Why Abortion Won’t Go Away

Ross Douthat has an outstanding short essay on the media response to Kermit Gosnell, the doctor who killed newborns. He quotes, at length, from abortion rights advocates, and gives them their due. They are right in saying that doctors like this would be a lot less likely to exist if there were easy, convenient access to professional abortion clinics. In a perverse way, restrictions on access actually enable devils like Gosnell.

Where such abortion rights advocates never go, however, is the bloody and physical reality of late-term abortions. They don’t focus on the actual fetuses/babies –one different from the other only by the matter of whether a doctor is operating on them inside the womb or outside. And that, Douthat points out, is what is so awful and compelling about Gosnell’s case.

One might have expected abortion controversies to have dried up long ago. The reason they persist–the reason why abortion is not really accepted after forty years of legal practice–is simply those fetuses/babies. It is very difficult to focus on them and remain free and easy about abortion.

Clearly, we live in a time when people want to go about their sexual business without minding anybody’s moral scruples. Most would rather live and let live and not think about it. Given that strong current of sexual individualism, I can’t see abortion rights really becoming threatened in the foreseeable future. But at the same time, I don’t see the issue quite disappearing, either. We don’t have to think about those fetuses/babies most days. But cases will surface to remind us of them.

State of the Church

The New York Times’ Ross Douthat has an excellent post on the state of American Catholicism. His very balanced views–which he explains in detail–can be summed up by his concluding sentence:

There is rubble everywhere, and fallen arches and sagging walls and cracking ceilings — but there is also still a foundation of belief upon which a stronger church might yet be built.

I would assess American Protestantism similarly. We are losing (fast) the easy sense of cultural authority and institutional security. We aren’t living in Christendom. The general culture doesn’t respect us, the younger generation has no plans to come back to church once they have children. Even the faithful have their doubts and their ideas.

Roughly speaking, we are becoming like Europe–much less churched, much less prone to pay attention to the church. There are advantages in that. When I visit the UK I’m struck that active Christians are a tiny sliver of the population but they don’t seem surprised or dismayed by it. That may be a healthier place to start from.

On Lincoln

Ross Douthat has an excellent blog post on the film Lincoln. Thanks be for that very rare thing, a truly thought-provoking popular Hollywood movie.

Where Is Mrs. Jesus?

I liked Ross Douthat’s commentary on the recent “Mrs. Jesus” media frisson caused by an obscure, late, possibly forged document mentioning Jesus’ wife. The only reason this made the news is because it suits us to reimagine Jesus in our image, and “our image” is certainly not celibate.

Douthat points out the classic “scholarly” move (scholarly only because it is made by scholars) in puzzling over why none of the original sources mention Jesus’ marriage. He cites the Smithsonian piece quoting the document’s discoverer, Harvard’s Karen King:

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

Two options: either random accidents of history have misplaced those documents, or else there was an early church conspiracy to erase them. The possibility that no documents mention Jesus’ marriage because he wasn’t, in fact, married, is too simplistic, too unsophisticated, to consider.

On Monogamy

I’m increasingly impressed by Ross Douthat’s willingness to write about important but icky issues. In yesterday’s New York Times he addresses “Why Monogamy Matters” and explains (among other things) why conservatives are unenthusiastic about funding Planned Parenthood.

Douthat tries to walk a careful line, making clear that he knows most people won’t and never have lived a perfectly chaste life up until marriage. He’s not, he says, promoting a “traditionalist utopia, where the only sex is married sex.” He’s making the point that sexual behavior should be shaped by ambitions toward love and lasting marriage. Such ambitions will lead to waiting longer, having fewer partners, and pursuing loving and lasting relationships. He cites social studies that indicate a “significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being,” particularly among women.

I mostly agree with what Douthat says, but I am not completely happy with his willingness to give away the traditionalist utopia. I understand the point he’s trying to make, but I don’t think he makes it very well.

It’s one thing to say that the world is a crooked place, and that people will inevitably fail to live up to the best for themselves. We should leaven whatever we say about sexuality with large helpings of grace and humility (qualities that Christians would have more of if they followed their Savior more rigorously).

It’s quite another to say that you don’t really expect anybody to live by sexual ideals, you just want them to be “shaped” by those ideals. That’s a lot like telling African dictators that you don’t expect them to actually live within the law, just to be shaped by it.

That’s the problem with Planned Parenthood. They say they want the best for young people, and they believe in good marriages and lasting relations. But they are so insistent that chastity is unrealistic for modern teenagers that they aren’t willing to challenge them to be better people. “Liberals argue, not unreasonably,” writes Douthat, “that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities of teenage sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism, and a jaded attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Sex is too important to be governed by “gritty realism.” We need ambitions and ideals. All of us do, whether we are 15 or 55, rich or poor. It’s true that society as a whole will never be a “traditionalist utopia.” But plenty of individuals do in fact live wholly admirable sexual lives. It is good for them if they do so—very good—and their example has a positive influence on all of us.

Kids (and adults) get plenty of gritty realism. They could use more hope.

Minority Christianity

Ross Douthat has another interesting column about the state of American Christianity in this morning’s NYT. It’s mainly a brief review of  books by Robert Putman and David Campbell (American Grace) and James Davison Hunter (To Change the World). In different ways the authors reflect on the place of religion in a less-religious America. Putnam and Campbell are relatively sunny, Hunter dark.

Putman and Campbell note that religion still plays a very beneficial role in upholding the social fabric of America. Hunter decries the tendency of religious people to see through the lens of culture war, so that “both conservative and liberal believers…frame their mission primarily in terms of conflict, and…express themselves almost exclusively in the ‘language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment and desire for conquest.’”

Douthat sums up:

Believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.

Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.

Changes in the Culture Wars

Don’t miss Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times (here) in which he comments on a changing social scene. I’ve written before about the confounding fact that college graduates tend to have lasting, stable marriages, while less educated Americans are frequently foundering. (See The Champions of Marriage, particularly.) Douthat notes the odd way this has fit into the convenient summary of culture wars: white-collar social liberals versus blue-collar cultural conservatives. The paradox was that “highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.”

Douthat’s reading of the latest data (particularly from The National Marriage Project) suggests that the class divide is changing. The educated elite are growing more religious and more socially conservative, possibly because evangelicals are  better educated. (He says they are now among the nation’s best-educated sub-groups. That’s a shock.) Culture wars are becoming a battle between two camps in the elite–” pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club.” (If you think Douthat doesn’t know the turf, consider that string of cultural shibboleths.)

But, he says, the less-educated are being left out of the discussion of what marriage means. For those who never made it through college, marriage is increasingly irrelevant. Evangelicals have moved up, but they have not managed to maintain a moral influence among the middle and lower classes in the way that the Catholic church did in the early twentieth century. (And, I would add, the way the Methodist and Baptist churches did in the 19th century.)

I think he’s right, and that’s a terrific challenge to all evangelicals.

Pantheism and Avatar

Ross Douthat has an excellent column in today’s New York Times. (here) He starts by noticing James Cameron’s apology for pantheism in the movie Avatar, and goes on to note pantheism’s increased attraction. In a low-key way he summarizes some of the issues that confront pantheism, and suggest why theists are better in tune with what we know about the world.