An End to Silence and Passivity on Abortion
Bishop Whitaker is First United Methodist Bishop to Speak at United Methodist Task Force on Abortion and Sexuality

Editor's note. The following is excerpt from a January 24 speech delivered by Bishop Timothy Whitaker, of the United Methodist Church, in Washington, D.C.

...Pope John Paul II has made a powerful Christian witness to God's peaceable purposes in his 1995 encyclical on The Gospel of Life. He warned the world about creating "a culture of death," that is rebellion against "the Gospel of life." ... He stated, "Only when people are open to the fullness of the truth about God, man, and history will the words, 'You shall not kill' shine forth once more as a goal for man in himself and in his relations with others."

In the United Methodist Church often many of us are silent and passive about abortion. ... I suspect that we are silent and passive about

abortion because often we allow ideology to trump theology in forming our ethical positions on controversial issues. ... Yet we who are Christians cannot let our ideological or partisan political loyalties constrain our witness to the living God. We need to view abortion as a concern that transcends ideological or partisan loyalties.

I think that our silence and passivity about abortion comes from the difficulty of being a Christian in America. I used to think that being a Christian in America is easy. ... Now I realize that practicing the Christian life in America has its own difficulties. The seductions of American life may seem more subtle, but they are real and dangerous. In America both the culture and the state view persons as autonomous individuals who have private rights to live as they choose.

But we who are Christians have a different anthropology: we view persons as members of a community who are made in the image of the Triune God and who have both rights and responsibilities. Therefore, we cannot endorse a woman's right to abort an unborn child as a morally neutral decision because we understand that the child also has a right to live and the community has a responsibility to care for this child if the mother is unable to rear it. ...

Can there be any doubt that there is silence and passivity about abortion in our Church? How often is a sermon about abortion or an educational forum on abortion offered in our congregations? How many congregations are involved in supporting crisis pregnancy centers in their communities or offering tangible support to women with unwanted pregnancies? What kind of pastoral counsel is being offered behind the closed doors of the pastor's office?

When the bishops gave splendid leadership in the Bishops' Initiative on Children in Poverty, there was a great mobilization of ministries for children, but not even scant mention was made of the deaths of unborn children because of abortion. At the 2004 General Conference the Church endorsed our agencies' continued participation in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice without much of a debate about how participation in this Coalition compromises our public witness against abortion.

We who are United Methodist Christians should continue to seek to embody in our teaching, pastoral guidance, congregational care, and public witness, the preservation of human life and a protest against the killing of human life in the name of the God of peace. ...

What I feel is revulsion at the moral horror that is abortion. This revulsion is magnified when I reflect upon the fact, as [theologian] Carl Braaten has said, "ninety-nine percent of all murders in the United States are abortions." I would like to be a bishop of a Church that knows how to make philosophers and politicians feel the same revulsion of the moral horror of abortion.

Perhaps this feeling of revulsion against the horror of abortion is a feeling shared by most human beings. Certainly Christians have feelings others may not have because we have been told the Gospel. For Christians, revulsion at the moral horror of abortion is a sensibility shaped by the story of God's purposes told in the Bible.

It is often said that there is no clear prescription against abortion in the Bible. That is because such a horror is unthinkable and unspeakable to the people of Israel and to the people who are the church. The grand story of God's gift of peace and God's opposition to the sin of violence compels us to be a people who try to protect the unborn from killing and to work for a culture of life. ...

As Christians moved into the wider world where abortion was not unthinkable or unspeakable, they had to apply the divine commandment against murder to the horrible practice of abortion. They did so because of their knowledge of the God of peace in the story of the Bible.

In our time and place, in our own Christian communion, we who are United Methodists also have a responsibility to live according to our first rule, which is to do no harm. Do no harm to the unborn! ...