Abortion and the cost of rhetoric (repost) ... and goodbye to the Atlantic for now.

In the straits of Gibraltar ... lights of the North African coast are discernible off starboard side of ship.

First port after Atlantic crossing: Málaga, Spain. This evening I'm writing from Madrid.

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I first published this post, Abortion and the cost of rhetoric, back at the time of the first round of intentionally provocative anti-abortion legislation in several states. It may be coming to pass that more recent state legislation is now making those legislators' dreams come true, as at least part of the U.S. Supreme Court appears to be drooling over the political bait represented by those new laws.

The preamble of the original post seems out of date, but my personal struggle with the issue itself has not changed, so it seems worth posting my arguments again. For me, the whole thing is made more pointed by the fact that so many people with whom I usually agree seem to be eager to find political gold in the draft Supreme Court opinion that is drawing so much attention. And I agree that it is urgent to find anything that serves as genuine warning of the authoritarian, white-nationalist future that awaits us if the Supreme Court becomes totally politicized. I just don't like the convenient assumption that being anti-abortion automatically correlates with support for that dismal future.

Here's most of that original post:

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For much of my adult life, I've been in the perverse position of opposing abortion while at the same time opposing most anti-abortion rhetoric. Right now, as the controversy swirls around the Alabama law and similar attempts elsewhere, there are three reckless inconsistencies that gnaw at me:

First: the new "heartbeat laws" are far more extreme than most anti-abortion advocates have advanced in the past. The new laws seem to represent a calculated tactic: their dramatic clash with the relatively moderate U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision would (they hope) inevitably lead to a chance to reverse it. According to polls, even Americans who oppose abortion still wish to reserve that option for rape and incest cases, but in Alabama's case, the law could punish abortion providers more severely than rapists....

In any case, tactical extremism just adds to the impression that brass-knuckle politics will, once again, make dialogue all but impossible. It makes me see double: are the bill's supporters being truly idealistic in their maximalist stance, or are they cynically exaggerating their true positions for a political gain?

Second: while both pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates count many women among their participants, a large percentage of anti-abortion legislators are men. For example, every Alabama state senator who voted for their new law was male; the state's four women senators opposed the bill. It seems beyond strange that so much veto power over women's health decisions is still exercised by men -- and those men seem, as a group, to be unembarrassed by this discrepancy and unenthusiastic about working for a more representative politics.

Third: both sides exploit the Bible. This is also an old story -- abortion opponents have one way of looking at Scripture; pro-choice advocates have another. The cost of this proof-texting approach: the secular observer concludes, in the words of the ancient cliche, "You can make the Bible say whatever you want." The "orthodox" and "progressives" of James Davison Hunter, or George Lakoff's "strict fathers" and "nurturant parents" -- all can find what they pragmatically need in the Bible to bash opponents and thereby gratify their main audiences.

The actual Bible is achingly ambiguous about the "sanctity" of life. My serious summary: life is precious, except when it isn't. Babies are precious, except when they're not. My opposition to abortion is not based on any specific Bible verse, but on the whole tradition that is summed up by the "consistent life ethic" -- which opposes abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, militarism, social and economic injustice, violence in all its devious and addictive forms. Are there other traditions of biblical interpretation? Yes, of course. Can I prove that the "consistent life" interpretation is more correct? No! Does it even command the respect of most Christians? I doubt it.

However, for me there's a persuasive consistency of this "seamless garment" approach to following the Prince of Peace. It's internally consistent: the unborn life is important, but its survival is no more guaranteed than that of the life that has emerged into the world. Just as we ask for sacrifices and communal responses in situations where conception was unanticipated, we ask for sacrificial and communal responses to injustice. We ought to be just as diligent in caring for the born as for the unborn, knowing that all our outward fortunes are uncertain, all of us require care and mercy. It's consistent with the loving kindness and mercy of the God of the Bible. And, just as Jesus and Paul demand, it rejects the hypocrisy of forms for the countercultural reality of the Good News.

This persuasive consistency, I think, would go a long way toward subverting the rigid categories of anti-abortion and pro-choice campaign mentalities. As a first practical step of mercy, we could gain the capacity to describe those we disagree with in terms that they themselves would recognize. (See Katelyn Beaty's "The Abortion Conversation Needs New Language.") And while we slowly build friendships around the complex shared challenge of reducing abortions, we may also find new allies for those other consistent life challenges: injustice, militarism, and all other threats to life.

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Some time after this original post, I wondered whether women were not considered capable of making their own ethical decisions. Does your morality measure up?

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Forgive yet another male evangelical writer weighing in on abortion, but Chris Gehrz's ability to keep the real-life complexity of the concern front and center, and be skeptical about quick legal fixes, is very welcome.

Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP) hold their annual meeting in three online sessions, starting in two days: Saturday, May 7. The schedule is here; the registration form is here. I will be part of a panel of bloggers on the third day of the meeting, May 21.

Nina Belyaeva, a legislator on Semiluk District Council, Voronezh region, Russia, may be the first person investigated for opposition to Russia's war on Ukraine on religious grounds.

Nancy Thomas on old romance: The trees talk...

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Kim Wilson, Kid Andersen, and a great band: "High and Lonesome."

Abortion and rhetoric, part two: does your morality measure up?

Another week has rolled by with no sign of outgoing U.S. president Donald Trump's readiness to concede his November 3 loss. His supporters in the public arena point to vast conspiracies aiming to deprive him of his big election-day victory. He takes great comfort from all this support, saying in one of his ongoing flood of fundraising appeals, "One thing has become clear these last few days, I am the American People’s ALL-TIME favorite President."

Meanwhile, away from the public microphones, and especially on social media, the president's supporters continue on their same old rhetorical scripts when addressing the rest of us: we are (1) rabid socialists; (2) baby-killers.

The socialist charge strikes me as wilfully ignorant, as I tried to say more tactfully a few weeks ago. I believe there is more genuine passion in  the anti-abortion argument. Last year, I tried to explain my own mixed feelings about the abortion debate, and how I ended up as an opponent of abortion who also opposes most anti-abortion legislation.

Democrats who participate in these abortion debates sometimes resort to the interesting argument that abortion rates may actually decrease during Democratic administrations compared to the stats under Republicans. Politifact assesses this argument as not entirely false, but requiring more context. (Snopes agrees, stressing the weak link between government policies and statistical trends.) However, I think the anti-abortion movement, at least among Christians, is based on an entirely different analysis. Their opponents are condemned, not on the basis of statistics (although the totals of lives sacrificed through abortion have shock value, of course). They are condemned for being willing to contemplate any abortions at all (or, depending on individual nuance, any abortions that are not justified by the need to save the mother's life).

I respect this reasoning. It seems consistent with Christian pacifism. I find it hard to justify the deliberate ending of a human life under any excuse. (My argument doesn't depend on whether or not the embryo has a soul or otherwise fits the description of a human life, if the decisive factor is simply time until that point is reached.)

Signe Wilkinson  

However, let's look honestly at the way the world is arranged now. Vast resources are put at the disposal of armies to extinguish lives as efficiently as possible -- lives that would otherwise be viable. On a more routine level, governments and voters enact policies all the time that are statistically certain to produce more victims than alternative policies might have done -- alternative policies, for example, to end hunger, reduce poverty, improve health care, overcome structural racism, regulate pollution, outlaw the death penalty, and end military assistance to regimes that starve, torture, and kill their political opponents. We seem to be entrusting our politicians to make the moral distinctions that supposedly justify these deaths, or potential deaths, while we abortion opponents do NOT trust women -- that is, the potential mothers -- to exercise their own moral judgment concerning pregnancy. I would love to see huge numbers of Trump voters direct the same moral scrutiny at health care finance, say, or the danger to our planet's ability to sustain human life, that they do to the mothers whom they judge unfit to decide on an abortion.

What unexamined assumptions exist behind this belief that women are unable to make adequate moral judgments about whether to have an abortion? Do anti-abortion campaigners fully understand what agony a women contemplating abortion might be going through, or do they suspect that a typical abortion is undertaken lightly, to correct the inconvenient results of wanton sexuality, and then lazily extend that assumption to everyone who might consider an abortion?

Obviously I don't actually know what judgments these campaigners are making about the women who would be affected by their prohibitions. I just want them to apply those same moral judgments to their own decisions affecting who prospers and who dies. In the case of those people who call Biden/Harris supporters "baby-killers," I don't see any evidence of that fairness.

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On November 29, we have an opportunity to celebrate the living legacy of Dorothy Day.

Roger E. Olson: Distinguishing the evangelical movement from the evangelical ethos.

...[W]hen I call myself “evangelical” I am not talking about membership in some organization or even movement. So far as I can tell the “evangelical movement” is dead and gone. I am talking about my identification with a particular ethos that defined that movement but lives on beyond its demise. And it pre-dated that movement’s rise.

Masha Gessen: Why our country needs a reckoning with the Trump era.

Consider the consequences of choosing against a reckoning—what we would leave in place by choosing not to look back. Republican lawmakers who enabled Trump, some of whom are refusing to recognize the results of the election, will likely continue to hold and win office. Executive-branch employees will continue to publish tell-all memoirs and secure appointments at think tanks and colleges as they await the next Republican Administration. In other words, they will continue to be members in good-enough standing of the political élite, demonstrating that political power in the U.S. confers a lasting immunity from prosecution and public reproach. Or, as Trump once memorably put it, “And when you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

As for the rest of us, if we choose to move forward without a reckoning, we move into the future lugging the trauma....

What event in the computer market in 2020 was (in Jack Wallen's opinion) the most important for the advancement of the Linux desktop?

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Little Charlie Baty, Anson Funderburgh, Mark Hummel, with R.W. Grigsby (bass) and Wes Starr (drums). Enjoy!

Seeking to justify myself

Source.  

I can't count the times I've heard, read, and appreciated the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke's Gospel, in which the conventionally religious people pass by the injured robbery victim, and the despised foreigner proves to be the merciful neighbor and comes to the rescue. Rarely, if ever, have I taken into full account the provocation for the story: the lawyer's question, "And who is my neighbor?"

More precisely, I've become interested in the motivation for the lawyer's question. Having won Jesus' approval for his reading of the requirements for eternal life ("Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind" and "Love your neighbor as yourself”), he wants more: 

"But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor?'" (My italics.)

In "justifying" himself, what was the lawyer trying to accomplish? Several commentators point to other examples of Luke spotlighting people who are more concerned about their own reputations than the essence of faith (Luke 16:14-15, 18:9-14, for example). Sharon Ringe's commentary on Luke (in the Westminster Bible Companion series) suggests that the lawyer, aside from showing off, was trying to get Jesus to put manageable boundaries on the concept of neighbor, perhaps to fit the lawyer's own comfort level.

Ringe ends her fascinating examination of this parable with these words:

No one can simply have a neighbor, one must also be a neighbor. Neighboring is a two-way street. The parable changes in a fundamental way how the question about neighbors is usually framed. The Gospel records no one's response to this story -- neither the lawyer's nor the onlookers'. The story simply stands as another challenge to the transformation of daily life and business as usual, which lies at the heart of the practice of discipleship.

I'm not surprised that the lawyer's and onlookers' responses are not recorded. What counts is Jesus' challenge to the lawyer's motivation -- his seeking to be seen as an expert on the law, and his desire to keep mercy in reasonable bounds. The response to Jesus' challenge that counts is ours.

Meme on Facebook.

The death of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter has put racism in the USA on trial in dramatic new ways, particularly in the polarizing context of this political season. As a sort of reaction, I've seen many variations on a theme that goes something like this: "I don't see race; I just see people." (Sometimes the tagline of this approach is "All Lives Matter," frequently accompanied by conspiracy theories about the Black Lives Matter movement.) My problem with this approach is that it reminds me of the lawyer who wanted to justify himself. First: he wants to show his own command of the law, and, to be fair, in doing so he is literally correct -- we are to love God and love our neighbor. In Black Lives context, we are to put an end to all false and unjust distinctions based on race. I can imagine Jesus saying, "Good! Do this and you will live."

In the Good Samaritan story, the lawyer still wanted to justify himself. In asking for a definition of "neighbor," the lawyer sought to prioritize his own comfort. Here we see a crucial lesson for our own dialogues on race: our personal story and our personal comfort are not the priority! You and I might personally not "see race," if that were possible in a nation that deliberately baked racism into every aspect of social and economic life for centuries. However, our smug certainty does not change life for anyone whose actual skin color makes life actually risky, who must "see race" to avoid those risks. And those who bear testimony to the risks of racism are our neighbors.

The man who was rescued by the Good Samaritan had been traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. In commenting on this passage, Martin Luther King proposed a logical extension of the Samaritan's mercy: 

On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [Source.]

This is what being a neighbor means now. For white followers of Jesus, it means not being obsessed with the need to prove that "we don't see race" and are obviously superior to those deplorables who do. It means learning to discern, with God's merciful help, what racism has done to all of us, and to engage in a deliberate collaboration with all the mystics and activists of all races, liberals, progressives, and conservatives alike, to pull down the strongholds of racism. Then we will know that All Lives Matter.

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I have a hard time imagining not seeing race, but maybe that's just me. I see no particular value or demerit in my white skin color, but I do have pride in my Norwegian heritage (especially as it has been shedding its near-homogeneity in the last half-century). I want to learn about and enjoy the pride that people from other cultures have, whether or not those cultures are linked with skin colors different from mine. When I was in high school, the expression "Black is Beautiful" gained currency; am I to deny this? The Black church was my first consistent exposure to Christianity; am I to betray that legacy?

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At the time I'm posting this, Aleksei Navalny, Russia's best-known opposition leader, is fighting for his life. This link is likely to be outdated in a matter of hours. More from Meduza. I've also been following coverage on this Russian site, Dozhd TV, which passes on a report from the head of Navalny's anti-corruption organization that Navalny's body contains a substance that is hazardous to those around him.

Kristin Du Mez: Jerry Falwell, Jr., and the legacy of evangelical machismo. (That's my term, not hers.)

Aside from controversies over "All Lives Matter" and the supposed socialist hell being prepared by Democrats, the evangelical support for Donald Trump is often driven by the anti-abortion movement. Supposedly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are "hell-bent" to pull out all stops on abortion. I tried to encourage cooler rhetoric in this post from a year ago last spring. Randall Balmer has this interesting resource (PDF) to put this relatively recent evangelical concern into historical perspective.

Why do missionaries leave the field? In particular, what are the cultural factors? Andrea Sears presents data from 714 survey respondents.

Friday PS:  I just saw this Washington Post article about interracial conversations among evangelical leaders and the dramatic effect of Trump's presidency. This quotation from Emmanuel Acho leapt out at me, just hours after I'd published this week's post: 

"Some Christians say, 'It’s not about race, it’s about grace. It’s not about skin, it’s about sin,'" Acho said in an interview. "It’s hard for Black people to attend predominantly White churches, specifically when White pastors are silent on the issues that matter to Black people."

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Mstislav Rostropovich plays Bach's sort of blues.

The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump:

30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity. (Ronald J. Sider, editor; Cascade Books, 2020.)

Randall Balmer, one of those thirty contributors, states flatly:

"After a long and lingering illness, evangelicalism died on November 8, 2016."

He goes on:

On that day, 81 percent of white American evangelicals who for decades claimed to be concerned about "family values" registered their votes for a twice-divorced, thrice-married, self-confessed sexual predator whose understanding of the faith is so truncated that he can't even fake religious literacy.

Was this death actually worth grieving? Balmer, historian of American religion at Dartmouth College, outlines the history of American evangelical Christianity with special attention to its abiding preoccupation with social improvement: abolition of slavery, equality for women, education for all classes of people, peace, temperance, prison reform, and a testimony against the abuses of capitalism. All in all, it's a legacy worth preserving -- and extending.

Balmer also puts into perspective the argument that I most often hear among my own contacts in the evangelical movement: the top priority of Trump's evangelical fan club is opposition to abortion, which supposedly makes all their tolerance of Trump's failings worthwhile. Balmer writes,

The standard, albeit false, narrative is that evangelical concerns over legalized abortion prompted evangelicals' political engagement in the 1970s. This abortion myth, however, collapses under closer scrutiny. Evangelicals considered abortion a "Catholic issue" in the 1970s; the Southern Baptist Convention called for the legalization of abortion in 1971, and evangelical leaders, including W.A. Criswell of First Baptist Church in Dallas, applauded the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

It was the formation of Reagan's alliance with the Religious Right, and the need for that movement to defend causes beyond segregated education, that brought abortion into the circle of concern. (Frank Schaeffer's book Crazy for God, reviewed here, describes how his parents played a central role in adopting abortion as a headliner for this alliance.) What are  the chances that this alliance can be broken and the movement restored to its former gospel integrity? Balmer doesn't have much confidence: evangelicals, who lack liturgical and hierarchical scaffolding,

... are too susceptible to the cult of personality, and the unholy alliance between white evangelicals and the hard-right precincts of the Republican Party has calcified over the past four decades. But if I were to search for glimmers of hope, I'd look to evangelical women and to younger evangelicals willing to challenge the shibboleths of their elders and reclaim the faith.

So far, I've sampled just one of the thirty advertised voices in this book. Balmer provides a historical context; others provide biblical, theological, legal/constitutional, and public policy dimensions. For example, Ron Sider examines the implications of Donald Trump's performance in the COVID-19 crisis. Other authors address racism, misogyny, the demonization of immigrants, the misappropriation of Bonhoeffer's legacy, hostility to environmental concerns, and the flagrant use of falsehoods in the Trump movement. Chris Thurman summarizes the roles of five prominent evangelicals who go beyond supporting Trump -- they publicly insult Christians who criticize him.

With thirty contributors covering much of the same territory, some aspects of the current spiritual crisis represented by the Trump movement are touched on more than once. However, I also appreciated several insights I'd not heard before. For example, Napp Nazworth's chapter, "Race-Baiter, Misogynist, and Fool," includes an interesting Bible study on the word "fool" -- using that word according to biblical understanding rather than as an all-purpose epithet. He applies it to the president, and considers the biblical warnings about not associating with fools. (He also examines the other New Testament meaning of "fool," as in "fools for Christ," and "folly to the Greeks.") 

In addition to his own contributions, editor Sider closes the book with an afterword that includes this plea: that we Christians engage biblically in a way that attracts, rather than repels, the non-Christians who are watching.

In one sense, this book is necessarily dated. (Ron Sider's discussion of Trump and COVID-19 addresses the situation as of April 7. As bad as things looked then, they're now much worse.) Many of the contributors wrote their chapters with the 2020 U.S. presidential election in mind, and of course that election is now less than three months away. However, as a case study of biblical/political conversation among diverse evangelical voices, and later as an invaluable time capsule for Christians of the future, I'm sure the book will be useful far beyond its sell-by date.

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Svetlana Alexievich on Belarus: President Lukashenka has declared war on his people.

I'm serving as a U.S. 2020 Census enumerator this year, so I was immediately interested in this article on people who don't want to answer Census questions. (So far I've been pleasantly surprised.)

Paul Louis Metzger on race, biology, and psychology.

Almost half of the UK's nonprofit organizations addressing global poverty will be forced to close within a year, according to the Small Independent Development Charities Network.

Bulletin: Heather Cox Richardson's daily letter summarizes today's should-be-stunning revelations of misdeeds from the target figure of Ron Sider's book.

 

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The late Magic Slim in Brazil. Sometimes nobody else will do.

Abortion and the cost of rhetoric

Sources: baby bassinet; execution gurney

Last night on television, I heard another panel discussion on abortion. Rick Santorum defended Alabama's just-signed law practically banning abortion altogether -- his main point was that even pregnancies resulting from incest and rape represent innocent lives, however horrific the circumstances of their conception. His opponents on the panel objected to his imposition of his own religiously-based standards on others.

For much of my adult life, I've been in the perverse position of opposing abortion while at the same time opposing most anti-abortion rhetoric. Right now, as the controversy swirls around the Alabama law and similar attempts elsewhere, there are three reckless inconsistencies that gnaw at me:

First: the new "heartbeat laws" are far more extreme than most anti-abortion advocates have advanced in the past. The new laws seem to represent a calculated tactic: their dramatic clash with the relatively moderate U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision would (they hope) inevitably lead to a chance to reverse it. According to polls, even Americans who oppose abortion still wish to reserve that option for rape and incest cases, but in Alabama's case, the law could punish abortion providers more severely than rapists. (It's logical, says Santorum; rapists rape while abortion providers kill.)

In any case, tactical extremism just adds to the impression that brass-knuckle politics will, once again, make dialogue all but impossible. It makes me see double: are the bill's supporters being truly idealistic in their maximalist stance, or are they cynically exaggerating their true positions for a political gain?

Second: while both pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates count many women among their participants, a large percentage of anti-abortion legislators are men. For example, every Alabama state senator who voted for their new law was male; the state's four women senators opposed the bill. It seems beyond strange that so much veto power over women's health decisions is still exercised by men -- and those men seem, as a group, to be unembarrassed by this discrepancy and unenthusiastic about working for a more representative politics.

Third: both sides exploit the Bible. This is also an old story -- abortion opponents have one way of looking at Scripture; pro-choice advocates have another. The cost of this proof-texting approach: the secular observer concludes, in the words of the ancient cliche, "You can make the Bible say whatever you want." The "orthodox" and "progressives" of James Davison Hunter, or George Lakoff's "strict fathers" and "nurturant parents" -- all can find what they pragmatically need in the Bible to bash opponents and thereby gratify their main audiences.

The actual Bible is achingly ambiguous about the "sanctity" of life. My serious summary: life is precious, except when it isn't. Babies are precious, except when they're not. My opposition to abortion is not based on any specific Bible verse, but on the whole tradition of interpretation that is summed up by the "consistent life ethic" -- which opposes abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, militarism, social and economic injustice, violence in all its devious and addictive forms. Are there other traditions of biblical interpretation? Yes, of course. Can I prove that the "consistent life" interpretation is more correct? No! Does it even command the respect of most Christians? I doubt it.

However, for me there's a persuasive consistency of this "seamless garment" approach to following the Prince of Peace. It's internally consistent: the unborn life is important, but its survival is no more guaranteed than that of the life that has emerged into the world. Just as we ask for sacrifices and communal responses in situations where conception was unanticipated, we ask for sacrificial and communal responses to injustice. We ought to be just as diligent in caring for the born as for the unborn, knowing that all our outward fortunes are uncertain, all of us require care and mercy. It's consistent with the loving kindness and mercy of the God of the Bible. And, just as Jesus and Paul demand, it rejects the hypocrisy of forms for the countercultural reality of the Good News.

This persuasive consistency, I think, would go a long way toward subverting the rigid categories of anti-abortion and pro-choice campaign mentalities. As a first practical step of mercy, we could gain the capacity to describe those we disagree with in terms that they themselves would recognize. (See Katelyn Beaty's "The Abortion Conversation Needs New Language.") And while we slowly build friendships around the complex shared challenge of reducing abortions, we may also find new allies for those other consistent life challenges: injustice, militarism, and all other threats to life.

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Part two: Does your morality measure up?

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Elesha Coffman on the legacy of Rachel Held Evans.

The silent significance of British Quaker meeting houses.

Cathedrals "should unite, not divide people": the case of Yekaterinburg.

Victory Day, and again Stalin looms over the scene, not necessarily to Putin's advantage.

Russia without Putin: Sean Guillory interviews Tony Wood.

"...[T]he more Putin becomes indispensable to any description of Russia, the more every successive description of Russia has to have him in there. Otherwise people won’t understand what you’re talking about because you imagine every news report about Russia, even if it’s about reindeer herders in Yakutia, has to have some reference to how this relates to Putin and his power system. Is he in control of this remote outpost or not? And I think that’s really counterproductive. It just narrows the horizon within which people are framing what’s happening in Russia."

Project Artemis: crash program or modest proposal?

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Ray Manzarek describes the creation of "Riders On the Storm."