In a 26 Feb 99 article, San Antonio College (SAC) Professor Richard K. Schoenig made some revealing remarks about Christians and abortion in an article entitled “Distancing, condemnation clash with beliefs” published in the Ranger, SAC’s student newspaper:
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It is sometimes said that “the proof is in the pudding,” or as Jesus says in Matthew 12:33, “A tree is known by his fruit.”
These sayings remind us that actions often speak louder than words.
In the abortion controversy today, I think this is especially true.
More than 1.5 million abortions are performed each year in the United States. Christians have been in the forefront of opposition to such abortions.
In particular, the Catholic Church and conservative Protestant-based groups, such as Operation Rescue, have publicly admonished those seeking or providing abortions, while assiduously campaigning in legal arenas to outlaw the practice.
At the heart of the Christian objection to abortion is the claim that at the moment of conception, God provides an immortal soul to each fertilized human egg, thereby giving it full moral protection.
This, Christians believe, gives every pre-born from the moment of conception as much a right to life as you or I, and makes all induced abortions murders.
This is obviously strong stuff. If abortion is indeed murder, then a million and a half of them each year mean we are truly in the midst of a holocaust of innocents of immense proportions that would make even Herod blush and Hitler envious.
Yet here we confront a disconcerting action-words disconnect.
The vast majority of Christian abortion opponents distance themselves from, and even condemn, violent action to stop abortions, including bombing clinics and executing abortion providers.
What’s wrong with this picture is that all this distancing and condemnation conflict with two of their core beliefs.
The first is that abortion murders babies.
The second is that it is morally permissible, and in some cases morally required, to protect the innocent with force proportionate to the threat.
Given that the threat of murdered babies is as grave as it gets, and given that there have not been any successful nonviolent alternatives to stopping these murders, then violence is the only option left.
To see this more clearly, imagine that you come upon an intruder in your house who is about to stab your newborn baby.
Few, if any, non-passivist morally sensitive people would condemn you for killing the intruder, if that were the only way to prevent the likely fatal stabbing.
How, then, can non-passivist Christians consistently disavow, for example, the actions of John Salvi who killed abortion providers to prevent them from performing abortions?
It certainly won’t do to reply that Salvi’s actions were against the law. Christians have always held that a law can, and sometimes must, be disregarded if it permits God-condemned immorality.
Furthermore, no major non-passivist Christian group of which I am aware has held that fatal force against Nazi slaughterers was morally wrong.
If morally sensitive people really believed that, a million and a half babies were being slaughtered each year with legal immunity in this country, as in Nazi Germany in the ’40s, they would no more condemn violent resistance to such a slaughter than they would have condemned violent resistance to the Nazi slaughters.
More likely, they would consider such violent resistance to be positively heroic, and perhaps even morally obligatory in certain circumstances.
Make no mistake. I am not arguing in support of anti-abortion violence. In fact, I think it is morally deplorable.
What I am saying is that the deeds of anti-abortion Christians simply do not match their inflammatory rhetoric. On the one hand, they constantly and vehemently call abortion murder.
Yet, on the other hand, they just as constantly and vehemently condemn those who seek to stop these million plus murders by the only means available — violent fatal force.
There is no proof in this pudding.
Perhaps down deep, like most other people, they really do not believe that all abortions are murder.
In any event, they need to get right with logic one way or the other and either endorse anti-abortion violence straight out or repudiate their incendiary claim that all abortion is murder — a claim which incites the very violence they deplore.
The Ranger published my response in its 5 March edition:
In your Feb. 26 edition, Professor Richard K. Schoenig in “Distancing, condemnation clash with beliefs” sets up a false dilemma for Christians (and by extension, for everyone else) by demanding they either endorse anti-abortion violence or accept abortion.
Schoenig’s dilemma is crafted by elevating the elimination of abortion to an “ultimate good” and then finding fault with Christians for not living up to the value system he has constructed.
Although abortion is a great evil, other things do come first. One of these “greater goods” is order.
Without order, neither justice nor anything else is possible.
Christians rightly reject violent protests against abortion because such violence would create greater evils than abortion.
Schoenig’s mistake is crafting a false dilemma is further aggravated by making a number of other mistakes.
First of all, he treats conservative Christian beliefs on abortion monolithically, which they assuredly are not.
There is a vast difference between believing a fetus has some rights vs. having the full rights of an adult human being. Christian anti-abortionists are found all across this spectrum.
Second, Schoenig fails to recognize that Christianity is basically a religion of persuasion, not coercion.
For that reason, Christian protests must always take into account the impression they make on society at large.
One should not try to save a dog from wandering into traffic by yelling and running toward it. Neither should Christians respond to evil in a way that drives people further into the path of evil.
Professor Schoenig could just have easily set up the same kind of false dilemma for those opposed to capital punishment.
The net effect of his article is to suppress the free speech of those opposed to abortion by portraying them as nascent assassins, fire bombers, or accessories thereto.
He has added nothing to the abortion debate except an example of faulty argument.
Schoenig’s artice is “reductionist” in portraying opposition to abortion as simply a matter of religion — the Christian religion in particular. There are, however, non-religious and non-Christian reasons for opposing abortion just as there were non-religious and non-Christian reasons for opposing the Holocaust. (If tobacco companies are responsible for healthcare costs caused by tobacco, why aren’t abortionists responsible for social security deficits due to the 50 million prenatal deaths they have caused?)
Language has both performative and informative purposes. The performative effect of Schoenig’s article overwhelms its information content and that effect is to create a hostile academic atmosphere that suppresses legitimate objections to abortion among SAC students. Unchecked, Schoenig could easily goad some naive student into taking the wrong path out of the false dilemma he crafts. But scoring points in favor of abortion apparently is worth the risk of that outcome for him. Although Schoenig tries to distance himself from that outcome, he really cannot escape a large measure of blame it something like that were to happen. That eventuality would be a “pudding” whose proof Schoenig would be extremely fortunate not to taste.
People who occupy positions of authority over impressionable young people need to be careful, not only about crafting false dilemmas, but about what such false dilemmas might do.
Schoenig’s article is a philosophical and a prudential mistake.
— historeo.com
Tags: Catholic Church, Germany, healthcare costs, Intimidates Students, John Salvi, Protestant, Richard K. Schoenig, San Antonio College
Nice rebuttal. This topic seems to be near and dear to ours truly, Dr Schoenig. I was in his honors philosophy class a few semesters ago, and I dealt with this type of thing all the time. As one of the Marx brothers would say, “He’s honest, but you’ve got to watch him a little.” 😉
Amen. We, as sons of the Living God, must pray for Dr. Schoenig. I too took his ethics class and our arguments about this same topic and defending another Christian student about her believe in God lead me to a downgrade; apposing a Christians free speech consequently costs the student a grade or two. – as Urkle would say, “Did I say that?”