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Philistines and Pharisees, Pt. 2: Acceptable Crimes

Staunch opponents of abortion often declare that abortion is murder. They believe that life begins at conception, and therefore terminating a pregnancy at any point amounts to taking a human life.

If indeed abortion is murder, then it follows that no pregnancy can be terminated, regardless of the circumstances, since there is no such thing as “justifiable murder.” Homicide refers to the taking of a human life, and there are many legal definitions of justifiable homicide (one will be argued in the Trayvon Martin shooting). But murder by definition is the unlawful premeditated killing of one human by another. It is never legal.

It is difficult to imagine the anguish of a rape victim who is asked to give birth to her assailant’s child. But if abortion is indeed murder, then the crime of rape does not excuse the crime of murder, and the birth must take place.

Most Americans agree that abortions should be legal for rape and incest victims. A recent survey indicated that only 22% of Amercians would ban abortions in those cases. The Republican Party has taken the position in their party platform that all abortions should be outlawed in all cases.

Most anti-abortion candidates for high office would allow abortions under certain circumstances. This is bad logic, but good politics. Politicians must appeal to a diverse electorate. Advocating the strictest interpretation of abortion means alienating a large percentage of voters. However, if you oppose abortion in some cases but not all, then abortion is merely homicide–and in some cases, it is justifiable homicide. Suddenly the moral imperative to ban abortion disappears. When the cause of the pregnancy is deemed too abhorent, then abortion is okay. This is moral relativism. It is the position of the Pharisees.

The Philistines have their own viewpoint on abortion, and it is no more intellectually stable than the Pharisees’. They argue that life does not begin at conception, but at some later point during the pregnancy. If you kill a baby moments after it is born, that is murder most horrible. And probably two months before birth is also reprehensible. But maybe five months is okay. No crime. No guilt. They don’t want to deal with the clear fact that once conception begins, a human being will surely result unless action is taken to prevent it. Devising arbitrary concepts of “when a person becomes a person” is semantics, not ethics.

Christians are not called to be moral relativists. Successful politicians must be. Christians don’t believe that “the end justifies the means”, but that is part of politics. Now, of course there are many Christian politicians: most people in Congress would identify themselves as Christians. But for the most part they end up acting like Pharisees, because they want to legislate human behavior without applying the teachings of Christ. “Do not resist an evil man…turn the other cheek” isn’t good national defense. More importantly, it won’t get you elected. There are plenty of clear directives from Jesus that Christians are called to follow, but they are deemed too unrealistic to actually be implemented in real life. As Captain Barbosa would say, “it’s more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

Hence, the world doesn’t change.

In 2004, when the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became known, imagine what would have happened if America’s evangelical leaders had called a news conference to announce publicly and clearly that “Christians don’t torture.” The world would have taken notice, non-Christians would have gained a new appreciation of the faith and a moral tone would have been set for the nation.

But moral relativism means that often we behave in ways that serve our larger goals, or protect our interests (personal or national). Our prejudices and preferences also get in the way. American Christians promote firearms in ways that no other Christian society does. Our love of guns is obviously anithetical to the teachings of Christ. But if religion is merely rules, then we can still be good Christians if we follow the rules we create for ourselves–and impose on others.

Pharisees are all about rules. Philistines are all about uninhibted pursuit of selfish desires.

Jesus is all about love, compassion and sacrifice. Sacrifice! For strangers and enemies! Not too appealing to either Philistines or Pharisees. So instead they debate an issue like abortion where politics and situation ethics determine their positions, and both sides feel content that they are either protecting human rights or following God’s law. In the meantime, the Philistines ignore the fact that for most people this is an exercise in selfishness: they just want to have sex without consequences. And the Pharisees prefer to issue laws that dictate and control behavior, as if that ever worked in the past. As if laws can change the human heart.

Most people have heard of the Bible story that contains the line “Let whoever is without sin cast the first stone.”

That’s a tricky Bible story–so tricky that it’s not even included in many early versions of the New Testament. But it highlights the key distinction between the ways of the Pharisees and the way that Christians are called to act toward others. In the story, a woman has been caught in adultery. The Pharisees bring her to Jesus, which seems odd, since they would normally just judge and sentence her–to death by stoning. But the Bible says they bring the woman to Jesus “to test him, that they might have some charge against him.” They  knew that this Jesus fellow was likely to act in non-traditional ways. The hardliners wanted to show that Jesus wasn’t following the Law.

You know how the story goes. When Jesus confronted the Pharisees, they drifted away one by one, until just Jesus and the woman were left standing alone. He told her that he did not condemn her, but admonished her to “go, and sin no more.”

It’s much easier to judge people than to love them. It’s easier to engage in culture wars with Philistines, claiming they are destroying our Christian nation. But attraction works better than promotion. The way to change society is not by tacking the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall. The best way is to lead by example, to live a life that demonstrates God’s love. The Philistines are looking for something, and think they can find it by following the selfish desires of their hearts. They look at the Pharisees, who appear to be mean-spirited hypocrites, and the Philistines reject the only answer that will truly satisfy them: a selfless love that doesn’t judge others, but merely seeks to act as Jesus has clearly taught us to act.

In the meantime, Christian politicians refuse to denounce torture, allow widespread distribution of automatic weapons, modify their positions on abortion and tell people what they want to hear. Literally following the teachings of Jesus is just too doggone dangerous. And it won’t get you elected.

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you–but not what they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on peoples’ shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kindom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.”

From the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 23.