'Graced response' and pro-vita faith

I've used the term pro-vita for the past few years to describe the view of many Christians I encounter - particularly Gen X'ers, but others as well - who are dissatisfied with the conventional liberal and conservative positions on "life issues," such as abortion and capital punishment.

Those positions tend to be insufficiently theological in their expression, and hence, insufficiently consistent.

More and more, Christians want consistency on how we view God's desire for the life of all his creation. I've written about how this affects my own positions on abortion and the death penalty a couple of times before (see posts here and here). I am "pro-life" in both cases, meaning that I am both anti-capital punishment and anti-abortion.

There are some elements of the pro-vita position I have wanted to develop but just haven't had the time to do. For instance, I understand creation care - the theological approach to our stewardship of the earth - as a pro-vita position (see this post, for instance). And without a doubt, our outreach and ministry with the poor is a core commitment of a pro-vita faith.

None of these positions are duties, undertaken out of a sense of bare obligation. They are, instead, the graced response of Christian men and women who have seen their own lives redeemed by Jesus Christ and thereby understand God's desire for the flourishing of all life on this good earth.

To that end, I want to share some online interviews and articles by Prof. Amy Laura Hall, who teaches theological ethics at Duke, that I think speak profoundly to the pro-vita understanding of our moral lives. Dr. Hall, an elder in the Southwest Texas Annual Conference, often takes the time to write "for the church," meaning that she takes the fruits of her research and theological reflection and presents them in a way that those outside the academy can really engage them.

Check out these links, and note how Dr. Hall is writing to that part of the pro-vita ethic that seeks to embrace vulnerable women and children into the body of Christ:

Articles by Dr. Hall:
"For Shame? Why Christians should welcome, rather than stigmatize, unwed mothers and their children," Christianity Today (September 2006)

"'Designer baby' option raises ethical concerns," UM Reporter (April 15, 2009)

A 2004 interview in CT:
"Unwanted Interruptions: Why is our culture so hostile to children inside and outside the womb?" Christianity Today (July 2004)

A 2008 review in CT of Dr. Hall's newest book, Conceiving Parenthood:
"Unplanned Parenthood," Christianity Today (July 2008)

A part of my own sense of calling is to do what Dr. Hall is doing in these links - that is, speak to both academy and church about important matters of our faith. That means I'm particularly interested in pastor-scholars who seek to do the same. In my mind, her approach is exactly what both academy and church need.

My Obama problem

The presidential election is less than two weeks away, and I still don't know who I am voting for - or even whether I'll be voting. I've struggled with whether to bring this up in a public way on my blog. But a civic forum at Duke Divinity School a couple of nights ago convinced me that I should, and so I am asking for your help.

Please read the following with an open mind (even if you don't agree with me on the issue in question). And if you can help me to reason through this, I would greatly appreciate it. Let me also say that I am revealing a lot more of my political views than I would normally do in so public a setting, so please take that into account if you choose to respond.

My Obama problem is with the issue of abortion. I am a pro-vita Christian, which means that I am ardently pro-life in all of the social/moral issues that tend to confront us. (In this blog post last year, I proposed the term 'pro-vita' as a way to identify those Christians who are both anti-abortion and anti-death penalty, issues that typically divide liberals and conservatives. I would also add an extreme reluctance to engage in war, which I understand to be the very minimum in Jesus' admonition, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Maybe that just makes me Catholic. Whatever.)

During my time as a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was converted to the anti-death penalty position and demonstrated publicly against it in Nashville. I have been generally pro-life on the abortion issue for many years, but during my time at Duke, this fairly passive pro-life position has been transformed so that I view the abortion issue as indicative of the whole Christian view on the sanctity of life (That is, I tend to think that Christians who rather blithely describe themselves as pro-choice are either: a) unreflective regarding the doctrine of creation; or b) simply inconsistent in their Christian self-understanding due usually to an idolatrous loyalty to the radical privatization of American individualism and the consumerist commodification of all things, including babies).

For what it's worth, I am grateful to both Vanderbilt and Duke for the impacts they have had on me regarding issues of life, and I think it the particular ways they influenced me are a testament to those schools' particular strengths.

Here's how I understand my Obama problem. As a Christian, I see one of the greatest duties of politics as the amelioration of suffering for the citizens of the body politic. (A more optimistic view might say that politics should promote the flourishing of life, but my understanding of the pervasiveness of sin is too great to allow me to make such a statement.) At this point in history, it seems like the Democrats are poised to be much more effective than the Republicans at this task. For one, I think the legacy of the Bush administration (and the complicity of the pre-2006 Republican Congress in its policies) discredits the Republican Party generally. And secondly, I find the McCain/Palin campaign's proposals to help us recover (from war, from economic disaster, from environmental degradation) to be fairly unconvincing.

On the contrary, I think the Democrats are more in touch with some of our pressing problems, including healthcare, the environment, the economy, and U.S. relationships with other nations. Plus, I like Obama. True, I wish he had more national political experience. But I think he reasons well (one of the greatest political skills required of a president), and I think he will surround himself with those who can help make up for some of his areas of inexperience (e.g., his selection of Joe Biden to bolster his understanding of foreign policy). You can go down the list of issues, and in this election at least, I will check off with the Democrats on just about every issue - save one.

But that one is a big one. Depending on whether you go with the CDC or the Guttmacher Institute figures, there are between 850,000 and 1.3 million abortions in the United States each year. And if you regard each one of those abortions as the taking of human life in a way that transgresses the law of love as given to us by Christ, then the issue of abortion looms at least as large as any other single political issue. At the civic forum at Duke earlier this week, one of the professors present said that the interaction between secular politics and the church should work to make both spheres more aware of the outcast and marginalized among us, to the end that they are seen as human beings. I tend to agree with that statement, especially as it relates to the most marginalized persons among us - those in the womb, who are so defenseless that they cannot even cry out in anguish.

The reason this becomes a very pressing issue in this election has everything to do with the Supreme Court. The Court's two oldest members are among its most liberal - John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If they retire in the next four years (and it seems almost certain that Stevens will), and they are replaced with conservatives, it could be mean the end of Roe v. Wade and the return of the moral debate around abortion to state legislatures, where it belongs. There the witness of Christians can actually make a difference in the fight for life (in the legal realm).

[On the likelihood of the next president having the opportunity to appoint several justices to the Supreme Court, see this NY Times editorial. The Times is clearly not where I am on the issue of Roe v. Wade, but I agree with it on the point that the next president may have a significant impact on the direction of the court for years to come. For the record, the attitude of the most conservative justices on the Court on the issue habeas corpus has been extremely troubling to me, as we have seen in the legal twilight zone surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. In June, the Court upheld habeas corpus for enemy combatants, indicating that it viewed the right to habeas corpus to be universal rather than just confined to U.S. citizens. I agree with that opinion, the passage of which - admittedly - was dependent upon the Court's liberal members.]

In the prospect of judicial appointments lies the real issue, for me, because Obama would probably be the most ardently pro-choice president we have ever had. (For a general op-ed piece on Obama's extreme pro-choice position, see this Michael Gerson column.) Obama's role opposing the Born-Alive Act in the Illinois State Legislature in 2002 and 2003 is generally well-known, but if you aren't aware of it, read this good article written by Robert George and Yuval Levin. It is a shocking story, told with factual detail.

George and Levin explain Obama's opposition to the proposed Born-Alive Act while he was a state senator in Illinois:

"As his original 2002 statements [in the Illinois State Legislature] make clear, [Obama] sought to defeat the Born-Alive Act because he recognized that it bears at least implicitly on the larger question of abortion in America. He seemed to realize that the logical implication of protecting the child born alive after an attempted abortion is that abortion involves taking the life of a child in the womb, and that acknowledging that, even at the extreme margins of the practice of abortion, could put the legitimacy of abortion itself in question. Therefore, Obama chose to defend the widest possible scope for legal abortion by building a fence around it, even if that meant permitting a child who survives an abortion to be left to die without even being afforded basic comfort care."

John McCain might well replace Justices Stevens and Ginsburg with judges who would rightly see Roe v. Wade as a perversion of the U.S. Constitution (though I admit that is not a foregone conclusion). Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly replace them with justices at least as liberal as they are. That means that the 2008-2012 period stands as particularly monumental in the history of the abortion issue in this country. And if you think the saving of so many human lives is of paramount importance, that has to impact how you view this election.

And that's what has got me in a quandry. I welcome your comments (and advice).

Pro Vita Christians

I am pro-life, all the way down. That causes confusion, though, because of the connotations that the term "pro-life" has in debates around abortion. "Pro-life" opponents of abortion are contrasted with "pro-choice" advocates of legalized abortion. And of course, pro-lifers are seen as generally conservative and pro-choicers as generally liberal.

Then there is the distinction between anti-death penalty advocates and pro-death penalty advocates. The former are stereotyped as liberal and the latter as conservative.

Then there are people like me, who see God's valuation of all human life as sacred and who are pro-life (in the abortion sense) and anti-death penalty. I recently heard an anti-death penalty comment that it is important to realize that life does not begin at conception and end at childbirth. And that's true. It begins at conception and ends at natural death, whenever that comes. I believe in protecting and upholding life at every stage along the way (and as a correlate to that, I believe in Christ's power of redemption no matter what a person has done).

So what label describes people like me? (Confused, maybe? I hope not!) I think there are actually a lot of us out there, Gen X'ers especially, who want to consider their views from a Christian perspective first (rather than from a polticial perspective that then gets imported into a supposedly Christian context). And I think the number of these people is growing.

I propose a new term: Pro Vita Christians. It is a way of saying "for life" or "in favor of life" but without the political baggage of the term "pro-life." It is a way of affirming God's love and care for all of his creatures - from the unborn baby in the womb to the convicted killer on death row.

This is a confessional stance, to be sure. And it is sure to be unpopular with both conventional liberals and conventional conservatives. But isn't it time Christians started thinking about their stances based on theology rather than secular political ideology?

I'm a Pro Vita Christian. All the way down. Who's with me?

Back from travels...

I took a little unannounced hiatus from blogging for a few days over the Christmas holiday. Emily and I were on the road visiting family in Tennessee and Arkansas, and it was just too much to try to write meaningful posts. But we're back in Durham now, and I am gearing up for the spring semester here at Duke. So I should be back on a more regular schedule.

I've received a couple of responses from the admittedly impassioned post a couple of weeks ago about the death penalty. I am as adamantly against the death penalty as I am against abortion, positions for which I make no apologies. My views on these two issues arise directly out of my faith, and perhaps someday I will write a post on why this is so.

In the mean time, I was interested to read in this morning's New York Times that a legislative commission in New Jersey has recommended that the state wipe its capital punishment laws off the books. That would make it the first state to officially abolish capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in the 1970s. As the article notes, the New Jersey commission's recommendations are following a national trend away from the use of capital punishment as an acceptable part of our penal system. The Times articles notes, "[The commission's] report found 'no compelling evidence' that capital punishment serves a legitimate purpose, and increasing evidence that it 'is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency'."

I say 'amen' to that. You can read the rest of the article here. And as always, I welcome your thoughts and comments on this issue.

Thoughts on Capital Punishment

For just one moment, let's lay aside all the many sound theological arguments against the death penalty (and there are many). When our supposedly "most humane" way of executing people goes this terribly awry, it shows that something is fundamentally wrong with the death penalty system:

A few days ago, the state of Florida attempted to execute a convicted killer named Angel Diaz. But instead of the execution going smoothly, the person administering the lethal drugs messed up. The drug cocktail went into the soft tissue of Diaz's arm (instead of a vein), and it took him 34 minutes to die. During that time, witnesses reported seeing his lips moving, his eyes alert, and his Adam's apple bobbing furiously.

Sound gruesome? And this is supposed to be the nicest way we have to legally kill people. See a summary article for yourself in the NY Times.

Some of the more grisly aspects of Diaz's experience are chronicled in this CNN article.

I am 100% against the death penalty. Now, I do not believe that society should be "soft on crime." And I do not believe that we should turn convicted killers out onto the streets. But that does not mean that we should be in the business of "eye for an eye" retributive justice. There are better ways to pursue justice - both in the form of punishment for offenders and vindication for the victims of crime.

But let me go out on a limb here. If you are in favor of the death penalty, isn't lethal injection a fairly cowardly way to go about it? The justification for it that is usually given is that it is the most humane way to kill someone. I think it is actually just the opposite. I think that lethal injection is really easier on the public, because it gives the semblance of something that is painless and even medical - hence the gurney, syringe, etc.

Let's remember that the electric chair was once employed for many of the same reasons. The condemned could sit down in a chair, which seems like a positively civilized way to die. And the electric currents theoretically didn't do anything traumatic to the exterior of the body - or at least, it didn't seem nearly as violent as the snapping of the neck via hanging. Of course, hair catching on fire and exploding eyeballs changed that perception in time.

If we're going to continue capital punishment, let's do it in a way that is really the most painless for the condemned: the guillotine. In one quick instant, the spinal cord is severed and feeling stops. In that way, you even avoid the momentary terror that a hanged man must experience as he falls through the trap door of the gallows. Of course, there is no way to avoid the few seconds of cognitive awareness that a severed head may experience, but there's probably no way to get around that.

Wouldn't the prospect of guillotining condemned prisoners seem gruesome to the public, you might ask? Yes, it would. Exactly. But if we are going to keep up the barbaric practice of state-sponsored killing, we should at least do so in an honest way. A way that causes the least suffering on the part of the condemned, but a way which also brings home the reality of what we are insisting must be done.

And FYI, the picture of the gurney above was taken off the Florida Department of Corrections homepage, where it is proudly displayed. It's probably the same one that Angel Diaz suffered on for 34 minutes last week.