Careful! Protecting Life Might Turn You into a Christofascist
In Which I Fisk A Terrible Sermon And Absolutely Lose My Temper
Lucas van Leyden (1494–1533) Mondana and Child under a tree, 1514
I feel like yesterday I was accidentally verging on Takes except that I didn’t think to number them. This morning, I have one long rant, with a fun video at the end.
Somehow I came across a sermon, probably preached around Christmas time, by someone who admits he’s been in seminary a total of four weeks, who previously had been in the Texas Legislature. To me, he looks but a babe, but his impressive resume indicates he can’t have been born quite yesterday. The sermon is a study in every heresy about Jesus being a feminist that has ever been cobbled together. He even quotes from the Gospel of Thomas so that you may observe how deeply unserious this particular congregation and preacher are about the Christian faith.
But that’s not why it’s interesting to me. How Jesus is actually a feminist has been done a lot. What is more unusual is how nicely this young person articulates the current predicament of modern people, not only women but men also. Plus, he speaks clearly and is easy to understand. His time as a politician has made him into the sort of Ted Talk-esque rhetorician that doesn’t try the mind too hard. And, since it’s the end of the week and I’m pretty tired, I’m willing to accept these small mercies. I’m plunking the video here, but the lines I’m interested in I have transcribed below so that I can respond to them in the usual way.
I suppose I should admit straight away that his voice is rather soothing. Beyond that, his ability to speak in soundbites is most useful for me trying to type. Let’s dive in.
Religion always pointed me toward politics, but now politics is pointing me back to religion.
Wait a minute…is this Christian Nationalism? Is it really the case that this person went to work in politics because of what he believed in his faith tradition? I hesitate to label whatever kind of gathering this is a Christian one, since he’s subverting the very heart of the Christian gospel, but still, color me bemused that some people are allowed to do this—not you, of course, unless you’re pro-choice and pro-trans, only then is it ok.
I’ve come to believe that the root of our many problems…is spiritual. Our inability to love ourselves, our neighbors, and our planet is killing us.
It is spiritual, of course. We all agree on that point. But it’s not because of our inability to love ourselves, it’s because we refuse to love God with all our hearts and minds and souls and strength. We’ve been busily working on loving ourselves for several decades now and you can see how it’s working out. I know, I know, you say, we just haven’t tried loving ourselves hard enough, we must love ourselves even harder. Ok, fine, but I’m not joining in. I’ll be over here in the corner memorizing the Psalter, waiting for you to get tired of that and try something different.
The preacher wants you to know that if you bring your faith feelings into the realm of politics, unlike him who is allowed to do that, you will literally turn into a “Christofascist:”
….Christofascism [is the term coined] to describe the kind of Christianity that worships power.
Remember, most people who are accusing other people of doing things are themselves guilty of those things. Not all the time, of course. I can accuse someone of theft without myself being a thief if the person did just steal from me. But if I’m bitterly angry at you for gossiping, it’s more than likely that I’m the raging gossip. In this case, as the “sermon” unfolds, we’ll see that the whole thing is about power. This “preacher” and the “congregation” he addresses are all keenly conscious of the importance of having power. It’s just that they don’t want you to have any. If you do, and you use it to advance a peaceful and orderly society built on principles derived from Scripture, you’re a Christofascist. If you want to protect the life of the unborn baby, you hate women and are a Christofascist. If you think it’s possible to believe the crazy crazy idea that both the woman and the unborn baby are fully human, you are literally a Christofaschist. Don’t even think of trying to say that pregnant women without the right to kill their offspring are even human enough to take responsibility for themselves and for the children they bear how dare you:
This summer more than half our population became second-class citizens. Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the state. And nothing is more unchristian than that.
Well, I can think of some things that are more unchristian—murder is pretty unchristian. Is he saying that all women in Texas are basically enslaved because they can’t get abortions there? That is quite an expansive definition of slavery, and not very kind, if you are looking for new opportunities to tone-police.
I don’t want to be annoying or anything, but getting pregnant and giving birth did not make me a second-class citizen. It didn’t even have anything to do with consent. If I had been raped and conceived a child, I would have been sinned against, grievously, but not in such a way that I was robbed of my humanity—which is given to me by God, not other people—and turned into a second-class citizen. Speaking of how-dare-yous, how dare this guy dupe all the people in that room into thinking something so wicked? I just got to the part in the Bible this morning where Jesus informs the crowds that anyone leading any of his “little ones” into sin should have a millstone tied around his neck and be thrown into the sea. People who go to church to hear about Jesus are the Lord’s Little Ones. Any preacher who stands up and lies like this is looking at an eternity of hurt. My gosh, what a church wreck.
The preacher, of course, is in a pickle because he used the word “woman.” He has to stop and make an important clarification:
…our trans-community needs abortion care too….when I use the word “woman” it should not be understood as an exhaustive term, but rather as a lens to … interrogate patriarchy.
Did you know that you, as a woman, besides being a second-class citizen in states where you are not allowed to murder your infants before they’re born, are also just a “lens” to “interrogate the patriarchy?” I know you probably thought you were an adult human female, created by God, known by him from before the foundation of the world, knit together in the dark secret of your mother’s womb, intimately and wonderfully made, that you’ve been given the extraordinary gift of sheltering the thing God loves so much that he stamped his own image on each and every one—human lives. But actually, really, you’re only a lens to interrogate the patriarchy, which is another way of saying that men can come along and say that they are better women than you and you should shove over. Hashtag Tare Down The Patriarchy.
What a ghastly mess we’re in. We carry on:
Throughout human history, the greatest threat to women has been men.
No. Throughout human history, the greatest threat to women has been sin and its consequence, death. Sin was the free choice of the first man and woman. They did it together. It was the dream of their hearts. They looked at that lovely piece of fruit. They pondered the intoxicating words of their other greatest threat, Satan, and then made the choice to bite down. Speaking of choice:
Choice meant consent. Choice meant power. Choice meant freedom.
The preacher is talking about his mother, here, and how she indoctrinated him at a young age in the ways of Planned Parenthood. It’s heartbreaking to think that a woman with a young child would constantly and willfully hold out before the face of that child the fact that she could have killed him before he was born if she had so desired. Love is Love amirite. Anyway, also observe that we are talking about power. Some people do need power—women need the power to kill their unborn children, and men need the power to pretend to be women and to take over women’s spaces. They also need power to make sure you never have the chance to explain how they are wrong.
Now we come to the denouement, the moment where we are introduced to that primordial lie from which all other lies have been flowing:
Women will never be free until they belong to themselves.
No, women will never be free until they belong to Jesus. Women will never be free until they can accept their own biological realities. Women will never be free until they are rescued out of all their sins by placing their faith in the work of Christ on the cross. There are all kinds of ways that women can be free, but none of them include belonging to themselves. “Belonging” requires two people, or one person and some object. You can’t “belong to yourself.” On the other hand, you can worship yourself. You can destroy yourself. You can sacrifice yourself. You can give yourself to someone else. But for belonging, there has to be another person there besides yourself. What’s so amazing about motherhood is that, after so much pain and anxiety, suddenly you find that you belong to someone, your own child, who came out of you, who is part of you, and yet who isn’t you. It is the sweetest and most astonishing kind of belonging. It takes one entirely by surprise. It’s like falling in love. In many ways, for many women, it even feels a little bit like salvation. And that, my dears, is why Satan hates it so so much.
Upsettingly, for Satan, the young “preacher” accidentally says the quiet part out loud in the next few soundbites:
The disagreement about the legality of abortion is not a disagreement about life. It is a disagreement about personhood.
Yes, and we’re going to go ahead and keep saying that the person is made at conception. It is a work of God, though also the work of two human people. Two things can be true at the same time. God acts and the two people conceiving the child act. A life—a human life, a person—is created. You don’t have to be tricked into the dumb choice he’s trying to force you to make.
Is an embryo a legal person whose rights trump those of a woman?
Go read some books, sir. The scientific and the spiritual evidence shows that the mother and her baby are biologically and emotionally and spiritually bound up together. For a while, for all practical purposes, they are indistinguishable from each other. Mary Harrington said about the birth of her daughter that it felt as though she had grown another arm, only wasn’t an arm, it was another person whose life was irrevocably bound up with hers. When the baby, born or unborn, dies, part of the mother dies. Part of her is torn away that can never be got back, except in heaven. There should be no discussion of trumping, of rights, of a battle for who gets to live and who has to die. This is not the Hunger Games. How dare all the people who force women to make this choice. This is not a choice. This is a lie. A sick, evil, wicked lie and the fact that it’s spoken in what is called a church building makes it even worse.
If an embryo is a person, those exceptions are morally unintelligible, morally reprehensible.
Yes. Indeed. So we have been saying. What you are doing is making murderers out of millions of people who would never have done that if they had known what was at stake.
Legal personhood evolves with life, and life is change without clear or definite boundaries.
No, actually, life has a very definite boundary. At some point, it comes to a hard stop—called death. Then we can begin to talk about eternal life. But at this point in the story, life begins at one moment and then ends at another. It’s not rocket surgery. Even some biologists and some Supreme Court judges have figured it out.
The only way we can allow the rights of an embryo to trump the rights of a woman is if we believe a woman is not a full person. And… that has been the default belief throughout most of human history.
No, it hasn’t. Jesus believed that women were people too and so were babies and so were men. You’re the one, mister seminarian preacher man, who is making an accursed mess of who gets to be a person. You are the one fearmongering. And for what? Is someone paying you? Has Satan offered you some kind of special half-priced time-share? Do you think you will not be held to account on the final day? Not so, for there is one Lord and Judge, and he sees the heart of every person who will someday stand before him.
May you never preach another sermon again. May you go about limping. May you be struck blind on the way to your next class. May you fall off your bicycle. May the Lord appear to you and tell you what a wretched and wicked man you are. May you repent before it is too late.
So anyway, have a nice day and please enjoy this fun video:
Ha ha ha, please don’t make creepy small talk with my kid about what grade she’s in. Love the haircut though.
"This “preacher” and the “congregation” he addresses are all keenly conscious of the importance of having power. It’s just that they don’t want you to have any. If you do, and you use it to advance a peaceful and orderly society built on principles derived from Scripture, you’re a Christofascist."
Yep. And Big Eva eunuchs like Russell Moore, David French, Curtis Chang etc. etc. say pretty much the same thing. They are just more subtle about it most of the time.
You go, Girl!