William Murchison

What this country needs is a good, consistent theology of human life.

I am not here to offer it. I am here to illustrate the need.

Human life? Good, apple-cheeked–well, occasionally not quite apple-cheeked–life? Innocent, gurgling, carpool-driving, tennis-ball-swatting life? Don’t all the diet books, health clubs, Lamaze classes, women’s shelters, and elder-care centers prove endlessly our society’s dedication to the good life for all?

That would not be precisely my point. My point would be that our society lacks a consistent theology of life: a blanket of assumptions about the origins, duties, and responsibilities pertaining to life; a guide to our actions in, so to speak, living out those assumptions.

What we have, after the intellectual and social upheavals of the past four decades, is a muddle of assumptions, no one assumption more compelling, except maybe legally, than another one; all up for grabs, despite the excitement which frequently grips us because of news stories about life. Stories, for instance, about "innocent lives" at risk.

There you go–innocent lives. The hue and cry is out for America to stop, in the name of mercy, the precipitate killing of death row inmates. Doesn’t that prove something?

It proves, I think, the size and shapelessness of our moral muddle. It proves how differently, and how selectively, we look at the varied issues of human life. Generalized solicitude for convicted murderers, general nervousness and drumming of fingers at the very mention of that dreaded topic, abortion–you must back off a ways to appreciate such a picture. It is a picture of ourselves, sometimes at war with ourselves. This makes it hard to back off. So also it obliges some effort in that direction.

Page One of the New York Times, May 14: "Bush Candidacy Puts Focus on Execution." On execution of the innocent, as it happens. The concern at the Times, and elsewhere, centers on suspicions that particular Texas inmates put to death may in fact have been guiltless. Gov. George W. Bush, the pro-capital punishment governor of a pro-capital punishment state, is called to account for what his political enemies would like to show as his indifference to questions of guilt or innocence–Jes’ So’s Bubba Gits to See the Bad Guy Go Out Hard and Fast.

It is no part of my business to arbitrate the wisdom or foolishness of Texas criminal justice under my own governor. It seems fair to propose that Texas criminal justice functions with a concern and disinterestedness as notable as that of the state in which the New York Times is published; this in spite of, or because of, the two states’ different views of the death penalty.

A related question strikes me as no less interesting and maybe a lot more so: Why does a certain kind of American get wrought up about capital punishment but not about abortion? Doesn’t this seem a bit, well, odd? Yet so it often happens in these times. Self-conscious friends of "civil liberty," who huff and puff over the taking of "innocent life" by the state, are unruffled when the state lets doctors take life you would reasonably suppose to have the tinge of innocence–unborn life.

What goes on here? Something hard to see because of the muddle that is our daily portion in a world more deferential to opinion than to truth-claims. Lacking a unitive vision concerning life–or, for that matter, death–moderns make it up as they go. We are all over the map on life questions: no common understanding of what it means to be alive in the world, or of the rights and duties that aliveness entails.

Politics–now that’s different! Politics we understand far better than ethics. Politics is real and hands-on, a thing of the sunlight rather than the dark places where philosophers and theologians mutter incomprehensibly to each other.

Our modern views of life are perforce political. Not everywhere, not always–but enough places, and enough of the time, to warp and confuse discourse about the moral view of life. You see Hillary Clinton stalking New York State, claiming to be the pro-choicest of pro-choicers, and right away you know what she is about. The lady isn’t running a philosophy seminar; she is panning for votes. As is, for that matter, her Republican opponent Rick Lazio, whose lone scruple (though not an insignificant one) on the issue is partial-birth abortion.

Now and again the new politics and the old ethics meet uncertainly, doubtfully, in public. You get the capital punishment debate and its manifold confusion of purpose and emphasis.

Just what do we think about life these days? A lot of things, some of them contradictory, others ambiguous. It may be no wonder, with respect to issues like abortion and euthanasia, that the great American public refuses to come down firmly on one side or the other, and that force (i.e., judicial decree) carries the day and rules the roost. As Lenin proved, a man with a plan wins out over any number of planless, clueless men and women.

There is no good, consistent theology of life. It seems logical, by way of getting into this question, to mention the ways our two great political philosophies–"liberalism" and "conservatism"–look at life. (I quote-mark the terms due to escalating doubt as to how much content they retain in the 21st century; but the device, once resorted to, hardly requires repetition.)

Life to many conservatives–though far from all–is holistic. There is a spiritual context to it. God is the author, and life is of a piece. Conservatives tend to read their Scripture with zeal if not literalness. When the Good Book, as well as the continuous tradition of the Christian churches, affirms the divine character of life, conservatives tend to draw protective rings around it.

Except regarding war and capital punishment. Here we come to something different in conservative discourse. Various liberals support capital punishment, if usually with greater delicacy than conservatives do. And as a pre-kind and gentle Bob Dole pointed out in a 1976 vice presidential debate, Democrats–good liberals for the most part–got us into every war this century.

Still, conservatives more strongly support the death penalty, consistent with their concern for divine justice and an orderly society. Likewise conservatives tend to back up the military and its endeavors. One reason is the habit they long ago formed of casting their buckets deeper than any liberal would into the well of unashamed, sometimes bawdy, patriotism. If America is our country, then the defense of America becomes a duty. Necessarily, the fulfillment of such a duty will involve some shedding of blood. One doesn’t encounter a whole lot of conservative pacifists.

What about the liberal view of life and the contrasts it presents? The liberal would not present himself as one whit less concerned about life than the conservative. He would turn the question, though. He would talk about life in the here and now: life, in other words, outside the womb.

Liberal ministers and theologians–generally a this-worldly lot–acknowledge the divine lordship. What they would have us understand is how much injustice, despite this lordship, afflicts human affairs. God is a god of justice. Would not a conservative say as much? Of course. Let’s see what we can do, then, to help spread the justice around.

For liberals, as for conservatives, life questions touch justice questions at two points of the moral compass: capital punishment and abortion.

Here we have living people, the liberal would say: people mistreated, abused, by The System. Abused? How’s that again? Abused means "forced" –the phrase, or its like, permeates pro-choice discourse–to carry a pregnancy to full term. To stifle personal preference, out of fear or whatever, is to submit to injustice. Notwithstanding that two lives, two destinies, seem to collide here, the liberal–particularly if running for political office–almost unfailingly comes down on the side of the mother. It would be cynical to observe that dead babies don’t vote. But they don’t, whereas ex-mothers do.

Then, for liberals, there’s another consideration: the masses (downtrodden) vs. the classes (over-privileged). That introduces the question of women –the only known majority to enjoy "minority" status; women hunched over their washing machines (formerly it was "washing boards"), beaten down by circumstance and brutal or, at the very least, insensitive men. ("…[T]here are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro. Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’–that is, the place chosen for them." –Simone de Beauvoir, 1949)

To do secular justice for women means to free them of imposed burdens, e.g., "involuntary pregnancy." The life issue is about women’s lives.

Capital punishment was where we came in–small waves of indignation starting to swirl about us and, more particularly, about George W. Bush. The matter is tough. But then that is nothing new in the experience of a civilization pledged to defend life in general through the retributive taking of specific life.

Capital punishment, whose popularity seems unique to Americans (for reasons that probably warrant a Ph.D. dissertation) is in force in 37 states. Proximate cause of the present excitement is the moratorium on executions imposed by Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a professed supporter of the death penalty. Ryan insists that before he will approve further executions he must receive "a 100 percent guarantee" that the executioner has the right miscreant. Lately in Illinois new evidence has exonerated 13 men on death row. Ryan is aghast. He wants no more of this.

Not that anybody else wants more, including George W. Bush, whose complicity in the execution of innocent men is implied by the Times’ piece of May 14. The Times acknowledges that "No one can point with certainty to a case in which an innocent person has been executed" in Texas since reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. But, then, you never know, do you? Classic (which is to say, pre-1960) theology speaks to the question: In any society of fallen men and women, imperfections of understanding and practice are sure to exist. Since 1994, 11 inmates of death row in Texas have been exonerated. The statistic stares meaningfully at advocates on both sides of the issue.

Meanwhile a senior Roman Catholic prelate, Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, has called for a moratorium on executions in California, based on his reading of the capital punishment system as "fatally flawed." Among "the public," whatever that woolly term may mean, support of capital punishment has lately dipped to its lowest level in 19 years. (A "mere" two-thirds now support it.)

Is a consistent theology of life starting to coalesce? Not quite that. Note the level of support that capital punishment still enjoys. Mark the determination of governors like Bush to carry out the traditional understanding; namely, an essential part of justice is the infliction on criminals of punishments equivalent to their own, original acts of injustice and violence.

No such argument is readily resolved, even by appeal to theology. Secular and theological premises get well mixed up here, both sides using both when it suits their respective purposes: the right to kill, based on theology; the duty not to kill, likewise based on theology. The biblical record is broad enough to encompass both viewpoints.

Thus St. Augustine famously found divine sanction for those who wage "just wars," as well as for those who "put to death wicked men." In particular cases, admittedly hard ones, public imperatives and special circumstances trumped the rule designed for everyday, ordinary life.

Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae justifies capital punishment in "very rare" cases of "absolute necessity." A crack wide enough, perhaps, to thrust an executioner’s needle through, and to do so on Christian grounds. Yet what Evangelium Vitae calls "a positive attitude of absolute respect for life" is more congenial to Christian ethics in modern times.

Theology commands–at the barest minimum–reluctance to take life. No beer-bottle-waving, or songs of triumph, in celebration of an execution. No contempt or sloppy disregard for the rights of one in jeopardy of the death penalty.

And no abortion either? From secularists come the sounds of throat-clearing. When the theological bandwagon takes you past your intended destination, what is there to do but hop off–rapidly? Conservative Christians can frame the abortion debate any way they want to; that doesn’t mean non-Christians–or for that matter liberal Christians–have to give them the time of day.

You see how it is–no good, consistent theology of human life. Not any more. We are all over the map. We can’t come together.

Mention abortion to a knot of anti-death penalty demonstrators, and expect from some the knowing nod, from many more the impatient arching of eyebrows. The tender solicitude that death row inmates command transfers poorly, it would seem, to "fetuses."

Not the solicitude paid on Christian grounds. Says John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae: ". . . I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral . . . abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth."

Which is all very well, you see–for popes. Who have to talk like that, one supposes. You use your popes where you can (as on capital punishment), and where you can’t (as on abortion), you wander off, whistling softly. The same with other, non-Catholic theologians. You pursue the aim you want to pursue–"empowerment" of powerless women–in whatever context you want to, unconstrained by any generally accepted "theology" of life. As it happens, no such animal exists.

The torrent of rhetoric about the value of "innocent life," when delivered from the secular perspective, starts to peter out as soon as the conversation turns to abortion. (Not always–there’s Nat Hentoff.)

The American Civil Liberties Union’s opposition to the death penalty ("an intolerable denial of civil liberties") is well-known and of long standing. The ACLU energetically calls attention to the current vogue for decrying the execution of the innocent and calling for death penalty moratoriums. But what has the ACLU to say about abortion? Among other things, this:

"Anti-choice representatives are waging a new battle over reproductive freedom with the introduction of legislation that would create a new, separate offense to punish anyone who injures or causes the death of a fetus during the commission of certain federal crimes." The congressional measure intended to deal with this state of affairs "is . . . an inappropriate method of punishing violence against women because it seeks to separate the woman from her fetus in the eyes of the law. Such separation is merely the first step toward overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating a woman’s right to choose."

Likewise the ACLU stoutly supports a woman’s supposed right to use the abortion-inducing drug RU-486, in furtherance of the "constitutional right to access abortion services."

Not much sympathy in these enlightened precincts for a child whose mother declares him an encumbrance, then acts accordingly. We don’t have children here, we have fetuses. We don’t have "innocence," we have the unspoken presumption that moral categories exist purely outside the mother’s womb; that the womb may indeed be a preserve from the moral fistfights people get into when they have too much time on their hands. Let the mother exercise her precious reproductive freedom. We’ve got death row inmates to be liberated.

There isn’t much pretense, in anti-death penalty literature, that innocence is the North Star by which the movement steers its course. The movement hates capital punishment, period. "Innocence" is a fortuitous talking point: a club with which to clobber the lukewarm or uncommitted (assuming a good, life-loving pacifist can be pictured "clobbering" anyone).

So where are we by this point? In a muddle, I would think; dispensing ad hoc judgments right and left. It is a condition that likely satisfies no one, including the most proficient ad hoc-ers.

You enter the assorted debates on human life with little expectation of convincing anyone: at best of overpowering rivals, shouting them down, shaming them; winning through intimidation, political or journalistic. The meeting ground is too narrow for easy patching up of differences. Though this clearly shouldn’t be the case.

Take the matter of executing the imputedly innocent. Nobody wants any such result. Nobody. (The ACLU’s own literature acknowledges, cannily or generously, this very point.) What’s wanted is justice: always a slippery commodity, but one usually within the grasp of a people seeking it with common purpose.

The capital punishment wars of the past 40 years have exposed the lack of just such a common purpose. Proponents of capital punishment seek repair of the social breach caused by an act of violence. Opponents slough off the very idea of such a breach. What they see, usually, is a murderer who, for one reason or another–sociological, medical, familial–did something for which it would be unfair to hold him fully accountable.

The issue of "innocence" matters deeply, no matter how it may come to be employed politically. To execute the guiltless is to stain the criminal justice system, standing temporarily on its head the very purpose of such a system–that is, to protect and vindicate the innocent.

A good, consistent theology of life–distinct from our current muddle of assumptions–would allow a little deeper probing. It would help with the devising of remedies that do not undermine active use of the death penalty. It would show, further, the futility of seeking to perfect any man-made work. Gov. Ryan’s insistence on "100 percent" certainty of guilt as a prerequisite for execution in Illinois assures us no one will get executed in Illinois while George Ryan remains governor. A moratorium on executions clearly means no innocent man will be executed; it means, likewise, no guilty man will be executed. Moratorium backers, in Illinois and elsewhere (including clerical backers), advance just this trade-off–rarely saying as much.

A good, consistent theology of life would help us work through the perplexities of the situation, keeping in view the necessities and rights of the accused, the necessities and rights of the victim in whose name accusation is lodged, and the necessities and rights of the society acting–it trusts–to repair a breach in the social order. Do all sides in the debate see the need for such a balancing act? The secular/political opponents of capital punishment–who in our secular/political age greatly outnumber the theological types– seem not to see such a need. Against capital punishment the ACLU vaguely pleads injustice. Well, you know what?–it would be nice to know who earns the high privilege of defining "injustice"; I mean, apart from the ACLU’s in-house staff. Unjust? On what terms that non-ACLU types are bound to accept?

I keep saying "’theology" of life. Why so? Why not "philosophy"? Well, you see, for a very good reason: Unless we draw God intimately into our conversation–and authoritatively, so far as that can be done–essentially liberal/secular premises kick in. We move from theology to politics, from the high ground of Bible studies and encyclicals and sermons to the very, very low ground of political speeches and appeals to interest.

How this works in the context of abortion we see all too clearly. Take away the divine sanction for life, and let the arguments begin over "convenience," "fairness," and other qualities peripheral to the main issue, which is the integrity of a life formed by God.

Richard John Neuhaus’ naked public square, where theologies of any sort meet a hostile reception, is a naked beehive, buzzing with viewpoints of every kind and description. Free thought is of God. Hooray for it. But to say that thought forever bars conclusion and consensus is to say something dangerous. A consensus about life we used to have, built up by clerics and judges and teachers and authorities of various sorts. It held that life, being good, was to be valued, protected, succored on premises that strengthened the society and gave due glory to the author of life.

Can anything resembling that consensus be reconstructed and put to use? Can the junkpile of easy, secular assumptions be cleared from our midst? It would be pleasant to say yes. It would be more accurate to say, God knows. It would be faithful and sensible and praiseworthy to say, with a smile, sure–let’s have a go.

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