I believe that American Christians have become tools of the Republican election machine—at the expense of their own image and message.” (166)

He quotes another young adult raised in the church who “became disillusioned with his church and eventually his faith because he started to question the heavy-handed political involvement that seemed to be a requirement. His comment: ‘A lot of times the church would take a conservative Republican stance, and anyone who did not fit into that mold was judged as not as good a Christian as everyone else.’”  (166)

As Kinnemann makes very clear, there is no one, unanimous “Christian” presence in politics, despite the rhetoric of groups like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition, or the new "Faith Leaders Coalition": “among the evangelical segment, only a slight majority are registered Republicans (59 percent). That’s a high proportion, but far removed from the monolithic levels one might expect based on media pronouncements or the expectations of Christian leaders.”  (161)

Last fall Christianity Today published an article with this headline: “Survey: Frequent Bible Reading Can Turn You Liberal." In the article, Aaron B. Franzen summarized conclusions from a recent poll by LifeWay Research:    

• For each increased level of Bible-reading frequency, support for the Patriot Act decreased by about 13 percent.

• Support for abolishing the death penalty increased by about 45 percent for each increase on the five-point scale measuring Bible-reading frequency.

• The more someone reads the Bible, the more likely he or she is to believe science and religion are compatible. (For each increase on the five-point scale, the odds that they see religion and science as incompatible decrease by 22 percent.)

• "How important is it," the survey asked, "to actively seek social and economic justice in order to be a good person?" Again, as would be expected, those with more liberal political leanings were more likely to say it's very or somewhat important. And those who read the Bible more often were more likely to agree. Indeed, they were almost 35 percent more likely to agree at each point on Baylor's five-point scale.  

• The survey asked whether one must consume or use fewer goods in order to be a good person. Political liberals and frequent Bible readers are more likely to say yes.  

Just last week, Abington Press released a new book called Hijacked: Responding to the Partisan Church Divide, by Mike Slaughter and Charles Gutenson. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but the problem it addresses is a real one, and growing worse by the day.

In his own blog, Slaughter writes “As Christians we have too often allowed worldly political ideologies to become determining factors for our theology rather than grounding ourselves in sound biblical theology for determining our politic. Some well-meaning believers have become more passionate about engaging in the heat of partisan political debate than they have been in sharing the good news about Jesus. Left and right, blue and red are but imperfect systems that are passing away. These systems, by their very nature, create barriers of division. The way of the cross is eternal and tears down the dividing walls that stand between us. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave or free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

George Barna and other Christian leaders are free to vote as they wish. They are free to endorse the candidates of their choice. But when they include the word Christian or faith in their endorsement, they hijack, once again, the name of Christ, and the community of believers, for their own less than perfect causes. As a follower of Christ, I pray for our disillusioned generations, and encourage our leaders to reconsider their allegiance and their misuse of influence. As Christ's people, we are called to be agents of reconciliation - to God and to each other - not agents of one political agenda.


I'd love to hear what you think on this. Your comments and questions, as always, are welcome. And I've been working on moving to an easier commenting platform - but not sure it's an improvement. I'd welcome your thoughts on that as well.