A recent New Yorker profile of Michele Bachmann triggered a national debate over evangelicals, abortion and violence. The piece stated that evangelical right founder, Francis Schaeffer, advocated the violent overthrow of government to end legalized abortion. Evangelicals insisted, in turn, that he did not.
To be fair to the New Yorker, most anti-abortion evangelicals are by no means pacifists. Rick Perry, who has presided over more than 200 executions, is nevertheless considered by evangelicals like Jerry Falwell Jr. to be "one of the most pro-life governors in American history."
And shortly after the Iraq war began, the 2004 National Election Study found that, of mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, Catholics and members of other religious groups, evangelicals were the most likely of the four groups to oppose abortion but also the most likely to support the war and strongly favor the death penalty.
One of the most likely groups in America to support violence against adult humans is also one of the most likely to identify as "pro-life."
But to be fair to evangelicals, regardless of what Schaeffer believed, one is hard-pressed to find a mainstream Christian leader who accepts using violence to stop abortion. Abortion clinic bombings, the killing of abortion doctors and even the suggestion that Schaeffer would advocate violence to stop abortion -- all have been quickly and heartily condemned by mainstream anti-abortion groups.
The debate illustrates a curious fact: pro-life evangelicals say that life begins at conception and abortion is murder. But they don't actually believe it.
It makes little sense to reject pacifism, to insist abortion is morally equivalent to the organized slaughter of millions of children and then to say that violence should never be used to end abortion.
If one agrees with Schaeffer's depiction of abortion as on par with the atrocities of Nazi Germany, one can quite reasonably agree with the actions of Christians in Nazi Germany, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who took up arms to save Jews.
As Hastings Center ethicist Thomas H. Murray asks, "If it would have been morally justifiable to kill Nazi mass murderers, would it not be similarly justifiable to kill the perpetrators of what [pro-life activists] view as the contemporary American holocaust?"
It would take the most ardent pacifist indeed to content himself with voting and picketing over the course of a genocide of innocents that stretched on for 40 years with no end in sight and, with 50 million abortions to date, resulted in more causalities than the real thing.
The evangelical left joins many anti-abortion Catholics in rejecting all violence, making it less susceptible to this charge of inconsistency. But while liberal evangelicals often profess to agree with the right on the morality of abortion, their desire to make abortion just one of many issues on the agenda suggests otherwise.
Income inequality and global warming may be important, but it's hard to believe they should rival the state-sanctioned murder of millions taking place in one's own country. Imagine Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, berating fellow Christians for letting the Holocaust distract them from taking care of the environment. If abortion is what most evangelicals say it is, single-issue political makes a lot of sense.
The evangelical right and left do share one apparent contradiction between words and actions. Despite professing to believe that embryos are humans from conception onward with as much value as a child, both groups have never been troubled by what should, for them, be an unsettling fact: due to hormonal imbalances, chromosomal abnormalities and a number of unknown reasons, between 60 percent and 75 percent of all embryos die in the womb.
In the analysis of those who believe life begins at conception, this means more than half the human population immediately dies.
These would be natural deaths, while deaths from abortion would not be. But deaths from cancer, heart disease and AIDS are natural as well. And those who care about humans suffering from them don't passively resign and let nature take its course. They insist that large sums of money be spent understanding these maladies and trying to remedy them.
Yet the same organizations that profess to believe every embryo is equivalent to a fully developed child have shown no concern at all for what, in their own analysis, would be the number one cause of death in human history.
Whether the topic is violence, expanding the issue agenda or the embryo miscarriage rate, evangelicals who liken abortion to the Holocaust and embryos to children demonstrate by their actions that they don't really believe it.
Calling abortion genocide may be good for rallying voters and gathering funds, but when the campaign season is over, evangelicals ultimately share many sentiments with their pro-choice counterparts. They are uneasy about abortion, they even think it's morally wrong, but they are not prepared to treat the developing embryo like they would treat a child.
And that means, Francis Schaeffer and the New Yorker aside, that at the end of the day, pro-life evangelicals have more in common with pro-choice liberals than they think. Neither group believes that life begins at conception.
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Michele Bachmann Says Views on Abortion Were Shaped by Her ...
So how many have you shed? When was the last time (or first time) that you visited a Veterans hospital to comfort the sick? When was the last time (or first time) that you opened up your home to one of those boys that had an arm or leg blown off in Iraq? You know, talk is always cheap and criticism is usually poisonous (James 3:8).
We should be a bit kinder to one another, more willing to see the good in someone regardless of how they may or may not differ from us.
Zmberg was merely reiterating, perhaps in a rough way I could say, what the author of the article touched on in his third paragraph, that evangelicals tend to be a group promoting a pro-life agenda while at the same time being pro-war, and more so than any other group espousing Christianity. That is not truly pro-life is it? Am I missing something? Just asking.
We may disagree, but the only distance between us is the distance we place there ourselves, politically or philosophically, etc. God would have us love one another, seek to understand and have compassion, rather than hate, kill or otherwise persecute.
Peace and good will to you. =)
Now sperm live in a females tubes for up to three days, but if that egg (ova) is fertilized by a sperm cell in those tubes, the act is seals the deal of conception...right then and there. There is life in the ova and life in the spermatozoa; life will create life...at that moment.
According to the bible it is when you take your first breath. Science contributed to your definition of life.
Either way, I want to know what gene combination or the cellular status that facilitates a soul into a single cell.
Many say animals do not have souls, so why is a collection of 46 chromosomes, with specific gene arrangements the basis for having a soul where all other living things are left without?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe what people thought about the universe and how things actually work wasn't quite up to speed as compared to today.
I'm sorry that you suffer so much from a guilty conscience that you assume everyone else needs to as well.
Glad to help.
thanks for your help. In the abortion industry, life is "defined" when a baby is born; those in the industry dehumanize the life to justify taking its life. the boys in Nazi Germany did the same thing to the Jews, Gypsies, and other "undesireables". Life is occurs during conception; responsiblity occurs after birth...period.
No one wishes to force someone with an conviction that abortion is immoral or wrong to have one against their will. It's not about winning, it's not about being right, it's about having the freedom to retain one's autonomy and to have the freedom to make the best possible medical decision. Nothing more.
But what I have seen is a core, on both sides, of people who really aren't concerned about abortion per se, but use it as a political weapon. And a segment of both groups who want the other side to admit that their side is right, that the pro-life group was wrong and needs to admit it. Or the pro-choice group was wrong and must admit it. They use abortion as a hammer to bludgeon the other side. For them, it is in the end, about wanting the other side to conform to your ideas of how life should be lived. On the pro-choice side, it is about wanting the Religious Right to shut up and stop telling them how to live. For the pro-life side, it is a religious mandate from God that they convert everyone to their way of thinking. I'm not talking about ALL pro-lifers or ALL pro-choice believers. But that small minority on both sides. And that was who I was referring to in the original post.
Also, in a democratic society, there is no way to effectively outlaw abortion. We had illegal operations when it was not legal.
Those who want less abortions need to work on ways to support mothers and to show that infants are valuable. Romania under the Communists had a higher abortion rate than the Netherlands. It was illegal in Romania but legal in Netherlands. The support was there for the mother which encouraged her to keep the child. Lately, all I hear is how to cut all the programs that help families.
Too often I see those who march against abortion also march against any program that would help the mother keep the child.
K
Its sad to see moral realivism just overwhelming the church. This is just one of the many divisive by products of Protestanism.
What you were reading in Leviticus was the basis for the holiest day of the year from the Jews; it’s called Yom Kippur. What you were reading involved the ceremony of the two goats-one known as the "scapegoat”. The scapegoat was released into the wilderness to die for the sins of many. You were also reading that Aaron was the "high priest" that initiated this requirement of the blood sacrifice (recall that a bull was also sacrificed for Aaron's family and one goat for the sins of the Israel. it is not a coincidence that Jesus was the High Priest (from the Levitical line-through Mary) would take away the sins of the world once and for all because He is God, and as the Perfect Sacrifice He could be the substitution atonement to appease God. What else could that” most holiest” day mean?
There are a few pieces to the puzzle that places Jesus birthday in late September that I won’t go into detail with. Suffice it to say for this discussion that life begins at conception and the classic example of this involves Immanuel on say, December 25 of 7BC..
Does life begin at conception? Is a zygote alive? Sadly, yes. So all abortions fall into the category of killing, almost. The trouble is that, up to a point, this is not an independent life form and does not even consist of undifferentiated cells. So it is not human, yet. Justice Douglas got it right in Roe v. Wade by trying to determine the government's interest in the fetus's survival during the three trimesters he identified. But to get to the heat of the moral side to this issue, we have to look at the private interest.
Very briefly, a woman has right to determine her own survival interests. Plea note, even killing in defense is allowed. abortion is not quite that, but eliminating and growing organism within one's own body, one that has no independent viability or identity, is her choice and no one else's. After that, it get tricky, to be sure. But individual survival choices are legitimate. We kill to eat every day, all of us. And cows, last I checked, were sentient, caring creatures. The solution? Don't put women in this position. And if that's not enough, fund counseling and adoption services better.
This is a nasty issue. Dissembling and hypocrisy won't solve it.