Why do the same people who fight against abortion argue that parents should have the right to beat their children and
deny them medical care
or education, as some conservative Republicans have done recently? How
can someone oppose family planning because a pill or IUD
might have the
rare and unintended
consequence of interfering with implantation, and then endorse beating a
child, which might have the rare and unintended consequence of
battering her to death?
These two positions fit together seamlessly only when we understand the
Iron Age view of the child imbedded throughout the Bible, and how that view has shaped the priorities and behavior of biblical literalists.
Extreme Biblical Parenting
In 2014, Pentecostal parents Herbert and Catherine Schaible went to jail after a second of their nine children
died
from easily treatable bacterial pneumonia. The Schaibles belong to a
sect that relies on prayer for physical as well as spiritual healing. In
a police statement, Herbert Schiable explained that medicine "is
against our religious beliefs." Sects like their point to the New
Testament books of Matthew and Mark, which both say that devout
believers can pray for anything in faith and God will grant their
request (
Mark 11:24 and
Matthew 21:22). All that is required, according to the writer of Matthew, is
faith the size of a tiny mustard seed. The Schaible’s pastor blamed the deaths of the two children on a “
spiritual lack” in the parents.
Most
devout Bible believers turn to science when their children can’t
breathe, but 38 US states have now passed laws to protect parents who
don’t—along with parents who
beat their children in accordance with biblical advice, or deny them education on religious grounds.
The
Schaible case is a chilling example of how these laws work. In 2009,
the Schaible’s two year old son, Kent, died of pneumonia after having
his illness treated by prayer alone. Under Pennsylvania’s faith-healing
exemption both parents were allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges.
The result was a sentence of probation; and after agreeing to seek
medical care for their children in future, the Schaibles were allowed to
keep custody of their other kids. But In 2014 the Grim Reaper struck
again in the form of another untreated infection. This time, the couple
was jailed after 8 month old Brandon died. The parents were sent to
prison, not for killing a child, but for violating the terms of their
earlier probation.
Republicans Double Down on Protecting Parents over Children
In
spite of similar tragedies around the country, legislators in multiple
states are looking to expand laws that exempt parents like the Schaibles
from criminal charges. Georgia recently
introduced
legislation that appears to offer legal cover to parents who beat their
children (and men who beat their wives) for religious reasons. In
Idaho, despite more than a
dozen child deaths
linked to one small sect called the Followers of Christ, Republican
state legislators introduced a bill in February granting parents broader
leeway to harm children—as long as their motives are religious. The
bill secures faith healing exemptions from medical neglect laws; reduces
the court’s power to protect abused children; discourages doctors and
teachers from reporting suspected abuse; and excuses religious parents
from education requirements that otherwise apply to Idaho residents. On
March 23, 2015, it passed the Idaho Senate 27-7, along straight party
lines.
In 2011, after a series of child deaths from medical neglect, Oregon’s Democratic governor took the opposite tack,
stripping
faith-healing parents of legal protection from criminal charges. Oregon
children stopped dying, but some extreme families moved to Idaho. In
the words of law professor Marci Hamilton, “Idaho has become a haven for
parents who martyr their children for their faith.”
Emboldened by Hobby Lobby
Since the Supreme Court’s 2014
Hobby Lobby decision,
conservative Christians in the U.S. are testing “religious freedom”
claims as a means to opt out of a wide array of rules and
responsibilities that otherwise apply to all Americans. Much of the
focus has been on exemption from reproductive healthcare, queer equality
rights, and finances (what churches give and get when it comes to
public funds and services.) But exemption from child rights and
protections should be thought of as a fourth leg of the “religious
freedom” agenda.
Devout Bible believers regularly
oppose child protective services,
insisting that the right of religious adults to do as they choose
trumps the right of children to be free from harm. Evangelical Christian
leaders fought the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child, making the U.S. one of two countries (along with Somalia) that
failed to endorse it. In some U.S. locales, like the State of Virginia,
they have sought and
won the right to deny children basic education, including the ability to read and write.
The Embryo Anomaly
But
while conservative Bible believers look bent on depriving born children
of any and all human rights, they simultaneously claim that every
fertilized egg merits protection. Ignoring the fact that
most fertilized eggs, when left alone, simply die
before implanting or else self-abort, believers oppose stem cell
research, abortion and even contraception that might harm embryonic
human life.
The Religious Right’s extreme devotion to embryonic
life was on display in a recent bill aimed at protecting women and
children from sex trafficking. Conservative Republicans inserted
language that would deny abortion care funding to young girls who got
pregnant after being coerced into sexual slavery,
forcing them instead to carry pregnancies and give birth.
To
a person imbued with modern secular ethics, such priorities may be
immoral; but in the Iron Age worldview of the Bible writers and
fundamentalist believers, they actually make sense.
A Modern View of Childhood
Modern
secularists think of children as persons with rights based on their
capacity to suffer and feel pleasure, to love and be loved, to be aware
and self-aware, to have preferences and intentions that are expressed
via decisions and actions, and to have dreams and goals that place a
value on their own future. These capacities, which make human life
uniquely precious, emerge gradually during childhood, which is why
children can’t take care of themselves. Parents are thought of as
custodians, who have both rights and responsibilities that change over
time, based on the ways in which a child’s own capacities are limited.
In
this view, as children become more capable, their rights increase
within developmentally appropriate limits, while parental rights and
responsibilities decrease. If a five year old prefers vanilla ice cream
over strawberry, most people believe that, all else being equal, he or
she should be allowed to choose. A seven year old has little say in a
custody agreement, but a fourteen year old who prefers to be with one or
the other parent can get a hearing from a judge. Similarly, the
capacity for sexual consent emerges gradually during adolescence. Young
teens may be capable of consenting with each other, but their
vulnerability to manipulation and exploitation means they are protected
legally by the concept of statutory rape.
In 1923, Kahlil Gibran published his much loved book,
The Prophet,which contains his poem “
On Children.” Gibran’s poem, though deeply spiritual, reflects a modern view of childhood:
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.
You
may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in
the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
Gibran’s 20th Century view would have been completely alien to most of the Bible writers.
A Biblical View of Childhood
In
the Iron Age mindset of the Bible writers, children are not individual
persons who have their own thoughts, with corresponding rights. Rather,
like livestock and slaves, they are possessions of the male head of
household, and the biblical framework governing treatment of children is
property laws, not individual rights laws.
The term
chattel refers
to moveable personal property, economic assets that are not real
estate. In the Bible, children, like slaves and livestock, are chattel.
Male children grow up to become persons, while
females remain chattel throughout their lives, first as assets of their fathers, then as assets of their husbands.
The
texts bound together in the Bible were written over the course of
hundreds of years, and they reflect the evolution of social and ethical
norms within Hebrew culture during that time span. Some express a more
compassionate and dignifying perspective toward children than others.
But fundamentalists and other Bible-believers treat these texts as a
package, a set of perfect and complete revelations essentially dictated
by God to the authors, which is why they all too often end up pitting
themselves against ethical, compassionate treatment of children. Taken
as a whole, the biblical formula for parenthood is based on several core
assumptions:
§
Children are property of their fathers. This is why God can allow Satan to
kill Job’s children during
a wager over Job’s loyalty—and then simply replace them. It is why a
man who injures a woman causing her to miscarry must
pay her husband for the loss.
§
Children are born bad and must be beaten to keep them from going astray. This mentality combines the idea of
original sin because Eve defied God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge, with “spare the rod, spoil the child”
admonitions
from the book of Proverbs. It is one reason that early Christians
believed that Jesus, as the perfect “lamb without blemish” could not
have a human father and so
added the virgin birth story to the Gospels at the end of the 1st Century.
§
A father’s right of ownership extends even to killing his child. This is why it makes sense for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac or Jephthah to
sacrifice his daughter, or even God to give his “only begotten son” as a human sacrifice. In the Torah, a man can send his child into battle or
sell his child into slavery. The Torah advises that a rebellious son should be
put to death.
§
The primary value of adult females is to produce valuable children, meaning male children of known origin. Hence, a female’s virginity is a core part of her economic value. This is why a rapist can be
forced to marry the damaged goods in the Torah as is
sometimes the case in conservative Islam today, or a female can be
stoned for pre-marital sex. In the Hebrew Torah, the wives of the patriarchs
send their slave girls to get pregnant
by their husbands to up the baby count. In modern America, Evangelical
girls attend purity balls and receive promise rings by which they pledge
their sexual purity to their fathers until they can be “given in
marriage.”
In this context, the seemingly bizarre and hypocritical
stance of defending embryonic life while simultaneously defending child
abuse is coherent. A man has a right to offspring. Woman was made to
bear them. (As both
Bible writers and Church leaders through the ages have reminded us
over and over,
that is her purpose and her salvation, the way she makes up for Eve’s
act of defiance, even if it kills her.) Within the hierarchy of the
family, a woman has authority only over the children and
only by proxy:
she acts as an administrator of God’s will and that of her husband. A
child is not a person with intrinsic rights but a man’s possession, to
bring up according to his own values and beliefs, and paternal rights
have few limits.
By Way of Analogy
For a
modern reader, the concept of chattel is simplest and easiest to
understand when applied to livestock: A rancher owns cows for the
purpose of breeding them, and he guards their fertility carefully to
manage the kind of calves he wants. A young, fertile cow is worth more
than an older less fertile cow. A bred cow is worth more than an open
cow. A cow has no right to avoid pregnancy, however unpleasant or risky,
and no-one but her owner can decide when she has given birth to enough
calves. Someone who deliberately caused a cow to miscarry would be
stealing from the owner. Once calves are born, they belong to the owner,
who has the right to poke or prod or hit or kick (or castrate) them to
get the kind of behavior he wants.
At one point in American history, this was
how many Christians thought of slaves,
and they cited the Bible to back up this view. Today most Christians
find human slavery appalling. But because the Bible and Koran bind
believers to the Iron Age, echoes of the Iron Age chattel structure can
be found in the views and values of devout believers.
Female Birth Control Violates Biblical Property Rights
In
this worldview there is little room for abortion or even pregnancy
prevention, or for that matter any form of reproductive agency on the
part of a woman. God is in charge, and every baby is a blessing, an
arrow for the man’s quiver, one of his economic and spiritual assets.
“Let go and let God,” women are told. A female is defined by her
sexuality and childbearing—as a virgin, mother or whore—and
contraception turns the first two of these into the third.
Modern
Catholicism’s Madonna-whore dichotomy and anti-contraceptive theology
may have evolved as a competitive breeding strategy designed to serve
the religion itself. But Catholic antipathy to female contraception has
more ancient and primitive roots in the Iron Age culture of the Bible
writers, and perhaps—beneath that—in the biological instinct that nudges
individual males to control female fertility and engage in competitive
breeding of their own.
Coerced pregnancy is one means to this end,
and freely given prior consent is “not a thing” in either the Hebrew
Torah or the Christian New Testament: Eve is created for Adam when none
of the other animals are found to be suitable companions for him. Women
are given in marriage as transactions between men throughout the Torah.
Sexual slavery abounds, with God providing instructions on how to purify
virgin war captives before they are bedded. (See
Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like if We Actually Followed the Bible.)
In the gospel story of the virgin birth, Mary is told (not asked) by a
powerful being that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and she will get
pregnant. Of course she is thrilled—if a woman’s role is to bear
children, what greater honor than to bear the child of a god?—but the
bottom line is that intentional, volitional decision making by females
about childbearing is simply
beyond the consciousness of the Bible writers.
Abortion—a
woman’s decision to end an ill-conceived pregnancy—violates the
biblical worldview in yet another way. In the Bible, bearing and ending
life are roles that clearly split along gender lines. Females may have
the power to bear life, but only males can end it. Man holds the right
of life and death over his own chattel, just as God holds the right of
life and death over humans, his sheep. The Bible
says
a man can beat his slave to death, and as long as the slave survives
for a day or two afterwards, the owner is within his rights. In fact,
the Bible endorses men terminating life for many reasons: eating or
sacrificing animals, vengeance, territorial dispute, eradicating
witchcraft or paganism, punishment, displays of power, and religious
rituals, to name a few.
A Degraded Concept of Personhood
What
about the Religious Right’s Personhood movement, which seeks
person-rights for embryonic humans? Doesn’t it contradict this
framework? No. The anti-abortion Personhood movement, which attempts to
equate personhood with human DNA, is part and parcel of this same
worldview. In the Personhood movement, the qualities normally associated
with personhood (sentience, feelings, thoughts, preferences,
intentions, self-awareness, etc.), the qualities that create the basis
for independence and rights, are irrelevant.
The Personhood
movement allows Religious Right leaders to co-opt centuries of human
rights law and political philosophy while simultaneously undermining any
concept of personhood that grants rights or autonomy based on the lived
experience of another being. Consider, for example, the
Alabama law
which assigns “personhood” to a fetus—and then hands all associated
rights to a (usually white male Christian) attorney. Fetal Personhood
laws which equate personhood with DNA secure the Iron Age hierarchy of
God and man over woman and child (and, tangentially, man over other
chattel like non-human animals and artificial intelligences).
Beyond the Bible
In
sum, it is much easier to extrapolate from the biblical worldview to
the idea that a parent has the right to beat his child or withhold
medical care, or that a teenage sex slave should be forced to bear a
child, than to derive the idea that we have a responsibility to bring
children into the world under the best of circumstances and to
acknowledge their rights as individuals once they arrive. These are
fundamentally post-biblical ideas, as is the notion that empowering
women to delay or limit childbearing is a positive social good.
For
those who are not bound to the priorities of the Iron Age, fetishizing
fetal life while hurting and disempowering women or children is morally
incoherent. Thanks to science and scholarship, we know much more than
our ancestors did about embryonic development--a
reproductive funnel
that requires many fertilized eggs to produce a few healthy babies. We
also have learned much about child development, the gradual process by
which a child takes on the unique psychological capacities of the adult
human. And we know more than ever about the lived experience of sentient
beings—including women and children. None of this knowledge supports
the moral priorities of the Iron Age.
Instead, in this alternate
worldview, thoughtful, intentional childbearing empowered by the full
spectrum of family planning care goes hand in hand with a value on
thriving women and children. A woman is an independent person and so are
her children, and it is her right and responsibility to plan her family
so as to live her life to the fullest and stack the odds in favor of
her children having rich, full lives of their own.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of
Wisdom Commons.
She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old
Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles
can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.
http://www.alternet.org/belief/glaring-brazen-hypocrisy-heart-american-right-wing-christianity
