North Of The Tracks
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
On Being a Single Issue Voter: Or Why Abortion is Still the Most Important Issue (To Me)
It seems to me that the question of whether or not one should be a single issue voter depends on the gravity of the issues at stake in a given election. Are the various issues facing us in a given election of equal moral weightiness? I'm convinced that they are not. As I have wrestled with and thought through this issue, I've become convinced that some issues are so big that they overshadow and perhaps even underlie many other issues. To fail to come down on the right side of these issues, is to fail to be faithful as Christians in our time and place. I am convinced that abortion is just such an issue for our times, and that, as such, it should take precedence over all other considerations in our decision concerning how to vote as Christians. In short, I believe that, in practice, we should be single issue voters. I'd like to attempt to explain why I hold this view.
First of all, I am convinced that abortion kills a fellow human being, one who is deserving of all the same rights and protections that those of us who live outside the womb enjoy. From a purely biological perspective, it is inarguable that from the moment of conception, a human life exists which, if unimpeded in its growth and development, will ultimately become a fully functional human being. If you are reading this, then you are one who was once a single celled fetus whose development towards adulthood was unimpeded. Furthermore, the Christian tradition has always affirmed the personhood of the fetus and has always considered abortion immoral and sought to stop it whenever possible. Richard John Neuhaus points out that, "From the early years of the Church’s life, Christians distinguished themselves from the surrounding pagan society by their refusal to abort or expose their children. And when, centuries later, they were in a position to influence public policy, their conviction that every human life was created and loved by God, and therefore ought to be cared for and protected by us, became the law."
One argument frequently heard from those Christians who wish to ignore or downplay the abortion issue in their voting is that killing in war and the death penalty are also immoral and that, therefore, a candidate who opposes abortion but who supports war or the death penalty is really no better than a candidate who is pro-choice but who opposes war or the death penalty. While at first glance this argument may seem to have some merit, I find it ultimately uncompelling. Without going into a lot of complex argumentation about the permissibility of killing in war or the death penalty (which space here does not permit), I think it suffices to say here that, even if these forms of killing are ultimately judged to be wrong (and all killing is tragic, even if it is not wrong), they still do not compare to the moral tragedy of abortion. This is because not only does abortion kill a fellow human being, it kills the most helpless and innocent human being imaginable. The unborn child in the womb is completely innocent of any crime against another and is in the most completely helpless and dependent position that it is possible for any human being to be in. It has no possibility, even conceptually, of escaping the fate thrust upon it by those who have power over it; it cannot run away, or hide, or argue on its own behalf.
If it is the case, then, that abortion kills a fellow human being, and not only that, but one who is utterly helpless and innocent, it seems to me that abortion is a moral crime of the highest order. It is not simply killing, it is killing the innocent and victimizing the most helpless among us. It is hard for me think of any issue that carries more moral seriousness than this. If throngs of our fellow human beings who exist outside the womb were being carried off en masse to be murdered, such as has happened in the past, I don't think there would be any question among us as Christians that this was the crucial moral issue of our times and that we must attend to this issue above all others. It seems to me then, that it follows from this that if the unborn are fully human in the same sense as the rest of us, and are, furthermore, the most innocent and helpless among us, that abortion must therefore be the crucial moral issue of our times, an issue which takes precedence over all other issues.
The reality of our present political situation, for better or worse, is that we live in a two party system, and that one of the two parties in this system tends to be far stronger on the issue of protecting the human rights of the unborn. This does not mean that the agenda of this political party is synonymous with Christianity, or that Christians should uncritically attach themselves to this party. What it does mean, however, is that given our limited choices and the moral seriousness of the issue at hand, we vote for those who adhere more closely to the historically Christian view on this issue.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Hope?
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Blue Collar Intellectuals by Daniel Flynn: A Book Review
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
On the Need to Please Others
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Reality vs Ideology
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Where I Am
To put it bluntly, the last four months since I left my job and moved here have been among the worst of my entire life. In fact, I can only think of one other time in my life that things seemed worse than this. I have spent the last four months feeling like nothing so much as a prisoner of my circumstances. The truth is, right now, I have trouble seeing how it's possible to be anything else. All my former talk to the contrary now seems to me like a load of pretentious, self-deluded, spiritualized garbage.
Shortly after I moving here I got sick. Actually, it was a month to the day I had left my job and thus given up my health insurance. This was a scenario I had known was possible, and even feared on some level, but hadn't seriously entertained. I went to the doctor and paid out of pocket to be treated. I took the medicine I was prescribed and seemed to get better. But then, just as I was finishing the medicine, I caught a cold, and at the tail end of that I ended up with another sinus infection.
Of course I didn't want to believe it. But the symptoms were too clear (and too miserable) to ignore. So back to the clinic I went, to spend more money out of pocket. This time they put me on a different, supposedly stronger medication. Even before I had finished the course of medication, it became apparent that I wasn't getting better. I ended up on antibiotics a third time and didn't get better then either. By then I'd been sick for a month.
On top of that, I was working two part time jobs, neither of which I really liked much. As a result of the time and energy consumed by the two jobs, I wasn't really able to participate in the life of the community I came to join either, a nice bit of bitter irony. I was discouraged, angry, exhausted, and overwhelmed.
To make a long story short, I ended up leaving one of the two jobs in the hope that the extra time to rest would help me get better. It didn't. Fearing possible pneumonia, I ended up going back to the doctor two more times, being put on antibiotics two more times, and I still didn't get better. Finally I was put on allergy medicine, which seemed to help some but didn't really make me better. I continued to feel lousy and exhausted all the time.
Finally, I was able to take a vacation and go home over the week between Christmas and New Years. I was still feeling fairly lousy, but at least I was able to rest and enjoy spending time with my parents. My mom also paid for me to see her chiropractor, who gave me some supplements to treat my sinus problems. Leaving my parents on New Year's Day and returning to the miserable life I've been living here, was one of the saddest things I've ever done. I cried a lot that day and even the next.
After arriving back here, I began to treat my illness with an aggressive combination of home remedies and continued taking the supplements given by my mom's chiropractor. Over the course of a week, this seemed to help a lot. Then, a few days ago, with the help of friends, I had an appointment at a naturopath clinic. They put me on a restricted diet and gave me some more supplements to take. As of today, I am feeling much better, almost normal in fact. That is definitely something to be thankful for, but the story doesn't end there.
The whole time I was sick, I thought that if I could just get better, everything would seem fine, that I would be happy again. Now I'm feeling much healthier, but instead of being happy, I feel depressed. I made a big move and it was supposed to be a new start in life. Instead, it just feels like the same life I thought I was leaving behind, except worse. I'm working a job that I don't enjoy, the same kind of work as the job I left, except for far less money and with no health insurance. I'm living in someone else's house because I can't afford to live on my own. I'm nearly broke. I miss my family. I don't see a way forward.
A friend tells me that I lack faith that God is working in my life. That’s probably true. It’s hard to believe when life is so relentlessly painful and you don’t see a way out. God and His purposes seem like distant abstractions compared to the financial burdens I face, a job that makes me anxious and stressed all day, and my inability to see any way through these struggles. I'm tired of everything feeling like a continual painful uphill struggle towards nothing. I don't know what the answer is, but I feel like something needs to change, and soon.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Insanity?
Recently, I have done something insane, at least according to common wisdom. I have resigned my decent paying, secure, stable job with no guarantee of another one. I have done this at a time when the economy is bad and many people cannot find work of any kind. The reason for this is that I am moving in order to live in community with friends and to participate in starting a church with them. This is more than just something that I really want to do. It is an attempt to find and fulfill my life’s purpose and calling.
I have believed since the age of twenty-one that God called me to ministry of some kind. I have primarily felt that this calling was of an intellectual nature; that I was called to understand the culture I live in and how the Christian faith relates to that culture, and to help others understand that too. I pursued education to that end. Somehow, though, the opportunity to pursue that intellectual calling never seemed to come to fruition in the way I imagined it would, which is to say, through paying work.
As a result, I realized at some point that I would have to pursue this calling through unpaid work if it was ever to be fulfilled. This has been the story of my entire adult life, working jobs to pay the bills while seeking my true vocation outside the world of paid work. In that sense, what I am doing now is nothing different. The difference is that never before have I clearly allowed my sense of vocation to shape my actions and choices over and above the necessity of making a living in the everyday world. Prior to this, my reality has always been primarily defined by the need to have a job so I could pay the bills. This, of course, is conventional wisdom.
On top of that, despite my sense that I was called to ministry, I did not see myself as the sort of person who would be good at starting a church. It was, in fact, something I had no interest in doing whatsoever, and something I was sure I would be bad at. Yet the circumstances of my life lead me down this path and drew me into this group of people, and I formed relationships that I did not want to let go of. So I began to think about participating in starting this church. But that would mean having to move fifty miles from where I currently live, and that would make it too far for me to commute to my current job.
For a long time, I still believed I could not commit to quitting my current job and moving without first having another job to go to. Over the course of a year, however, the job did not materialize. I began to give up hope. Finally, after much struggling and soul-searching, and with the wisdom and guidance of others, I came to believe that this is what I should do.
So here I am, by all conventional accounts doing something that is incredibly foolish, leaving behind the safety and security of a stable paying job in order to pursue a calling that some people believe cannot even exist. It is simultaneously the most empowering thing I’ve ever done and the most frightening. Some days lately, like today, I wonder if I made the wrong choice. I think I must be insane. I have no idea what will happen in the months to come. But I have to believe that if God is real and he called me to this, that He will make it possible. And believing it means living like it’s true.
This, I think, is what St. Paul means when he says in his second letter to the church in Corinth, that we Christians walk by faith and not by sight. To walk by faith rather than by sight does not mean that we stick our heads in the sand and pretend like the realities of life in this world don’t exist. It means, rather, that though we are aware of those realities we don’t allow them to be the final word in defining our existence. We live as if life is more than necessity and mere survival. We are not prisoners of our circumstances.