There is an old and rather ugly joke about two people on a cruise. They who both want and need each others love. But there is a misunderstanding. She says, “wouldn’t I, wouldn’t I” in response to his invitation to dance. But obsessed with self consciousness about his wooden eye he offers an ugly retort about her face.
They must have been Christians talking politics.
An essential part of having a political conversation is using the same words to mean the same thing. This is particularly true when the words themselves are value-laden words, words that describe important aspects of who we are or think we are.
Of course you need other things as well, like an agreement on what authorizes any statement as true. If you don’t agree on the source of truth, and you don’t agree on the meaning of words, then so-called conversation partners are just bloviating for entertainment. It often happens in sports bars in airports, where people drink and talk about a football they don’t care about while waiting for a plane that will end the conversation with someone they’ll never meet again anyway.
One assumes that serious political conversations try to rise above the airport sports bar level.
But apart from wasting words, holding a political conversation in which value laden words have different meanings for both parties inevitably results not merely in misunderstanding, but in increasingly vicious mis-characterizations of one’s opponent as a person who has bad, even terrible values. This dehumanization of one’s opponent (and that is what it is) the fully justifies insulting and even violent discourse, and perhaps even real violence.
Now in dozens of blog posts and Facebook comments I’ve read persons aligned with the pro-life movement refer to everything from the immediate union of human sperm and egg to a newborn human as either a “baby” or a “child.” And so it follows, and this is found in most of these posts, that those who seek, perform, or even support abortions are called “baby killers,” “child killers,” and murderers. Because as those who use these terms well know, the words baby and child are as value-laden as they imprecise.
It is hard to find an exact equivalent in so-called pro-choice movement, but the phrase “a woman’s body” to mean the entirety of what lies beneath her skin when she is pregnant comes close. By including in “the woman’s body” a morula, blastula, embryonic disk, embryo, and fetus the gradual differentiation of mother and developing fetus into two distinctive selves disappears. So of course anyone claiming trying to limit what a woman does with “her body” to keep it healthy in her own judgment (at any point in her pregnancy) is just another misogynist oppressor; little different from a rapist or wife beater in trying to control women by force.
And that is pretty much where we are in the so-called Christian conversation about “reproductive rights” or “abortion rights” or “abortion” or whatever value-laden word you the read want to use as a club against your enemy. And don’t give me this “I love them but disagree with them.” if you’ve called a person a murderer or a misogynist you don’t love them. So give up that BS.
One reason for using scientific terms and concepts in public discourse about public policy is that generally they aren’t value laden. They help us speak with precision and make decisions based on physical realities observable by all rather than theological or ideological assessments that gain assent only among believers.
This is why in the various forms of inter-religious dialogue of which I’m a part the participants spend a great deal of time defining just what we will be dialoguing about, in terms that do not privilege on religion over another. We want to teach, not bloviate; to learn and not just be confirmed in our opinions.
Well I don’t expect this little blog to change things. But I offer it as a heads up. Whatever side you are on: if you a deploying value laden words in public discourse in a manner than dehumanizes your fellow Christians then it is time to ask forgiveness. Time for all of us (I’ve done it too) to ask forgiveness and further, repent. If we as Christians don’t find a shared value-neutral language for not only what is going in pregnancy, but in human sexual, economic, political, and general social relations then we will find ourselves locked in our continued downward spiral of political and spiritual irrelevance.
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