Thursday, June 6, 2019

Sin and the Idolatry of the Pro-Life Movement

For some time now I have found myself frustrated by a repeated pattern in inter-church relationships. This is the repeated abdication of sin by progressives as a concept, wherein we defend those labeled as "sinners" by the conservatives, and refuse to call out conservatives on their own sinful behavior, usually in the name of unity.

Despite the frequency with which the conservative wings of the church throw around the term, Sin is a fairly complicated subject. The scriptures make clear that there isn't a list of actions which define the concept of sin in its entirety, certain activities that, if avoided, assures someone of a sin free life. Yes, there are actions that can be sinful, but context always matters. For instance, the Ten Commandments list murder among the Thou Shalt Nots, and yet the people of God in Scripture are, from time to time, called upon to kill.

It's also important to note that not every commandment of God is a Thou Shalt Not. There are also quite a few Thou Shalts, making it possible to sin by inaction as much as by inaction. And as always, context matters. We are repeatedly called upon to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for those in need, but giving to feed an addiction, or to empower an abuser, are not in following with the message of the Scriptures either.

All of this to say that in order to really talk about Sin, one must be willing to admit to its all encompassing nature and complexity. An act that seems sinful on the surface might be commanded by God, an act that seems righteous might be a heinous crime before the Lord.

This, of course, is often the problem with preaching about sin. A preacher faces their congregation, wanting to teach them the right way, and people in general want more of an answer than; "Well, it's complicated." To assure people that such a thing as righteousness and sin still exist, preachers often reach for examples that seem the most rock solid, a bedrock of morality upon which their congregation can build, (forgetting, of course, that such a bedrock has already been laid in Christ.)

And for the past century or so, the best sources of this bedrock sin has been the LGBTQIA+ community and... Abortion.

I mean, how much clearer could it be? We're talking about babies. Don't you love babies? Don't you want to protect them, especially from someone so horrible as being willing to kill them from within their own bodies? It's typically a pretty easy sell, and so we are provided with a rock-solid example, and even better, more than half of our population aren't even physically capable of committing it, so little worry of pointing an uncomfortable finger at someone you depend upon for money.

Now, that alone is bad enough... after all, Sin is something we all struggle with, and so building a theology of Sin around such a specialized action that has no direct bearing on the lives of a majority of your congregation is not just cowardly from the perspective of the preacher, its directly harmful to others, allowing us to separate the world into "Righteous" and "Sinners" instead of the Biblical view, where we are all Beloved Sinners.

The appeal is obvious, of course. Not only do you get to assert your authority by being "tough on sin," you can rally your congregation into xenophobia, giving them an other to target their aggression at, never mind the fact that the repeated Scriptural Command towards the "other" is to care for them and protect them.

But it hasn't even stopped there. Actions taken on behalf of the pro-life movement have repeatedly abandoned the commands of the Scripture in the name of the end justifying the means, to the point where, in the faith life of many so-called Christians, opposition to Abortion has supplanted worship of Christ as the single most important aspect of their faith. (Thou Shalt Have no Other Gods Before Me.)

We've all seen it. Undercover videos falsely doctored to portray workers at Abortion Clinics or Planned Parenthood as trafficking in the bodies of slaughtered fetuses. (Thou Shalt not bear false witness.) Snipers killing Abortion providers, clinics shot up. (Thou shalt not Kill.) Women simply seeking affordable healthcare being called whores, screamed at, profiled and attacked. (What you do to the least of these, you do to me.)

But it goes deeper. Repeated debates over the start of life skip over the fact that the individual who is pregnant, has undoubtedly started life, and who also undoubtedly bears the image of God, is treated as nothing more than an incubator for the fetus, their own humanity and rights almost utterly ignored at the very heart of the debate, transformed into bystanders in their own bodies.

Can one build a scriptural argument against abortion? Certainly. But sacrificing every other Christian ideal in pursuit of that single, highly debateable, point of theology is the very definition of idolatry. And I'm not talking about the cutesy "is it idolatry for our kids to spend so much time on social media" crap that circles these days. It is literally replacing your God with a single concept, a concept that so supercedes your faith that any other command is trumped in the life of faith.

We've been bad at naming such behavior as sin. And that needs to change.