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Most U.S. Abortions are Due to Pro-Life Movement

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The pro-life movement has been forced into an all-or-nothing mindset. They’ve convinced themselves that abortion is murder and that it must be eliminated, and yet in no foreseeable future will there be zero abortions.

Nevertheless, this is their unreachable goal. This dogged attachment to a no-win project, at the expense of better approaches, puts the blame for most U.S. abortions on them.

Let’s consider another route, a win-win route, to substantially fewer abortions. With this approach, we will try to reduce abortions, not pretend that we can eliminate them. We won’t try to make them illegal (which has never worked) but make them unnecessary. The focus will be on the actual problem (unwanted pregnancies) rather than the symptom (abortions). If we deal with the problem, the symptom takes care of itself, and pro-lifers will discover that pro-choice advocates share the very same problem. The evidence shows that to reduce unwanted pregnancies, we need to provide comprehensive sex education and convenient, subsidized access to contraception.

Do I hear grumbling? Do I hear puritanical Christians muttering that they won’t put up with public schools teaching 12-year-olds how condoms work or pharmacies providing easy access to contraceptives? Then let’s double check: are we dealing with a Holocaust or not? Is abortion murder or not?

I’ve read many articles from Christians claiming this very thing. Assuming that they’re being honest and millions of conservative Christians really do think this way, let’s take them at their word and proceed.

(This post is about twice as long as usual, but with the U.S. election coming up in days, and abortion being the biggest single issue driving Trump voters, I wanted to have a complete argument for a logical approach to abortion in one article. And pro-life voters, if you want to reduce abortions, you need to rethink what you look for in your candidates.)

Harm reduction and consistency

Let’s consider abortion from a harm reduction standpoint. A harm reduction policy tries to minimize the harm caused by a human behavior.

The best-known such policy is probably needle exchange programs that allow intravenous drug users to exchange used needles for clean ones. While it’d be great to eliminate the drug addiction, experience has shown that that’s very hard to do. Instead, many jurisdictions focus on minimizing the social harm such as the incidence of HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases that can be transmitted by dirty needles. This policy also puts addicts in frequent contact with organizations that can help when they’re ready to quit.

Cast the net more broadly, and medical treatment for accidents can be thought of as harm reduction. No one wags their finger at an accident victim and says, “You knew that car crashes can happen, and yet you drove in a car anyway, didn’t you?” We treat the guy who shot himself by accident. We treat the smoker who gets lung cancer. We treat the person with a poor diet who gets type 2 diabetes. The medical staff does their best, and society (directly or indirectly) pays the bill.

Consider harm reduction even more broadly. We don’t want anyone getting married casually, but we provide divorce as a mechanism for getting out if necessary. The legal option of bankruptcy causes less harm than debtor’s prison. A tough love approach, like long prison terms for drug offenses, often doesn’t minimize societal harm, and a soft landing can be a smart compromise.

If the medical system treats the victim of a car accident (heck, if the medical system treats the person who has a sexually-transmitted disease), by the same logic it should treat the woman who’s pregnant by accident.

A new plan, part 1: sex education

The first part of a workable plan to reduce unwanted pregnancy is comprehensive sex education in school. Of course, the first category of people trying to squirm away from this will be conservative Christians, but remember that the motivation for this approach was to find a way to substantially reduce abortions to satisfy those conservative Christians. This is for you, so grit your teeth and let’s proceed.

Schools must teach children early, before they are likely to become sexually active. The curriculum must come from U.S. and international programs proven to work (unlike abstinence-only programs, which have been proven to fail). There’s clearly room for improvement, since the U.S. ranked worst in a National Institutes of Health survey of 21 countries: Switzerland had 8 pregnancies per thousand women aged 15 to 19, while the U.S. had seven times as many.

Effective programs can provide dramatic success. Wyoming had its birth rate among 15–19 year-old women drop by 40 percent in six years, and this was credited to improved sex education.

And ineffective programs can worsen the problem. A survey of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that “60 percent of young adults are misinformed about birth control’s effectiveness,” and blamed that misinformation on abstinence education, which often tries to downplay the effectiveness of contraception. In another survey 44 percent of young women agreed that “It doesn’t matter whether you use birth control or not; when it is your time to get pregnant it will happen.” Only 31 states require sex ed, and only half of those mandate that it must be accurate.

We teach teens how to do things safely: don’t read your phone while driving, don’t get into a car with a driver who’s drunk, and so on. They’re going to get a sexually mature body whether we like it or not, and 95 percent will have premarital sex. We must teach them how to use that body wisely.

Let’s end this section with a palate cleanser:

Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in Hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth and you should save it for someone you love. (Butch Hancock)

Part 2: convenient contraception

The next component in workable policies to minimize unwanted pregnancy is easy access to safe contraception. Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) like intrauterine devices or subcutaneous implants are twenty times more effective at preventing pregnancy than the birth control pill. They make no demands on the user, like remembering to take a daily pill or to bring a condom.

That difference between perfect use and typical use (the success rate in a laboratory setting vs. in the real world) is important because about 40 percent of unplanned pregnancies in the U.S. are due to careless usage.

Several programs show the value in LARCs. Delaware reduced its abortion rate 37 percent in three years. A similar program in Colorado reduced abortions by 34 percent in two years.

Those are improvements due to improved contraception technology. What about cost as an obstacle? One study found that free birth control cut abortion rates by about two-thirds.

Part 3: no nuisance regulations

Conservative states seem to compete with each other to find ever more innovative nuisance regulations that don’t reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies or improve the health of the woman. These include pharmacists deciding which prescriptions they will fill, mandatory waiting periods, false or incomplete information about abortion, mandatory counseling, required reading materials, unnecessary sonograms, required listening to the fetal heartbeat, and so on. These must go. The time from the discovery of an unwanted pregnancy to abortion (if that’s the woman’s choice) should be minimized. That’s not to suggest it should be rushed but that, if it is to happen, it should happen as quickly as possible.

And that’s it: comprehensive sex ed in schools, convenient subsidized contraception, and no nuisance obstacles to abortion. Make these sensible changes, and the abortion rate will be cut in half. One influential thought piece—where I was first introduced to this program—suggests that the rate could be cut by ninety percent. That argument adds some additional features like helping parents become more comfortable discussing sex with their children, improving access to reproductive health services in marginalized communities, seeing family planning as not only a private matter but one that belongs in the conversation with one’s doctor, and researching birth control for men.

Costs?

Some may be wondering who’s going to pay for all this. Given the high cost of more citizens—it costs about a quarter of a million dollars to raise a child to age 17 in the U.S.—it’s not surprising that these programs generate more savings than they cost. One study concluded that “Teen childbearing cost taxpayers $9.1 billion in 2004.” The Colorado program (above) found that every dollar invested in the program brought a six-dollar savings in the Medicaid program. A policy simulation from the Brookings Institution predicted similar savings.

Some Christians might say that taxpayer funding of contraception and sex ed offends them. Yeah, well, that’s life. I don’t like paying for abstinence-only education programs or government programs that promote religion, and I doubt you protested then. Even if you don’t have school-age kids, you pay for public school. We need to follow the evidence and work together for the common good.

Let’s look at the social cost of the pro-life movement from a different angle. What happens when a child is brought into the world unwanted and unloved? Or when the mother doesn’t have enough for another child or the environment is dangerous?

An article from 2001 tried to quantify that. It concluded that the dramatic drop in violent crime in the early 1990s was due in large part to the legalization of abortion nationwide by the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

In short, many of the 18-year-old men who would have caused violent crime in the early 1990s didn’t exist because they had been prevented 18 years earlier.

(This argument might sound like that from the book Freakonomics (2005). In fact, Steven Levitt was the coauthor of both the article and the book.)

The impact of abortion on the crime rate is often overlooked, but the pro-life movement must answer for the increased crime due to unwanted children.

Revisit the problems within the pro-life movement

In the last post, 6 Flaws in the Pro-Life Position (that Pro-Lifers Must Stop Ignoring), I explored six problems with the pro-life position. I promised in response a new, more effective approach (sex ed, convenient contraception, and no nuisance obstacles). Let’s revisit those six problems. I think they’ve been resolved.

  • Problem 1: Abstinence doesn’t work as birth control. Encouraging abstinence can be part of sex education, and it does work for a minority of teens. But abstinence-only education is a failure.
  • Problem 2: You focus on the symptom, not the problem. We’re now focusing on the problem: unwanted pregnancies.
  • Problem 3: You’re working against pro-choice community. By focusing on unwanted pregnancies, what both groups see as the problem, the two groups can work together.
  • Problem 4: Children will become sexually mature, whether you like it or not. Sex ed will be made appropriate for the age of the children. Children will be taught what they need to know before it becomes necessary.
  • Problem 5: Making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent abortions. The goal is reducing unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is still available, but the better we are at reducing unwanted pregnancies, the less the demand for abortions.
  • Problem 6: Obstacles erected for abortion clinics won’t work against medication abortions. We’re reducing abortions by focusing on the problem, unwanted pregnancies. Nuisance regulations aren’t helpful.

Is this a bridge too far?

I feel the need to check in again with Christians who are squeamish about this route. Perhaps they’re afraid that it might encourage teen sex. To them I say: I thought you said that the state of abortion in the U.S. is a Holocaust. I thought you said that abortion equals murder.

If not, then don’t create a pro-life litmus test for politicians. And if it is, then it may be true that teens will have sex more. You can even consider this a harm if you want (though keep in mind that pregnancy and STD rates will be much less than they are now). But who cares if this approach dramatically reduces abortions? If abortion really is murder, then I can’t imagine what could be worse. You’d really push back against a workable approach because it offended your prudery?

For Chicken Little politicians, it’s all about the power

Remember the folk tale Chicken Little (or Henny Penny)? An acorn fell on his head, and he ran around warning everyone that the sky was falling. We see something similar in the U.S. today. Christian and political leaders run around, telling Christians that the sky is falling because of abortion. (I’ll refer to both Christian leaders and political leaders as “politicians” since, in this context, their motivation is power.)

The pro-life movement is a political movement, not a moral movement. The problem was manufactured, and many Christian denominations just a few decades ago were in favor of the Roe decision that legalized abortion. A summary of a 1978 Christian analysis of abortion shows a surprisingly pro-choice attitude, supported by these churches: American Baptist Convention, American Lutheran Church, Disciples of Christ, Church of the Brethren, Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist Church, and United Presbyterian Church.

Today, abortion to conservative politicians is a problem to be nurtured, not to be solved. They’re the only ones who can solve the problem, you see. But if it were solved, it wouldn’t be a vote getter. What else explains conservative politicians pursuing a policy that is so ineffective? (For more on this critique, see my previous post, which listed the fundamental flaws in the pro-life position.) These politicians want pro-life and pro-choice advocates divided. Strife means votes!

The conservative voter is the mule pulling the cart, motivated by the carrot on a stick of Roe overturned. And who’s back there sitting easy in the cart holding out the carrot? It’s conservative politicians who know what motivates the mule. If you want to make some serious progress on abortion rates, find politicians that embrace a practical policy like the one in this post and join forces with pro-choice advocates. Working together, you’d be unbeatable.

For years, conservative Christians have been taught that “Are you pro-life?” has the same answer as “Do you love Jesus?” Whether Jesus cared much about abortions is a question for another post, but if you want to make a dent in abortions, refocus your activism on measures shown to minimize unwanted pregnancies.

We have an election coming up. If abortion is a big deal to you, forget overturning Roe. Vote instead for those candidates who are most likely to push for tested policies that discourage unwanted pregnancies. That’s how you will minimize abortions.

Pro-life advocates, we can’t do this without you.

No amount of belief makes something a fact.
— The Amazing Randi (1928–2020)
(Thank you, Randi. You will be missed.)

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Image from Spenser (free-use license)
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6 Flaws in the Pro-Life Position (that Pro-Lifers Must Stop Ignoring)

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The U.S. election is two weeks away. Let’s talk about the biggest issue in the minds of Trump’s supporters, abortion.

I want to expose six fundamental flaws that underlie the pro-life position. I think I have solutions, and next time I will outline them. My goal (perhaps surprisingly) isn’t to tell pro-life advocates that they’re idiots but to expose the errors and show them how to fix them. In this post, let’s look at the problems.

(Going forward, I will use “you” to refer to an imaginary pro-life advocate.)

Problem 1: Abstinence doesn’t work as birth control

Congress has put billions into abstinence-only sex education. That money peaked during the Bush administration, was largely redirected to other sex ed programs during the Obama administration, and has increased again during the Trump administration. As one example, the Texas state board of education recently doubled down on abstinence as the focus of sex ed.

But these programs don’t work. Toward the end of the Bush administration, a study was done to evaluate the results of these programs. Out of 700 federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs, “[four] were handpicked to show positive results and they still failed”! There was no increase in sexual abstinence, no increase in the age of sexual debut, and no decrease in the number of partners.

We can analyze this another way. Look at the 2018 list of states ranked by teen birth rate. Take the top 10 worst states and compare them against the top 10 reddest states (ranked by the percentage that voted for Trump in 2016). Six are on both lists: Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Now do the opposite comparison: match the 10 lowest teen birth rate states with the top 10 bluest states (ranked by the percentage voting for Clinton). Again, six are on both lists: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New York. None of the worst-birth-rate states are on the blue list, and none of the best-birth-rate states are on the red list. Whatever conservative states are doing, it’s not working well.

Now consider abstinence teaching in schools. While it’s hard to make a quantitative comparison, bluer states are (in general) likelier to cover abstinence, cover contraception, and take a positive view of sexual orientation. Redder states are likelier to stress (rather than merely cover) abstinence and emphasize that sex is reserved for marriage. They are less likely to cover contraception or take a positive view of sexual orientation (source).

But isn’t abstinence 100% effective?

I’ve talked with conservatives who shake their heads at my ignorance and inform me that abstinence, by definition, eliminates the need for abortion. Abstinence means no sex, no sex means no pregnancy, and no pregnancy means no abortion—QED.

But it obviously doesn’t work like that in the real world. The effectiveness of contraception is measured in two different situations, perfect use and typical use. Perfect use is how it is used during a clinical trial, where every step is done correctly. Typical use is how it is used by ordinary consumers, and these consumers can misunderstand or misread directions, not bother with or forget to take a daily pill, ignore cautions, and so on. So, yes, the perfect use of abstinence gives perfect results, but as we’ve seen above, typical use of abstinence doesn’t give great results.

Abstinence “always works” in the way that dieting always works. If your last weight-loss diet or fitness commitment didn’t work, then you probably have first-hand experience with typical use not matching the expectation of perfect use. It’s like saying “Don’t get shot!” to someone off to war or “Just stop smoking!” to someone trying to quit—not really useful advice since you’re confusing typical use with perfect use.

Abstinence isn’t even a birth control method. To see this, imagine you plan to do some outdoor chores and ask someone for a recommendation for sunscreen. Their response: just stay inside.

It’s true that if you stay inside you won’t get too much sun, but that ignores your goal of doing chores. “Stay inside” isn’t a kind of sunscreen. (h/t Love, Joy, Feminism)

An analogous example is that you want to take a long trip, and you ask for advice on whether it’d be safer to go by plane, train, or car. The response: the safest option is to stay home. That’s true, but it ignores your goal of making the trip.

The choice of birth control method asks, assuming I will be sexually active, what is the best method to avoid STDs and pregnancy? “Just don’t have sex” doesn’t answer the question.

Problem 2: You focus on the symptom, not the problem

Abortion isn’t the problem; abortion is the symptom. No one would have abortions without the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.

No one enjoys getting an abortion. It’s an unpleasant medical procedure with some risk. About this we’re all on the same page, which brings us to the next problem.

Problem 3: You’re working against pro-choice community

You might think “So what? Why would I want to work with my enemy?” but you’d obviously be more effective if you could work with them rather than against them, given the stalemate we have today.

The pro-life movement wants no abortions and the pro-choice movement wants to keep them as an option, but there is common ground. Both would like to see fewer unwanted pregnancies. An unwanted pregnancy prevented is far cheaper, safer, and easier than one treated with an abortion. Fewer unwanted pregnancies mean less demand for abortions (which makes pro-life advocates happy), and that means less pressure to restrict abortions (which makes pro-choice advocates happy).

The pro-life movement’s focus on the wrong thing—the symptom of abortion rather than the problem of unwanted pregnancy—is so flawed that it looks deliberate. It’s like someone wants there to be conflict, to prevent people coming together and making progress on the real problem.

(More on who that might be in the next post.)

Problem 4: Children will become sexually mature, whether you like it or not

Christian pundit James Dobson said about the recent decision by the Texas state board of education to focus sex ed on abstinence:

Activists groups like Planned Parenthood and its morally bankrupt allies were salivating at the chance to eliminate abstinence-based teaching once and for all and replace it with a not-suitable-for-children indoctrination program. If they got their way, 11 and 12-year-olds would spend classroom time learning about gender identity, condom use and other highly sexualized topics.

By “11 and 12-year-olds,” I assume you mean “children who are about to become sexually mature.” Yes, they need to understand how their bodies will soon work.

Imagine a world where every teenager got a car, and you couldn’t prevent that. They would be eager to drive their cars, and all you as a parent could do would be to put up constraints and educate them so that when they left your house as adults, they would be responsible drivers.

Wouldn’t you want them to get driver’s ed?

In our world, people are getting married later and sexually maturing sooner. In the U.S., women are marrying on average at age 27 and men at age 29. Onset of puberty is now 10–11 for girls and a year later for boys (about five years earlier than it was in the 1800s). The process is complete about five years later.

That’s a given, and your only option is how to respond. “Wait until marriage” won’t work for everyone. It’s particularly naive given the many years typically between sexual maturity and marriage. Wouldn’t you want them to get driver’s ed?

Problem 5: Making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent abortions

Remember Kermit Gosnell? He ran a filthy abortion clinic in Philadelphia that focused on illegal late-term abortions and was sentenced to life in prison in 2011. Though they may not realize it, this is pro-life advocates’ goal. When safe, legal abortion is unavailable or inconvenient, it will be performed in unsafe, illegal clinics. One of Gosnell’s patients said about the closest Planned Parenthood clinic, “The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death.”

We’re seeing the beginnings of this today. A recent study of the restrictive climate in Texas, where more than half of abortion clinics have closed, has found that seven percent of patients seeking abortion tried to end the pregnancy on their own rather than jump the obstacles to get to a clinic. That’s more than three times the national average. The restrictions in Texas have also made late-term abortions increase.

Reliable data about the abortion rate before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal nationwide is hard to find, but it appears that about 800,000 abortions were performed per year. That’s roughly the rate today. With our substantially higher population, that means the abortion rate was higher before Roe.

We find the same thing in other countries. Abortion rates are highest in countries where the procedure is illegal. No, making abortion illegal won’t make it end.

Problem 6: Obstacles erected for abortion clinics won’t work against medication abortions

Nuisance regulations like demanding that clinics have wide corridors or that their doctors have hospital admitting privileges (as Texas has imposed) will become less relevant. Medication abortions are abortions done by pills rather than an operation, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved this treatment twenty years ago. For abortions up to ten weeks’ gestation, the majority are done this way in the U.S., and that fraction is increasing.

Regulations about corridor width won’t matter if the abortion can come through the mail. Prescription drugs already come into the U.S. illegally from countries with cheaper prices. The tighter the controls on bricks-and-mortar clinics, the more demand for safe medication abortions will increase.

Let’s find solutions to these problems and find ways to make the pro-life movement effective. Continue with: Most U.S. Abortions are Due to Pro-Life Movement

“Explain to me how making abortion illegal
wouldn’t lower abortion rates.”
Explain to me how making drugs illegal
didn’t lower drug use rates.
— commenter adam

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Image from Ragesoss (license CC-BY-SA-3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0)
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Jesus vs. Slavery: Tom Gilson Responds (3 of 3)

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Did Jesus make a clear anti-slavery statement? Christian apologist Tom Gilson says yes (part 1).

I disagree. Let’s wrap up with Gilson’s attempt to show my logical errors and some concluding remarks.

My errors brought to light

Gilson tried to expose my logical errors. Let C = the claim “Jesus was the Son of God whose primary mission on earth was to die for our sins and reconcile us to God.” My “huge” error, Gilson tells us, is

  1. Assume C is false.
  2. Conclude C is false.

In other words, I’m charged with circular reasoning.

Nope. I do conclude that Jesus wasn’t a god, and my argument is this entire blog. But I’m pretty much on board with the various reasons Christians give for Jesus’s visit to earth, according to the Bible. So no, no circular reasoning.

I am confused, though. The idea of Jesus coming to earth “to die for our sins and reconcile us to God” is popular, so I’ll accept that. But then what does that do to Gilson’s reference to “[Jesus’s] mission of revolution at the level of the heart”? He needs to get his own story straight before scolding me for not understanding Jesus’s mission. Those two missions don’t sound synonymous.

And if Gilson is saying that Jesus’s “primary mission was to . . . reconcile us to God,” it sounds like he’s agreeing with me. He’s saying that Jesus had more important matters to deal with than attacking slavery. Fine—then stop saying that he attacked slavery.

[Jesus] proved by demonstration that all persons are of equal worth. He taught love for all.

Jesus did hang out with prostitutes and tax collectors. But he also emphasized that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). He dismissed non-Jews as dogs (Matt. 15:26) and pigs (Matt. 7:6). The social hierarchy was clear in Jesus’s mind.

[Teaching love for all] was insurrection enough on its own to get himself executed for it.

Huh? Do you really not know why Jesus was executed? All four gospels agree on few things, but they all report that the accusation against Jesus was written on the cross: “King of the Jews.” Setting yourself up in opposition to Rome’s king—that was insurrection.

Still, he didn’t use the word slavery, though, so, hey, “How good was he?”

Dismiss the sarcasm, and Gilson is on target here. The Son of Man was given an easy pitch, and he swung and missed. Gilson wants to dismiss that as unimportant, but what does it mean that Jesus gets a trivial moral test wrong? This is how outsiders test Christianity’s claims. Jesus can’t be a god and get “Is slavery morally okay?” wrong.

Summary points

Gilson tries to summarize my fourth post with two points. That sounds like an easy job since my arguments are simple, but he fails. Is it that hard to read an atheist without bias?

1. A lot of Christians have either misunderstood or failed to follow Jesus’ teachings.

Here, Gilson throws imperfect Christians under the bus, but this isn’t my point. I argued that an objective, unbiased reading of the Bible gives far more support for the slave-owner than the abolitionist.

2. Jesus didn’t use the word “slavery,” so therefore he wasn’t against it.

Does Gilson actually think this is an accurate summary, or is this a deliberate strawman? My position is simply that slavery is a test of Christian claims for Jesus. Is Jesus an omni-benevolent being? Then surely he would make at least a tiny fraction of his message a clear rejection of slavery. The Golden Rule, a vague condemnation of greed, or rules of sexual morality aren’t the same thing.

To state the obvious, I will be the judge of this test. Gilson always has the fallback that Jesus’s lack of an obvious anti-slavery message might make some sort of sense in God’s mind, but then his argument degrades to, “Sure, I realize that Jesus appears to not be particularly benevolent, but—who knows?—maybe we just can’t understand.” (More on what this argument imposes on the Christian here.)

Let’s take a step back

Why is this hard?

I’m kidding of course—I know why it’s hard. By addressing the slavery question, Gilson shows that he understands that it’s an Achilles heel. He’s a product of Western morality, and he’s surely as horrified by slavery as any of us. But the best he can come up with is weak arguments like, “The principles Jesus taught cut every leg out from under slavery” when the simple and obvious explanation is that Jesus was just an ordinary person (or literary figure) of his time who couldn’t imagine a society where slavery was both dispensable and dispensed with.

Jesus sounds like a product of his time. His story isn’t that of a timeless god sharing wisdom with no expiration date. He was just another prophet or mythological god-man like countless others from the Ancient Near East. If he were an omni-benevolent god, he’d sound like it.

If you’re just going to go with “Well, his ideas lived on,”
I’ll put Jesus behind Archimedes, Socrates, Euclid,
Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein,
Fleming, and Bohr in that regard.
All of their ideas are current today
and of great value in modern society,
whereas Jesus espoused monarchy, slavery,
and 2nd-class status for women.
— commenter Richard S. Russell

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Image from Kevin Jarrett (free-use license)
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Jesus vs. Slavery: Tom Gilson Responds (2 of 3)

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Did Jesus make a clear anti-slavery statement? Christian apologist Tom Gilson insists that he did. In part 1, we got into Gilson’s rebuttal to my argument that Jesus didn’t say anything of note about slavery.

By the way, did I mention that Gilson has a new book out? He could talk about little else in his rebuttal, which made for a confused foundation. Let’s be clear: I’m interested only in the question of the morality of Jesus as evidenced by his stance on slavery.

We’ll continue with Gilson’s attacks to my argument.

A literal approach to the Bible?

Gilson said:

[Jesus’s morality] cuts the legs out from any possible motive for slavery. It takes a special kind of wooden fundamentalism to notice that [and] yet think Jesus failed to say anything about slavery.

I never said Jesus said nothing. Jesus did mention slavery but only in passing. He never criticized it. And from the standpoint of the twenty-first century West, that silence is deafening.

Jesus had no problem redefining Old Testament rules about murder, adultery, divorce, and more in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). If he cared about slavery, he could’ve changed its rules, too. Imagine this brief statement added to the list:

You have heard it said that you may own people as slaves for life. But I tell you, a person is not a beast that may be owned by another person. Nor are people Jew or Gentile such that one can own the other. All are equal in the eyes of the Lord.

Just in case it’s not obvious, that’s not in the Bible. It was my invention.

An imperfect person can figure this out, but this morality is apparently beyond Jesus.

“Barker’s and Seidensticker’s Silly Simile”

I end most posts with a quote that might be relevant to the topic of the post, or maybe I thought it funny or witty. My second post ended with a quote that had Gilson wrapped around the axle for a dozen paragraphs:

Asking, “If there is no god, what is the purpose of life?”
is like asking, “If there is no master, whose slave will I be?”
— Dan Barker

Gilson was clutching his pearls as he imagined Barker setting “god” and “slave-owning master” as equivalent. Gilson said, “Now, if there is a god for whom that’s true, I don’t believe in it either. It’s certainly not the God I believe in.”

Barker wasn’t referring to Yahweh (that is, God with a capital-G) but rather “god.” This wasn’t specific to Christianity. And doesn’t the Christian God assign a purpose? Christians celebrate this and even try to use this as a bragging point against atheists: they have an objective purpose, and those poor atheists don’t.

Explaining something so straightforward feels like explaining a joke, but since Gilson seemed confused, let me try. “God” and “slave master” in the aphorism are used as purpose-defining beings. You aren’t a slave, so don’t look to a master to define your purpose. You do that yourself.

And by the same logic, the lack of a god (or pope or pastor) to constrain you is freeing—you’re an adult, and you can ignore them and define your own purpose for your life.

Finally, given that Gilson got Dan Barker’s job title wrong (Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), let me add a little color that I imagine was also lost on him. Barker’s quote echoes “No Gods, No Masters,” the slogan of a newsletter launched in 1914 by feminist Margaret Sanger. It is also the subtitle of Women Without Superstition by Annie Laurie Gaylor, the other co-president of the FFRF.

So no, not a “silly simile” but a thought-provoking comparison.

Let’s return to Gilson, horrified at any suggestion of equivalence between Yahweh and a slave master.

Our God is not like any slave-holder they’ve encountered.

Here’s what God World is like. Think of sleeping children who startle awake at a noise and wonder in terror if this is the Armageddon their parents have said is imminent. Or the children taught to hate the classmate with two mommies. Or parents who treat their sick children with prayer instead of medicine. Or Christians bullied on how to vote to keep Jesus from crying. Or gays driven to suicide after Christian bullying. Or Catholic bureaucrats who put the church’s reputation over the mental health of children and shuffle around pedophile priests. Or Jim Jones.

To this, I expect a cheerful, “Well, I also don’t believe in a god who would have anything to do with that!” This misses the point. These are the consequences of a god that some believe in, and they built that belief on your Bible. I agree that God is different in important ways from a slave master, but Christians are still chained by their beliefs.

I do get a bit perplexed when [skeptics] take question-begging approach like Seidensticker does, for example assuming that Jesus’ primary mission to seek and save the lost couldn’t possibly take precedence over stopping slavery.

I never assumed that. There are 85,000 words in the gospels, and no one is saying that that should be one long diatribe against slavery. I’m just asking for a couple of sentences making clear his rejection of the institution and what his followers should do about it. Not finding this, I conclude that Jesus isn’t the benevolent god Christianity claims.

And if you’re explaining why Jesus didn’t attack slavery, you’re just undercutting the central point of your argument. It doesn’t matter why he didn’t attack slavery; I’m simply pointing out that he didn’t.

Concluded in part 3.

If the Bible got the easiest moral question
that humanity has ever faced [slavery] wrong,
what are the odds that the Bible got something
as complicated as human sexuality wrong?
— Dan Savage

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Image from Zulmaury Saavedra (free-use license)
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How Good Was Jesus if He Didn’t Eliminate Slavery? (4 of 4)

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We’ve read ten points in Tom Gilson’s argument that Jesus was ardently anti-slavery despite not saying a word against it in the Bible. Let’s wrap up some loose ends in this final post in the series, looking at what the American Civil War can teach us about which side made the stronger biblical case for its position, the reason you wouldn’t expect Jesus to care about slavery, and some final thoughts. (Part 1 of this series is here.)

American Civil War: which side had the stronger biblical case?

I’ll agree that we can do the Gilson two-step and select only Bible verses that reject slavery (or, given that there are none, verses that speak of peripheral issues like brotherly love or sexual morality). Christians did this in the lead-up to the American Civil War. But of course their pro-slavery opponents did the same thing, making their own argument necklace by stringing a very different set of beads.

Here is a comparison of the Northern and Southern biblical arguments from a modern American historian. Not only did Jesus not make a clear anti-slavery statement, but the Bible was the more effective weapon in the hands of the pro-slavery South.

Professor Eugene Genovese, who has studied these biblical debates over slavery in minute detail, concludes that the pro-slavery faction clearly emerged victorious over the abolitionists except for one specious argument based on the so-called Curse of Ham (Gen 9:18-27). For our purposes, it is important to realize that the South won this crucial contest with the North by using the prevailing hermeneutic, or method of interpretation, on which both sides agreed. So decisive was its triumph that the South mounted a vigorous counterattack on the abolitionists as infidels who had abandoned the plain words of Scripture for the secular ideology of the Enlightenment.

Why Jesus didn’t reject slavery

Jesus didn’t end slavery because the harm it caused in society wasn’t important to him.

Life for the common people was hard, and for more reasons than just slavery. There were taxes, droughts, famines, war, highway bandits, disease, and more. Life wasn’t easy in first-century Palestine.

Jesus cured a few people to prove that he was supernatural (see John 5:36), but he didn’t eliminate any diseases. He magically fed crowds a few times, but he didn’t end hunger. He didn’t free Judea from Roman rule. Improving this life wasn’t his goal—why tidy your cabin if the ship is sinking?

Jesus was an Apocalypticist. He felt that the current corrupt Age, ruled by an evil being, was soon to end. This would usher in a new Age with a benevolent ruler. Under this thinking, even the problem of Jesus the god who failed to end slavery goes away because Jesus was just the messenger.

Jesus made clear his short-term focus when he said, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:34). A few verses earlier he identified “these things” as the sun and moon darkening and the stars falling to earth.

Jesus didn’t end slavery because, in his mind, the end of this Age was at hand. Slavery would end at the same time. (I explore the consequences of Jesus’s short-term focus in more depth here.)

Now I’ll undercut my own defense of the logic of Jesus’s position. If the end were nigh, why worry about any social ill? If you’re not going to bother with slavery, why worry about the poor? The near-term future held, not simply a decent meal each day, but life with every pain removed.

And how anti-slavery can the New Testament be when Paul uses the idea in a positive way when he calls himself a “slave of Christ Jesus” (Romans 1:1)?

Concluding thoughts

Seeing Jesus as a failed Apocalypticist doesn’t help Gilson. Jesus as a failed anything won’t do, and Gilson is left handwaving why Jesus was the Great Emancipator but the Not-So-Great Communicator. And we come back to the fact that if Jesus wanted no slavery, he would have said so or poofed it out of existence. The simplest explanation is that Jesus didn’t care.

Compare that with something that Jesus very much did care about—compassion for the disadvantaged, to take one example. Here is what that looks like in the Bible.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27).

If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? (1 John 3:17).

We see Jesus’s compassion for the disadvantaged in:

  • the story of the widow’s mite: “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all the others.”
  • the story about the rich young ruler: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor.”
  • the parable of the sheep and the goats: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
  • the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

You want to know what Jesus would say about something he cared for deeply? Like that. And that’s what you don’t see for slavery.

Tom Gilson has replied to these posts. I respond here.

When Christians tell you that they’re confused with
how the Bible seems okay with slavery and polygamy,
don’t tell them not to worry and that 2+2=5 after all.
2+2=4, and the work of Christianity
is learning how to deal with 4.
— Laura Robinson

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Image from muammerokumus (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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How Good Was Jesus if He Didn’t Eliminate Slavery? (3 of 4)

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Despite being a god, Jesus is unaccountably never able to speak for himself. For better or worse, he has his friends to defend his good name (in this case, it’s for worse). The seven points we’ve analyzed so far from Christian apologist Tom Gilson have been full of holes (part 1 here). Here are the final three.

[EDIT: Gilson wrote a second post in response. Find the link at the bottom of post 2.]

8. Bible slavery was nothing like American slavery

“Slavery was absolutely woven into the economy and culture of the day. It was nothing like southern chattel slavery, of course. If you’re thinking slavery in 1830s Alabama, you’re not thinking of slavery in first century Greco-Roman or Judaic culture.”

No, I’m thinking about slavery as sanctioned by God in the Old Testament. If morality isn’t relative, as Christian apologists insist, God’s rules about slavery should always be in vogue, whether given 3000 years ago or yesterday.

Let’s have a quiz. To compare biblical and American slavery, we’ll take Gilson’s claim as a challenge. I’ll paraphrase two slave laws. One is from Alabama from the 1830s and the other from the Old Testament. See if you can tell which is which.

Law 1: If, through abuse, a slave owner dismembers or kills a slave, that slave owner shall be punished as if he had committed the same offense on a free person.

Law 2: A slave owner is assumed to treat his property responsibly, and that includes beating as may be necessary. A beating shall be considered abuse only if the slave dies or is unable to return to work within two days.

(The sources of these two laws are given at the end of this post.*)

Gilson said, “[Slavery as prescribed in the Bible] was nothing like southern chattel slavery, of course.”

Wrong. American slavery and biblical slavery were pretty much identical. I make that comparison here.

If slavery improved in first-century Judea as compared to Old Testament times, I would like to see evidence that it was due to Judaism. “Well, yeah, they had slavery in Palestine, but it wasn’t that bad” is hardly a bold endorsement of God’s society on earth. I think it’s fair to insist on high moral standards for the Creator of the universe.

(This is where apologists will point to The Fall® and say that society’s problems are all mankind’s fault. (1) This argument fails, and (2) blaming it all on people is exactly what you’d say if you were stuck defending a god who didn’t exist.)

The god who spoke the universe into existence could probably find a solution to slavery. As usual, Christians have their god running from opportunities to show he exists.

9. You underestimate how entrenched slavery was

“[Slavery] was embedded in the social structure, so deep that you must realize there’s no way anyone could have just ended slavery. The Greeks, Romans, and Jews had no conception of widespread voluntary employment. There’s no chance that Jesus or anyone could have instituted it overnight. They’d have been slaughtered for trying.”

Remind me sometime to explain what “omnipotent” means.

God is (supposedly) magic. If God wanted slavery gone tomorrow, he could make that so.

And don’t tell me that slavery is part of God’s marvelous plan. Whatever God expects to achieve through abysmal living conditions, he could achieve with magic. And the existence of slavery has a straightforward natural explanation. The God hypothesis adds nothing.

What sounds more likely—God dictating the rules of slavery in the Old Testament and letting it persist through history or “God” being a human invention, just like all the other gods?

10. Jesus did end slavery, just not right away

“What was needed was a revolution of the heart, which [Jesus] led, and then the gradual development of economic and social structures to fill the place slavery had held. It resulted over time in the ending of slavery in Europe; and in fact, there is no place on earth where slavery was abolished except under the influence of Jesus Christ.”

There are more slaves today than ever! “Revolution of the Heart” might work as the title of a pop song, but it’s just handwaving to imagine it having changed the world. The Ten Commandments, purportedly from God himself, banned lying, stealing, or murder almost 3000 years ago. How did that revolution work out?

Why focus on just slaves in Europe when Jesus’s “revolution” was for the whole world? But let’s ignore that and focus on the claim that there are no slaves in Europe. The 2018 Global Slavery Index says that today there are more than 10,000 slaves each in Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, and the Netherlands. And more than 100,000 in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the UK.

Data on France says that most of its slaves are prostitutes, with domestic work being the second largest category. Additionally, France annually imports $15 billion in products at risk of being produced by forced labor. Germany has similar numbers—90% of its slaves are prostitutes and $30 billion in imports are possibly produced by forced labor.

Gilson tells us that it pleased God to handle this humanitarian crisis in a gradual manner. No need to rush in headlong and eliminate vast amounts of human suffering all at once, right? Jesus couldn’t just end slavery but had to work through William Wilberforce (a Christian) to end the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.

And Jesus also worked through France’s very atheistic Revolutionary government to end slavery there in 1794. And haphazardly through other countries throughout history, I guess. (How frustrating it must be to be omnipotent and yet constrained by inept humans.)

Who’s responsible—Christians or Christianity?

It is maddening to find Christian apologists who claim their god can do anything but then must explain how God stepped back when any of us with that power would’ve stepped up. They tap dance away from the fact that whatever they claim God did is more easily explained by it coming about naturally or due to human action.

Now consider his final claim, “There is no place on earth where slavery was abolished except under the influence of Jesus Christ.” One Greek scholar said in the fourth century BCE, “God has left all men free; Nature has made nobody a slave.” Where in the Bible does Jesus say something like that? Stoicism was a school of philosophy founded in Greece about a century later. Abolition of slavery was not a tenet, but they got a lot closer than Christianity did, and three centuries earlier. Gilson will point out that the Stoics had no principles rejecting slavery, but then neither does Christianity.

Gilson’s error is in conflating the actions of people who happened to follow Jesus and the principles of Jesus. Did Christians eliminate slavery in Europe? Not exclusively, but largely. Was that because they were Christian? I await the evidence that atheists couldn’t have done the same thing.

And let’s be clear that simply making a Bible-y argument doesn’t count. I have made arguments aimed at Christians supported with Bible verses, and I’m an atheist. I need to see a convincing argument that these Christians from centuries past wouldn’t have been abolitionists if they hadn’t been Christians. If they were simply expressing human morality, remember that atheists can be good people, too.

Not only did Christianity not end slavery quickly (as one would expect if the anti-slavery case made by Jesus were as strong as Gilson claims it was), it even supported it. In 1205, the pope authorized the slavery of Jews “because they crucified the Lord.” A decree from the pope in 1452 allowed the king of Portugal to enslave Arabs and pagans and then take their land and property. And in 1866, the pope sent instructions to a Roman Catholic authority in Ethiopia that said, in part, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.”

If Jesus missed the boat, he had company. Christianity looks to be people all the way down.

Concluded in part 4.

Unreflective Comment of the Day:
Why would people in America
want to embrace the religion of the slavers?
— Pat Robertson (on Muslims)

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*Law 1 is from the 1833 Alabama law code: “Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person.”

Law 2 is from Exodus 21:20–21: “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”

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Image from Kirill Pershin (free-use license)
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