The Use and Abuse of Christian Values by the Right
The political language of the extremists who hijacked the Republican Party is cynical, dishonest and bizarre in its Orwellian obfuscation of the Administration’s policy objectives and intentions by giving them names that suggest the opposite of their actual intent. This is not new, but in the current political season we are reminded once more of the deception in the use of the terms values and value voters.
We recall earlier manifestations of this dishonesty in programs such as the “clear skies” and “clean water” initiatives, which had the objective of easing EPA rules and allowing industries greater license to pollute, the “secure borders” initiative that promoted and encouraged open borders in the interest of increasing the supply of low wage earners to put downward pressure on wages in the U.S. while inhibiting the ability of states to enforce immigration law, the Homeland Security bill that consolidated previously separate agencies into one super agency staffed by political cronies whose legendary incompetence decreased our security against real threats while focusing on imaginary ones. Finally we mention the oxymoronic compassionate conservatism of George Bush, a campaign promise made by him but unkept and ignored once he was in office as his administration promoted policies that were anything but compassionate and were most certainly not conservative.
Perhaps the worst examples of the use of political language that misrepresents or obscures its real objectives are terms such as pro-life, family values, and values voters, which these religious conservatives associate linguistically with “Christian values” despite the obvious fact that the ideas represented by these terms represent just the opposite of Christian values. Even more bizarre, these right wing religious zealots fail to understand or use correctly the term Christian, whether as a noun or an adjective, by attempting to limit its use to their particular narrowly-conceived brand of fundamentalist Christianity rather than its most widely-used and generally understood reference to the larger community throughout the world who consider themselves to be Christians, that is, members of one of the many Christian churches or more generally followers of Jesus and his teachings.
Christianity has been successful primarily for the values it models and encourages rather than for what it condemns, and in that stylistic approach it attempts to encourage and practice what we know or think we know about the values of Jesus himself. We could go one step further by observing that whenever any group of Christians becomes more concerned with what it opposes and condemns, when its voice becomes shrill and scolding, it has wandered off the reservation and has become much less like Jesus and much more like the Pharisees that Jesus stood up to in his own time by speaking truth to power.
That said, let’s look at the terms used by the right wing religious-political ideologues and how they use those terms. Pro-life sounds like an innocent enough term. It is hard to find anyone who is not in favor of a culture of life rather than death. That seems to imply respect for life, particularly human life, as a pre-eminent value and, absent any other considerations, seems to be a value worthy of our support. If we really believed in human life as a pre-eminent value superior to other values we would oppose war in any of its forms or rationales, oppose the death penalty as an inappropriate response of society to murder because it is taking life to revenge life taken, advocate for the quality of human life in society under the presumption that survival alone is not what we mean by life, seek to cure the ills of mankind whether economic, social, cultural or medical, and work to improve the quality of life of humanity generally. It seems to me that is what Jesus did.
Where the “pro-life” community goes wrong is misrepresenting its position as supporting a culture of life when it is really only interested in being “anti-abortion.” You do not have to read very much to realize that anti-abortion advocates pretty consistently seem to support positions that are “anti-life” in other spheres, such as support for war (at least “just wars” or wars that they believe are in their interest), defense of the concept of “collateral damage” or “pre-emptive war” as a justification for the taking of innocent life, and support of capital punishment as just retribution for causing the death of another or for other egregious anti-social acts. There are multiple instances of anti-abortionist activists bombing abortion clinics and killing abortion doctors and other medical staff in their misguided crusade in support of their warped view of the culture of life. In short, anti-abortion advocates are not consistently “pro-life” because apart from the single instance of abortion they allow values other than absolute defense of life to affect their judgment about when taking human life is justified or necessary in support of other values they believe are more important than preservation of life.
Simply stated my objection to the position of the anti-abortionist crowd is that they are inconsistent, illogical and ultimately dishonest in their claim to be pro-life. However I do not deny them their right to their views, inconsistent though they are. My moral objection to their position is that though they have the right to their (inconsistent) position that abortion is wrong under any or some circum-stances, and although they have the right to abstain from having abortions or performing them, they do not have the right to interfere with others who parse the moral equation differently and may conclude that having an abortion is a lesser evil than some alternative, there being no valid arbiter between them.
The same analysis can be applied to the way the terms family values and values voters are used and misused by right wing extremists. In common parlance the term family values refers to traditional family friendly social policies and values enshrined in the social welfare net, free public education, day care, minimum wage, access to child health care, family planning activities, maternity leave, social security, and respect for and care of our elders. I suspect that Jesus would have supported these family friendly programs if he were around today. However religious right wingers twist the terms family values and values voter into a set of code words for ugly anti-gay rhetoric and a host of laws designed to outlaw marriage and secular unions of gay couples. The absurdity of this is that right wing political activists deliberately undermine real family-friendly values in pursuit of this hypocritical agenda that pretends to be family friendly.
To make this point another way, note that right wing Republican activists who talk about family values routinely oppose day care and early learning programs, family planning activities, child health care, social programs, food stamps, Medicaid, social security, maternity and paternity leave, elder care, education and any other social programs that are designed to strengthen the family. We conclude that this is another area in which the language of the extreme right (and its fellow travelers in the fundamentalist Christian sects) is misused to subvert and undermine real human values while disguising and pursuing a decidedly un-Christian or anti-Christian political agenda. The fact is we are all values voters, that is, we all vote our values. It is disingenuous for the right wing falsely to claim family values while actively undermining legitimate family values and advocating uncharitable and hostile social values in their stead. They have the right to do that, but not the right to claim moral superiority in doing so.