Smashmouth Compromise?

Introduction

A week or so ago, Bibledingers hosted another debate on abolitionism versus smashmouth incrementalism. This one involved four of us—Joe Rigney was together with me, and T. Russell Hunter teamed up with Jon Speed. And while we didn’t resolve anything, I do think that the debate was clarifying in several ways. Many thanks to Bibledingers for hosting us.

There were various points that were brought up that I would like to develop further here, and maybe even a point that should have been brought up but somehow wasn’t. This latter phenomenon is something the French have a phrase for—l’esprit de l’escalier. And please, for those of you who listen to my blog posts, pardon my French—which I accomplish by means of rusty hedge clippers. This refers to the “wit of the staircase,” and refers to things you think of later on that you should have said. The perfect point you ought to have made occurs to you, but it does so on the staircase, as you are making your way to bed. Oh well.

Fill It Out Some More

First, there was one point that I raised in the debate that I want to fill out a bit more. Because of the free-flowing nature of our discussion, I didn’t get to develop it as much as I would have liked to do. Nobody’s fault but mine, of course, but . . . there is no time like the present.

Let us imagine a range of anti-abortion responses and tactics, and rank them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the most tepid and 10 being the most radical. A 1 would be Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare,” and 10 would be armed bands burning down clinics and summarily executing abortionists. Together with abolitionists, I would agree that the “pro-life” options at the lower end of the scale are morally compromised, and examples of sin.

The debate we had was a debate between 6s and 7s. The question I would like to press here has to do with trying to identify the guiding principle that enables the 7s to stop at 7. If the central charge against the 6s is that they do not come all the way to 7, a logical follow-up questions would be, “Once we are both 7s, why do we not go on to 8?” This would be to organize sit-ins and rescues at abortion clinics. Why not 9? This would be to fight for legislation to secede from the Union if any other state failed to adopt a standard other than absolute abolition. And why not 10? This would be armed insurrection with the eradication of abortion as its stated goal. Why not go to war, as in, actual war?

In short, what is the standard that enables us to be unable to live with some compromises and able to live with others? Again, by what standard? I believe the answer to this question lies in the recognition that trade-offs can represent moral compromise, but whether they do or not, they are nevertheless inescapable. That means that accepting some trade-offs is acceptable, and other trade-offs are not. Our dilemma is never trade-off/no trade-off. In this fallen world, the dilemma is always which trade-offs are lawful.

Whether you believe in trade-offs or not, this does not keep the trade-offs from happening anyhow. So the Christian who is seeking to navigate this issue is never going to be in a position where the trade-offs are non-existent. What he has to do is to make sure that whatever trade-off he accepts is consistent with the law of God.

So here what the trade-offs look like. Smashmouth advocates would rather have a bill signed into law that protects some babies than purer bill that doesn’t make it to the governor’s desk, and that therefore protects no babies. That’s a trade-off. Not only so, it is the place where the abolitionists say that it is a compromise that represents a plain moral failing.

But wait. The trade-offs continue on up the line. The abolitionist, while fighting for an absolute protection of the unborn in one state through legislative means, is nevertheless willing to forego direct action in peacefully shutting down clinics. That’s a trade-off. The legislative process is slow, and so why aren’t we trying to save as many babies as we can today? Why not go to 8? How many babies will die while we are getting a clean abolition bill to the floor of the legislature? Why not direct and peaceful action at the clinics now?

Then once we are at 8, we go back to the legislature. Let’s kick it up to 9. Why are we introducing abolitionist bills that, if passed, would still leave our now “pure” state in an impure covenant and alliance with 49 other states that don’t protect the unborn adequately, and with many of them that don’t protect the unborn at all? Jehoshaphat had no business being in an alliance with Ahab. What are we doing? That is yet another trade-off. We would rather have an intact America than to take a thoroughgoing stand for the unborn. While fighting for children here, we are nevertheless willing to remain in a covenanted union with states that murder their children over there, and right up to birth too.

When Paul Hill shot the abortionist years ago, his logic was that pro-lifers use the rhetoric of “murder” for their fund-raising purposes, but they don’t really act like it is murder in real life. Why don’t we take up arms in order to prevent the bloodshed that is happening today? Waiting for a pure bill to get out of committee would just seem to a revolutionary pro-lifer to be just another species of dithering. To a revolutionary pro-lifer, the smashmouth guys and the abolitionists together are just a pack of sissies, and with not a dime’s worth of difference between them. So what standard does the abolitionist appeal to when debating with someone like Paul Hill?

So the smashmouth position is that trade-offs are regrettably necessary, and we are responsible to do whatever we can, and to do so while playing the long game. But the abolitionist position is “no trade-offs” at all. So for them, directed to them, a most reasonable question would seem to be “why the trade-offs then?” Why do you stop where you do?

Which End of the Feet Are the Toes On?

Another point I wished to fill out a bit more is this one. Why is the content of the bill the only thing considered, and not the trajectory of the bill?

The debate has to do with the lawfulness of signing a bill that said, simply, “No abortions will be performed in this state after the detection of a fetal heartbeat.”

The abolitionist position is that such a law is compromised in its very essence, and that no Christian magistrate could ever sign something like that without sinning. The smashmouth incrementalist position is that signing such a bill could be a degraded and immoral act, or it could be an act of high virtue. It all depends. Depends on what? Let me give you two scenarios that illustrate both the wickedness and the virtue, and they do so by passing identical legislation.

Say that a governor, a professing Christian, signed such a bill, but he did so in a state that had previously had an absolute ban on all abortions. The effect of this law he just signed would be to “legalize” the killing of unborn children prior to a heartbeat. It would introduce murder into his state. This would be an act of great wickedness.

Say that another governor, also a professing Christians, signed a bill with exactly the same language. But he did this in a state in which abortion-on-demand was already legal and widely accepted. The effect of the law that he signed—this same law with the same wording—would be to save the lives of all the unborn children who had a heartbeat. He would have signed a stronger bill, but no bills of that nature were going to make it through the legislature.

Nevertheless, the result of the first signature was that the legalized murdering started, and the effect of the second signature was that a large part of the murdering stopped. The smashmouth argument is that that to examine the words of a bill only, and not to include the intent or the effect, or the trajectory, is a tragic form of myopia.

Regulating That Which You Hate

The central argument that Joe Rigney brought to the debate was that Scripture tells us that God hates divorce (Mal. 2:16). Nevertheless, because of the hardness of the people’s hearts, God permitted divorce (Matt. 19:6-8). And the problem that the Pharisees had was that they interpreted God’s permission as being tantamount to approval. “They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?” (Matthew 19:7). They took the legal permission to divorce as though it were a command to divorce, which it most certainly was not.

In short, if God allowed a practice to continue, even though He hated it, then does this not mean that a magistrate (for various prudential and practical reasons) might imitate God in this regard?

Now the comeback could easily be that divorce and murder, while both contrary to God’s will, are not in the same category. Murder is the shedding of blood, and thus is a far more serious crime. At least that is what I would say in response if I were assigned to argue the abolitionist’s case. So do we have any examples in Scripture that would highlight Rigney’s pattern, but which involve bloodshed as opposed to sexual ethics? And the answer to that question is that “well, yes, we do.”

When God established the six cities of refuge, this was His stopgap solution to the problems created by the ancient office of the blood avenger. Say that two men were out chopping wood, and an axe head flew off the handle of one man’s axe and killed the other man. This was entirely unintentional, meaning that at worst the man was guilty of accidental manslaughter, and not murder.

But in the older system, according to an ancient custom, the family of the deceased had a blood avenger, who would come and kill the man that this had happened to. And what God does is regulate this practice instead of outlawing it.

Note carefully what this is saying. It is saying that a man who is not guilty of murder can nevertheless be killed by another man, and this killer is not guilty of his blood . . . meaning that he could not be charged with murder. If the fleeing man made it to a city of refuge, they could not turn him over to the blood avenger, and they could not turn him over because he was innocent of a murder charge. And if the blood avenger caught him before he made it to the city, he died—not because he was guilty but because he was slow.

Now I don’t have any problem saying that this provision, this requirement to establish six cities of refuge, was God’s way of tapping the brakes on a system of very rough justice that really needed to be phased out. And I would also say that the duty of someone from this family to kill someone from that family because of an accident is yet another example of hardness of heart. But this law, given through Moses, is not an example of “partiality.” Not at all. Nevertheless, it was possible for an innocent man to die under this system because of a bit of bad luck.

Some ancient practices God just forbade, flat out No sodomy. No cult prostitution. No graven images. Other practices He phased out by regulating them. Lex talionis. Concubinage. Polygamy. The blood avenger. And if we want to learn how to distinguish what should be in which category . . . to the law and to the testimony (Is. 8: 20).

Conclusion

The attractiveness of the abolitionist position is that it is simple and straightforward. The charge that will be brought against the arguments marshaled above (and anything like them) is that they are complicated, and stuffed full of words. My reply is that simplicity is a virtue, but being simplistic is not. There are many positions that are attractive in their apparent simplicity—Sermon-on-the-Mount-pacifism, or early-church-socialism, or swear-not-at-all pietism. There are good answers to them all, but they are answers that are . . . stuffed full of words.

But they are not just words. They are arranged into arguments, and it is my conviction that they are arguments that need to be answered . . . and not just denied.