The Supreme Court, in a radical, and frankly mind-boggling decision last month, overturned the long held precedent that allowed women the right to make their own reproductive choices. There’s been much written about this activist Court and the dangerous implications of their actions. Doctors and legal scholars are doing all they can to save the lives soon to be lost. I’m not here to add my voice to theirs. I’m not a doctor. I never went to law school. And even though I have my own emotional history, I’m also not going to tell heartbreaking stories from women in an attempt to bring alarm or an increased urgency to the floor. There are plenty of people doing just that, and they are doing it well. What I am is a theologian. And while theology shouldn’t be part of the national legal conversation, it is, nonetheless. The topics for which liberals and conservatives create public theologies differ, but there’s no need for that. Today, I’m articulating a Theology of Life that I’m hoping will help us meet the moment. You may recognize some of this from the letter Rev. Dr. Sarah Lenzi and I started last month when we saw what was soon to be coming at us.
From the moment we pull the first breath of air into our lungs, forged in the wet and dark of the womb, to the moment we empty those lungs for the last time, beginning the slow process of decay that will feed Earth again, we are alive, and we are beholden to one another. Our work while we are here is to protect life, all life, as sacred and holy. What happens in the womb and in the soil- these belong to God, to Earth, to Spirit; what happens before and after life is not ours to know. The human task is to know that all life on Earth is sacred, all life is a reflection of, even the embodiment of, the Holy. We are here to protect and delight in it while we share these human lives; what comes before and after are beyond our reach. Where the edges of life begin or end, we do not know. How we live this life, how we treat each other, how we embody our holy nature- this is our work. These truths lie at the heart of liberal religious theology.
Religious conservatives will often present the argument for and against reproductive justice and abortion in particular as an argument between those who believe in the sacredness of life and those who treat human life cavalierly. But, in truth, both the right and the left share a belief in the sacredness of human life and that where we differ is in how we understand the work of our human living and, in particular, what is ours to know and to legislate.
At the core, the issue around reproductive rights is the question of authority. Who has the authority? Do I determine what I do with my body or is there a moral code that over-rides that choice? If all life is holy, then each pregnant person, themselves holy, should have the right to choose whether to continue or terminate their pregnancy without being forced to justify that choice, and without fear of moral judgment or legal repercussions. The presence of an embryo inside a person’s uterus does not render them any more or less righteous, any more or less the embodiment of the infinite sacred, any more or less capable of self-determination. There is no theological justification for neglecting the sacred life of a mother over the sacred life of an unborn child. Even neglecting the thousands of women who have to make choices regarding pregnancies that will result in children who will suffer horrifically or carrying pregnancies that will end their own lives, there are women who make choices to terminate pregnancies simply so they can live the lives they dream for themselves. Once we know that those women are also holy, we have to protect them with at least as much zeal and commitment as anyone else.
Extending the notion that even a clump of cells a few weeks in existence is of equal value to the full life of the person within whom those cells are reproducing is a leap in our ability to understand the edges of life. There is tremendous hubris in creating public policy declaring that we know when life begins or ends or what defines life at all. The full human experience does not include insight into where or how life forms or if or in what way it ends. Do souls live on before or after we are here together on this planet? Are we formed of something beyond the physical matter we see and feel? Without clear, empirically tested answers, we are left only with those things we can and do know. And yet, public policy is being determined by precisely this kind of projection and guess work, fueled by religious fervor.
Liberal religion’s ceding of ground on theological questions has left religious conservatives in the position of being able to define, for the broader American public, what God is, and what God wants with regard to many things, including abortion. We have given away the moral ground in the debate for Reproductive Justice and it has been to our detriment. It is time we stop.
Generally, liberal religious people like us do not share a defined understanding of God, preferring instead to create communities of conversation and seeking in which each person can delve into their understanding of the sacred and holy. We share the belief that our human diversity is a reflection of the diversity of the infinite sacred. Liberal theologians in the 21st century, do not believe that it is our work to define God. To pretend that we know what that word truly signifies, other than the grand mystery deep within and beyond our knowing, is the height of arrogance. We come, rather, from a stance of humility in the face of the unknown, allowing awe, and the love it engenders, to lead the way.
Liberal theology does not negate or deny the existence of God and it does not understand human life as anything less than sacred. Rather, in acknowledging that there is a vast mystery that begins before and extends beyond our breathing sentience, liberal theology chooses instead to focus on the here and now. When we focus on those things we can know, it becomes clear that questions like, “When does life begin?” are out of our purview while questions like, “How do we ensure that women have full agency over their bodies?” fall into our realm of understanding and are within our ability to affect.
Unitarian Universalists aren’t alone in recognizing our limitations on these issues. When Confucius was asked questions about the after-life, his response was that we are all here to play our role in society, that there’s no need to ask questions for which there are no answers. And, there is a great Buddhist parable pointing us in the same direction. When one of the Buddha’s disciples is asking all kinds of questions about the nature of existence, the Buddha responds by telling him a story of a man shot by a poisoned arrow. Before the man will allow a doctor to remove the arrow, he insists on knowing who shot him and where the archer was from and who his family is and where the arrow was made and what kind of wood it’s made of. Buddha points out that this man will die before getting any answers. He says we first pull the arrow out. We first end the suffering. Once all the suffering is over, we can ask questions we may never know the answers to, but for now, we act in compassion for ourselves and others. Great teachers have been guiding us to focus on the pain, on the suffering, on the tremendous need we see in the people right before us, and to let go of the idea that we can define life or understand more – or that we need to understand more – than what is here an now.
Just as we recognize our own limitations, we recognize those of the State. Facing the Great Mysteries is not the work of our government; it is the role of the clergy and theologians. Making broad, legally binding decisions based on theological questions - which has begun to happen at every level of government - is wholly inappropriate and is a reversal of the intent of the separation between church and state. While we have endowed our government with the power to ensure our freedom to wrestle with these questions without interference, we have historically declared that they cannot answer these questions for us. Still, they try.
The genius of the American Experiment was the container of freedom wrapped around us, allowing us to explore many ways of knowing and living. Before our freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion were established, nations around the world had always required uniformity and conformity in an attempt to hold a people together and strengthen a government. It was understood that everyone had to believe the same thing for a nation to have sufficient power and that disagreement was weakness. While there are still some nations that adhere to this philosophy, the United States, in a fit of Enlightenment optimism, believed and continues to adhere to the notion that we are even more powerful, and have an even happier populace if each person is allowed the freedom of conscience and the opportunity to pursue their own religious sensibilities. Our Constitution goes so far as to ensure that no one Church or religion will ever benefit from governmental support or suffer from governmental interference. And yet, in this overturning of precedence and establishment of the state’s right to remove agency of a woman over her body, the American government has favored the theological framework of conservative Christians over the freedom of faith and self-determination.
With this decision, our Supreme Court blurred the lines between church and state, opting for one worldview to become the law of the land, limiting our freedom of belief. With so many of you, I mourn the dramatic overreach of our Supreme Court, as they attempt to reach into every level of government and our lives with arguments grounded in boldly stated theologies not shared by the diversity of humanity in our nation. This overreach limits our individual choice, it limits our agency over our own health and bodies, and it lays the groundwork for an increasingly conservative theology to become the foundation of our legal system. This blurring should be a call to action for any American who truly believes in the constitutional guarantee to freedom of religion and for all of us who adhere to a liberal religious worldview who are comfortable in all our not-knowing, who understand the edges of life to be blurry and undefinable, and who respect the rights of individuals to make choices for themselves without state interference. The Supreme Court might have been hoping to put an end to this conversation with their recent ruling. Instead, they have awakened a sleeping citizenship, a people ready to remind our government of our inherent freedoms, and our right to explore and embody our faith. Liberal religion will no longer cede this ground to conservative Christians who have forgotten that freedom belongs to us too.