Sorry, Heidi, but last week’s Alabama court decision that embryos are “children” has absolutely nothing to do with “Christian nationalism”
The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision last week affirming that frozen embryos are “children” has set off a madcap rush of overheated journalism to pronounce the end of the world as we know it.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow, for instance, huffed that the ruling shows America’s dangerous “slide toward theocracy” and that “control of women’s bodies is the endgame.” He went on to warn that the novelty of the Alabama court decision suggests “religious conservatives won’t stop until that goal is achieved”.
Jeet Heer, writing in The Nation, proclaimed that the Alabama court decision can only be blamed on Trump and Trumpism, which “is now in open alliance with Christian nationalists — a faction markedly more radical and opposed to democracy than the mainstream evangelicals he courted in previous elections.”
Finally, Democratic strategist Max Burns opined in Politico that the verdict underscores how “America is facing a threat of Biblical proportion — the rise of Christian nationalism”. Burns warned in his piece that “the extreme theocratic actions of the Alabama Supreme Court should be seen as the first salvo in Christian nationalists’ effort to reshape every aspect of American life and law.”
One needs to take with a grain of salt Burns’ claim that the ruling has something to do with an organized and highly secretive cabal of Christian fundamentalist operatives who are poised to take over the American government in January 2024 just like Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917.
Burns, of course, in his article references the unhinged and paranoid left’s favorites conspiracy theory focusing on American Pentecostals, which I analyzed several weeks ago.
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Even National Public Radio trumpeted the same ridiculous conspiracy theory in the following tag for its popular segment “All Things Considered”:
More has become known about the Alabama chief justice’s ties to a far-right Christian Nationalist movement that played a major role in the January 6 riot. The movement aims to assert Christian supremacy.
As CNN itself recounts, the decision of the Alabama Supreme Court was merely the moment of closure for several tracks of litigation by different plaintiffs going all the way back to 2006. Their briefs, in turn, did not make unprecedented arguments so much as leverage the fine points of long-established state law.
In addition, the lawsuits that ultimately succeeded on final appeal technically had nothing at all to do with abortion, or “reproductive rights.”
Three couples sued a clinic whose specialty was in vitro fertilization for destroying embryos, a form of negligence they sought to characterize as “wrongful death” which under Alabama statues passed in the nineteenth century would have allowed them to claim significantly higher damages.
What has stirred up a hornets nest on the left, however, in the aftermath of the ruling was 1) the court’s contention that embryos are “children” (i.e., what are termed “persons” 2) the fact that the chief justice himself cited the Bible and offered a theological argument instead of parsing secular law.
The fact that the gist of the Supreme Court finding rested on an interpretation of Alabama statutes that dated to Reconstruction, which already incorporated similar language and reasoning, is in the minds of the press and judicial alarmists beside the point.
It should be noted that Alabama has historically always been just about the most religiously conservative of all states in the U.S., and few reputable legal experts would predict that the ruling last week actually might set any kind of national precedent.
Nevertheless, Politico writer Heidi Przybyla, who earlier last week had climbed on her high horse and like Paul Revere and galloped across the media screaming “the Christian nationalists are coming”, went on MSNBC and asserted that the very same “Christian nationalists”, as opposed to ordinary Christians, were a clear and present danger because
…they believe that our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any Earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God.
Of course, Christian doctrine — not just the “Christian nationalist” version, whatever that signifies — has maintained for well over a millennium that human rights do in fact come from God.
Long-standing Catholic doctrine itself references both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament in making such claim, which constitutes the foundation of its social teaching on everything from abortion to compassion toward immigrants to the theory of just war.
In response to Przybyla’s outlandish and patently ignorant comments Catholic Bishop Robert Barron posted a video on social media blasting them as “”one of the most disturbing and frankly dangerous things I’ve ever seen in a political conversation.”
Regarding those in the media and on the fringes of academia who have severely and actively sought to distort the history of Christianity in shaping the American political ideal, Barron remarked: “in their enthusiasm to go against Christian nationalism, they’re actually going against the foundations of our democracy.”
Barron underscored Thomas Jefferson’s language in the Declaration of Independence concerning human rights “to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”.
It is worth pointing out that the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the fledgling international organization in December 1948, not only retains Jefferson’s precise verbiage, it also echoes in its opening sentence Catholic natural law doctrine in declaring that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
Although the UDHR, in contrast with the Declaration of Independence, does not make specific religious references (obviously because of the plurality of world religions), it relies heavily on them.
The Carter Center, the former Democratic President’s non-profit center for the promotion of human rights that can hardly be described as “Christian nationalist”, on its website correlates Biblical passages with every one of the UDHR’s 25 articles.
The authors of the UDHR also took into account the teachings among others of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Confucianism.
As the distinguished Sri Lankan jurist Christopher Weeramantry writes in the preface to the scholarly anthology Religion and International Law, “practically every notion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related documents can be shown to have been touched upon, whether directly or obliquely, in the scriptures of the major religions.”
Thus the type of argument pushed not only by Przybyla but by many prominent ideologues who should know better — i.e., that human rights are constituted by governments alone — is historically fallacious on the face of it.
Barron is correct, therefore, in admonishing us that the disconnection of human rights from religious convictions is the stuff of totalitarianism.
It is common knowledge that UNDR was chartered immediately after World War II because the atrocities and appalling devastation wrought by the fascist powers showed the world what happens when human rights are not guaranteed by some kind of transcendental order of value.
Which brings us back to the Alabama Court decision.
Whether we like it or not, the decision forces us to ponder foundational issues about the inextricable connection between the laws to which we adhere (including the lawmaking process) and the shared ethical and spiritual commitments that give them legitimacy in the first place.
The basic human rights we take for granted have an integral “theological” dimension to them that cannot be avoided.
For example, if a woman has a “right” to an abortion (which even Roe vs. Wade technically did not grant), it is because of a moral priority that is given to the life of the mother. If the reverse is true, then it is because the same priority is accorded to life of the fetus.
How we sort out those priorities depends on forging a deep moral consensus, which is increasingly lacking in our hyperpartisan and toxically polarized political situation nowadays.
As Visa Kurki reminds us, any theory of rights hinges on an underlying theory of “personhood”. What constitutes a “person” is a controversy that has persisted in different cultures since ancient times.
The controversy cannot be resolved by shrill, anti-religious polemics, especially by invoking the tiresome and unsufferable boogeyman of “Christian nationalism”.
