A Better Conversation about Abortion #3
A Better Conversation about Abortion #3
Thanks to what’s-his-name Akin in Missouri, a campaign season that was supposed to be dominated by economic issues instead now feels like every other divisive, social-issue election. Ross Douthat had a piece in Sunday’s NY Times, questioning whether this development is bad for both parties and not just the Republicans.
I don’t know about the politics of it, but I do know that Christian conversation on the issue should rise above what’s offered by pundits and politicians.
Earlier this week, I posted about a girl named ‘Rachel’ who was my first pastoral encounter with abortion as a moral dilemma.
Rachel was the first person who impressed upon me the truth and urgency of Stanley Hauerwas’ comments that, for Christians, “abortion is not fundamentally a question about law, but about what kind of people we are to be as the church and as Christians.” In other words, to rephrase Hauerwas in the context of my anecdotes: what if Rachel- pregnant and addicted to drugs and alcohol, without a job or an education- had belonged to a Christian community dedicated to embodying the example of Acts 4? If Rachel had had such a community, then I believe all our cultural debates about “rights” and “privacy” and “the sanctity of life” would have become less immediate.
What Rachel most needed was not to be compelled by the law in any certain direction. She desperately needed a community who would care for her, who would refuse to judge or condemn her, who would hold her accountable and who would do so by bearing her burden with her.
Certainly Christians have a right and a responsibility to advocate for our beliefs in the public square, but our calling, first and foremost, is to be a community. The Holy Spirit gave birth not to a group of believers who first lobbied for their convictions to be reflected in public policy. The Holy Spirit gave birth to a community in which the wider world might see the Gospel of Jesus Christ lived. The Holy Spirit gave birth to a community that would, by divine design, look different from the larger world- a community where the New Creation inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ was embodied.
As the Didache indicates, the early Christians- much like today’s Christians- practiced their faith in the context of an empire that did not share their beliefs or ethics. One of the ways those first Christians embodied the reality of the New Creation was by adopting the unwanted babies that the empire abandoned to exposure and death. The early Christian community was characterized not by laws, platforms or positions but by witness.
So too today, I believe the world most needs to be shown, not forced by law, a different possibility of life. The world needs to be shown a community where the wants and impoverishments that often pressure women to have abortions no longer exist because this particular community shares all of its possessions together. The world needs not to be told by force of law that there is no right to the privacy of the body. Rather the world needs to be shown what a community looks like where its members, by virtue of baptism, all belong to one another.
I do not think that Christians will ever persuade others to our convictions until Christians learn how in community to embody a more persuasive form of life. In other words, if the energy and time that so many Christians now devote to enacting their beliefs in the public square were instead given to creating the sort of community we find in Acts, then I believe what would emerge would be a true place of refuge and a light to the nation.
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I have always been pro-choice for a number of reasons; but the most difficult scripture passage for me to reconcile has always been Luke 1:40-45. Yes, as a Christian community we need to be supportive and tolerant.