Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire
The end of the great American Culture War is coming into sight. It will end, not with a bang, but a whimper as its partisans succumb to age and exhaustion.
There will be emotionally rewarding victories for both sides, but no unilateral surrender by either party to the struggle over which values should drive Americans to lead good lives.
The permissive, post-Christian side to the war will win on gay rights but the traditionalists will win something on abortion.
Americans in the middle, who have a passion for neither extreme, are in the process of shaping majority compromises on both issues.
The first compromise emerging is the legalization of gay marriage. It seems that a majority of Americans now are no longer willing to stigmatize sexual behaviors that for centuries were proscribed for the righteous under orthodox Christian teachings. This new tolerance is appearing in the secular statutory authorization of gay marriage.
But the passage of statutes conferring the legal status of “marriage” on same-sex life partners is taking place in a quiet acceptance of religious freedom. The compromise emerging is that the law will no longer devalue same-sex relationship commitments but will not force Americans in faith communities opposed to such relationships to acknowledge them as religiously sanctioned. Secular law will provide one definition of marriage but churches will be left free to sanctify or solemnize only those commitment relationships they respect.
As a consequence of this separation of state and church, churches are splitting over the morality of same-sex relationships. This is going on mostly in the mainstream Protestant churches. Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists are dividing at the congregational level into accepting or rejectionist denominations. Believers are choosing which version of Protestantism they prefer by joining one kind of congregation or the other. Evangelicals and fundamentalists are holding firm to their objections to same-sex unions, as is the Catholic Church. Post-Enlightenment churches and the non-churched are already in the accepting camp.
In this environment of choice, I predict that many Catholics who strongly disagree with the teachings of their church on homosexuality and related issues of gender and sexuality will begin leaving, one by one, to join accepting mainstream Protestant congregations.
But on the other major battlefield of the Culture War — abortion and the right to life — partial victory will go to the traditionalists. A compromise majority consensus is emerging around permitting a right to choose for pregnant women up through the 20th week of gestation but not afterwards. Some 12 states have adopted this policy as law, and the U.S. House of Representatives has taken a similar stance.
The 20-week rule does not impose through secular law any definition of life for the early weeks of pregnancy. This is a compromise for the pro-life movement, permitting time for those who would seek an abortion to obtain one.
At the same time, the 20-week rule affirms that at some point in a pregnancy, a human life comes into being, which, befitting its status as a human person, now has a secular claim on its mother not to terminate it.
Since the beginning of the cultural struggle over the right to life, polls indicated that a majority of Americans wanted both some freedom for women to end unwanted pregnancies and limits on that freedom. But until now, neither the pro-life nor the pro-choice side has taken time to work out just how to do that. A 20-week rule does so and, I predict, will gain the assent of a majority of Americans.
Today polls indicate that a majority of Americans can accept ending a period of choice for pregnant women at 20 weeks of gestation.
Now, the 20-week rule rests on a significant predicate. It is not justified on religious, but rather on secular, grounds. The reason for the rule is the asserted “fact” that a fetus can “feel pain” after 20 weeks. Just how we can know this is a puzzle to me, but I am willing to accept the proposition on face value as it contributes to a constructive civic compromise in ending the Culture War.
The 20-week rule for ending the right to terminate a pregnancy is not based on Christian scripture or other church teachings. It represents new recognition by the pro-life movement that we live in a society where church does not and cannot dictate to state. Therefore, the 20-week rule leaves open for 20 weeks freedom of belief as to the status of a fetus. The 20-week rule is an application of the First Amendment that government shall not establish religion in this republic.
There is something in this rule for both pro-life and pro-choice partisans. For pro-choice advocates, such laws would confirm a woman’s secular right during a substantial period of the pregnancy to have it terminated.
At the end of every pregnancy, however, there is little room for theological speculation. Science can take over. The fetus has developed the capacity to live outside its mother’s womb just as any person can. This is a matter of fact, not of belief only. It can be tested and demonstrated to be true, as can most secular facts. The seminal US Supreme Court opinion in Roe v. Wade put the time when speculation over the status of a fetus must change to secular certainty at the point when a fetus becomes viable for life outside the womb, estimated in the normal case at 24 weeks of gestation.
The Pro-life movement has spent 40 years seeking to change Roe v. Wade on religious grounds. If its leaders now accept the 20-week rule based on pain instead of a 24-week rule based on viability, that is welcome movement towards civic harmony out of respect for the separation of church and state.
During the years of debate over abortion rights as a matter between mother and fetus, I was always struck by the silence with respect to a point made, I am told, by St Thomas Aquinas — who asked, when did the soul enter the body?
Aquinas reportedly looked to the moment of “quickening,” or some 40 days after conception, as the time when full spiritual humanity began in each person. His question was mostly theological, trying to insert religious insights into matters of biology. Aquinas’ query opened for me the need to avoid rigid legal conclusions on matters of theology that lie beyond scientific resolution. Freedom for different beliefs may indeed be the wisest choice when we may live in a single political community but live by many different and even conflicting theological understandings.
This was the position taken by John Locke in his Letter on Toleration, which sought an end to the sectarian wars and persecutions among Christians in his day.
The emerging compromises on gay marriage and abortion reflect Locke’s vision of separation of church and state. On matters of theology — marriage as a holy sacrament, the placement of an immortal soul in a body that will turn to dust and ashes — the state has no prerogative to enforce such beliefs one way or the other.
The state needs secular reasons for its laws, not religious ideals.
As the baby boomers who have led the fight in the Culture War now leave the stage of history for their retirements and then the trip to the beyond, America may indeed come to resolve the disputes which that generation so vigorously maintained.
