My Long Wade with Roe

I was born in 1974.  

One year after the 7-2 Supreme Court decision siding with Roe that the State of Texas’ abortion ban was unconstitutional. 

I grew up in the cultural phenomenon known as the Christian Right, a.k.a. the Moral Majority.  This movement started before me and Roe.  It began out of resentment and fear over racial integration during the civil rights movement.  This is where the right’s contempt for “Activist Judges” originated.  These judges were messing with the proper order and ranking of human bodies and it felt ungodly.  The massive uptick in private Christian schools was motivated by fear of our country’s meddling with the god of white-Cristo-supremacist-patriarchy.  But the crusade to maintain the God ordained society under the standardizing white protestant male needed a better banner than racism. 

 

Perhaps even more scary than society’s imminent collapse from race-mixing was the terrifying prospect of women having agency and authority without male oversight.  “Women making decisions all by themselves!?"  An ominous musical score plays.  Foreboding Blood Moons appear. The Sun goes dark. The Earth melts.  Enter now to the stage a redirected concern for the unborn.  It came at just the right time and was a highly successful mobilizing foil for galvanizing political and cultural power.  The pro-life movement was born. 

Over the past fifty years, this network of various denominations of Christians was bolstered and held together by this unifying fight for life. Overturning Roe was a mission symbolizing all moral well-being.  I mean, how could anyone possibly have anything valuable or true to say if they supported the killing of babies?  Abortion rights and their providers exemplified the epitome of moral self-deception, decadence, and the hatred of all that is holy.

I grew up learning that society’s evils were caused by activist judges, femi-nazi’s, free-love hippies, and God-hating liberals inside the US, and of course, the Communists everywhere encroaching from the outside.  My foreign policy imagination was formed by the movie “Red Dawn” (1984, starring Patrick Swayze).  My domestic policy was informed by Rush Limbaugh, every evening during his 30 minute fireside chat television show.  My theological imagination was captured by the rapturing 1970s “Thief in the Night” movies — a precursor to Tim LaHaye's “Left Behind” empire of Christian vengeance porn.

This very scary world was held in stark contrast to an ever-growing and popular evangelical expansion.  It was an alternative cultural society complete with its own publishing companies, colleges, camps, conferences, schools, media, music, and art?.  To be a member in this world gave you meaning, purpose, belonging, and a passport to move freely and excel within its own self-contained sub-culture.  It felt right and good so long as you remained within its heavily policed boundaries. Boundaries for our own protection of course, but also obscured from view. The high walls were painted like the sky across a vast illusion of a sea, like in the movie “The Truman Show”.  It was a totalizing frame of reality which I was taught was The Biblical World View.  A view that can and should be imposed on others as an act of love.  It was love because everyone else didn’t know any better.  They were the Lost.  Those who had a veil of lies covering their eyes. 

In this world, the pro-life movement undergirded an evangelical’s self-understanding as America’s righteous remnant.  A small group enduring persecution for righteousness' sake, but who would ultimately inherit the kingdom of God.  Even as the evangelical movement has fractured, frayed, and been exposed in endless scandals, one of its few surviving identity markers is being pro-life.  It is a critical Jenga piece holding up what remains of its meaning and belonging system.  To touch it is existentially jeopardizing and terrifying.  Waffling on abortion will get you immediately canceled, shunned, and shamed. 

Growing up pro-life was the only political organizing that was known to me.  Marches for life meant picketing Planned Parenthood and supporting Crisis Pregnancy Centers.  Being pro-life did not mean marching for sensible gun laws, the abolition of the death penalty, universal health care, livable wages, humane immigration, banning torture, ending nuclear proliferation, or stopping police brutality against black and brown bodies.  Rather, organizing the march for life happened once a year around the anniversary of Roe as our public prayer to overturn America’s sin.  It was also accompanied by the Pastor’s annual sermon on how life began at conception and the self-evident corruption of this society’s love affair with abortions.  I remember every election season people in our church parking lot would hand out colorful voting guides to help us vote for pro-life candidates. It was the only issue that mattered. And it was and continues to be a single issue exceedingly easy to exploit for voter turnout. 

This political mobilization strategy expanded in the past several decades to a larger umbrella called family values.  Included with the sanctity of life, is the fight for the sanctity of marriage, the criminalization of parents raising Trans kids, not saying Gay, and the fight against teaching American history that includes the perspective of its First Nations and African Slaves.  The larger umbrella reveals the original motivation of the movement as inherently racist, supremacist, and patriarchal.  This however is completely obscured by those feeling the urgency to mobilize for these values. The refrain goes like this…“I am not racist, supremacist, or patriarchal. I am being faithful, biblical, and obedient to God!”

I don’t hear evangelicals talk as much about moral relativity as we did when I was growing up.  “The ends never justify the means”. This was a proverb that pretty much held the weight of scripture.  We believed in moral absolutes and that is what set us apart.  We were not like those Hollywood elites constantly shoving all kinds of relative propaganda and debauchery in our faces.  Our heroes are the football coaches praying on the high school field with the guys.  Godly mentors who instill traditional values of honor, loyalty, sanctity, and respect for authority. The Clintons were the face of everything wrong with America in the 90s.  And Bill’s sexual escapades and abuses of power exposed a corrupt leader morally unfit for office.

It is difficult to be an evangelical in America.  Constantly feeling shamed and blamed by “the Media”.  The punch line of late-night comedians. Scorned by liberal mainline churches in decline, who are probably just jealous of our multi-site ever-expanding ministries.  It is hard to endlessly have your faithfulness misunderstood as bigotry, anti-science, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and hate.  White evangelicals consistently poll as believing that they face more discrimination than other groups in America.  To be an evangelical is to assume that you will be misunderstood, targeted, and discriminated against.  The experience of persecution is believed to be the necessary burden and cross that this version of Christianity requires.  The good and faithful servant awards may never be received in this life, but they will for sure come in the next.  This often makes the evangelical’s experience of persecution a self-reinforcing form of validation.

It has been an especially challenging six years for evangelicals.  They have had to shoulder the responsibility for electing Donald Trump into office.  They have had to rationalize to themselves and everyone else the glaring hypocrisy of backing and electing a morally corrupt and greedy sexual assaulting narcissistic dictatorial charlatan into the highest office.  They have experienced some of their closest friends and relatives interrogate them and even leave their churches over their political stand.  81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 75% did it again in 2020.   

It is true that many evangelicals worship Donald Trump as a kind of messianic figure, but many more held their noses as they voted.  They were voting for new Supreme Court justices.  That’s at least what they told themselves. This was the moment to finally correct the court of its activist judges.  It was a “God works in mysterious ways” moment.  An answer to five decades of prayers moment.  A moment when we could say to the towering mountainous precedent of Roe, “be cast into the sea!”  Could the mustard seed faith of evangelicals finally come to fruition?  Could it be “for such a time as this?”

The leaked Supreme Court draft overturning Roe is an identity boost that evangelicals critically need right now.  More than if it actually gets overturned, the draft alone provides the necessary justification for evangelical moral relativity.  The harsh internal disequilibrium that they have had to endure the past several years can find a measure of revisionist resolve.  “God’s ways are higher than my ways.” Is what an evangelical can say, when they cannot say, “maybe the ends do justify the means?”  

The overturning of Roe helps a battered evangelical say, “I did not need to second guess myself.”  And “Our cause really is righteous and just.” And “I am playing for the right team.” And most importantly, “I am a baby saver.”

“I am a Baby Saver.“ 

This is a noble legacy. 

“I Saved Babies” is something you can put on your tombstone.  

Whereas, “I saved White-Supremacist-Patriarchy”…???

A faithful evangelical tried to explain it to me this way:  

“We may not like the pilot, but we like where the plane is going.” 

Where is that plane going exactly that feels so right that you would vote for someone so wrong?  

It was the same kind of rationalization in Alabama.  Disgraced Judge Roy Moore thought he could win the senate seat, even after being exposed for sexual misconduct with at least 9 teenage girls.  Moore was running as the family values candidate.  It is absolutely absurd.  And the absurdity provides a kind of apocalypse if you allow it.  An unveiling of the truth for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.  People like Roy Moore and Donald Trump can win the support of “family value voters” because although they are not moral exemplars, they simply do not threaten the Moral Order of the Universe.  

Those holding to a belief that there is a Divine Moral Order reflexively see that as being Patriarchal. Evangelicals will refer to it as God’s Creational Design. And this designed patriarchal ordering gets conflated into a concept called Family Values.  In patriarchy, you must maintain a strict gender binary.  There cannot be any queering of any kind because all bodies must be categorized, ordered, and ranked under a man. To be a man is not to be a woman, or Gay, Trans, Non-Binary, or Intersex. In America, we have a very entrenched kind of patriarchal ranking system.  It is white. It is Christian. It is heteronormative. It is cis-gendered, colonizing, capitalistic, and supremacist.  Donald Trump and Roy Moore simply do not threaten the American Patriarchy.  Threaten the patriarchy and the unilateral power dynamics of the entire universe will unravel.  Is there a climate crisis?  Well, it cannot be as threatening as offending the god of Patriarchy who could rain down judgment like Sodom at any moment. The supposed God that blesses America is Patriarchal. And HE demands the maintanence of that Patriachy in order for His beneficence to trickle down to the likes of you and me.

Roy Moore sexually assaulted girls.  Girls however are lower in the design order below men, so his sin does not immediately disqualify him.  And in the face of candidates who are challenging the white-Cristo-supremacist-cis-heteropatriarchy, Roy and Donald are men who will uphold it.  This is why Donald Trump can repeatedly say of himself “That no one has done more for Christianity than me.”  Donald or Roy may not be someone’s favorite moral pilot, but they will surely keep the Moral Order plane in the air for a little while longer.  This is why I believe evangelicals could stomach voting as they did.  It was not because they are pro-life above all else.  It is because their true image of God, the one standing behind the Jesus curtain that they worship, is a white god, a supremacist god, a patriarchal god, and a violent god. Their god is a Moral-Order-Warrior demanding the violent defense of the golden idol of family values.  And they bowed down.

I lost my good evangelical credentials almost as soon as I started as a pastor.  I remember my first year in 2005.  Christmas Day was going to fall on a Sunday.  I polled the congregation to see if we would prefer celebrating Christmas Day with our friends and families, rather than in the church building?  Would we be satisfied with the Christmas Eve service the night before?  Most affirmed and our church had its first Sunday off in 107 years.  

I did receive one dismayed letter from a Dear Saint announcing that they would be leaving the church over this.  The letter read… “No church on Christmas? What’s next ABORTIONS!?”

I did prove to be a slippery slope out of evangelicalism.  We ordain women.  We ordain queer folk.  We marry gay couples and even will perform straight weddings.  We march for black lives and support spouses needing a divorce.  And yes, I believe that access to abortion is ethical and just.  I believe that sometimes an abortion is the most loving option available and that those laboring with these decisions are in the best position to make them and should be granted the full agency and ability to do so.  

The WWJD bracelet came after my adolescents.  But What-Would-Jesus-Do became the moral rubric for evangelicals for a good while.  Probably until Lance Armstrong’s “Live Strong” bracelets were no longer in vogue because of his doping scandals.  I do not think ethical wisdom can be reduced to contextless right and wrong choices, but I will try to bring the ending of Roe into a WWJD frame of reference. I apologize upfront if this causes you to earnestly pray for my soul’s salvation.

Q: Do I believe Jesus would drive someone across state lines in order to get a safe and legal abortion? 

A: I believe Jesus would do more than drive.  I believe Jesus would cover all the expenses.  Well, I believe that Jesus would at the very least make the rich dude cover all the expenses.  It would be far better though if Jesus wasn’t needed to drive or pay in this scenario at all. That driving across state lines is back on the table is an absolutely ridiculous breach of justice. It’s wrong. 

We need to update our love thy neighbor and love is the fulfillment of the law parables for today. I believe the Good Samaritan might look like someone walking in solidarity with all pregnant humans.  I want all those the priests have disdained, the politicians scapegoated, and the judges ruled against, to have a good friend accompany them to the Planned Parenthood appointment.  And hear that friend reassure them with these words, “I am with you. I will support you. This is your decision, and no one else’s. God has given you the authority to decide when and if your body brings another human into this world. So, remember that I love you, God loves you, and She honors you and your decisions, and so do I.”

Maybe you need to throw dust in the air or rip your clothes over the scandal.  But I learned early on from Michael Card’s 1986 album “Scandalon”.  Michael Card, the one who would submit all of his lyrics to his church Elder Team for prior approval.  Michael Card, and apparently his Elders agreed, that Jesus “will be the Truth that will offend them one and all. A stone that makes men stumble and a rock that makes them fall.”  But beyond songs that quote Bible verses, I can hear Jesus saying frankly that “those who have and will need abortions, are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”  

Jesus did not offend many Lost people.  He did offend religious people.  And to the tribe that raised me…who reflexively quotes Paul in saying that we are the worst of all sinners, but continue to live Lording it over others with the blindness of our own self-righteousness: We need Jesus to offend us out of worshiping the god of the American patriarchy.

I have a great deal of compassion for how my transgressing of evangelical boundaries feels betraying, threatening, and scandalizing.  These boundaries provide an entire life, a sense of security, and a group in which to belong. This kind of tampering can feel absolutely unmooring.  For which, I can only be a witness to my own story and testify that there is an entire life outside of that small construction of reality.  There are new communities of people that provide generative, wise, and enduring friendships, as well as, a flourishing relationship with the Creator of Love waiting for you.  But yes, there is often a long and lonely space between.  It is not easy being an evangelical and it can often feel harder to have been one.

I do believe Jesus is really there in the Truman Show which is evangelicalism.  We tend to be so focused on winning people into it, however, that we miss Jesus inviting us out. 

This is not to say that if you follow Jesus, then you will come to the same convictions as me.  But I do believe that as a movement, evangelicals have been convinced that they are enlisted in a righteous mission to save babies and I think that is a foil. It is an unmarked grave. I have found it to be a movement co-opted into upholding some of the world’s most devastating and unjust systems of power while calling it faithfulness to God and the Bible.  But I also believe in the good news.  I believe in repenting and turning for the kingdom of God is already among us. I believe that Jesus is right here with you and me, ready to lead us out of this death-yard into new flourishing life.

"Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." (Ephesians 5:14)

Do Justice, Love Mercy, and Walk Humbly... (Micah 6:8)

~David