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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."
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!"
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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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