It was a hot summer day in 1982, and I was sitting in Chip's apartment with some friends. There were, I think, six of us, all involved in a coffeehouse ministry at a local university, and we'd just finished helping Chip move in.
A little background: I was not-so freshly graduated from high school, and freshly dropped out of Bible College, and a licensed Southern Baptist minister. AIDS wasn't a story yet, gay people weren't on my radar. The issue du jour was abortion. If you weren't against it, Jesus didn't love you.
I don't recall the conversation, but Chip at some point was playing audio of Kenneth Copeland or Jimmy Swaggart praying in tongues, and he pulled out a couple of anti-abortion "parody" songs. This kind of "comedy," by the way, is rarely funny. If you want to hear it done occasionally well, listen to Weird Al Yankovic. If you want to hear it done poorly, and with meanness, listen to this site's podcasts, which feature a takeoff of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Anyway, he played the songs, and all I can remember is that the chorus to one (with peppy, faux-jazz background music) was "Kill it!" referring, of course, to the unborn child.
One of the girls in our group caught my eye and motioned me outside.
This sixteen year old wept as she told me her story, and even at the young age of nineteen, I knew to keep my damn mouth shut and listen. Sherry, the child of an abusive, alcoholic father, had had an abortion when she was fourteen years old. She really hadn't had much choice. If her father had found out, he would have systematically beaten the child out of her, very likely killing Sherry in the process.
I think it is that story, and that young lady, that made me such a lousy Fundamentalist. Oh, I'm not saying I turned into a pro-choice Christian right then. I still didn't "believe in" abortion. I had the right bumper stickers on my car for years. I marched on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I did some pretty excellent videography for a fledgling TV show on an antiabortion segment. But in the back of my head, all those years, was Sherry.
Yet how could I be a Christian and not protest? Not condemn abortion? Not support pro-life groups, pro-life political candidates? Never mind that these groups did little to quell the tide of unwanted pregnancies. Never mind that the pro-life candidates did nothing to actually prevent abortions. And never mind that, to a person, each of these so-called pro-life candidates supported capital punishment (which I had never supported - but that's another blog post entirely).
Slowly, I began to notice this. It wasn't until about 2007 that it all finally clicked with me. At this point in my life, I was about two years into a spiritual transformation, leaving Fundamentalism behind and becoming what some have called "a garden-variety progressive," and others "ignorant and unteachable." Like my experience with Sherry, the catalyst had been meeting people who didn't fit into my predetermined boxes for how "those" people were: Gay folk. Transgender folk. Atheist folk. Alternative-religion folk.
I was sitting one afternoon in the office of a friend and mentor who was a small-church pastor. In the course of a conversation specifically about the troubling and divisive issue of abortion, she said that sometimes cut-and-dried, right-and-wrong choices simply do not exist. Not really.
And I thought about Sherry. Did she really have a choice? Would the "right" decision have been, as one Twitter follower suggested, to let her father kill the baby, rather than her doing it herself?
It's easy, I think, to be "against" something that doesn't directly affect you. I see it all the time; self-proclaimed "Defenders of the Faith" posting long, feverish blogs about the evils of this or that version of Christianity, entire churches dedicated to sending gay people to Hell, Message boards with members committed to telling one another they are on the right of what is good and pure.
Does a woman trapped in poverty, as 20% of Americans are, really have a choice? Does a woman who is the victim of rape have a choice? Does a child who has been molested have a choice? Does a woman faced with crippling illness or death if she carries a child to term have a choice?
I do not know the answer to these questions. My point is this: unless you are currently in any of those situations, you don't know the answer to the questions, either. To say otherwise, to claim you hold the perfect bit of doctrine for that particular slice of reality, is either Pharisaical hubris or downright idiocy. You don't. You can't.
Do you want to make abortion go away? Do you, really? Then pray - not in front of a clinic, but with a scared and lonely girl facing the kinds of non-choice Sherry faced. Talk - but not through a megaphone, holding a garish sign with a fractured fetus on it. Talk, instead, to people. Have dinner with abortion clinic workers. Buy a nurse a cup of coffee. Make friends with people. Have conversations.
I warn you, though, that something will happen to you. Something frightening and unfamiliar, something not at all in your control: you'll begin to see these men and women no longer as the shadowy specters of evil incarnate, all deaths-head grins and bloody lips, but as humans. People.
People made, just like you and I, in the image of God.
If you can still hate them, still treat them as a concept and not a person after that, then perhaps it is too late for us all.
