Spiritual Sunday
According to the Guttmacher Institute, “nearly one in four women in the United States (23.7%) will have an abortion by age 45.” Many of those who have had abortions are anti-abortion Christians, who seek to deny that option from other women. They give themselves a pass by declaring that Christ forgives them, making everything okay.
I have encountered stories of women who had an abortion one day and were out protesting against abortion centers several weeks later. I also know the story of my Tennessee Congressman Scott Desjarlais, who despite having obtained two abortions for his wife and a third for a mistress, continues to be a hardcore opponent of abortion. Apparently (this according to his Wikipedia entry) he told a conservative radio host that “God has forgiven me” and “asked ‘fellow Christians’ and constituents ‘to consider doing the same.’” In other words, my Christianity allows freedom for me but not for thee.
Using Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card reminds me of character in George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. Spintho, on his way to martyrdom in the Colosseum, believes he can misbehave to his heart’s content because “all martyrs go to heaven, no matter what they have done.” (In a comic twist, Androcles points out to Spintho that he may die of natural causes before being martyred, causing Spintho to panic, rush off to renounce his Christianity, and accidentally run into the jaws of a lion.)
I don’t see our Christian nationalists doing even this amount of soul searching, however. For them, power is the goal, whether over women, LBGTQ folk, liberals or what have you. They ignore the powerful message in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is that love is the road to heaven and egotism the road to hell. Jesus was well aware of how people would seek to twist his words to serve the purposes of earthly power. This is why he chastised Peter (“Get thee behind me Satan”) when the disciple sought to correct him for choosing the route of the cross. If Christian nationalists are willing to turn their backs on Jesus’s message of love in return for earthly power, then they have chosen Satan as their lord and savior.
Milton knew something about this. He had been part of a revolution that thought it was bringing God’s kingdom to earth, only to see the message corrupted by power seekers. In Paradise Regained, his Christ rejects Satan’s temptation that he become the ruler of Rome—which would be London in Milton’s time and Washington in our own. Here’s Jesus’s rejection:
Nor doth this grandeur and majestic show
Of luxury, though called magnificence,
More then of arms before, allure mine eye,
Much less my mind; though thou should’st add to tell
Their sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts…
And further on:
Wert thou so void of fear or shame,
As offer them to me the Son of God,
To me my own, on such abhorred pact,
That I fall down and worship thee as God?
Get thee behind me; plain now now appear’st
That Evil one, Satan, forever damned.
Again: any Christian that does not have love at the heart of his or her faith is not following Christ but the god of Self. And if such people forego humility and make righteous zeal their god, then Satan is calling the tune.