The other day I watched an interesting documentary about the Pro-Life movement on Netflix.  In some ways it was difficult to watch due to the content, but it was very illuminating as to the methods and mindset of the core anti-abortion activist.  The method of the film maker was not to have a debate, but to let the excesses of this movement’s leaders speak for themselves.   Though I commend this method, particularly for this topic, it left a great many deceptive assumptions lying on the table with no rebuttal.

Underlying the entire argument of those who seek to ban abortion is the assumption that the United States is, or was, or ever has been a “Christian” nation in the sense that Israel under King David was a Jewish nation.  This assumption is critical because the fact that Jesus, the person they ostensibly are seeking to emulate, never once even suggested that the mission of his followers was to sway or change Roman government policy.  In the day of Jesus, the whole of Israel was a province of Rome and it follows that if his message was to change the civil government’s practices he would have said so.   And Roman governmental practices were both brutal and unjust.   Christians today wince at the reality of Jesus’s crucifixion, yet in his day it was just a small but normal part of life, in the good times.  In bad times the main roads were lined with rotting crucified corpses.   For non-Roman citizens, no trial nor evidence was needed to be presented before the victim was crucified, just the capricious whim of a Roman official.   Yet, what do we see Jesus’s model for response to such injustice?  In the gospel of Luke Jesus answered:

“But I say to you that you must not oppose those who want to hurt you. If people slap you on your right cheek, you must turn the left cheek to them as well. When they wish to haul you to court and take your shirt, let them have your coat too. When they force you to go one mile, go with them two.”

Jesus was presenting a way of life for the individual who lived in a brutal and oppressed citizenry.   Not once did he, nor the apostles, seek to implement his new morality of love and compassion via any means of coercion, least of all by the strong arm of the state.   In the end Christianity was created for the powerless individual to find happiness in an unjust world.

Fast-forward 1,200 years.  Christianity had become the official religion in all of Europe. Religious law and civil law had become one. Far from the religion of the oppressed, the official “Christian” religion was the way of the oppressor.   To make this transition the simple words of Jesus were wholly inadequate, so a whole system of theology was created to “clarify” what Jesus meant, yet, these clarifications held the same (or more) weight than the words of Jesus himself.   Thus, the conception of “Christianity” went from the way of the oppressed to cope to the way of the oppressor to impose his will.

In the case of abortion, from the time of Augustin in the 5th century, the Catholic Church had debated when life began, but it was not until the 13th century did committing mid or late term abortion become equated with the civil crime of murder.  And it was not until the modern era that the idea of human life beginning at conception was embraced by the Catholic Church.   Now, my point is not to debate abortion, but rather to point out that the call to make all abortion illegal, has its roots not in the words or deeds of Jesus, but in the quazi-government of the Vatican.

Fast-forward again to the rise of the Christian right in the United States in the mid-1970’s.  Just a few years before this the Catholic Church began the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) as a direct political outreach from the Vatican to influence US public policy.    In the late 1970’s, the new movement of political evangelical Christianity was organizing itself, and needed allies and guidance in their efforts to fight back the moral liberalization that had taken place over the last decade or so.  NRLC, in one of the greatest  sales jobs ever, convinced these protestant political operatives to reject their historic position that the opposition to all abortion was strictly a creation of the Pope, in exchange for political organization  and muscle.

This was no small feat, because since the days of Martin Luther, protestants have vigorously supported that only the clear Bible texts can make moral injunctions of that magnitude.  Yet, the only time the Bible addresses abortion makes it clear that killing a young fetus is a property crime and only becomes murder when the child is big enough to visibly move in the womb.  Thus the text, and protestant tradition flatly rejects the NRLC position.  In particular, this sales job is amazing because one of the historic hallmarks of Christian Fundamentalism was its visceral opposition to all things papist.

Further, in the United States, there was a long tradition that the nation is aggressively secular and there has been little interest in adopting sectarian doctrine into law.  The historic secular nature of US governmental practice had begun to be eroded in the McCarthy era when a belief in God was embraced as a counter to the aggressively atheistic communist. Still, this “In God we trust” brand of religion of the Eisenhower years was bland and non-sectarian.

In evangelical and fundamentalist churches by the early 1980’s, with the rise of the Christian right, a new idea became popularized among evangelical Christians; the idea that the USA was the modern erudition of ancient Israel and thus all the biblical demands and promises made in the Old Testament applied to the American people and the US government.   This was a direct import from the Catholic position that government should be an extension of the power of the Church.   However, it stood in direct opposition to the Enlightenment founders of the USA and the liberal roots of the US Constitution.  Thus a new perversion of both traditional Protestant Christianity and of US History was sold to the zealous but ignorant evangelicals and fundamentalist.

The idea that the United States is a “Christian” nation and God’s promises to the Children of Israel apply to the US was sold.    Preachers all over the US began quoting verses from the Mosaic Law like “And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people.”  And “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”   In doing so they were deliberately leading their people away from the religion of Jesus to a new American messianic religion.

I have been in those services, I have seen how people young and old with all sincerity have prostrated themselves asking God to forgive the United States and heal our land.  It is a powerful message.  Implicit in this message is that the United States is a wayward theocracy rather than a secular democracy.   And this is what impels the efforts to ban abortion.  This is now the message of the huge evangelical community in the US and they are exporting it to the rest of the world.  They truly believe that God will bless or curse the US based on the extermination or toleration of a certain list of sins, every one of which were first delineated by the Catholic Church.   The left make a grave mistake when they assume these people are just charlatans, anti-woman or con-artists.  They would be less dangerous to both the message of Jesus and to civil society if they were.

I do not here even attempt to discuss the moral merits of abortion, but I do proclaim that the political pro-life movement has nothing to do with the simple and compassionate message that Jesus was teaching to the oppressed people of his time.  Life was hard in Jesus’s day and is hard today. People today need to hear how to survive and find happiness despite the difficulties of life.  I believe the words of Jesus can help them do that, but the words coming from too many sources that claim to follow Jesus only muddle (or even oppose) that message.