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Notes -
Christians and the Killing of abortion doctors:
I'm well aware that a strong case can be made for absolute Christian pacifism or more moderately for employing violence only with the consent of the ruling authority. Yet these positions are clearly not majority ones. Imagine if I posed to the average Christian the following hypothetical:
Tomorrow, the government passes a law declaring that blacks, being subhuman, are no longer entitled to any protection under the law. While the law allows you to kill a person who threatens the life of a regular person, killing a person who threatens a black is now murder. Mark 1.0 disagrees. While he is not black himself and has no special relationship with blacks, he consider them to be regular humans entitled to defense. As such, he goes to a black extermination center and kills a few of its exterminators. Are Mark 1.0's actions morally justified?
I think the vast majority of Christians would say that Mark was not only acting justifiably but commendably. If he started a revolution that overthrew the government, they would celebrate him as an example of Christian courage and dedication. If, however I replace Black with fetus, and exterminationist with abortion doctors, fundamentalists suddenly discover the value of 'giving unto Caesar', talk about how their belief in the sanctity of life is incoherent with killing abortion doctors and condemn Mark 2.0.
Once again, my claim is that there is no deontological theological justification that allows for Mark 1.0's actions, but not Mark 2.0's. Thus, when Christians claim to disown anti-abortion violence on religious grounds they are almost always either making a best methods utilitarian calculation (which given 60 Million abortions since Roe v. Wade seems rather specious) or demonstrating that their worship of the flag, trumps their commitment to God.
Well, yes, but actually no?
I don't think I have anything useful to say about what is or is not obligatory in Christianity, but I don't think Christianity is really at the center of your imaginings here. The very, very broad framing of this question is, essentially, "when is it permissible to deliberately end a human life?"
One answer a lot of people buy is "at some point before that life becomes self-sustaining" (i.e., abortion). Another answer a lot of people buy is "in defense of other (e.g. innocent) life." People who disagree with the former and agree with the latter have a moral framework in which it would appear permissible to end the lives of people who deliberately abort babies.
But we also live in a society where we have agreed that only certain people are allowed to end lives. No matter how much we might believe that someone's life should be ended, we aren't generally allowed to do that ourselves. Mostly this is government does it (police and military) but medical practitioners are also often licensed to do it (abortion, euthanasia).
Some people decide that their beliefs about proper killing make it impossible for them to, in good conscience, remain citizens of their nation. So they immigrate, or go "off the grid," or whatever. People do this with regard to war, to overpolicing, I assume some people do it with regard to abortion as well. But most people instead participate in the political process of trying to make sure that authorized dealers of death in their community are not dealing death in unethical or immoral ways. We don't always get what we want from our government, but taking killing into one's own hands constitutes a rejection of government altogether, and is very likely to end badly for those who do it.
I regard abortion as utterly horrific. I would not in principle oppose the death penalty for abortion providers, though my actual preference is rather more libertarian than this, partly because I think the standard list of rape, incest, and to save the mother's life are all persuasive exceptions to the general rule (similarly, I support the death penalty for other kinds of murder, too, in principle but not usually in practice). But in practice criminalizing abortion would be an absolute disaster, at least if attempted in America. Culturally, most people do not have a strong moral or religious commitment to the protection of nascent human life. Most people are simply unwilling to weigh the interests of the unborn that heavily. This might make some of them hypocrites, I suppose, depending on what other things they believe. But this is a real "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" conundrum. Probably none of us is completely happy with our government's current "who it's okay to kill" list. But most of us are also not okay with bearing the cost of changing that list. We are all of us always balancing a plurality of interests in our own lives, and what emerges from all these collective balancings may not be completely to your liking, but that doesn't mean your only option is violent reprisal against your enemies.
After all, Christianity also says, "the meek shall inherit the earth."
I think it's possible that this post is the answer, or at least part of the answer, to a question that's been kicking around in my brain for a while, which can be poorly summarized as "if Christians are opposed to abortion because they believe it is a sin, and therefore are motivated to exercise their voting rights to vote for politicians who promise to make it illegal (or appoint SC judges who would overturn Roe, clearing the way for making it illegal), surely they should also be voting for politicians who promise to make other things that they believe are sins illegal, including not being Christian."
I kind of assume that the reason (American) Christians aren't lobbying to make not being a Christian illegal is because it's just so completely outside of the (American) Overton window. But maybe there's another reason.
I might, perhaps, be incorrect in the assumption that the primary reason many/most Christians are anti-abortion is "because it makes God mad". After all, I've read plenty of well-written posts on this site and its predecessors putting forth philosophical arguments for why abortion is wrong that don't have any reference to theology or the supernatural. I've spent the past approximately five years arguing fairly passionately with anybody I think will listen that pro-lifers don't hate women, or want to make America a theocracy, they just believe a fetus is a living human with the same right to state protection from murder as any other living human, etc., on the basis of these posts.
However, more recently I've noticed that everybody making these well-written philosophical arguments also just so happens to be either a Christian, or somebody super concerned about falling Western birth rates, or somebody who just thinks that kids are the best and everybody should have more than they currently do...or some combination of all three. (If I'm wrong, please correct me, any anti-Western child-hating atheist pro-lifers out there.) So I'm no longer trying to convince anybody in my circle that they should listen more to what pro-life people are saying, any more than I would try to convince hardcore 2nd-amendment believers to listen to what the people lobbying for universal background checks and high-capacity magazine bans are saying, because I know that they (gun enthusiasts) know that they (anti-gun activists) ultimately want private firearms ownership either completely banned or made incredibly rare and highly socially stigmatized.
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Re-criminalising, because it used to be a criminal offence pretty much everywhere. But yes, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You have a generation of people who demanded abortion or accepted it once it was legal, and a generation of their kids who grew up with abortion being normal. And now the next new generation being told that abortion is a human right, it is healthcare.
Telling them that it should be a criminal offence sounds to them like trying to make having your tonsils removed a criminal offence.
Or banning explosives or light bulbs or plastic bags or gas-powered generators or raising the age of marriage or...
Just because something has long been legal doesn't mean it can't be made illegal at the stroke of a pen.
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This logic is never applied to any other circumstance.
If someone is attempting to murder a regular child the regular american celebrates the person who violently stops them. If a mass shooter strikes the ordinary non-governmental person who runs in to shoot them is celebrated as a hero. We have an entire culture based around celebrating the idea of resistors to nazi occupation, or the british, and who actively imagines violence against a hypothetical tyrannical government ALL THE TIME.
And yet the question of guerilla violence against abortion doctors "Child murders" in this logic... is not only not done, it is not even discussed as a question except by pro-lifers saying "Look obviously you don't believe this... you aren't even willing to discuss violence"
I can even count the number of nations that have been bombed in my lifetime, and certainly can't count the number where bombings have been openly discussed by the common laymen... the number of people who have suggest the death penalty for drug dealers, or going and vigilante turning back illegal immigrants, or punching facist, or standing up to communists...or defending the enviroment... or defending your property from enviromentalists.
Talk of escalating to lethal violence is the NORM of political discussion. People regularly praise fathers who kill pedos, or mothers who go vigilante on killers of family members... or hell women who cut the dicks off of boring dates they often never even subsequently accuse of sexual assault (people will praise just literal crazy people for maiming others)
hell VIOLENCE is the logical end of all politics... that what we're discussing when we discuss politics, who we'll organize to employ violence against... do you think taxes are backed up with only letters?
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And yet the only issue where there is no talk that violence could be justified, where there is zero tough talk of escalating to lethal solutions... just so happens to be the one where its claimed millions of children are being murdered.
I've literally heard more earnest talk in my life of escalating to violence over drag queen story hour, or Milo giving a speech on campus, than I've ever heard over abortion.
Do you not find that weird!?
And then you get even to the legal state backed solutions... and there are no teeth. No one proposes charging women who get abortions with homicide (meanwhile you hear howls for blood when it comes to mother of born children who kill their kids), there's very little discussion of even charging abortion doctors... You'd think talks of the death penalty for abortion doctors would be really common given they're supposedly SERIAL MURDERERS OF CHILDREN.
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Somehow this one issue, the holocaust of millions of children, is the one issue in politics people just seem to never get overly worked up about. contrast how much violence there was over a few hundred police shootings a year... or a single "'stolen election'"... or merely being forced to use a coivd passport, and be restricted from engaging in civic life.
Did any anti-lockdown pro-lifers look at lockdowns and the the covid authoritarianism... and when a comrade compared it to Nazi Germany say to them:
"What the hell are you talking about? Medical passports? Restricted economic activity? Maybe making Quarantine camps? That's low level 1930s stuff! Regime "Doctors" murdered almost one million CHILDREN last year alone. And they did the same the year before that. AND THE YEAR BEFORE THAT! We've been at 1945 sheer moral horror EVERY YEAR OF OUR FUCKING LIVES. And you're talking about them starting to maybe make camps!? We've been living in one of the top 5 worst regimes in human history, at a perpetual midnight of horror, for 50 years!"
.
No pro-lifer thinks like that. None sit around cursing the day Washington was born, that had any moment in US history changed, maybe if the British or French had held control, none of this would have happened. None sit around wondering maybe if the south, or the Kaiser, or Hitler, or Caececescu had won... maybe 1 million children wouldn't be murdered every year...almost none sit around praying for biblical judgement to destroy DC like Gomorrah or Jericho. But its exactly what their own axioms would suggest.
What would be the advantage to doing so, from the perspective of actual Christians? We don't believe that a better world is possible. We don't believe that we can build heaven on earth, or perfect humanity. If we did those things, the world would be more or less equally sinful after we did them, and possibly moderately worse for a while. What would we be accomplishing?
What Christian end, specifically, is advanced by engaging in mass lawless violence to suppress abortion?
No pro-lifer thinking like that is presented to you through the dozens of filters designed explicitly to suppress such ideas.
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."
"I desire mercy, not sacrifice."
Why would you expect us to?
You don't, again, appear to have the slightest conception of what Christians are, what they aim for and value. You worship violence, purportedly in service of ideals, but violence is easy and largely pointless. Life, stable, purposeful, fruitful life, that's hard. Building durable relationships, durable communities, that's hard, and valuable, and no amount of motorcycle warlords can or will replace it. The future belongs to those who show up. Christians are pretty good at showing up. Are anarchists? Fifty years from now, when my children are taking over for me, will your children be taking over for you? And even this line of argumentation is, at best, an attempt to frame the relevant issues into a secular frame, but that is not our frame and never will be.
At the end of the day, we don't care about the things you care about the way you care about them. And so you and others will continue to be mystified, and resort to absurdities to try to grok behavior that seems, to you, completely irrational.
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I can't tell whether you are cherry-picking or whether you're just missing empirical data, here.
It applies all the time. I did not specifically discuss the phenomenon of "defense of self or others" exceptions because they are exceptions, and they don't always stick. You might have to prove to a court of law that your justification or excuse is actually legitimate (see e.g. Rittenhouse). Even the military and police must sometimes do this! I did not specifically discuss the phenomenon of revolutionaries (failed or succeeded) because those are historical points where people have decided to pay the price of changing the list, so to speak. All your counterexamples are explained by the logic I presented. They are just examples where either the law still has the final say, or the law itself is being cast down in pursuit of something better.
No, violence is the failure mode of all politics. Violence is what happens when the polity fails, either internally or diplomatically. I agree that taxes depend on the government's monopoly on force. I agree that the threat of legal repercussion is a violent threat! But that is not the end, it is not the telos. The end of all politics is cooperation and coordination.
Are you sure about that?
I don't want to give the wrong impression. A fair number of acts of violence have been committed in defense of abortion, too. But it's like maybe you've never heard about clinic bombings? The idea that there is "no talk" about violence in these cases is laughable. We're talking about it right here. But it's certainly outside the Overton window, and there are many voices against abortion keeping their efforts deliberately inside the Overton window.
The fact that there is any talk at all of such things is pretty remarkable, I think! Because this particular issue is one where high-pressure psychological warfare has been waged against generations of Americans. I don't know what your bar for "really common" is, but I would certainly not call this kind of talk uncommon. I do have an unusually religious extended family, though, so maybe I just hear it more than you do?
I mean... you're just wrong about that. Especially here:
Visit the South, man.
Most people don't live life on their own axioms. Most people can't imagine even trying. First of all, most people's axioms are sweepingly incoherent. I suspect many people haven't got much in the way of "axioms" at all, and I am sure that most people have absolutely terrible reasoning capabilities. Those who are smart enough to think carefully about the idea that a holocaust-level extermination event has been condoned by our government are also smart enough to recognize that there is approximately fuck-all they can do about it unless they want to get into the "murder and
terrorismpolitical revolution business." And life is otherwise good enough that the balance scales don't--usually--tip that way for them. Bread and circuses go a long way toward calming a troubled conscience.And you can be disdainful of that, if you like; damning people for lacking the courage of their convictions is certainly a hobby of mine. But I think it is a bridge too far to simply tell people that they don't believe what they claim to believe. I don't know you, but given the tenor of many of your posts, I have a sneaking suspicion that you genuinely hold some beliefs on which you do not act to the utmost. I suspect almost everyone can be described in this way. Aristotle observed that man is not merely, as Plato asserted, the rational animal, but the political animal. We are interdependent, and often willing to bear heavy burdens to preserve the polity. I think a lot of pro-life Christians are not being hypocrites, but being deeply tolerant, despite weeping rivers over it, in a way that might only be described as quintessentially Christian.
There is a profound difference between being ready to act on your axioms immediately, and being willing to merely say it.
The communists were willing to talk about reigns of terror and liquidating the borgesoise decades before they ever got close to a revolution, ditto facists, likewise neocons, likewise libertarians.
Its really normal for people with political commitments to say "Yes ideally we'd pursue this violently. No we're not doing it now, we don't think we'd win"
Pro-lifers don't do that. They don't openly suggest the day of the rope is coming for abortion doctors, they don't openly speculate about getting their hands on the medical files and tracking down every murderous woman who dared be party to killing their own child. They don't discuss this. They don't fantasize about it. They don;t hint at it.
That makes them damn fucking unique amongst political movements.
Hell My fucking mother was big into the anti-lockdown stuff and her, her friends, and the commentators they follow commonly discuss the Nurremburg precedent and the possibility of hanging everyone involved in passing or enforcing lockdowns...
Many of these same people are Pro-lifers... Damn if that's what they dream of doing over restricted movemnent, what do you think they talk about doing to people who've systematically murdered millions of children every year?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
You and I have very different ideas of what's normal. I've never heard anyone say that, not even online. I'm sure there are some people but it's quite rare.
On the flip side, I do have some pro-life friends who have talked about violence against abortionists.
So uh, you're just wrong. At best you can say that there seems to be less advocacy for violence among pro-lifers than among most political groups, but that's hardly surprising when you're selecting for some of the most religious people out there.
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Don’t forget the other murderers in this murder conspiracy: the mothers-to-not-be. Murderers who in most cases don’t consider themselves such. Women told by their society that ridding themselves of this clump of cells and ending the nine-month insane transformation early is their science-given right and is a good and noble thing they do. Do they deserve a bullet in their heads too? Oh wait, that would kill the baby. Keep her locked up and force-fed vitamins, then seize her child as soon as it’s born and execute her? What a nightmare! (But she deserves it, she was going to slaughter her child in cold blood…)
And what of the police? A hail of gunfire for the would-be rescuer would only be the beginning. Politicians anywhere to the right of Hillary Clinton will be subject to immediate, intense demands that they publicly denounce such vile, vicious acts of terrorism. Anyone who didn’t would be subject to more intense media demonization than even Donald Trump was.
The women in the clinic would be treated as the victims of something worse than rape: right-wing extremism. They would be flown at taxpayer expense to another abortion clinic in the lap of luxury, where their children would die anyway.
So it would take an intense nation-wide effort, organized by militias and timed to occur on a specific day and time. One whiff of such an operation, and the FBI would come down on them harder than Hunter S. Thompson going cold turkey. And if it was pulled off, the screaming and anguish of feminists would be unbearable.
And all of that might, might be worth it to save children being slaughtered at the rate of one 9/11 every two days. But the souls of the women and doctors and moderates would forever be lost, because by their modern liberal standards and the mutated hearsay cultural ideas of Christian doctrine, only a false religion kills in the name of its god, only a false religion has to kill. And the irony is they’d actually be right this time.
Ephesians 6:12 - For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Murdering the flesh and spilling the blood of the babykillers would only feed the rulers of the darkness of the world, and tighten their grip. That’s not Effective Heroism.
Instead, pregnancy crisis centers which don’t pull dirty tricks offer life to children and salvation to their mothers, according to their consciences and free wills. You can tell they’re effective because “Jane’s Revenge” is targeting them specifically for destruction, and the left’s best weapons for community change, the media, are castigating them for their existence.
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