Here’s an angle I didn’t expect: an interest in the upside of slavery.
I’m responding to a recent post, “Did God Condone Slavery?” by Amy Hall of the Stand to Reason ministry. In part 1, I responded to her argument that Jesus updated the Old Testament requirements for divorce because society has matured. She wants to draw a parallel so that slavery is also an artifact of that earlier, primitive society.
(This is the final in a series of three articles.)
The value of suffering
Hall says:
It also needs to be stated that since the Fall, suffering has served an important purpose in this world. God’s highest goal for us is not our comfort, but our more intimate knowledge of, appreciation for, and love for Him.
Our comfort may not be God’s highest goal for us, but the Bible makes some bold promises about God’s promises, from both the Old and New Testaments:
No harm overtakes the righteous, but the wicked have their fill of trouble (Proverbs 12:21).
If you make the Most High your dwelling—even the LORD, who is my refuge—then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your tent (Psalm 91:5–10).
The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom (2 Timothy 4:18a).
These Bible verses make clear that God eliminates suffering for the Christian.
As for suffering as a way to love God more, God sounds like a domestic abuser. And that reminds me of the celebration of suffering from Mother Teresa, who heartlessly declared, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” Only religion could twist normal human instincts like this.
And what role could suffering have to play anyway? God is omnipotent, and he doesn’t need suffering to accomplish his goals.
Does it actually seem like Mankind’s benefit from slavery was greater than the harm? Tell that to the more than 12 million slaves shipped to the New World from western Africa.
Amy Hall vs. Jesus
Hall says that one benefit of human suffering, including slavery, is that it “reminds us of the ugliness of sin.” What I’m reminded of is that the poor living conditions for hundreds of millions of people around the world today make the God hypothesis unbelievable. Either God is nonexistent or he has a lot to answer for.
Notice where this puts Hall compared to Jesus. Unlike Hall, Jesus has an excuse of sorts. He was an Apocalyptic prophet who thought that the end of the age would arrive within the lifetimes of his hearers. He said, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” With the End coming in months or a handful of years, Jesus was concerned with getting people right with God. True, conditions in society weren’t great—remember his concern for the poor and sick—but he was focused on bigger issues. He had an excuse for ignoring slavery.
But Hall is all in, defending slavery as part of God’s plan. I’m certain that she would not want slavery reintroduced into the U.S. today, but how can that be if slavery played so important a role in Israelite society?
Christians eliminating slavery from the world
The existence of slavery taught God’s people both the condition of their own hearts and a crucial truth about their great, good God. This is why it was Christians in the 18th and 19th century who not only worked to see that others were freed from their spiritual slavery, but who also led the way in following God’s desire to free others from physical slavery.
Hall must have in mind William Wilberforce of England, whose Christianity was a driving force behind his work that ended the importation of slaves into Britain in 1807 and then abolished slavery in 1833.
But France abolished slavery in 1794 during the French Revolution, which was emphatically not a Christian regime. What was God’s point with that? And who could possibly imagine the abolition of slavery in Britain in the nineteenth century as the inevitable culmination of an anti-slavery movement that started in Palestine 3000 years earlier? That’s a pathetic addition to the resume of the Creator of the universe when the number of enslaved persons is greater (in absolute numbers) than it has ever been.
Compare God’s imaginary slow-motion elimination of slavery against the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which rejected genocide, slavery, and torture; applied modern rules to marriage; allowed anyone to reject their religion; applied these rights universally; and more. It makes the Ten Commandments look embarrassingly inadequate by comparison.
Hall wants to give God a pass for deeply harmful customs like slavery, lasting not just for decades but for millennia. In contrast to the omnipotent Creator, society can sometimes make quick progress. For example, same-sex marriage was barely an idea for most Americans after the Stonewall Riots, let alone a demand. Today, fifty years later, it’s the law of the land, and 70 percent of Americans approve.
I’m sure Hall as a conservative Christian would reject same-sex marriage as social progress and instead point to the recent leaked Supreme Court draft decision that looks like it will overturn Roe v. Wade, but that’s social change, too. We don’t need to imagine society with training wheels, and this defense of God, that society matures very slowly, fails.
The good side of slavery
Just as Joseph said of his own suffering as a slave, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good,” slavery did not pass through this world without accomplishing a purpose even greater than the suffering.
Does it actually seem like Mankind’s benefit from slavery was greater than the harm? Tell that to the more than 12 million slaves shipped to the New World from western Africa. This is nothing more than a statement of faith, and it must be one of the most weakly evidenced statements of faith in all of Christianity.
Hall has been dealt a poor hand, and she’s trying to make the best of it given the presumption of Christianity. If instead she followed the evidence without precondition, I wonder where she’d go.
If there is a God, his plan is very similar to someone not having a plan. — Eddie Izzard
God makes clear that he’s on board with slavery for life (chattel slavery). But is there a loophole?
I’m responding to a recent post, “Did God Condone Slavery?” by Amy Hall of Stand to Reason. In part 1, I responded to her argument that Jesus sometimes updated Old Testament moral dictates that were necessary because of the hard-heartedness of society. Jesus has an audience for his update because, apparently, society has matured.
Hall spends the rest of the post reading God’s mind and imagining a society that learns new things very, very slowly.
God’s ideal
Hall points out the difference between what’s legal and what’s moral.
The Law was not meant to be a list of everything moral and immoral. It functioned as every national set of laws functions—as reasonably enforceable rules to govern their society. And the Pharisees had made the mistake of focusing on merely staying within the regulations instead of going beyond them to seek the goodness of God’s ideal.
What was “God’s ideal” for slavery? And how do you know? Jesus didn’t give one of his “You have heard it said that X, but I tell you Y” corrections for slavery.
In addition to slavery, God regulated commerce, and 11 verses demand that merchants use accurate weights and measures. Did God hate commerce like you say he hated slavery? How do you know?
We modern Westerners are unified in our rejection of slavery, but it’s cheating to retroject modern morality into the mouth of Jesus. Let him speak for himself.
I agree that the Law can’t address every conceivable moral error, but if the Ten Commandments has “Don’t covet,” surely it could find room for “Don’t enslave.” The omission is easily explained by seeing Yahweh as a Bronze Age invention with Bronze Age morality. Slavery for life was just part of the culture of Yahweh worshippers 3000 years ago. Morals change.
Hall rushes to God’s aid, starting from Jesus’s update on the rules for divorce:
As with divorce, the same was true for slavery. The rules regulating slavery were added “because the hardness of the hearts” of humanity had created a situation where slavery existed and served certain functions in their societies.
And yet the Bible doesn’t say this. It never apologizes for its rules on slavery, it never updates its rules on slavery, and it never blames Man for slavery. Let the Bible speak for itself, and it’s clear that God supports slavery. I understand your motivation, but you can’t substitute your modern morality for God’s Bronze Age morality.
Society moves slowly
Deeply ingrained cultural patterns don’t change overnight, but must be redeemed over time. Slavery was intricately woven into the cultures of the day, so, as with divorce (neither being the situation God desired), God made rules to keep the evil of the practice to a minimum.
Slavery was also intricately woven into the culture of the U.S. South before the Civil War (1861–5). How would you have weaned that society off slavery?
Let’s look for precedents in the Bible. The Israelites had more than a thousand years with slavery in their culture before the time of Jesus. Are you saying that Israel/Judah was slowly maturing during that time? You find no evidence of this given Jesus’s silence on slavery—he’s clearly not enlightened on the subject. Or maybe the clock should instead stop with the anti-slavery work of William Wilberforce in the early 1800s. Unlike Jesus, Wilberforce and others actually did make significant progress. From the Exodus until the end of slavery in Great Britain was three thousand years. Do you really want to point to this glacial progress as evidence of God’s marvelous plan?
Hall said that “deeply ingrained cultural patterns don’t change overnight.” So if not overnight, how long would the culture of the South need to adapt to a post-slavery economy? Should we have also given it three thousand years?
But God can move quickly
And why can’t an institution like slavery be changed overnight, given that God is omnipotent? He imposed the Ten Commandments overnight, and the penalty for violating most of them was death. He could’ve set down new laws that forbade slavery and incorporated the formerly enslaved into the economy as free persons. And then give the economy a kick with better healthcare, universal education, agricultural innovation and irrigation, improved varieties of livestock and plants, new technology, and so on. God could have given Israel the strongest economy in the world, yes, overnight. The Creator of the universe would surely not be hobbled by primitive human institutions.
If you kidnapped someone and made him a slave, you were put to death [Exodus 21:16]. If a slave escaped from his master for whatever reason, you were not allowed to return him [Deuteronomy 23:15–16]. If you harmed so much as a tooth of your slave, you had to let him go free [Ex. 21:26–7]—in other words, no person was allowed to keep a slave if he mistreated him or her.
So now you’re promoting Old Testament rules to govern slavery! I thought those were imperfect rules, designed for a primitive society—no? (And while you’re collecting rules, don’t forget those for slaves for life in Leviticus 25:44–6.) It sounds like the parallel with divorce and hard-heartedness have been discarded.
Let’s not blur these laws together, because there are two kinds of slavery, just like there were in the U.S. Using modern language, the Bible supported indentured servitude, which was temporary slavery for six years. This was for fellow Israelites. There was also chattel slavery, which is slavery for life. This was for people from other tribes. God approved both kinds.
If the Ten Commandments has “Don’t covet,” surely it could find room for “Don’t enslave.” But the omission is easily explained by seeing Yahweh as a Bronze Age invention with Bronze Age morality.
Biblical laws undercut American slavery?
Hall continues:
Slavery in Western countries would never even have gotten off the ground had these rules been followed; the first rule alone would have prevented it.
Your first rule is no kidnapping to get slaves. But “slavery in Western countries” must mean chattel slavery, and Africans sent as slaves to the Americas were typically prisoners of war, just as the Bible allows for (“Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves”). Biblical and American chattel slavery were pretty much identical, so this rule in the Americas would have prevented nothing.
The third rule (you must release a slave you’ve injured) refers to indentured servants, not chattel slavery, so that’s not a relevant comparison. But slavery of Africans in the U.S. did have rules. For example, here’s an 1833 Alabama law that imposes the same penalties on someone who injured or killed a slave as if they had committed the same offense to a free white person.
When you realize you can just enjoy this life instead of trying to position yourself for a better next one, a huge burden is lifted from you. That’s not nihilistic at all. That’s a relief. — Hemant Mehta
Here’s an interesting angle on the debate about biblical slavery. Just because God regulated a practice in the Old Testament, this argument states, that doesn’t mean that God approved.
I’m responding to a recent article, Did God Condone Slavery? by Amy Hall of the Stand to Reason ministry. She notes that Jesus sometimes updates the Old Testament with new moral rules because Israelite society back in the Old Testament was immature. Here is Matthew 19:3–6.
Some Pharisees came to [Jesus] to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? … Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Biblical marriage
Be careful—biblical marriage is polygamy. Abraham had two wives, Jacob had four, and Solomon had 700. God said to David, “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more” (2 Samuel 12:8). There are a few caveats, but in general God is fine with polygamy.
This appeal to a maturing society is just a transparent attempt to paper over the Bible’s embarrassing contradictions.
Paul is surprisingly unsupportive of what evangelicals call “natural marriage”:
It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman…. To the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do (1 Corinthians 7:1, 8).
If you want to excuse the Bible because it’s a reflection of the culture of the time, I can understand that. But then don’t insist that the Old Testament’s bluster about homosexuality or human rights or chastity are binding today.
Jesus rationalizes his new divorce rule
Hall continues the passage from Matthew:
“Why then,” [the Pharisees] asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” [a reference to Deuteronomy 24:1]
Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.”
So God gave Moses a permissive rule about divorce and Jesus overrode that with a stricter rule (only the wife’s adultery permits divorce—see Matt. 19:9). Now show me the parallel with slavery. God legislated slavery for life (Leviticus 25:44–6) and gave the rules for beating slaves (Exodus 21:20–21), but where does Jesus override that with new rules? Your argument is that the Bible can change its rules, but you haven’t shown that it did in the case of slavery.
The Bible is contradictory
And consider the consequence of your argument. It shows that the Bible is contradictory. I agree, but do you really want to go there? Christianity from its birth in Judaism to the present continues to evolve. God gives the rules for divorce in Deuteronomy, and more than 500 years later in Matthew, Jesus gives different rules. This is how manmade religions work. It’s not surprising that a series of books documenting changing ideas over centuries don’t harmonize.
If God gave different rules for slavery back then, Jesus tells us, that was because the people were hard hearted. Does the new rule for divorce mean that the Jews have matured? But why would God need to wait for the Israelites to become mature enough to accept this new message? If they could handle the Moses version of divorce, they could handle the Jesus version. To take another example, God didn’t dribble out the Ten Commandments because they were too difficult for the Israelites to handle. They went live on one day, and the death penalty was the punishment for breaking most of them. There was no need for a centuries-long grace period.
Society must mature?
This appeal to a maturing society is just a transparent attempt to paper over the Bible’s embarrassing contradictions. Teleport an Israelite baby from 3000 years ago to the present, in a Western society, and it would adapt to Western morality like a modern baby in that society. Or imagine the reverse: God takes Western morality and imposes those rules on the Israelites of 3000 years ago like he did with the Ten Commandments. God never said that society needed to mature—he imposed rules, and the Israelites had to deal with them. Those rules could be Iron Age morality or, just as easily, modern Western morality.
Consider the structure of this argument. Divorce is defined in an embarrassing way in the Old Testament, but luckily it’s redefined in the New. Slavery is also embarrassing in the Old Testament. That’s not corrected in the New, but the divorce precedent provides an opening to slip in some modern morality as a correction.
The first problem is that this opens the door for anyone to reinterpret the Bible to suit their fancy. The Bible becomes a mirror, and today’s 45,000 denominations of Christianity show the consequence of that.
Second, if you’re going to impose modern society’s view of slavery onto the Bible, why stop there? Why not apply modern society’s acceptance of same-sex marriage or abortion on the Bible, too?
The holocaust happened and presented an incontrovertible proof that Yahweh is dead. Even if he had existed once, he too perished in the gas chambers. — Vitaly Malkin
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 become allies with 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.
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 rather than the often futile attempt to eliminate the 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 with 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 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 transmitteddisease), by the same logic it should treat the woman who’s pregnant by accident.
Abortion to conservative politicians is a problem to be nurtured, not solved…. What else explains conservative politicians pursuing a policy that is so ineffective?
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 domestic 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- to 19-year-old women drop by 40 percent in six years, and this was credited to improved sex education.
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 will get a sexually mature body whether the adults in their lives 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 bring a condom.
That difference between perfect use and typical use (the success rate in a clinical setting vs. in the real world) is important because about 40 percent of unplanned pregnancies in the U.S. are due to careless usage.
Conservative states seem to compete 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 from Dr. Valerie Tarico—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 wonder 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.
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 money to support another child, or the environment is dangerous?
An article in the Quarterly Journal of Economicsfrom 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.
“It doesn’t matter whether you use birth control or not; when it is your time to get pregnant it will happen.”
Revisiting the problems within the pro-life movement
In my last article, 6 pro-life flaws that pro-lifers must stop ignoring, I explored six problems with the pro-life position. I promised in response a more effective, common-sense approach. Let’s revisit those six problems to see how they fare with sex ed, convenient contraception, and no nuisance obstacles. 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 some 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 the pro-choice community. By focusing on unwanted pregnancies, which 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 should be made appropriate for the age of the children. Children will be taught what they need to know before it becomes necessary. Parents are welcome (even encouraged) to talk to their kids beforehand.
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 (abortion pills). 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.
It may be 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 would 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 power
Remember the folk tale of 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.
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 many churches.
Today, abortion to conservative politicians is a problem to be nurtured, not solved. They’re the only ones who can solve the problem, you see. If Roe is overturned, they’ll move on to anti-abortion laws in the states. Or same-sex marriage. Or contraceptives. Anything to keep their base anxious and off balance and voting for them.
What else explains conservative politicians pursuing a policy that is so ineffective? (For more on this critique, see my previous article, which listed some fundamental flaws in the pro-life position.) These politicians want pro-life and pro-choice advocates divided. Strife means votes! The last thing they want is to solve a problem.
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 article 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?” Jesus seemed to care very little about abortions (a question for another article), but if you want to make a dent in abortions, support effective policies like accurate sex ed and convenient access to contraceptives. Making abortion illegal isn’t one.
Pro-life advocates, we can’t do this without you.
No amount of belief makes something a fact. — The Amazing Randi
I want to expose six fundamental flaws that underlie the pro-life position. I will then propose solutions to strengthen it.
It’s two days since the U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked. My goal isn’t to scold pro-life advocates and tell them how they’re flushing the country down the toilet but to expose some of their errors and show 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 increased again during the Trump administration. As one example, the Texas state board of education in 2020 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.
Now consider abstinence teaching in schools. While it’s hard to make a quantitative comparison, the Guttmacher Institute shows that 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.
Laws about corridor width won’t matter if the abortion can come through the mail.
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 gives poor 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: 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.
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 the pro-choice community
You might wonder why you’d want to work with your enemy, but you’d obviously be more effective if you could work with the pro-choice community on shared goals.
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).
Take a step back and consider the status quo. 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 that puzzle in the next post.)
Problem 4: Children will become sexually mature, whether you like it or not
Christian pundit James Dobson said about the 2020 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?
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.
Problem 5: Making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent abortions
Remember Kermit Gosnell? He ran a filthy abortion clinic in Philadelphia that provided illegal late-term abortions, and he was sentenced to life in prison in 2011. Though they may not realize it, this is pro-life advocates’ goal. When safe and legal abortion is unavailable, 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 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 roughly 800,000 abortions, mostly illegal, were performed per year. That’s roughly the rate today. With our substantially higher population, that means the per-capita 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 two-gurney-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.
Laws 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.
Conclusion: Let’s find solutions to these problems and find ways to make the pro-life movement effective here.
“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
Can a loving god send people to hell? Almost thirty years ago, Christian apologist William Lane Craig debated atheist professor Ray Bradley on this topic.
That’s a good question. Let’s critique Craig’s answer.
Craig’s odd conclusion
William Lane Craig (WLC) acknowledged that this topic is potentially embarrassing for Christians, and he began by outlining the problem.
On the one hand, the Bible teaches that God is love, and yet, on the other hand, it warns that those who reject God face everlasting punishment, and it contains frequent warnings about the danger of going to hell. But aren’t these two somehow inconsistent with each other?
So we have “God is all loving” vs. “Some people go to hell.” That sounds bad, but WLC wonders if there is necessarily a problem. These two aren’t literally contradictory in the way that X and not-X are.
WLC says that the skeptic is making two assumptions (I’ve paraphrased them to make them more general):
If God is all powerful, then God could create a world in which everyone freely lives their life in such a way that they merit getting into heaven.
If God is all loving, then he would want such a world.
Given these, WLC concludes,
Now notice that both of these assumptions have to be necessarily true, in order to prove that God and hell are logically inconsistent with each other. So as long as there’s even a possibility that one of these assumptions is false, it’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell.
Yeah, that’s a compelling message: “It’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell.” Alternatively: it looks like God is a moral monster, but you can’t actually prove it.
Why is that not a popular sermon? I’d come to hear it.
A Christian response to Craig
Let me try to work within the Christian paradigm to see where that leads us. Let’s assume Christianity and also assume that free will is required for a fulfilled human life. This is supported by many Christian apologists who use the free will argument against the Problem of Evil. (I discuss this in more detail here and here.)
People in our world have free will, and yet most don’t meet the requirements for heaven. We know this because Jesus said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14). Few go to heaven, so the remainder must be destined for hell.
One way to salvage God is to argue that this world must be the best of all possible worlds. That is, God wants the best for us, but, imperfect as this world is, any alternative world would be worse. If God could’ve create a more-perfect world, he would have. This was the argument of Gottfried Leibnitz.
Conclusion: if God could’ve created a world populated by humans with free will such that everyone was good enough to deserve heaven, he would have. Since he didn’t, such a world couldn’t exist.
But hang on—don’t we already know of such a world? It’s heaven!
Heaven must have free will, since apologists tell us that God doesn’t want mindless robots programmed to love God. But heaven must be a fundamentally different place than earth. You might be able to put up with your nosey neighbor or your buffoon of a boss or your annoying in-laws for a limited time here on earth, but what if you were stuck with them (plus millions more just as imperfect), unchanged, for a trillion years? A heaven that put you in frequent contact with these bumpkins would soon become hellish.
Since we’re taking free will as a given, the answer is clear. That free will must come with the wisdom to use it properly.
Here on earth, we have the animal wisdom to know that deliberately hitting your hand with a hammer would be stupid, so we don’t do it. The profoundly wise beings in heaven would go beyond that. They’d have the free will to do bad things, but their wisdom would never go there. In heaven, your perfectly wise neighbors would have the free will to steal your wallet, but why would they? That would be just one of a vast number of stupid things, like hitting one’s hand with a hammer, that they would never bother pursuing.
This creates a contradiction. The existence of a heaven with free will says that, no, life on our earth isn’t the best of all possible worlds. Give us the wisdom to properly use free will (think of that wisdom as free will’s instruction manual), and we will freely choose to be moral and so merit heaven. And yet, using the best-of-all-possible-worlds hypothesis, we concluded above that earth was as good as it gets.
It looks like God is a moral monster, but you can’t actually prove it. Why is that not a popular sermon?
Response to Craig
Now return to WLC’s conclusion: “both of these assumptions have to be necessarily true, in order to prove that God and hell are logically inconsistent with each other.” Let’s review those assumptions.
Assumption 1 is, “If God is all powerful, then God could create a world in which everyone freely lives his life in such a way that they merit getting into heaven.” Agreed: heaven, with free will plus the wisdom to use it properly, is that world.
Assumption 2 is, “If God is all loving, then he would want such a world.” This also seems true. I can’t imagine any argument that concludes it’s a good thing to deliberately create imperfect people, knowing that they will wind up in eternal torment.
This has admittedly been an informal response to WLC’s answer to the debate question, “Can a loving god send people to hell?” Nevertheless, I find this a satisfactory answer to his challenge.
No, Dr. Craig, a loving God and torment in hell are inconsistent. It’s surprising that the atheist needs to teach the Christian about morality.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people. — Dr. House
