A Letter to My White Christian Pro-Life Friends, Part 2: My Misgivings
You can read Part 1 here.
Dear White Christian Pro-Life Friends,
If you from time to time have second thoughts about what the pro-life movement is doing to our country, our faith, and your own soul, this four-part series is for you. I only ask that you read it prayerfully and thoughtfully, with an open mind and heart. I hope you will feel that I show you and your sincere involvement in the pro-life cause the respect you deserve, and if nothing else, I hope this series will help you participate in the movement more wisely and lovingly going forward.
As I explained in Part 1, back in the early and mid-80's, I was attracted to the pro-life movement because it invited me to use my voice for those without a voice and to take a public stand for compassion and decency. Those values took hold in me and still guide me today. In fact, my life of public activism began in the pro-life movement.
But even as I marched and carried my sign for the cause, I began having vague but persistent misgivings about the movement at large. There seemed to be another agenda at work, and I wasn't sure what it was.
I could only make sense of my misgivings many years later when I encountered two books that gave some historical background to the movement.
First, I read Randall Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come (Basic Books, 2006). It helped me understand the movement's backstory.
In short, in the 1950's and 60's, reacting to school desegregation and civil rights legislation, large numbers of white Protestants and Catholics in both the South and the North transferred their children from integrated public schools to all-white private church-based schools. (These schools are often referred to as "segregation academies.") During Jimmy Carter's administration (1977-1981), a rumor spread that the government would soon remove tax exempt status from these segregated schools. Protestant and Catholic leaders came together in a series of conference calls to strategize how to defend their tax exempt status while remaining racially segregated.
This created an opportunity that a fundraiser and conservative activist, Paul Weyrich, seized. A conservative Christian coalition couldn’t be based on overt segregation and the white supremacy that fueled it, he knew, so Weyrich convinced Protestants to rally with Catholics under the banner of opposing abortion to protect their tax exempt status. Francis Schaeffer was welcomed into this growing movement, although he himself would surely have abhorred its racist underpinnings if he knew about them. (The central thesis of Balmer’s book is summarized in this Politico article, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right”: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.)
Kevin Kruse’s book One Nation Under God (Basic Books, 2015) sets the stage for the pro-life movement in the context of a larger conservative Christian movement that began in the 1930’s. (You can read an excellent review of Kruse's book here, and an interview with him here.) This movement began as a reaction against the Social Gospel, which drew from the theological work of Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, and which was important to Dr. King’s spiritual formation. The Social Gospel sought to apply the teachings of Jesus to public life today, so that, as the Lord’s prayer said, God’s will could be done on earth — in politics, in culture, in economics — as in heaven. I heard many sermons against the Social Gospel as a boy. They confused me, because I thought the world would be a better place if people lived by Jesus's teaching and example. Why would we be against the Golden Rule and the Great Commandment? I once asked my mother about this, and she said, "It could lead to socialism."
That's what trusted preachers told her, and that's what powerful industrialists thought too.
They saw the Social Gospel message as a threat to their form of capitalism. They joined forces with James Fifield, a seminary-trained Congregationalist who was liberal in his theology but a conservative libertarian in his politics. The life and teachings of Jesus were irrelevant to contemporary life, Fifield said, because “the salvation of the individual” soul was all that mattered. Billy Graham became an ally in this message, as did Abram Vereide, founder of The Fellowship -- a.k.a. The Family, with which I became quite involved in my twenties, and which was more recently described in the book and Netflix series by Jeff Sharlet, both called The Family.
Balmer and Kruse helped me see that hidden beneath the surface, two of America’s most deeply-embedded motivations — racism and greed — had joined forces to use the pro-life movement as a cover for their own agenda, which wasn't pro-life: it was extreme right-wing and white nationalist.
And well-meaning Christians like Grace and me, who simply wanted to do the right thing, were being swept into it, completely unaware of the backstory and hidden agenda.
My misgivings grew through the 1980's and into the early 1990’s. That's when my fellow Evangelicals were creating something called “Purity Culture,” which was intended to reduce pre-marital sex. Later research proved that these efforts were ineffective in reducing premarital sex, but beyond that, they had unintended negative consequences both psychologically and spiritually. (Several of my friends have written important books on this topic, including Pure by Linda Kay Klein, Sex, God, and the Conservative Church by Tina Sellers, and Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Du Mez.)
All this talk of sexual purity took place while a list of scandals grew, involving pedophile priests, sleazy televangelists, respected conservative pastors, and other Christian leaders. I remember thinking that we Christians were good at pointing out the sexual splinter in the eyes of others, but not so good at addressing the sexual beams in our own eyes. (Recent headlines only reinforce this observation.)
Something clearly wasn't working in the conservative Christianity I inherited.
I started listening to friends who were progressive Christians. They told me they were pro-choice but they were not pro-abortion. Instead of dismissing them as “baby-killers” as my more extreme friends in the pro-life movement would do, I started asking them questions and listening to their answers.
They explained that being pro-choice does not mean being pro-abortion. You can be personally against abortion because you believe it is immoral, but you can simultaneously be for choice politically, because you do not believe the government should have the power to impose your moral judgment on everyone. Years later (in 2016), my friend Rachel Held Evans made this same point in a widely-read blog post.
My pro-choice friends also explained that criminalizing abortion is not, in fact, the best way to reduce it — not by a long shot. A number of studies have shown that the best way to reduce abortion is to provide quality health care (including contraception), quality education (including sex education), and economic help to needy people. (That’s one major reason why abortion declined so significantly under President Obama - to the lowest level since before Roe v. Wade. See http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/17/509734620/u-s-abortion-rate-falls-to-lowest-level-since-roe-v-wade).
My pro-choice Christian friends also explained how they saw the pro-life movement as an arm of patriarchy, which puts female sexuality and female lives and bodies under male control. (This reminded me of the "come to Jesus" moment I recounted in Part 1.) Patriarchy, for example, minimizes the consequences of rape or abuse for men and maximizes consequences for women. The pro-choice movement was for empowering women, so that powerful men would not be able to control women's lives, moral agency, and bodies. The fact that the Republicans in Congress were overwhelmingly male, together with the fact that both Evangelical and Catholic clergy were exclusively male, struck me as evidence for this concern about patriarchy.
My friends also explained that many Christians don't automatically see abortion as a sin, nor do members of several other religions, including most branches of Judaism. For conservative Christians to impose their views on their fellow citizens of other religious faiths (and no religious faith), they said, would violate religious freedom and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. Of course conservative Christians are free to use their freedom of speech to persuade others not to have abortions. But when conservative Christians try to use the government to impose their religious beliefs on others by legislation ... that is not fair, my progressive friends said. And I saw their point.
Meanwhile, several times in my twenty-four years as a pastor, members of my congregation faced medical circumstances that my pro-life friends told me never happened. The easy answers the pro-life movement had given me rang hollow in hospital rooms where would-be parents agonized in tears over heartbreaking moral/medical choices involving abortion -- to save the life of the mother, for example, or in the aftermath of rape.
Along the way, members of my congregation and my fellow Christian leaders entrusted me with their private stories relating to abortion, and I took time to listen, really listen. The more I listened, the more the rhetoric of religious right leaders, including their use of the abortion issue, rang not just hollow, but deceptive.
I do not for one second believe that grass-roots pro-life people -- people like you, for example -- are being intentionally deceptive in your commitment to the cause. Not at all! I know how sincere you are because I marched and prayed beside you for many years. But I must make this confession: I believe the pro-life cause has been misled and corrupted, first by racism and greed, and also by power -- and specifically partisan political power.
I’ll share the choice these misgivings led me to make in Part 3.
Again, knowing how sincere you are, my white pro-life Christian friends, I thank you for sticking with me as I share information and ideas that likely feel deeply disturbing and even offensive to you. I hope you will consider reading Parts 3 and 4 too, but if not, I thank you for your attention thus far.
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Attention all Pastors, Priests, Church Board Members, and other Faith Leaders
If you're wondering what you can and cannot do politically as part of a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, you won't want to miss this free webinar with Melissa Rogers, this Thursday, September 10, at 3 pm ET.
Register for the free webinar here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BS-S1NXlTce-VYBQWCLTAg
I'll be co-leading this webinar with Amy Sullivan, a respected thought leader at the intersection of faith and public policy, and we'll be interviewing Melissa Rogers, who literally wrote the book on church-state relations: Faith in American Public Life, available here.
We'll engage with this resource for faith leaders and faith community board members:
Resources for Pastors
Register for the free webinar here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BS-S1NXlTce-VYBQWCLTAg
Melissa Rogers
Here's information on Melissa Rogers:
Melissa Rogers is a visiting professor at Wake Forest University Divinity School and a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies. From 2013-2017, she served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and executive director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Melissa previously served as chair of the inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Prior to that she was director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University Divinity School. She has also served as executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Her area of expertise includes the First Amendment's religion clauses, religion in American public life, and the interplay of religion, policy, and politics. Rogers co-authored a case book on religion and law for Baylor University Press, Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court (2008). She holds a J.D. from University of Pennsylvania Law School and a B.A. from Baylor University.
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A Letter to My White Christian Pro-Life Friends, Part 1: My Story
Dear White Christian Pro-Life Friends,
If you from time to time have second thoughts about what the pro-life movement is doing to our country, our faith, and your own soul, this four-part series is for you. I only ask that you read it prayerfully and thoughtfully, with an open mind and heart. I hope you will feel that I show you and your sincere involvement in the pro-life cause the respect you deserve, and if nothing else, I hope this series will help you participate in the movement more wisely and lovingly going forward.
I'm a family-oriented person, the father of four wonderful adult children in their thirties and the grandfather of five amazing grandkids ten and younger. I've been married to my college sweetheart, Grace, for 41 years. Grace was raised Roman Catholic, and she went to Catholic schools from birth through college. We met through a campus ministry.
I also grew up in a loving Evangelical Christian family in the Plymouth Brethren tradition. My parents were of Scot, Irish, English, and Dutch descent. For me, childhood was enriched by memorizing Bible verses, going to Bible camp in the summer, attending Bible studies, and having a daily quiet time with Bible reading. My whole life has been shaped by Scripture and the rich resources of the Christian tradition, and I am deeply grateful for my heritage.
In my teens, I became part of the Jesus Movement and the charismatic movement. For twenty-four years, I was an Evangelical church planter and pastor, and now I work as an author, speaker, teacher, and activist. I am especially dedicated, because of my faith, to working for the poor, the planet, and peace.
Grace and I were part of the pro-life movement near its founding, and I have many good friends active in the pro-life movement today -- both Evangelical and Catholic, and I hope you will graciously give me the chance to share my story with you.
Because I was born near the peak of the baby boom (1956), I am old enough to remember when conservative Evangelicals didn’t intentionally involve themselves in politics. Back then, we saw involvement in politics as a “worldly” distraction from our only real work in the world before the Rapture: saving souls bound for hell.
I'm also old enough to remember the early 1970’s, when Evangelicals widely supported abortion rights, including well-known Southern Baptists like W. A. Criswell, who believed that Genesis 2:7 definitively answered the question of when human life begins: at the first breath. (Even the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 never mentions abortion. Fifteen years later, the Lausanne movement included it in Article 4 of the Manila Manifesto - where it was mentioned, not to the exclusion of other issues, but as one among many.)
Back then, most Protestants considered abortion a “Catholic issue.” Abortion certainly wasn’t a litmus test for Evangelical orthodoxy.
The first time I heard of abortion wasn't even in church: it was in my senior year of public high school, in a philosophy class. I was assigned "legalizing abortion" as a topic for a research paper on ethics. I don't remember which side I took, or even if I took a side, but I do remember that I felt the issue was complicated, with good points on both sides.
When I became part of the Jesus Movement in the early 70’s, and then was involved with the Charismatic Movement in the mid 70's, I don’t ever remember abortion being mentioned. Not once.
Then I remember how quickly that changed in the late 70’s and early 80’s. For me, it was Francis Schaeffer's and Ron Sider’s writings that won me over to the pro-life cause.
For several years, I attended the annual March for Life with a sign in my hand, my wife by my side, our baby in a backpack, and a toddler or two in a stroller. I felt politically awakened.
I was taking a public stand for something for the first time in my life! Ironically, this didn’t make me feel conservative, because, as I said, all the religious conservatives I knew stayed away from any “secular” or “political” issues.
Marching and carrying signs and attending rallies for a cause I believed in made me feel dangerously liberal!
In the 1980's, as a young father and the pastor of a nondenominational church, I was concerned about the sexualization of children by advertisers and entertainers. I was concerned about the breakdown of healthy families and the prevalence of "latchkey kids." I was concerned about cavalier attitudes that cheapened sex and empowered predatory men. I was concerned about the startling rise in pornography addiction (even before the internet - remember video shops?). I was concerned about a general loss of reverence and respect, a rising tide of sleaze.
Pro-family, pro-life Christians, I knew, cared about these things as well, so I was glad to be counted among them.
But I gradually began to realize that I was being inducted into something bigger and more complex than I had expected.
I hit a “come to Jesus moment” one Sunday morning at the church I co-led. An unmarried woman in our church got pregnant and had an abortion. In our tradition, we followed a process of "church discipline" that was outlined in Mathew 18, and in the end, we removed her from membership. An older woman in our fellowship came up and handed me a folded over piece of paper. She didn't say anything; she just smiled, gave it to me, and walked away. On it she had written these words from another chapter in Matthew (23):
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees … tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”
I am sad to say that I was defensive at first, but later, her gentle confrontation broke through and I saw myself in her words. I thought of the Gospel story of the woman caught in adultery (in John 8:1-11), where a woman was publicly shamed by religious leaders while a man got off scot free. I had played the role of the judgmental religious leader, and I felt truly, legitimately ashamed.
My desire to do the right thing had led me to do something that I felt ashamed of.
But I kept marching, reading pro-life literature, and supporting the cause as I was able, even as my misgivings grew. I’ll describe those misgivings in more detail in Part 2.*
* Thanks for reading Part 1. I know how difficult it is to read things that don't fit in with our existing commitments and convictions. Let me just say that I'm grateful to you for reading this far, and I will only be more grateful if you stay with me through all four parts. Again, thank you.
0 Comments9 Minutes
Online Speaking Engagements for Brian D. McLaren
Greetings, friends!
Through June of 2021 (and perhaps beyond), I'll be focusing on online speaking engagements. It's safer in the pandemic and it's better for the environment too.*
If you'd like me to
- be the guest preacher at your church,
- give one or more lectures for a conference,
- lead or speak at an online retreat,
- do a Q & R or lecture and discussion for an online seminary class, reading group, or youth group,
- or in some other way join you in good work that you're doing,
... please contact us here: https://brianmclaren.net/contact/
From January through April of 2021, I'll also be doing an online book tour for my new book, Faith After Doubt. Details TBA.
*Just in case you're interested, I use a carbon offset program (planting trees) for mitigating air travel impact, and I invested travel income in going solar on my home in 2019. I'll continue to do offsetting, whether or not I return to air travel. Next goal: when it comes time to replace my hybrid car (Hyundai Ioniq, highly recommended), I hope to go electric. Here's more on this subject.
0 Comments1 Minutes