Christian Ethics Become Anti-Christian

The Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled that frozen embryos (with between 6 and 10 cells)  created through in-vitro fertilization had the same protection under the law as living humans. The head of that court gave an unreservedly religious rational for the ruling. (Read here for details: https://religionnews.com/2024/02/27/the-alabama-ruling-on-embryos-claimed-to-be-christian-christians-arent-so-sure/)

As the Religious News article points out, this ruling is closely related to religious reasons for banning abortion based on the idea that life begins at conception. Yet beneath questions of fetal personhood is a more fundamental issue.

Traditionalist Christians believe that there is a moral order to the way in which humans should reproduce. This isn't limited to confining sexual intercourse to a marriage between a man and a woman. It includes everything related to the uniting of a human sperm and a human egg and the subsequent nourishing of the embryo in the womb. 

Thus the current Pope has spoken out against surrogacy because it violates this order. The Southern Baptist theologian Andrew Walker speaks in a similar way of, "the moral goods that Scripture holds as insevarable for where conception ought to occur." In short, for both men conception must take place through the act of inserting a penis into a vagina, and the female source of the egg must bear it herself to full term. IVF would be unacceptable even if it didn't involve the destruction of some fertilized eggs.

This concept of a moral order to conception and pregnancy is set in the larger traditionalist Christian understanding that the whole of human behavior should be governed by divine mandate. And this is a traditionalist Christian misrepresentation of what it means to be human. Humans were not created by God to perpetuate a divinely mandated moral order. We were created by God in the image of God so that we can creatively work out our own moral order in partnership with God's providence. 

We were created to be ethicists and decision makers. Taking that away takes away our humanity.

What God has revealed through scripture, notably in Genesis 9, are the two basic principles necessary for creating a human moral order: that the purpose of all life and its context in the larger creation is fruitfulness and that all life is a gift of God and must be honored as such. Based on these principles we humans must, attentive to God's presence in the world and what it reveals, work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.  

This is why the imposition of a supposed divine mandate should not be used as a short cut that takes away the human vocation of shaping the moral order of human society. If Christians wish to conform their lives to a moral order that they believe God has given them as Christians then they should do so. But they have no right, and indeed, it is fundamentally against God‘s will, for them to impose that order on others. To impose a supposedly divinely mandated moral order is to actively rebel against God's purpose for humanity and deny fellow humans the opportunity to be fully human. 

It is unfortunate that in Alabama, and in several other states, Christians are using their temporary political power to short-circuit both ethical debate and personal decision making in order to impose laws that have no basis in publicly accessible scientific or historical reality. Instead these traditionalist Christians have taken their private interpretations of sectarian revelation and turned them into public law. 

This effort to impose Christian teaching on others is anti-Christian. It stifles the God-given creativity of human beings working together in a democratic society to find common values. It stifles their God-given vocation of ethical reasoning so as to order a religiously and culturally diverse social world according to the principles manifest in nature and history. It takes away from precisely the freedom from the law which Christ achieved for us on the cross.  

I know there are some who say that letting humans create the moral order under which they live will result in moral chaos because of sin. That is wrong. 

The  concept of original sin is not one of perpetual moral chaos. It is true that evil exists in human societies, sometimes to a startling extent. But Abraham's argument with God over the fate of Sodom is only one evidence for the endurance of a moral sensibility even in the midst of evil times and people. Israel is never depicted as the only people possessing a moral order, even though they alone have the revelation at Sinai. Nor are the gentiles depicted as lacking a moral order in the New Testament.

Sin doesn't destroy the human capacity for moral reasoning and morality in general. It destroys the human capacity to engage in moral relationships as a means of seeking and knowing God. Human morality doesn't quit being effective in ordering society, it ceases being a means by which humans relate to God. And even this is mitigated by the Holy Spirit's ubiquitous presence in human life.

Chaotic barbarism on a grand scale emerges most often in human history when rulers claim a divine mandate to establish order. Chaos is manifest most clearly in the orderly ranks of soldiers going into battle, and the tactical exactitude of bombers, fighters, drones, and missiles seeking their targets. Just look at Ukraine and Gaza.  Chaos is manifest most clearly in the work of pedantic bureaucrats and politicians punctiliously destroying human lives in the name of the letter of their laws. Just look at Texas. 

Or look at the chaos that has followed the ruling on IVF by the Alabama Supreme Court and the laws that led to it. Far from creating moral order, the ruling has resulted in moral chaos and the incoherence manifest among traditionalist Christians and politicians scrambling for a quick fix to their imposition of what they thought was a divinely mandated moral order. 

It's time for Christians to become the champions of the human freedom and responsibility restored to us through Christ's death and resurrection so that we can fulfill our human vocation to be the creators of moral order in own lives, and within the society in which we live.