Dazed and confused?

        What follows is not based on personal religious belief (or lack thereof) but is rather my commentary on the hypocrisy on constant display by those who, while carping constantly about the “scriptural foundations” of their lives, prove the lie of that statement in their daily action and attitudes.

            There are about 3,000 verses in the Bible that are concerned with social justice, taking care of the poor, the stranger, attitudes of kindness and compassion. It is dominant in the Old Testament (with the occasional time out for mass murder and selling one's daughter into slavery) and the New Testament and there is very little ambiguity in the texts. (Caveat here: this is never actually read in the original by ranting and raving muscular Evangelicals,)    

        So why are those issues not the dominant concern, of professing Christians, today? If abortion continues to be the number one priority for so many Christians at the expense of the issues the Bible does instruct on, are those who make it their only priority not giving the issue an almost idolatrous seat? I’m not saying abortion cannot be an important personal issue to a Christian, but there is no, as in zero, scriptural or historical justification for its being the number one issue, at the expense of the “least of these” who are suffering and have suffered at the hands of “good Christians” now and over the previous thousands of years.

       At this point I’ll “preface" my conclusion, which is that the abortion/prolife controversy is, in truth, fairly recent and that, only because it has been hijacked as a trigger point by evangelical preachers and their political cronies. It is instructional that Donald Trump became a “right to lifer” as a candidate after urging his pregnant girlfriend to abort her pregnancy rather than marry her, which he did when she refused. In so proclaiming, he garnered the immediate allegiance of the Evangelicals who have bought into this single issue at the expense of true moral behavior.   

       Not only did most well-known Christian theologians not take a strong stance on abortion, but neither do the strictest laws of the Old Testament. Anyone who has studied Old Testament law knows that very little goes unaddressed, from hair style to fabric choice! Yet, as Ignacio Castuera points out in A Social History of Christian Thought on Abortion, “The only passage that deals directly with the death of a fetus is Exodus 21: 23, which describes the penalty to be incurred for hurting a pregnant woman accidentally during a fight between two men. According to the Septuagint, if the fetus has not yet assumed complete human shape, the penalty is a monetary fine; but if the fetus is fully formed, the penalty is death. Thus, in ancient Israel, killing a fetus that was not viable was never considered murder.” Even today, most Jewish teachings hold that life begins not at conception but at birth and, unsurprisingly, 83% of America Jews believe abortion should be legal in most cases.

       In the New Testament, there is no direct teaching on abortion. Jesus does not address the topic specifically and not one of His parables talks about ending a pregnancy. Neither do any of Paul’s letters mention abortion. Let me restate: There is absolutely no New Testament discussion re: abortion.  Abortion was very prevalent in many of the places Paul visited – we know this from other historical texts, and as he mentions in his letters, these cities were brimming with prostitution and illicit sexual activity. In fact, Paul never had a problem speaking out on any topic he believed followers of Christ should pay attention to!

        This makes it very interesting that abortion was obviously not a topic of enough priority for Paul to even mention because, contrary to the many people on Facebook/Twitter/church signs/billboards who confront us with a challenge to “READ THE WORD ABOUT ABORTION,” he never does (mention it). And Paul was not ambiguous or shy about addressing anything he deemed important for a Christian life. There is no “Word” on abortion.

       So, when and why did the shift in mainstream Christianity and the Catholic Church against abortion take place if it had been unprecedented among all the other Christian controversies throughout history? The various factors are numerous and too esoteric to explore in-depth in this rant, however, the principal and constant underlying theme of these changes in Catholic Church doctrine, conservative Protestant socio-economics, politics and culture would seem to be a reaction towards movements to advance women’s rights and liberalism. There was a gradual shift of resistance towards such changes and views and laws on contraception, and abortion started changing within that resistance. Ultimately, it would become a political tool feeding the increased use of propaganda rhetoric that would take over thousands of churches in the 1980s.

         While the Church had always held that stopping a pregnancy around week 23-24 was morally wrong and it sometimes held the position that this was akin to murder, strong teaching and laws against late-term abortion due to concern for the mother’s health and first and second trimester abortion restriction was a new thing starting around in the late 1800’s. Another new thing about the same time - the idea of women’s independence, leadership and the suffrage movements at the turn of the century. You decide if this is coincidence or not; but I believe that the evidence suggests otherwise.

        In 1860 the American Medical Association initiated the biggest change in abortion views ever recorded in history. Castuera says, “Although their motives were blatantly tinged with self-interest, these mostly Protestant doctors persuaded a number of states to adopt anti-abortion laws that stayed on the books for a century. With these efforts, the AMA managed to put some of its competitors out of business, restrict the public role of women in bourgeois society, and strengthen the control of conventional male doctors over the field of medicine. It simply cannot be argued that abortion did not exist in Biblical times or during the time of Augustine and every other century until the 19th – the only thing that did begin to change was a liberation for women due to progress and a change in cultural and social values in the late 1800s.

        I believe the evidence suggests that political forces and resistance to change, the increasingly strong suffrage movement and later women’s rights movements, are truly behind the shift in views on abortion and women’s health, and the topic has become an intersection for conservative politicians to reach voters. Women in such groups have been gulled into campaigning and voting against their own self-interest.   

        Understand the implication of the above:  In a very real sense, the medical profession transformed abortion from a moral issue into a medical procedure and imposed the authority of physicians over it.” This shift also impacted women’s health in the 19th century as doctors started becoming pressured to not perform abortions or stop pregnancy from occurring, so women found at-home ways to end pregnancy, which often resulted in their deaths. Most, except maybe some on the very far left, believe that once a child is able to live on its own outside the womb, abortion should be out of the question apart from cases of the viability of the fetus and health of the mother. Furthermore, only 1.3 percent of abortions are “late term” (after 21 weeks), and these are almost always the result of a danger to the mother’s life or incurable illness within the child. It is a heart-breaking decision for parents and one that has had to be made for hundreds of years, amidst great devastation.

       The next big shift occurred in the 1980s when political conservatives organized around the topic of abortion and the “moral majority” and Religious Right churches were borne. Over the years, and in personal conversations or reading the writings of both conservative and progressive evangelicals, Christians of varying denominations and Catholics, a consistent theme emerges. Whatever their position now, most if not all, consistently maintain or at least, if honest, will admit that before the 1980’s, abortion was never a prioritized topic of the church except rarely in minority groups. It was not a measure of one’s Christianity as it seems to have become today and being called a “Christian Democrat” was not an unusual nor taboo thing. This major shift came about, not because of a “new Christian doctrine” or new book added to the Bible (there was no Dead Sea Scroll on abortion found in 1980…), but through political efforts by the GOP and conservative groups.

       This “political doctrine” has become religious and scriptural doctrine for millions, without question. A good part of this knee jerk response to the natterings of Evangelical preachers is the parallel elevation to iconic stature by political figures of men like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and other shamans selling God by the pound on TV. You know “Abortion is wrong and oh yeah, send me the money you reserved for medication.”

       There is no doubt of the sincerity of many Christians who hold an extreme anti-abortion view. Sincerity should not, however, be conflated with validity. The Zodiac killer was sincere, so were Idi Amin and Stalin. This not an argument in any way that the topic of abortion is not an important one, or to be taken lightly in any way. However, as mentioned earlier, it is simply impossible to justify the prioritization of the abortion issue over a host of other issues from a Biblical and historical viewpoint, especially when Biblical passages concerning other social and moral issues are so prominent.

        In summary: It simply cannot be argued that abortion did not exist in Biblical times or during the time of Augustine and every other century until the 19th – the only thing that did begin to change was a liberation for women due to progress and a change in cultural and social values in the late 1800s, and abortion opposition became a political propaganda tool which would take over thousands of churches by (and primarily in) the 1980s. The church has moved to the extreme Right on this issue, to the point that anyone holding even a moderate view on abortion, is portrayed as a far left radical and in fact an accessory to murder! Remember, these moderate views held by many Progressives are in fact to the Right of the Bible and the founders of the Christian faith. 

       The majority of Americans do not fit into either a “pro-life” or “pro-choice” box but believe in a moderate view that protects both women’s rights and the unborn. The major point here is: if more Christians would only start prioritizing the things Jesus their scriptures tell them, their focus would look drastically different than it does now as a Body.

        There simply is no “pro-life” label in the Bible, but there is one instance in which Jesus did label believers. It is in Matthew 25, in a parable called the Sheep and the Goats, in which he labels those who did or did not help the sick, the poor, care about those in prison and care for the stranger (he doesn’t specify that they must be “documented”). As portrayed in the New Testament and proclaimed as the “Word of God” by those rabid Evangelicals, their Savior made clear His priorities, yet many true believers, rather than following these  simple instructions,  have chosen instead to be used by politicians who have succeeded for several decades in transforming their  Christian culture into a voting machine by pushing the “abortion  button.” They are using the unborn and even the tragic circumstances surrounding abortion to do it, and that is the real disgrace.