Pro-Life Rhetoric and War
Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog
One of the problems that arises out of pro-life phrases like “sanctity of human life” is that it makes human life the standard. But God’s law is the standard, not human life. We should rather speak of the sanctity of God’s law, and the resultant dignity of human life.
Neglect of this principle is why pro-lifers often walk into a trap when they are asked if they are pacifists or if they support capital punishment under any circumstances. When they reply that they are not pacifists or if they show support for capital punishment, they are then charged with inconsistency. “Pro-life, huh?”
But life can never be the standard. God’s law (revealed or natural) is the only possible standard for public righteousness. Speaking of which, I am currently reading a good book on the subject of God’s law — we live in lawless times, and this book would be a good refresher for a lot of people.
A defenseless child in the womb is always to be protected, and never assaulted. That is the case across the board. The child has done nothing that could possibly warrant a just execution, and this is true in the very nature of the case. All we need to know is that we are talking about abortion. If we are talking about abortion, then we know what side we are on.
When it comes to capital punishment, we actually need to know the additional circumstances.
That is why we have things like lawyers, evidence, juries, and trials. Capital punishment is a horror when the accused is innocent. Capital punishment is the work of God when the accused is worthy of death, and has been found worthy of death in an honest trial. Capital punishment is what God’s civil deacons are required to administer in appropriate cases.
So when someone accuses a pro-lifer of inconsistency because he supports the death penalty as biblically defined, a moment’s reflection should reveal how absurd this is. “You oppose killing innocent people without a trial, and yet you support killing guilty people who have had a fair trial?” Right. What’s the problem?
War presents a similar challenge, only a thousand times more complicated than the trial of one murderer. I am responding here to some very glib comments online from libertarians who want to level abortion and killing in warfare, putting them on the same footing. But this is beyond facile, and is not serious moral reasoning at all.
If an elective abortion is performed on the other side of the country, in order to be opposed I don’t need to know the doctor’s name, I don’t need to know the mother’s name, and I don’t need to know the circumstances that led to the abortion. I am pro-life, which means that the nameless child deserves a defender. Period. This is the case because of the very nature of abortion and the abortion controversy.
But if I read about a drone strike in Yemen that took out a terrorist leader, I don’t have any idea what I should think about it. It may have been an atrocity, and it may have been the best thing we have done in that region for ten years. I don’t know, and I am really in no position to know. I cannot in good conscience accuse anyone involved of murder, because — I return to the theme — I don’t know.
I can have a general approach to foreign affairs that governs my voting, and I do — and that general approach would be on the non-interventionist side of things. So I am not saying anything here about whether war x is a just one or not. I am not saying anything about whether our presence in Yemen is in our national security interest. I dare say that it might not be, and that had I been consulted on the matter — I wasn’t — my advice might well have been to stay out. But a Christian man can still go there and fight honorably. He cannot be a “Christian” abortionist.
The just war issue divides into two categories — jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Roughly speaking, the first refers to just cause in going to war in the first place and the second concerns just conduct in the course of war. When soldiers capture a town, if they spiral out of control, looting and raping, this would be a violation of jus in bello. If they massacre a bunch of civilians because they didn’t want to transport them anywhere, this would be a war crime, and a violation of jus in bello. Every Christian military man must be ready, on a daily basis, to wreck his career, or to forfeit his life, rather than go along with atrocities.
But the question of jus ad bellum is a question for those who are actually making the decision — in our civil polity, the president and Congress. This is not a decision that requires the approval of individual sailors and soldiers — or citizens. In the nature of the case, they cannot know all the relevant factors. They can know what they would do, and should vote for people who agree with them, but they cannot know what the actual decision makers know. This does not mean that the actual decision makers cannot be evil, for they can be, but it does mean that people who don’t know anything about the details cannot talk as though they do. War is not evil in the very nature of the case, the same way abortion is.
So Christian libertarians need to be far more careful with their flattening rhetoric. In their opposition to abortion, they are well within the Christian moral tradition. But on war, they are currently well outside it. That is not the same thing as opposition to a particular war, which can be defended in all kinds of ways that could be consistent with biblical thinking. But to drag pro-life rhetoric into the Middle East does nothing more than add one more casualty to that sorry region.
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