Protestants and Abortion

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abortion, Christian Life Commission, March for Life, Mark Tooley, Presbyterian, Protestants, Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist Convention, United Church of Christ, United Methodist

(Photo credit: Catholic Philly)

By Mark Tooley (@MarkDTooley)

Last week about 100,000 or more marched in the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. This year they commemorated 40 years since the 1973 Supreme Court decision constitutionalizing abortion on demand.

Supporting the march and the pro-life cause were leaders of America’s two largest religious communions, the 68 million-member Roman Catholic Church and the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Meanwhile, agencies for the third largest, the United Methodist Church, crafted a news release virtually celebrating Roe v. Wade. But 40 years ago, both Southern Baptists and United Methodists, at least officially, backed abortion rights.

A recent analysis from Baptist Press, the official news service for the Southern Baptist Convention, recalled that their 1971 convention had backed laws permitting abortion in cases such as “rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” So the Southern Baptists essentially endorsed abortion on demand. A Baptist Press report two years later after Roe enthused that the court decision had “advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and justice.”

The head of the Southern Baptist public policy agency in the 1970s, then called the Christian Life Commission, backed government-funded abortions and supported, along with United Methodists and other Protestant denominational agencies, the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights. By the late 1970s, conservative Southern Baptists, alarmed that their church was following the liberal path of Mainline Protestants, began to organize their eventually successful ascendancy over the convention. In 1980, the Southern Baptist Convention backed a constitutional amendment banning abortion except to save the mother’s life. In 1988, conservative Richard Land became the new head of the Christian Life Commission, replacing a pro-abortion rights liberal. At the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wadein 2003, the Southern Baptist Convention repentantly declared: “[W]e lament and renounce statements and actions by previous Conventions and previous denominational leadership that offered support to the abortion culture.”

“I feel good that Southern Baptists are the most pro-life denomination of any size in the country,” Land recently told Baptist Press. “But I don’t feel good in the sense that I think we should always be doing more to help people understand the pro-life issue and how it relates not only to abortion but to euthanasia and end-of-life issues, which, of course, are going to become a more and more compelling issue in the immediate decades ahead.” Land is retiring this year as head of his church’s public policy agency after 25 years.

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention had 11.8 million members. Today it has just over 16 million. In 1971 the United Methodist Church had 10.5 million members, and today it has 7.5 million in the U.S. Some conservative Southern Baptists credit the abortion issue for motivating many conservatives in their battle for governance of the church, which conservatives had largely won by the late 1980s.

United Methodism first officially addressed abortion at its 1970 General Conference, when it backed abortion rights after a 20-minute debate among delegates. “The equality of our lives is increasingly threatened as the exploding population growth places staggering burdens upon societies unable to solve even their present growth problems,” it declared when urging state legislatures to permit abortion “upon request.” An earlier draft, proposed by the church’s Board of Social Concerns, but not approved, had even asserted that the “fetus is not a person, but rather tissue, with the potentiality in most cases for becoming a person, also recognizing that personhood is not possible without physical form.”

Fiercely opposing the abortion rights stance at the 1970 General Conference was the church’s then most distinguished theologian, Albert Outler of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who later warned: “How long can we meaningfully say that all men are created equal while the innocent unborn are sacrificed to personal whim, convenience, or that new test of Americanism in our increasingly technological and impersonal age: The qualification of being perfect, or being wanted, or being viable?”

The 1972 United Methodist General Conference acknowledged the “sanctity of unborn human life,” while claiming that “in continuity with past Christian teaching, we recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion.” In 1973, after Roe v. Wade, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and United Methodist Women’s Division helped to found the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, which remained headquartered in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill for 20 years. After a close vote at the 1992 General Conference that nearly withdrew the church from the abortion coalition, it relocated to new space. It also eventually changed its name to the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Episcopal, Presbyterian Church (USA), and United Church of Christ agencies still belong to it. Mostly using the churches’ names as a façade, it gets little if any church funding, instead relying on secular liberal philanthropies.

Last year’s United Methodist General Conference was prepared to accept a committee recommendation to withdraw from the abortion coalition until a legislative logjam and liberal maneuvers prevented a floor vote. In 2000, the United Methodist Church did oppose partial-birth abortion and has over the years backed other limits on abortion. But the church agencies belonging to the abortion coalition remain uncompromisingly pro-abortion rights. For Roe v. Wade’s 40^th anniversary, they expressed no sadness over the more than 50 million abortions since 1973.

Instead, officials for the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and United Methodist Women’s Division jointly declared: “In the wilderness of political posturing and divisive blaming and shaming, we seek to be a voice crying out to prepare the way for the Lord to bring about a new era of reproductive justice for our families and communities. We actively await the realization of God’s Kingdom on earth, a kingdom in which all pregnancies are intended, sexuality is safe and celebrated, and families are healthy and secure.”

In contrast to likening abortion rights to the Kingdom of God, Southern Baptist spokesman Richard Land surmised: “I won’t feel ‘good’ — in the sense of good with quotation marks around it — until every Southern Baptist is pro-life and honors the Baptist Faith and Message commitment to defend ‘the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.’”

As Africans and U.S. evangelicals gain a majority within the United Methodist Church, the abortion rights stance almost certainly will fall. And someday soon, United Methodists may formally repent of their past, long-time official support for unrestricted abortion on demand.

 

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Emergent Christianity Comes to Memphis

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atonement, authority, Barton Gingerich, Bible, Brian McLaren, Christianity, Church, conference, Emergence, emergence Christianity, emergent, evangelical, Evangelicals, mainline, Memphis, neo-monastic, philosophy, Phyllis Tickle, postmodern, Protestant, Protestants, religion, theology

Writer Phyllis Tickle praised McLaren’s iconoclastic contributions to religious dialogue. (Photo Credit: Flickr)

At a national gathering on emergence Christianity (their term, not ours), noted writer Phyllis Tickle compared Brian McLaren’s Mere Orthodoxy to Luther’s 95 Theses and St. Anselm of Canterbury to an Islamist imam. The grandmotherly guru of post-evangelical Christianity was the star of the conference, sharing her characteristically saucy humor at her home parish of St. Mary’s in Memphis. She joined nearly four hundred attendees, including such luminaries as Tony Jones, Brian McLaren, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lauren Winner, and Doug Pagitt. A keen observer and chronicler of what she calls “the Great Emergence,” Tickle identified possible obstacles for the emergent movement to tackle in the coming years.

The founding editor of the Religion Department of Publisher’s Weekly explained, “What began as a conversation has become a movement…It won’t stay that way…What we’re talking about is a new tributary of Christianity.” Tickle instructed that, every five hundred years, Western civilization (especially members of Latinized Christianity) “goes through a rummage sale” and experiences significant paradigm shifts in all of life. “In the last forty years, things are starting to come apart,” she observed. She spent hours narrating an intellectual history of science, mathematics, politics, philosophy, and theology. She highlighted the breakdown of certainty, the erosion of authority to individualism, and especially the apparent downfall of Protestant biblical inerrancy. While the nimble and progressive emergence movement is perfectly situated to ride the relevance wave in the coming decades, more reactionary elements will experience a “realignment”—she mentioned that John Piper and Tim Keller are among the leaders of this countermovement. Ultimately, she foretold a “coming age of the Spirit,” in which dogmatic orthodoxy and claims to absolute truth (outdated artifacts from the ages of the Father and the Son) would melt before a loving communion of uncertainty.

Tickle offered important recommendations for emergent Christians. First, she intoned, “We need to address the authority issue, and we don’t know have that answer yet.” Using literary theory, emergents have excelled in tearing down claims of authority over their lives. They consider the Magisterium, confessions, creeds, and inerrancy as inadequate—they believe one can live life in contradiction with most or all of these foundations. “Scripture will play a part. The Holy Spirit will have a role in establishing authority in emergence Christianity.” Earlier, she claimed, “Emergents…believe the Scripture is actually true. Most people in the pews want it to be factually true.” Tickle commended the group for avoiding the “arrogance…that God can be trapped in our understanding.” The emergent thinker labeled the Bible as “patriarchal” (“only a fool” would think otherwise), condemned the concept of a closed canon of Scripture, and still supports homosexuality even though “the Bible is not in favor of homosexuality—it just isn’t. The approval is not there.”

Second, she advised, “You and I and our children and grandchildren are going to have to form a theology of religion.” Like many Christians, emergents struggle to be committed believers living alongside other people of earnest faith—all without falling into civil unrest. Nevertheless, the Episcopal lay woman criticized former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey for calling on European courts to address English courts who are attacking the religious liberty of Christians and caving in to Sharia law. Tickle preferred the opportunity to lump Islam into the Judeo-Christian stream, creating the category of “Abrahamics.” “Can we do that without universalism?” she inquired, “Christian universalism is an oxymoron looking for a place to park…We need something more than the elephant getting feeled up by the five blind Hindus [sic].”

The noted speaker also contended, “We need to devise a new doctrine of the atonement.” Informing the audience that there are at least six kinds of atonement theory, she excoriated the penal substitutionary view of redemption. This “bloody sacrifice” approach is the evangelical staple, teaching that Christ took upon God’s wrath against Law-breaking sinners upon himself as a substitute, thus purchasing grace and mercy for believers. “It won’t play anymore,” Tickle stated. She traced this view back to the broader satisfaction theory of St. Anselm of Canterbury. According to her revision, after failing to stave off the First Crusade, Anselm decided to write his Cur Deos Homo to comfort soldiers doomed to die in the Holy Land. She audaciously analogized, “It was like the way some radical imams tell suicide bombers that, if they strap twenty grenades on and blow themselves up, they’ll get twenty virgins in paradise.” However, emergents have so deconstructed this view of redemption and its offshoots that they have lost a coherent explanation for the Incarnation and crucifixion.

Finally, Tickle warned her peers, “For the first time in history, we don’t know what a man is.” Setting him apart for thinking, memory, emotional affiliation with a tribe, and language have all fallen away to scientific research. Moreover, drugs can change someone into a completely different person. She rhetorically pondered, “Maybe I’m just a wash of chemical over neurons in my head.” In short, Tickle outlined that contemporary men do not know what a soul is. She concluded that end of life issues, abortion, capital punishment, robotics, transhumanism, and other questions of personhood cannot be addressed until this question of the soul finds an answer.

Regardless, Phyllis Tickle has high hopes for the emergent movement. She deemed that Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy functions like the Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses (albeit without the ensuing papal bulls and peasant revolts). If McLaren truly is of similar stature to Martin Luther (a doubtful point), then perhaps Tickle is most like Martin Bucer: granting identity, unity, and self-awareness to a disruptive movement. However, instead of a reform for the entire Western Church, Tickle generally addresses dysfunctional Protestants who have read too much Derrida. Whereas Bucer strove to tie together Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Calvinism; Tickle attempts to unite such disparate chords as the neo-monastics, oldline “hyphenateds,” and the non-denominational “emerging.” Even if emergent Christianity’s presence is so far relegated to the bywaters of Anglo-America, the emergents themselves think highly of their matron.

Bart Gingerich is a research assistant with the Institute on Religion and Democracy. You can follow him on Twitter at @bjgingerich.

Religion and Voters in 2012

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2012 Elections, @TheIRD, Evangelicals, God Gap, Institute on Religion and Democracy, IRD Blog, Mark Tooley, Mitt Romney, Protestants

(Photo credit: Talking Points Memo)

By Mark Tooley

Whatever the reasons for Mitt Romney’s defeat and Barack Obama’s victory, it cannot be faulted on traditional religious voters, who seem to have voted in force.

As predicted in a pre-election Pew polls and elsewhere, traditional Catholics and evangelicals seem to have repeated their 2004 high water of support for the Republican presidential nominee. Exit polls showed that white evangelicals, who were 26 percent of total voters, rehashed their 2004 level of support for George W. Bush, supporting Romney by 79 percent to 21 percent. In 2004 white evangelicals were 23 percent of the electorate, sparking fears of impending theocracy by some on the Left.

Exit polling revealed Protestants and other Christians (including evangelicals and Mainline Protestants of all races plus presumably Eastern Orthodox), who made up 53 percent of the electorate, voted 42 percent for Obama and 57 percent for Romney. A poll more strictly confined to Protestants shows they favored Romney 62 to 37 percent. White Protestant and other Christians, comprising 39 percent of the total, favored Romney 69 to 30 percent. Weekly Protestant church attenders favored Romney 70 percent to 29 percent.

A pre-election Pew poll showed most Catholics supporting Romney. The exit poll showed Catholics, who were 25 percent of the electorate, voting 50 percent for Obama and 48 percent for Romney. But weekly mass attending Catholics supported Romney by 57 to 42 percent. And white Catholics, comprising 18 percent of the total, supported Romney by 59 to 40 percent, a greater percentage than their 2004 support for Bush. Weekly church-goers of all churches, who comprised 42 percent of the electorate, supported Romney by 59 to 39 percent.

Read more here.

“Queering” the Pentecostals

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charismatic, Institute on Religion and Democracy, IRD Blog, Julia Polese, LGBT, pentecostals, Protestants, sexuality

(Photo Credit: The Pew Forum)

By Julia Polese

Mainline Protestants in liberal-led denominations are long used to advocacy of GLBT causes.  But is this advocacy now even in generally conservative Pentecostalism?   Seemingly so, based on presentations at the Society of Pentecostal Studies (SPS) gathering at, ironically, Pat Robertson’s Regent University earlier this year.

The SPS is an academic organization “dedicated to providing a forum of discussion for all academic disciplines as a spiritual service to the kingdom of God.” Started in 1970, the SPS is the oldest academic society in the charismatic movement and was founded principally to serve the mission of the Pentecostal church worldwide. Pentecostals and charismatics take up a unique place in the world of evangelicalism. While charismatic denominations like the Assemblies of God and the World Church of God in Christ are not known for their liberalism, Pentecostalism has birthed its fair share of heresies. The Oneness movement – a Modalist aberrance that imitates the Sabellians of old by denying the three persons of God in favor of three modes – grew out of charismatic circles.  And some charismatics are associated with the “Word of Faith” movement that has birthed many a televangelist.  However, the SPS seems to have been established as a means to counteract this tendency in Pentecostalism. Applying rigorous academic study to a movement occasionally plagued by fideism is commendable, especially as it continues to grow exponentially in South America and Africa.

This year, the SPS Meeting was held in March at Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach The theme was “Pentecostalisms, Peacemaking, and Social Justice/Righteousness.” Papers covered a variety of historical, theological, and philosophical themes unique to the world of Pentecostalism including “Willing to Know: Searching for Inspiration in the Epistemological Approaches of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus and Blaise Pascal” and “African Pentecostal Biblical Hermeneutics: How Do ‘Ordinary African Pentecostals’ Read / Interact with the Bible?” Two papers in particular, however, seemed a bit out of the ordinary for the Pentecostal movement at large.

In “Queer Tongues Confess, ‘I Know, That I Know, That I Know’:  A Queer Reading of James K.A. Smith’s Thinking In Tongues,” Jared Vazquez of Philips Theological Seminary argues that the Twentieth Century hermeneutics of suspicion initiated by Freud, Marx and Nietzsche and continued by Foucault and Derrida later is the  pentecostal (small ‘P’) hermeneutic. He argues that “queering” theology is natural for charismatics because “queer model or methodology is similar in metaphor to speaking in tongues, phenomenologically, epistemologically, and affectively. If Pentecostals speak in tongues and subvert language, queers embrace embodiment that subverts social norms.” The paper is general Foucault and Derrida, peppered with words like “deconstruction” and “transgression” and phrases like: “Thus our work begins first by deflecting textual violence, then outing the text, and finally befriending the text.” But it argues that this hermeneutic is natural to the charismatic experience and should be embraced by those seeking to affirm homosexuality in the church.

Another paper that engaged how sexuality is viewed within Pentecostal circles was Queen’s University’s Pamela M. S. Holmes’ “’Can We Find A Way To Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting About It?’  One Pentecostal’s Response to Brian D. McLaren.”  Her arguments are largely experiential, beginning with her personal testimony about growing up in Canadian Pentecostalism with a mother who had been divorced and then remarried and continuing with her story about considering abortion when she and her husband became pregnant at an inconvenient time in their lives. Using Nietzsche’s preferred genealogical approach to history, Holmes reproduces McLaren’s exploration of the discontents of “Greco-Roman narrative with its dualistic frameworks including a distinction between the real and the ideal” regarding sexuality. Proving there’s nothing new under the Sun, McLaren betrays himself as a run-of-the-mill progressive, arguing that while God does not change, the Old Testament records reveal only the Israelite tribe’s understanding of him as a “a warring and vengeful tribal god…who demanded that enemies be wiped out.” Only as humanity “matured” could the true, loving nature of God be revealed. Thus, Holmes argues, it falls to us, who, presumably are even more mature than the people of the New Testament, to question the “heteronormativity” of our predecessors and, in a Foucaultian fashion, to reveal and deconstruct the power behind traditional ideas of homosexuality in the church.

Though these approaches may be shocking to the charismatic community, they are not new. The intellectual heritage of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida even touches the Pentecostals. Vazquez and Holmes begin with experience and try to make Scripture conform to their arbitration of what is good.

J.I. Packer wrote about the growing differences of authority in the 1950’s in “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God. Evangelicals take Scripture alone as the final authority, Catholics, Scripture and Tradition, and, responding to the intellectual trends at the time, Packer explains that modernists take empiricism as their final authority, discounting all supernatural events recorded in Scripture. Updated for today, the hermeneutic of suspicion still makes the individual skeptic the final authority, but now the individual does not even stand on solid ground. While I might argue that Pentecostalism is, in fact, epistemologically more responsive to this sort of interpretation with its affirmation of continuing personal revelation in the form of the spiritual gifts, these trends can be seen across the theological board. It is truly kowtowing to the spirit of the age over the authority of God’s revealed word. Progressive hermeneutics like Vazquez’s or the process theologians at Claremont could not exist without the development of post-modern interpretations and their myriad discontents.

What orthodoxy needs to stem this flow is an understanding of biblical epistemology. What does Scripture tell us about what it means to “know”? If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, how do we respond to the process theologians of the world? It is a charge for members of the Society for Pentecostal Studies and others to form robust responses to these ideas that understand their origin and the roots of their departure from biblical understanding.

 

How to Write about Evangelicals Rejecting the Religious Right

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abortion, Activism, Creation Care, Evangelicals, GOP, Institute on Religion and Democracy, IRD Blog, Jonathan Merritt, Luke Moon, Pew Research, Politics, Protestants, Q Ideas, Religious Right, Young Evangelicals

By Luke Moon

Are you a young evangelical who is tired of the “culture wars?” Are you the son of a famous Evangelical leader often associated with the Religious Right? Are you looking to write a article or blog about how “your generation” is abandoning partisanship and especially any connection to the Religious Right or the Republican Party?  Here is a simple Style Guide that will help you effectively make your case.

1.  Start your introductory paragraph stating how young Evangelicals are abandoning the partisan politics of the Religious Right. It is best to describe how the Religious Right has been largely unsuccessful and how it has hurt the image of the Christians in general. In no way can you allow your affinity for the Religious Left to be exposed. Therefore, always claim to be “Kingdom centered”.

2.  Explain how Evangelicals have finally moved beyond the bloody battles over abortion and homosexuality. If you can’t find a picture of abortion clinic protestors holding signs of an aborted fetus or, better yet, a pack of folks from Westboro Baptist Church with signs stating God’s hatred for gay people you can use a picture of people praying.

Contrast all of those old Evangelicals by explaining how new Evangelicals are now moving on to more enlightened and important issues like global warming (creation care), immigration (DREAM Act), and supporting government poverty programs (Circle of Protection). The reader must be persuaded to ignore the issues being embraced by the young Evangelicals are the same issues the mainstream media, Jon Stewart, and the Democratic Party think are important too.

3.  Use outdated stats from Pew or Barna to prove the sad state of affairs facing Republicans because their decline Evangelical support base. Pew Research Center has some really great data showing that from 2001 to 2007 support for the GOP among young evangelicals declined by 15% over that time period. Do not use the newer Pew study that found 82% of young white evangelical registered voters favor the GOP.

4.  Attack James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Richard Land or any other Christian leader who has actually taken a stand on an important cultural issue that can be associated with the Religious Right. Be sure to ignore Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, which you have no doubt memorized, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.”

5.  Conclude by describing how this new and improved non-confrontational non-affiliated, non-committed version of Evangelicalism will save the Church.

You can do all this, or simply read Jonathan Merritt’s column in USA Today.