“Christians are not fundamentally concerned about living”

Whenever the idea of being “pro-life” or the concept of the “sanctity of life” are being bandied about, as they are now in the wake of Dobbs, I often think of this passage from Stanley Hauerwas’ Suffering Presence:

It is a mistake to assume that “sanctity of life” is a sufficient criterion for an appropriate concept of death. Appeals to the sanctity of life beg exactly the question at issue, namely, that you know what kind of life it is that should be treated as sacred. More troubling for me, however, is how the phrase “sanctity of life,” when separated from its theological context, became an ideological slogan for a narrow individualism antithetical to the Christian way of life. Put starkly, Christians are not fundamentally concerned about living. Rather, their concern is to die for the right thing. Appeals to the sanctity of life as an ideology make it appear that Christians are committed to the proposition that there is nothing in life worth dying for.

I come back to this passage a lot in my head: the words “Christians are not fundamentally concerned about living” have really stuck with me since I first read them. They are challenging words, especially for those who are called to lead churches today. I don’t think a lot of Christians today want to hear that Christianity isn’t about how to find some little piece of comfort in a difficult world, but is instead about how to prepare yourself to die for something you believe in. I don’t envy pastors who have to try to thread this needle. But I think Hauerwas is right; after all, we follow a Savior who died, and we are called in Scripture to be willing to do the same. The Christian life is one that is different from the culture around it, not in a contrarian sort of way, but because we understand life to mean something more than just existing.

The problem with pro-life rhetoric is that it doesn’t seem to have a firm foundation of what it is we are preserving life for. It mirrors the common American conversation about liberty in this way; freedom is always from something, and very rarely for anything. Life appears to be the same for American Christians. We are standing for life, not because we then want to declare that that life needs to serve the needs of others, but because we want to be able to do with life whatever we please. Its just another way that American Christianity has become wrapped up in the worst kind of Enlightenment liberalism, the kind that takes it deepest cues from capitalism and the market, a kind amoral permissiveness that says if you can afford to do it, then it is good to do. Ethics are a function of financial and social capital. Life isn’t about the good, in a philosophical sense; its about gratifying an immediate desire. In this understanding, life perversely comes to mean not dying, because I have more things that I want to do, to buy, to consume. Life is just the avoidance of death long enough to take another hit of whichever drug consumes us.

It becomes hard then to take pro-life arguments seriously, because they seem to have such a casual disregard for life and its purpose beyond just being born and thus existing. This is why I have such a problem with the pro-life movement, despite my own moral qualms about abortion. If we are going to work so damn hard to force women to carry to term any and all pregnancies no matter the cost, shouldn’t we have some idea of what kind of life we want people to lead? It isn’t good enough to say “live and let live.” Christians can’t be laissez faire about these kinds of things; we are too committed to following a risen Lord who lived life in a very specific way, and even more importantly, was willing to give up his life for the sake of his friends and his God.

Because, in the end, that is the “something” for which life exists: to love and to serve your Lord God and your neighbor. Those words mean something, something more than just “get yours while you can.” Death is not to be feared, and life is not to be revered, because neither are absolutes; only God is, and as Scripture tells us, God is love. Hauerwas goes on in the same vein:

Therefore life for Christians is not sacred in the strict sense. Christians view life as a gift, but a gift for which they must care. Thus the claim that life is sacred is not really so much a statement about ourselves as it is an indication of the kind of respect we owe our neighbor. Our life and the lives of our neighbors are to be protected, since they are not ours to dispose of. For our dying as much as our living should be determined by our conviction that we are not our own.