(This entry also posted at www.livejournal.com/community/abortiondebate.)
Jennifer Baumgardner, a noted feminist activist, has recently designed and marketed a t-shirt that has sparked an (inter)national response, becoming a lightning rod for the emotions that surround the abortion debate. The shirt simply declares:
I had an abortion.
Baumgardner created the t-shirt to “combat the stigma that still shames and silences those who have had an abortion” (for more on this see the article entitled “Full Frontal Offense” by Rebecca Hyman in bitch, Winter 2005). The goal is to radically personalise the abortion debate. “To be vocal about abortion – not by supporting an abstract 'freedom of choice,' but instead by naming abortion as a fact of women's experience – is thus to break the dual threat of political and public shaming that keeps women silent.” Of course there has been a rather mixed response to the shirt (to say the least!) – even with feminist circles.
So how should Christians who seek to journey in love relationships with the suffering and the marginalised respond to this shirt? I can deeply empathise with Baumgardner's desire to see shaming and silencing overcome. Too often Christians have damned others for engaging in activities that they disagree with thereby creating devastating structures of shame that result in deep hurt and brokenness.
Yet I cannot embrace abortion as a morally neutral (or positive) act. Not because I believe that the human fetus is a “person” from the point of conception or whatever. The point at which a fetus becomes human seems somewhat irrelevant to the debate (in part because it is insoluble). Rather abortion seems to clash with Christianity because Christianity is an affirmation of the goodness of creation and life. Conception begins a genuinely creative process that, at some point, creates new life. To terminate that process seems to be an act of hopelessness that contradicts, or at least misunderstands, the Christian hope.
As well Christians tend to miss the point of the cause of abortion. If the majority of abortions are performed for (1) financial reasons (the woman or the family is too poor to be able to sustain another child) and (2) health reasons (the fetus has displayed some sort of physical or mental disability) then Christians are called to commit themselves to journey in love relationships with the poor so that there is enough for everybody and (2) re-affirm, in both word and deed, the value and humanity of people with disabilities. If this were done the vast majority of abortions would be avoided altogether. A third category should be added, but I suspect this is the minority: (3) those who have abortions because they are pursuing wealth, power, and influence, and having a child would result in a major blow to these objectives. In response to (3) Christians should be modeling a commitment to radically different objectives such as peace, justice and reconciliation.
Of course there are always exceptions. We can all imagine nightmare scenarios where an abortion may be the best solution but even then it is not something Christians celebrate – rather they journey alongside the woman, grieving the tragedy she has experienced with her, and providing her with the strength and support to overcome.
So how does one hold this view of abortion and not contribute to the shaming and silencing of women who have abortions? The first step is recognising that as long as we don't journey alongside of the poor or affirm the humanity of the disabled, or live for radically different objectives, we are all complicit in the act of termination. The first step is taking personal responsibility, recognising how there were so little genuine alternatives available (certainly there are always options but how realistic, how genuine those options actually are can vary greatly).
The second step is to become an open and welcoming community to all those who engage in activities that Christians do not condone. This is somewhat complicated for it means being welcoming without sacrificing the genuine Christian vision or identity. It seems that contemporary Christians have mostly been unable to find the balance here. Either they drift too far to one extreme, developing a laissez-faire attitude to all things moral and adopting the “whatever works for you is the right thing” attitude that is so prevalant in our society. Or they drift too far to the other extreme and stigmatise and excommunicate those who engage in actions that the church cannot support. It is the second extreme that has come to shame and silence women who have abortions. Yet those who belong to the first extreme are equally complicit for developing a morality that contributes to an apathetic and self-absorbed lifestyle.
Simply put, Christians need to model communities where all are welcome to come as they are and openly share their experiences – whether that be things that have been done to them or things they have done themselves – and find a tender, loving embrace in response. Perhaps most importantly Christians are called to model God's forgiveness, announcing that God's love has broken into the world and cannot, and will not, be defeated. In this situation Christians are called to take suffering onto themselves, not impose suffering on others.
Therefore, although I empathise with Baumgardner's motives I will not buy her t-shirt. Often, in response to shaming we can go the extreme of reveling in the acts that have caused shame in an effort to overcome it. Indeed, much of the discussion revolving around individual rights seem to do just this. Individual rights is a brilliant way to avoid any sense of corporate responsibility. “I am entitled to security, to comfort, to self-fulfillment, therefore I don't have to plead the cause of the needy, I don't have to concern myself with where I spend my money…” and so on and so forth. I can't wear Baumgardner's shirt because abortion is the result of some grievous problems in society. I can't celebrate abortion because I can't celebrate the abandonment of the poor. I can't celebrate the dehumanisation of the disabled. I can't celebrate the pursuit of power, wealth and influence – and I certainly can't celebrate the rape of a teenage girl that results in pregnancy. What I can do is learn to love people the way that Jesus loved and not define them by certain acts. Why do we so often define people by one or two specific actions? Let us learn to see the beauty, the worth and the wonder that fill all people. When we see people in this way we will treasure them not damn them.

I will be completing a paper on hell/annihilation/universal salvation today. I'd like to post it here but I don't know how to do that without taking up a ton of space. Curious? Let me know and I'll email it to y'all – if I have your email address. If you do read it and want to question/comment it would be neat if you did so under this post (instead of emailing me) so that we could talk about it as a group.

In Romans 12.20, Paul writes,
Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath [of God], for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.
Whereas human vengeance is often motivated by hatred, God's vengeance is an act of love. Human vengeance is destructive, God's vengeance is creative. God's vengeance, while liberating the oppressed and healing the wounded, also brings restoration to the oppressors and liberates them from their acts of oppression. God's vengeance results in the new creation of all things. Thus Moltmann can write,
The 'Last Judgment' is not a terror… It is a source of endlessly consoling joy to know, not just that the murderers will not triumph over their victims, but that they cannot in eternity even remain the murderers of their victims.
That is why we are not to take vengeance into our own hands – we have profoundly misunderstood it and when we have taken it into our own hands cycles of violence, destruction and sin have only been perpetuated. This is why Paul goes on to say in Romans 12.21f,
“But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing so you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Evil is not overcome through human instruments of punishment and subjugation. Evil is overcome through the doing of the good, through a willingness to continue to suffer, through a refusal to hate and through the embrace of love. By living in such a way we become a witness to the final restoration and reconciliation of all things in Jesus. After all, Jesus is the Judge. Yet, as Hans Urs Von Balthazar says, Jesus crucified is the revelation of the Judge who puts himself on the side of the those who would damn themselves.
Let us leave vengeance to God. For in the consummation of the kingdom we just might discover that vengeance looks very little like the ways we have imagined it. Leaving vengeance to God is not waiting for those who have caused us suffering to finally be subjected to suffering. Rather leaving vengeance to God is waiting in hope for all to be liberated from brokenness, pain, and sorrow.

For Francis [of Assisi] religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love affair.
– G.K. Chesterton
And that's just what is lacking. Over and over I see Christians who relate to God like they relate to an idea. I see Christians who know God like they know math, physics, philosophy or any other area of knowledge. I see Christians who pray with rhetorical devices and formulas. What I rarely see are Christians who know God like they know a person. Christians who talk with God not just to or at God.
Increasingly I have begun to think that this is the problem that lies at the very root of the plethora of problems that exist within North American Christianity today. Ultimately, at the bottom of it all, North American Christians miss the mark because they've never truly known God. Despite all their talk about “personal relationship with Jesus” I wonder how many of them have actually met him.
But Francis was right – true religion is a love affair. It's passionate, it's intimate, it's genuinely knowing and being known. Without that intimacy, without that very real personal relationship, Christianity is bound to become twisted into perversion or wither into nothingness.
It is this relationship that lies at the heart of Christian mysticism. That's why C. Ringma can say that Christians in the West in the 21st-century will become mystics or cease being Christians. This is what Kierkegaard never grasped. “Mystics,” he said, “have not the patience to wait for the revelation of God.” Contra-Kierkegaard mystics are not those who give up on understanding. Rather they are those who are rooted in love relationship and are so grounded in trusting the one they love that they do not need a complete answer to everything. They possess the understanding that only intimacy grants. Kierkegaard would reduce God to a proposition. Of course, this only makes sense as relationships – interactions between the self and the other – are increasingly impossible within Kierkegaard's existentialist framework.
This is why I am also increasingly thinking that Christians need to stop trying so hard. Christians are involved in a mass of activities seeking to transform the world, bring the kingdom of God, build the church, etc., etc., etc. But, outside of genuine relationship, these activities will be futile, like matches struck in a midnight thunderstorm. A flash of light, the smell of smoke, then darkness and rain, darkness and rain, darkness and rain.
The first thing Christians should do is cry out to God. Cry out for a genuine encounter, cry out for God's in-breaking into their lives and into the world. Until God comes everything is useless. Yet Christianity is marked by the guarantee of God's coming. God will come. God is not just the God of the past or the God of the future. God is the God of all of history, and that includes the present.
And when God does come, when God breaks in and transforms our present we will realise then that God is, after all, our Lover.