"I Didn't Move; You Did" (Part 16): The Shift Away From Honoring The Imago Dei In Everyone

One of the things evangelical Christianity taught me was that every human being bears the image of God. Probably everything in this series references this is some fashion: the help of the poor, the care for the immigrant and refugee, the rejection of racism and unjust discrimination, the interest in alleviating global poverty, the concern for the environment so that deadly pollution is curbed, the rejection of war as the preferred way to solve conflict, the importance of honoring the autonomy of people, etc. 

All these things were embedded in the evangelical creeds that formed my life and my evangelical church community for decades.

That conviction helped make me "pro-life" (though these days I prefer the term "whole-life".) I believe human life should be protected and honored from the moment it begins until the moment it ends. But honoring life means more than keeping someone physically alive. It means treating people with dignity, justice, mercy, kindness, and love.

The unborn child bears the image of God. So does the immigrant at the border. So does the prisoner. So does the person with a disability, the elderly person, the poor person, the Muslim, the atheist, the political opponent, the transgender person, the Republican or Democrat politician...the list goes on.

Human dignity cannot depend upon whether someone looks like me, votes like me, worships like me, shares my citizenship, or seeks my approval. If the image of God means anything, it means that human beings possess a dignity we did not give them, and we cannot take away.

That is why the last decade has been so disorienting for me.

Something has changed in significant parts of American evangelicalism. Language and behavior that Christians once would have recognized as cruel, vulgar, degrading, or dehumanizing are increasingly excused—and sometimes celebrated—when they come from the right political leaders.

We seem to have lost something more fundamental than civility. We have lost some of our capacity to walk in another person's shoes—to do and say unto others as we would have them do and say unto us. We have lost not only sympathy, but empathy.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us. Charlie Kirk famously said that he couldn't stand the word empathy. Books with titles such as The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy have found receptive audiences in conservative Christian circles.

Of course, empathy can be misguided. Feeling another person's pain does not require agreeing with everything that person believes or does, and it doesn't mean we have to avoid truth and confrontation.

Yet the Christian tradition that has often spoken about orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right action) has an underused third "ortho" -  orthopathy (rightly ordered affections). It asks. "What kind of heart am I cultivating? Or, more simply: am I learning to feel about people the way Jesus does?

I am concerned that conservative evangelicals will win political battles while losing something far more important: empathy. We can become the kind of people who no longer recognize dishonor and cruelty when we see it - or, even worse, when we do it.

So, let’s look at how the administration that evangelicals have put into office twice is doing in the areas of orthopraxy and orthopathy when it comes to viewing, treating, and speaking about everyone as image bearers of God.

A Defense of Missouri's Proposed Abortion Restrictions

Considering all the noise about Missouri's attempt to outlaw abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy, I figured it is worth taking the opportunity to look at more closely at how the facts of fetal development argue for more restrictive abortion limits in the interest in protecting unborn human persons.

First, what is that thing inside the womb that it impacted by abortion? Is it a clump of cells or a baby? I will let pro-choice advocates give their explanation of what an abortion does:

• ''In 1970, an editorial in California Medicine noted: “Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra-or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.” 
• Former Planned Parenthood President Dr. Alan Guttmacher was perplexed that anyone would question these basic scientific facts. “This all seems so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn’t part of the common knowledge,” he wrote in his book Life in the Making. (A. Guttmacher, Life in the Making: The Story of Human Procreation, New York: Viking Press, 1933, p. 3.)
• A Planned Parenthood brochure in 1963 noted, “Abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun.  It is dangerous to your life and health.”
• Faye Wattleton, the longest reigning president Planned Parenthood, told Ms. Magazine: “I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.”
• Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine in 1974: “There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy…”

Note that the issue is not whether or not abortion ends a developing human life. The question is about who gets to make the call about what happens to that growing human life, and why. The Supreme Court has weighed in on that very issue. According to lifenews.com:

"Viability... is an important mark in the abortion debate. In Roe v. Wade and the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court argued that states do have an interest in protecting an unborn baby’s life once they are viable. Viability at the time was considered to be about 24-26  weeks [22-24 is more commonly cited now]..."  

Paul Barnes, special assistant to the attorney general of Missouri, argues that Missouri's stance is in line with the Supreme Court standard:

"The viability line is constantly moving. When viability is the issue, then the state’s interest trumps the woman’s interest. It’s always moving in favor of the state’s authority, it’s never moving the other direction. The more developed the fetus is, the state’s interest is stronger in protecting unborn life.”

Since I don't think legal necessarily equals moral, I believe there is an important question worth asking: is viability the right line to draw when it comes to the protection of unborn human life? Perhaps a better phrasing: Must human beings be viable in order to be human persons and thus deserving of the moral status that would rightly be accorded to them?

First, there is good reason to think the 'viability' line is a philosophically tenuous position:

Here is the Court's entire argument in Roe v. Wade for using the viability criterion: 'With respect to the State's important and legitimate interest in potential life, the "compelling" point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb.' 

That's seriously the entire argument... It is, of course, circular reasoning. Viability is important, the Court says, because that's when a child can live outside the womb (the definition of viability). Viability is important, that is, because it is viability.

"[T]he Court's defense seems to mistake a definition for a syllogism," noted the eminent Yale law professor John Hart Ely (who personally supported legalized abortion). Indeed, "scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds have recognized," writes University of Georgia law professor Randy Beck, that "Roe literally provided no argument in favor of treating viability as the controlling line, much less an argument grounded in constitutional principles..."

If we do take this to be an "argument," it is a fallacious one, as Francis J. Beckwith writes: 'For the Court to make its argument valid, it would have to add to its factual premise [the fact of fetal non-viability] the normative premise: whenever a human being cannot live on its own because it uniquely depends on another human being for its physical existence, it is permissible for the second human being to kill the first to rid the second of the burden.'

The Court assumed that premise in both Roe and Casey. The Court has never argued for it.

So the first point is that the Supreme Court is not infallible, and may, in fact, build their rulings on a discouraging lack of reason at times.

Second, there is good reason to think it is a morally problematic position given the nature of the unborn. Perhaps the following walk through the weeks of fetal development during pregnancy will make this second point more clear. I encourage you to watch the videos as you read (they are not 'gotcha' videos about abortion).

Beyonce's Inadvertent Pro-Life Baby Bump

• "When Beyonce steps out at the Grammys Sunday night (Feb. 12), at presumably around the 5-month mark, she’ll be carrying not one but two babies…” 
•  “Beyonce (and Her Twins)Set to Perform at 2017 Grammys.” 
•  “Beyonce And Her Twins Are Performing At The 2017 Grammys.” 
•  “GRAMMY Awards: Beyoncé (and Twins) Will Perform “Slowed” Set at Sunday’sShow.” 
• "Beyoncé, fresh off the announcement that she is pregnant with twins, took the stage to perform a spiritual, sweeping, multimedia-filled tribute to motherhood."
• "It was beautiful, majestic, and every bit as Beyoncé as one would expect. And of course, through it all, the twins were already killing it from the womb."
•  “Beyonce and the twins did the Grammys.” (twitter)
•  “So Beyonce's twins already performed on ‪#GRAMMYs making them the youngest artists to ever perform.” (twitter) 
• "The twins slayed their first performance, as expected." (twitter)

    ___________________________

Who knew Beyonce would turn her fans pro-life? It’s almost as if they suddenly recognized unborn babies for what they are – babies. If Beyonce were to miscarry, she and her fans would not mourn the loss of clumps of tissue. They would mourn the loss of her children. If Beyonce were attacked and she miscarried, I suspect the news reports would be full of language that talked about her babies, not her fetuses, being killed, and rightly so. Twenty-nine states would prosecute the attacker for murder. 

And yet Beyonce could have walked off the stage and, in seven states in the United States, gotten an abortion even if the babies were viable. (And yes - third trimester abortions are a real deal. See here and here and here and here and here.) Beyonce herself fights for the right to do this. This would be celebrated too, I suppose, because it's her choice. But then the term 'fetus' would be used, because it's a much more impersonal and dehumanizing way of referring to the unborn than 'baby'. 

The difference between 'baby bump' and 'fetal bump' apparently has nothing to do with ontology and everything to do with perspective. It's as if Planned Parenthood has convinced the world that Schrodinger's Baby will be what people want it to be when they finally decide whether or not to keep the baby. The Federalist asks, "Would Beyoncé’s Babies Still Be Babies If She Chose Abortion?" Well, yes.

As if to highlight this tension, there’s a bar in Chicago throwing her a baby shower – a baby shower – with the proceeds going to Planned Parenthood, which stops more baby showers than any other entity in America. 

Cognative Dissonance Level Rating: Epic. 

Why I Am Pro-Life

"Being pro-life" could potentially cover a lot of issues (capital punishment, euthanasia, etc). There is also a discussion to be had about the importance of protecting and honoring all born life - a position often referred to as "whole life," and which is probably a more accurate term for how I feel about the sanctity of human life.

However, that's not the focus of this blog post. I am going to focus on abortion, a 'life' issue that is front and center in our culture, especially on a day during which hundreds of thousand will March For Life  specifically for the issue of abortion

I am going to give four different arguments for this position. The first two arguments draw from Judeo-Christian history; the others will offer arguments that can be made apart from a belief in the veracity of the Bible.

1. THE ARGUMENT FROM SCRIPTURE

Historically, the Judeo-Christian consensus has been that the unborn child is a human being.

NARAL, Doritos, And The "Tactic Of Humanizing Fetuses"

During the Super Bowl, Doritos aired a fan-made ad that generated a lot more response than they expected. Here's the ad:

I suspect viewers would have laughed (or cringed) and moved on - it was, after all, just a chip commercial - except that NARAL promptly weighed in. Apparently, "humanizing fetuses" (or making unborn baby humans seem, well, human) is merely an anti-choice tactic, a scurrilous misrepresentation of what happens during a pregnancy. 

Rather than repost pro-life arguments that I have made elsewhere, I will simply offer the following five videos for your viewing pleasure. They aren't gross; they aren't made by rabid pro-lifers. The first two simply shows what happens in the womb when a fetus develops. The final three show when and how an unborn baby begins to respond to his or her environment.