I know I’ll be open to the charge that critiquing Bill Moyers is as pointless as it is repetitious. Moyers is relentlessly hostile to pro-lifers, “the religious right” (which is anybody to Moyers’ right), and to ordinary commonsense. Why bother talking about the April 30 encomium he offered on his program, "NOW, with Bill Moyers," to the “March for Women’s Lives"?
There are several reasons. Moyers has made it his life’s work to convince the American public that the real “faith-based” position on abortion and euthanasia is one that “respects individual choice.” This is the made-in-his-own-image god that Moyers worships, a deity who offers a blank check to abortion and euthanasia on demand, and when it is deposited, willingly cashes it.
Moreover, Moyers is the perfect representative of a kind of unbridled anger masquerading as a crusader that we, unfortunately, see more and more of today. He’s worth reading for what he represents.
Talking about Moyers also gives me reason to first re-run a review of an extremely helpful critique of the very mindset Moyers personifies. After discussing Prof. Michael Gorman’s and Ann Loar Brook’s book today, you can put Moyers’ and his guests’ spiritually bankrupt formulations in context. ************************* ****************
"Holy Abortion" and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
That pro-abortionists fly under false colors is hardly news. That they have co-opted many institutions is not a state secret. But the extent to which they misuse and misrepresent the prestige afforded by their various associations is a much under-reported story.
A small book, "Holy Abortion: A Theological Critique of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice" does an exquisite job of explicating the "yawning gap" (as one reviewer put it) that exists between the abortion position espoused by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) and various mainstream religious denominations who list themselves as supporters of RCRC.
Like NARAL, RCRC has gone through a name change. Founded in 1973, it was then known as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights.
But whatever the name, what gives RCRC its influence (as authors Professor Michael J. Gorman and Ann Loar Brooks write) is that "Nearly 40 national organizations from Christian and Jewish denominations, movements, and faith-based groups, as well as Unitarian, humanist and ethical associations, now make up its membership."
Among that group the real muscle is provided by four mainline Protestant denominations - - the Episcopal Church (USA), the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church.
For those of us who belong to one of these denominations, it is a constant source of irritation and spiritual exasperation that they are yoked to an organization for which there is no such thing as an unacceptable abortion. At the least a trial separation is in order, in anticipation of a final parting of the ways.
"Holy Abortion" is a project of the National Pro-Life Religious Council, an organization of pro-life leaders from a number of religious denominations determined to strengthen the pro-life witness within these denominations. That can mean anything from shoring up an already firm foundation to essentially building one from scratch.
It is the goal of this brief and readable book to show that none of these mainline denominations, theologically speaking, has any business being in the same room with RCRC. Prof. Gorman and Ms. Brooks are to be congratulated for doing the kind of patient research that allowed them to produce a scathing indictment both of RCRC and of those denominations which have lent their name to the work of an organization for whom "Choice" (capital C) is god.
This careful analysis allows Gorman and Brooks to spell out the assumptions that undergird RCRC's wide-open advocacy of abortion and contrast them with the official abortion positions of a number of its member churches. They capture perfectly the essence of the RCRC position - - "Abortion is holy because God is pro-choice" - - and contrast it with the basic mainline position - - "Abortion is tragic because God is the giver of life."
They document this conclusion by examining six themes in RCRC's literature and holding them up against official statements on abortion of denominations that have official ties with RCRC, which bills itself as "the interfaith movement for choice." The reader quickly sees that whereas the religious denominations' wording is the model of nuanced, carefully limited support for abortion, RCRC celebrates abortion as literally "holy."
(Neither the authors, myself, nor the readers of this editorial would settle for "limited" support for abortion. Nor are they so naive as to believe that the carefully limited acceptance of abortion found in official documents is how their individual pastors or national bodies always act in real life. But the point is that these denominations, at a minimum, ought to sever ties with RCRC as part of the ongoing process of reexamining their positions on abortion.)
RCRC's basic thrust is that the decision whether to abort is "between a woman and her God." As the wording suggests, this is an open invitation to find the "god within," a deity who offers "unquestioned sustenance and support in a woman's pursuit of the best choice for her, according to her."
Women and young girls are viewed as absolutely autonomous moral agents whose abortion decisions are and ought to be unilaterally made and utterly unreviewable by others. There is also no room for the input of friends, community, church, professionals, or anyone else. But, then again, there is no need, for each of us has within us a "Greater Truth, Higher Power, Inner Light," etc., etc. whom we can tap into for advice/ratification.
One RCRC pamphlet puts it this way: "You are to claim your godlike, God-given role in creation by saying yes or no, secure in the knowledge that whatever you decide, after having honestly sought what is right, God will bless." As is obvious, this deity is remarkably undemanding.
This unabashed, unrestrained, and unlimited promotion of abortion finds many distasteful expressions. One is to hold "religious convocations" outside abortion clinics to express "gratitude" for the "work" done inside. What kind of work? "Holy work, service provided by God's people on behalf of God's people."
Vigorously spreading and promoting abortion (a kind of evangelism of death) becomes, as the authors observe, RCRC's equivalent of the Great Commission.
After first comparing this spiritually maimed view of abortion to official church statements of affiliated denominations such as the United Methodist Church, Gorman and Brooks then offer what is described by the publisher as "a more thoroughly Christian perspective on abortion that encourages the churches to incorporate historic and contemporary ecumenical voices that RCRC disregards or dismisses." The differences are striking.
To take just two examples, no mainline denomination would tolerate such blasphemies as a description of abortion as "a holy activity" or "a work of God" in its official documents. And whereas RCRC can't wait to spread abortion to "underserved populations" (especially youth), mainline churches are "profoundly disturbed at the way abortion has become a form of birth control and symptomatic of a widespread casual attitude" about human life.
In this last section Gorman and Brooks examine abortion in the context of what we might call the megathemes of the Christian faith. Some analogies and comparisons work better than others, but the thrust is to show that a theology and an ethic that has no room for the powerless is dramatically at odds with what the Christian Church has historically espoused.
In this context it's worth recalling that Prof. Gorman's magnificent book, "Abortion and the Early Church," demonstrated that the Jewish faith out of which Christianity grew was staunchly anti-abortion. The early Christian Church was even more pro-life. Quoting Gerald Bonner, Gorman and Brooks note that the prohibition of abortion was "the universal teaching of the early Church."
Going further, how does the idea that a woman "owns" her body square with the Apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthians in which he wrote, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body." Not very well.
Another huge incompatibility is the militant insistence that freedom is individual. As Gorman and Brooks explain, for the biblical writers, "[F]reedom is not a private experience but a communal reality. It is known, not in the pursuit of self-interest, but in a life of self-giving for the good of others."
The "supreme value for Christians is not choice," Gorman and Brooks conclude, "but covenantal faithfulness to God." In short, "We are not our own."
"Holy Abortion" is an excellent resource, one that can and should be shared, in particular with Christians who take their faith seriously. The book will remind them that the Christian Church must be "a community that does not allow itself to choose between women and children."
And because there is such a radical disjuncture between RCRC and the entire ethos of the historic Christian Church, it follows that "it is time for this relationship to end, and for Christian lay people, clergy, churches, and denominations to pursue a more appropriate and truly Christian response to the problem of abortion."
At this point it occurred to me that it was almost as if Prof. Michael Gorman and Ann Loar Brooks were clairvoyant. If you read their 2003 book, "Holy Abortion: A Theological Critique of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice," it's as if they had an advance look at the observations made about the "March for Women's Lives" that came forth just a few days ago from the mouths of PBS's Bill Moyers and his merry band of pro-abortionist guests.
But that's not so strange, come to think of it. Moyers, a secular evangelist for the anti-life ethos, represents to a "T" a worldview that would offer hosannas to the "March for Women's Lives." Whom else would he invite to lay verbal palm branches at the feet of NARAL, NOW, and their ilk but others who worship at the altar of "choice"?
Moyers didn't beat around the bush. Here is how he begins:
"You no doubt read or heard something about that huge March for Women's Lives in Washington last weekend.
"A single photograph captured it for me. Hundreds of thousands of people, spread across the mall in the heart of the nation's capitol marching for choice. We took a closer look, and found something that the press all but ignored. Many of these people were there on faith. ...
"They came from all over the country to join the largest demonstration for a woman's right to choose ever held in the nation's capital. Despite the sheer size of the crowd, this day was more than a matter of numbers. For thousands of these people, coming here was a pilgrimage. They came as an act of faith, a witness to deeply held beliefs about religion and conscience."
And that theme of pilgrimage and conscience is repeated over and over again by his guests. The REAL religious folk are not "their old adversaries from the religious right," those who, Moyers laments, "The mainstream media often seem to think...are the only religious opinions that count."
Au contraire. Moyers continues, "This weekend, however, the right is vastly outnumbered by other believers who read the same Bible and reach a different conclusion. This interpretation of scripture holds that the creator God bestowed on human beings the sacred gift of free will. This capacity to choose, they say, is at the heart of what it means to be a moral person."
Talk about name dropping! This is the ideology of "choice" sanctified by no less than "the creator God."
At one level, you want to ask politely, "Are you kidding me? Are you serious?" At another level, you just shake your head.
What a bizarre idea. The ability to choose, in and of itself, is "at the heart of what it means to be a moral person”? There is no connection to WHAT is chosen? What an undemanding, don't-bother-me-with-the- details deity this is.
Moyers interviews some of the usual suspects, representatives from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Catholics for a Free Choice, and the Women's Division at the United Methodist Church, for example. They like Jesus because "Jesus came to free women as well as men. And call women to follow their conscience as well as men," in the words of someone by the name of Jacqui Bishop.
But to "free them" to take the lives of their defenseless children? To "follow their conscience" on a journey whose end point is over 44 million tiny body bags? I don't think so, do you?
Only an amazing tunnel vision and tin ear for ethical discourse allows them to say what they say. Over and over and over again, Moyers' guests offer variations of this from Ellery Duke, described as a seminary student and daughter of an ordained minister: "Overall, I think we need to look at the message of scripture.... God's action in history...is always on the side of persons who are suffering..."
Fair enough. It's the tag-on line that turns what she just said on its head: God is always on the side of "persons who are agonizing about decisions. That is where God stands in alliance."
Let me get this straight: If I'm agonizing over throwing my child out of a speeding car, "God stands in alliance" with me? If someone else in a faraway nation is agonizing over beating his sister to death because she wants to marry someone he doesn't approve of, does "God stand in alliance" with him? I don't think so, do you?
There's lots and lots about standing with the powerless, as if the unborn child is not the most powerless human being in God's creation. You ask yourself, don't these people listen to what they say?
Ms. Duke's final oration needs to be quoted in its entirety. Consider:
"If you decide that you're going to get an abortion and you go to the abortion clinic. God is with you. When you walk in through that crowd of demonstrators. God is with you when you walk in that door. God is with you when you walk into that room. God is with you when you're laying on that table. And God will be with you when you walk out and have to live with your decision. And God is offering comfort through all of that. Not judgment. Comfort."
I did not see the program, only read the transcript, which was graciously provided to me by Tim Graham of the Media Research Center. So I can not describe for you her tone or the way she looked at Moyers.
What I can tell you from reading her words on paper is that we are in the presence of a genuine fanatic. Has she so stilled that "still small voice" that Ms. Duke actually believes God, the Author of Life, has no opinion as the abortionist shreds one of His creations? That He would, figuratively, hold the woman's hand while the abortionist, literally, rips her baby's hands off?
Please don't misunderstand. One needn't be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim to believe--know, actually--that God forgives those who come to Him with a contrite heart, acknowledging their transgressions, and asking for forgiveness.
But that is NOT the same thing--not even remotely--as turning God into Someone who provides "comfort" to someone/anyone engaging in an intrinsically evil act. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, sick.
Moyers and his guests are determined to place a religious gloss on abortion. They're not about to cede the moral high ground to those who, for religious (or non-religious) reasons, stand athwart their "right" to take the lives of innocent, helpless unborn children.
And, I would suggest, that is not merely a "political" calculation. They may honestly believe, as Ms. Bishop said of her own abortion, "I think it was probably the most merciful thing I could have done at the time."
And saying that is their "right," I suppose. But will that fly on Judgment Day?
I don't think so, do you?
posted by: reducto (reply)
post date: 05.07.04 (10:19 pm)
A superior blog.
posted by: jacqui bishop (reply)
post date: 05.07.06 (6:20 pm)
Please don't presume to know what judgment day will bring. You can know only that it will be a holy judgment by a holy Creator whose love and mercy are unconstrained by human rules and regulations. He reads the heart, after all.
He will, hopefully, read your position as proceeding from a reverence for life. I hope that is true.
The difficulty is that in denying women choice, you consign them to slavery. No one who lacks authority over their own body is more than a slave. If that is what happens to women again in this country, it will, among other things, ensure that the lowest man on the totem pole will always have someone to kick—or rape, and ensure that the woman will have to bear the consequences, no matter what. At least 25,000 women a year suffer those consequences.
So your reverence for the life of undifferentiated cells is offset by your disrespect for the lives of fully embodied women.
I challenge you to create a woman-friendly policy, one that does not sacrifice the welll-being of the mothers to the existence of a few cells that don't even have the capacity for consciousness. Human control over birth rates is crucial for the planet's well-being.
If so-called pro-lifers were really anti-abortion, they would be promoting birth control instead of fighting it.
The morning after pill doesn't even work when a woman is pregnant. It is a preventive, not a remedy. Why aren't you promoting it?
I know I’ll be open to the charge that critiquing Bill Moyers is as pointless as it is repetitious. Moyers is relentlessly hostile to pro-lifers, “the religious right” (which is anybody to Moyers’ right), and to ordinary commonsense. Why bother talking about the April 30 encomium he offered on his program, "NOW, with Bill Moyers," to the “March for Women’s Lives"?