The U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which had established the legal freedom to have an abortion as a Constitutional right. This has moved the question of the legality of abortion back into the democratic legislative process (where it belongs), and a number of states have quickly moved to make abortion illegal within their territories. Many Christians have enthusiastically celebrated this as a great victory for life. Other Christians have criticized this as an illegitimate denial of people’s legal freedoms and rights. What is the correct Christians perspective on this issue?
Christian Ethics and U.S. Law
The Gospel of Jesus Christ points to a nonviolent ethic that rules out all forms of violence, and that certainly includes abortion, the deliberate killing of preborn human beings. From a Christian perspective, abortion is murder. It is unthinkable that a follower of Jesus Christ would carry out an abortion, and abortion should without question be absolutely forbidden within the Church.
Just because something is immoral, though, this does not necessarily mean that people do not have a legal right to do it. From a Christian perspective, idolatry, the worship of gods other than the Christian God, is immoral, one of the worst sins of all. Yet, the U.S. Constitution guarantees the legal right to freedom of religion. If the U.S. government tried to outlaw Islam, Hinduism, or any other non-Christian religion, I think almost any American Christian would strongly object and would fight tooth and nail to preserve the legal right of their non-Christian neighbors to engage in idolatrous practices, in spite of believing that these practices are immoral. It is perfectly consistent to believe that something is immoral, and at the same time to strongly insist that people have a legal right to do it.
I think many Christians would acknowledge this, but insist that murder is without question something which no one has a legal right to engage in. Further, they would argue that the government always has a responsibility to outlaw all forms of murder. There is, however, at least one form of violence which almost all Christians would say should be a legal right, in spite of it being incompatible with Christian ethics: killing in self-defense. Deliberately killing another human being in self-defense is incompatible with the demands of Christian discipleship. In other words, from a Christian perspective, it is murder. Yet, it would be deeply problematic if the legal right to kill in self-defense were taken away and the government started prosecuting people for using violence to defend their own lives. Almost no Christian would be in favor of ending the legal right to kill in self-defense, in spite of it being, from a Christian perspective, murder.
There are, of course, some significant differences between the violence of killing in self-defense and the violence of abortion. Most significantly, using violence in self-defense kills a guilty person who deserves to die (but whom Christians must love), while the violence of abortion kills an innocent child. Many Christians would insist that the government must always protect innocent human life from violence, even if it might tolerate other forms of violence such as killing in self-defense (It might surprise these Christians to learn that, after the Roman Empire became Christianized, it outlawed infanticide, but did not outlaw abortion).
The biggest difficulty with making abortion illegal, of course, is that most non-Christians in our society do not believe that the violence of abortion is morally wrong. So, some Christians argue that, since we cannot expect non-Christians to believe that abortion is murder, we should tolerate it and make it legal.
I agree that we cannot expect non-Christians to believe that abortion is morally wrong. This is because I believe that we cannot have any moral expectations at all of non-Christians. But just because we cannot expect anything morally of non-Christians does not mean that we should not try to influence non-Christian society and government to improve morally and to move closer to conformity with a Christian ethic. The Church has been able to successfully do this with regard to many moral issues in history, such that certain immoral actions which used to be accepted without question in society are now regarded as unthinkable thanks to the influence of the Church. There are already a significant number of pro-life secularists. So why should we think the Church should not be able to get American society to the point where abortion would be unthinkable?
Almost all American Christians seem to believe that making slavery illegal was a great moral triumph for the Church. Now, before the Church came along, virtually no one questioned the moral legitimacy of slavery. The idea that slavery is wrong was a Christian idea (which the Church then spread to other cultures and societies). This aspect of Christian morality was then imposed by governmental force onto an unwilling society. Christians who support a legal right to abortion, while at the same time believing that it was a good thing for Christians to leverage the coercive power of the state to outlaw slavery, are thus being wildly inconsistent. For which is morally worse: enslaving someone, or slaughtering a baby girl while she writhes in agony and tearing her limb from limb?
Being Consistently Pro-Life
Personally, I believe that the way slavery was ended in the United States was not a moral triumph for the Church, but a moral failure for the Church. This is not just because it took a horrifically destructive civil war, in which massive numbers of professed disciples of the Prince of Peace participated, to end it. It is also because the Church should have ended slavery in the U.S. by first making slavery unthinkable and forbidden within the Church, and then by influencing the surrounding culture through its example. Instead, many American churches firmly supported slavery, and it was only by leveraging the violent, coercive power of the state that American Christians were able to end slavery. This was a massive moral failure of the Church.
All the governments of this world are founded on and perpetuated by violent coercion, and every action of a nation-state is backed up by the threat of violence. All the kingdoms of this world operate in ways that are radically incompatible with the nature of God’s Kingdom, and are in rebellion against the Lordship of Jesus Christ, this world’s only true Lord. Thus, from the perspective of the Gospel, the governments of this world are not morally legitimate. The Gospel calls us to reject all forms of violence and to follow Jesus on the way of the cross. For Christians to use violence, even in an attempt to prevent violence, is thus deeply problematic and self-contradictory. For Christians to leverage that violent, coercive power of the state in order to try to force others to conform to Christian morality, even with regard to violence, is, to say the least, quite dubious. Being disciples of a crucified Lord means that we should use force and coercion, if at all, only in rare circumstances.
What this means is that the Church should not be so focused on making abortion illegal. Instead, the Church should be focused on faithfully living out its identity as a nonviolent community, and then being a witness in American society against all forms of violence (abortion included). We should certainly seek to make abortion unthinkable in American society, and to put an end to it. But we should carry out this task using Gospel methods of persuasion, rather than coercion. In other words, the Church should be consistently pro-life.
Having said this, I find it extremely strange to see any Christians working to legalize abortion. Should Christians work to legalize the killing of African Americans or Jews, just because some non-Christians believe that killing African Americans or Jews is not morally wrong? Though the actions of the state are not consistent with the demands of Christian discipleship, the governments of this world do have a part to play in God’s providential plans, indirectly serving Him by providing order and protecting human life (Rom 13:1-7). We should respect this role which the state has, and, if it takes steps to protect innocent children from being killed, respect and tolerate that as well.
Pro-abortion advocates ceaselessly try to “justify” the violence of abortion by claiming that pro-life people only care about human beings up to the point they are born. There is a kernel of truth communicated in this tired (and false) claim. That kernel of truth is that there is a lot more to being pro-life than a refusal to use violence. Refusing to use violence against other human beings is merely the bare minimum of what is means to be pro-life. Being genuinely pro-life also means consistently showing love to other human beings, genuinely caring for them, and providing for their needs. The Christians refusal to use violence is just one part of a holistic ethic of living lives of love, truth, and self-sacrifice, rather than lives governed by pride, greed, and lust. If the Church wants to be genuinely pro-life, it must do much more than just protest violence. It must seek to be a community of love in which pride, greed, and lust have no place, and to be a witness to the surrounding culture that this is what it looks like to live in a genuinely human way.