The Ethics of Prejudice

The Ethics of Prejudice: A Philosophical Defense of Christian Ethics

Introductory comments: This was written for a class I took called Christian Apologetics. It's addressed to sketpics and atheists (ie, most of my friends,) asking them to re-evaluate the knee-jerk assumption that Christianity is irrational and totally useless. A shorter version was given for the required speech presentation. So the bits are the cheesily rhetorical are supposed to be that way.

(I know there's a bit in the middle where I criticize without first doing in-depth explaining about the opposite opinion; in my defense, this was written for a class where we'd all read the article, and I simply couldn't let my word count go any higher.)

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Many of the great speakers of the past sought to sway their audience by appealing to that which was best and most noble in them. The most rousing and obvious example is of course, "What will you die for?" But this is not the question I have come to ask you.

One of the major purposes of a Christian apologist is to convert people to the faith. They, too, ask questions of evaluation, such as, "Where is God in your life?" But that is also not the question I want to ask.

Consider for a moment, if you will, the American civilization. Not just our current culture, our habits and prejudices, our day to day and news source to news source reactionary ethics—but that fine line of national identity that connects where we came from with were we are. Like any line, it has no meaning without relation to its endpoints—which is why people ask questions about nobility and God. The unspoken assumption in their rhetoric is that such a progression—and the endpoint itself—is meaningless unless it's not merely a progression, but a continuity of development, towards a good and better end.

There's been a lot said in recent years about social development, with people examining how our society got to be the way it is, as well as where we’re going—with usually the criticized aspects traced back to a particular idealist group or historical figure. There isn't much consensus on either of those, because everybody has a different agenda. What has been widely agreed upon is the current state of "post-." We are described as post-industrial, post-modern, post-9/11... and, naturally, post-Christian.

Religion’s place in today’s secular world is no small issue. Today we are struggling with a multiplicity of and savage competition between lifestyles, ethical systems, scientific developments, and cultural identities. Today’s cardinal societal virtues, such as tolerance, acceptance, and equality, are quite literally “signs of the times.” They are the only tools a “post-everything” people have to bring to this overwhelming question: “Where do we go from here?” It is my position that as a society, our rejection or acceptance of Christianity—or, more precisely, what the majority of Americans think Christianity is—will be the turning point in this confusion, and the lynchpin of the society that will evolve after. Ultimately, it comes down to this: where you see society heading, and what you think is driving it there.

This, then, is my question to you: What are you willing to settle for?

The following three points that I will present for your consideration are meant to illustrate that a society succeeding in doing what ours is trying to do—eradicate Christianity from the public sphere entirely—comes to an endpoint where no one wants to be—regardless of your theological commitments, or lack thereof.

My first point may be summarized this way: If you’re going to reject Christianity, you ought to reject the real Christianity.

The English philosopher Herbert Spencer once said, “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

Today, many people borrow the first part of Spencer’s famous lines, but substitute their own “eternal ignorance principle”: religion. Ironically, this kind of thinking is exactly what Spencer was talking about. Although he was no fan of Christianity himself, Spencer recognized the importance of getting a fair and impartial review of the facts before coming to a conclusion. Absorbing general public opinion or letting a few off-putting individuals form your opinion for you is intellectually foolhardy, and a strange habit for a society that claims to love all things empirically tested to have picked up.

Nonetheless, that is how Christianity has achieved its common public face today—a false front that is largely vindictive stereotype, created by ignorance and kept in place by those who should know better with a deep-seated prejudice against all things “supernatural.”

There are two major categories that objections to the faith fall into. The first is about the quality of the believers and what that reflects about the religion itself. This is usually expressed by calling Christianity “irrational.” On the one hand this opinion assumes something about what “blind faith” means, while on the other accusing believers of being, at best, uneducated, and ignorant, at worst. The second category of objection also questions the legitimacy of Christianity as an organization. This is usually expressed by the idea that it is “pre-” or “un-scientific.” This usually includes the assumption that the Bible is inaccurate or made-up.

To combat a prejudice you must first understand it. This requires knowing where it came from, what its basis is.

Of these objections, the first indicates an intellectual distance from the content of Christianity; the second reveals the critic’s suppositions about the nature of reason and the scope of science; and the third, unfamiliarity with archaeological history and evidence.

Generally speaking, it was not until after the Enlightenment, and the time of the famous philosopher Voltaire, that the modern notions of reason, science, and religion, came to be as we know them. Interestingly, this point is brought thoroughly home to people on both sides of the faith divide; on the one hand, by Pope Benedict XVI, and on the other, by secular John Ralston Saul. Benedict’s address “Reason, Faith, and the University,” and Saul’s book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West both examine what it means for something to be reasonable and to be scientific. It is not the same question anymore.

Pre-Enlightenment reason was much broader than our current edition. Today, when we ask if something is reasonable, we generally mean, “Is it scientific?” For something to be scientific, it must be empirical; that is, concrete and quantifiable. If you can’t experiment on it, it’s not scientific.

The idea that data is data—you can’t fool science—quickly evolved into its popular corollary: science can’t fool you. But this assumes information speaks for itself. However, facts do not exist in isolation. They come as answers to questions, and questions are always shaped by our prejudices—sometimes consciously by our agendas, the ends we wish to achieve, making these facts are our manipulated means. A wise man once said, “No data speaks for itself. Data just lies there. People speak.” In the same vein, the famous author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the importance of opinion and motive in gathering and presenting “science”: “Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.” So much for the myth of impartial objectivity.

Within this narrow definition of reason the entire existence and usefulness of philosophy becomes… well, academic. What is the point of discussing right and wrong—a discussion crucial to religion in particular and societies in general—when, while you can see examples of them in the world, you can’t find, let alone measure, a “unit” of good or bad?

This also throws the tools of reason into doubt. The rules of logic were before considered as reliable, if not more so, than experimentation by the scientific method. But now? The laws that govern reason are no more sensible—literally—than that “unit” of goodness.

This crippling of reason, confining it to merely empirical data, crippled society. Scientific reason gives us many things; it teaches us what and how. But it only demonstrates; it doesn’t explain. It can’t answer—can’t even ask—the question, “Why?” This is the first and foremost question of religion and philosophy.

Nonetheless, this is the legacy of reasoning the Enlightenment has left pop-philosophy today: Since philosophy can’t come up with certain answers, “faith” certainly can’t, so religion must be even less certain. Because every philosopher has a different idea, and once faith is excluded there’s no “objective” list of “right” answers with which to compare their thoughts, there must not be an actual way to go about answering ethical questions.

But this conclusion is faulty. One major reason for this is disagreement is not evidence of something not existing at all. We’re so used to considering the idea that we can be wrong about things we forget what the implications of being wrong are. If we can be wrong, we can be right. There’s something we’re being wrong about. Certain things only have meaning in relation to their opposite. They are defined by it—up and down; short and long; correct and incorrect.

This conclusion also assumes there’s only one kind of certainty: the kind you can see. But even daily life shows us this can’t be the case. Humans are fully capable of making inferences and forming logical connections between all kinds of non-empirical data. We do it at work, in our relationships—when evaluating our lives. If we don’t allow for the process of abstraction, half of our daily activities can’t take place. If that abstraction weren’t capable of allowing us to arrive at true conclusions, those daily activities wouldn’t take place functionally.

The same reason that is the heart and process of non Bible-based philosophy is the reason used by religious figures. The real, substantial difference between Christian theology and secular philosophy is that the philosopher attempts to prove his premise before drawing a conclusion. Christians start with an un-argued premise—the Bible was divinely inspired—and work from there. Interestingly, many of the conclusions Christian ethicists come up with, such as, murder is wrong, are things the larger, secular society wishes it could justify, too.

The point is, not only is reason broader than empirical evidence, but this very reliable reason is at the heart of Christianity, which is self-described as a reasonable faith. People want to choose the popular idea of ‘science’ over religion because they see it as unbiased and fair. The simple process of empirical science itself is objective in the sense many claim, but there is little of that around today. When people champion Science, they’re not talking about empirically verifiable experiments in the laboratory, the impartial and fair seeking of physical truth. Rather, they’re talking about a philosophical position: not just the non-existence, but the non-necessity of God, of religion as a whole. This is a conversion-oriented atheism full of the same proselytizing these very scientists abhor in so-called “fundamentalist Christians.” A secular society is one thing; this kind of intolerant atheism is something else entirely. If we’re going to get rid of bias, let’s be… well… fair: don’t hold Christianity to a standard to which you hold no other position, including the modern conception of science.

This goes for the historicity of the Bible, as well. One of the major factors in the uniformed critic’s opinion that Christianity is unreasonable starts with the assumption that the Bible is just there to trick people. They treat the Bible as if it sprang whole from a fully formed and evangelical Christianity in the modern context. This could not be further from the truth.

Believing the Bible to be inspired by God is a decision made in faith. Understanding the Bible to be a historically reliable text is a matter of knowing the history of the Jewish culture in which the Old and New Testaments were written, and the archaeological evidence corroborating them. In his compilation book of evidence for the historicity of the Bible, A Ready Defense, Josh McDowell argues the same tests used to determine the accuracy and reliability of other ancient documents, from the Iliad to Aristotle to Shakespeare, are the same tests that should be used when evaluating the Bible. After all, there is no reason not to, except a pre-conceived prejudice against it. When these three, the bibliographical, external and internal evidence tests, are applied, there are three unavoidable conclusions: First, we have more extant copies of books of the Bible than any other historical manuscripts; second, judged by the literary standards and motivations of the Hebrew culture in which they were written, the books are themselves internally consistent; and third, everything from the geography of the ancient world to other ancient sources of literature confirm both the styles in which the books were written and the details of historical events recorded there.

Such are the conclusions we can draw from these facts: Christianity is eminently reasonable; the most common arguments against it are based not in reason and impartial judgment of Truth, the supposed stance and aim of all science, but the clandestine championing of its opposite viewpoint. If Christianity’s opponents were really so convinced that it was such an evil, they would attack it on grounds of reality, not this fabricated “straw man” of Christianity. It is a fallacy of prejudice, justified by the would-be rationality of this post-Christian “brave new world”: if it’s empirical, it’s good.

You may not like the idea of faith in a higher being, perhaps it seems silly to you, out of place in the modern context. But Christianity has something immediately practical to offer as well, something which, for the faithful, is inseparable from their belief in God, but is also imminently acceptable, even necessary, to a secular public. Even in—especially in—a society where the separation of church and state is held so dear. In other words, we’re talking about the reasonability of Christian ethics, and its relation to contemporary societal dilemmas.

Those who wish to wholeheartedly throw out Christianity in its entirety have rarely considered what effect that would have on their society’s conception of right and wrong.

Nonetheless, we live in a self-described “post-Christian” culture. But what elements of it, exactly, are post-Christian? And if we have removed Christian ethics, what have we replaced them with? Has the change been an improvement?

My second point is dedicated to addressing this question, and may be summarized this way: Human dignity matters, and nothing respects it like Christianity.

To illustrate this, I want to start with an example of a society which has already gone the direction America seems to want to go: the Netherlands. The following should make it clear what a detrimental effect their current system of bioethics has had on their society.

Before 2001, euthanasia was illegal on the books, but condoned in practice. Now, laws are going the reverse direction. The infrequent times doctors are actually brought to trial for abusing their powers over life and death—it should be noted, by relatives or parents of the patients in question—the courts have ruled in their favor, saying they had no option but to kill. Recently, the Netherlands has been under heavy scrutiny from the rest of Europe for proposing euthanasia as the only medical solution when, even if the patient was terminal, palliative care—that is, treatment of the symptoms to make the patient’s last months comfortable and humane—has been entirely ignored. Some Dutch doctors, hearing about the British successes with palliative care, answered that they did not need to study it, as they could apply euthanasia instead.

It may be politically correct, but still a few voices of dissent have been raised in the Netherlands. A member of the House of Lords Committee on Medical Ethics stated, “We asked doctors in the Netherlands what it was like when they did their first euthanasia case. They said they agonized over it. The second case was much easier and by the third it was a piece of cake. We found that chilling.”

The medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has studied euthanasia in the Netherlands. He observes, “What was intended as a solution for exceptional cases has become a routine way of dealing with terminal cases. The Netherlands has moved from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress, and from voluntary to involuntary euthanasia." Today, the handicapped, new borns, comatose patients, and even completely healthy but depressed people have been euthanized without punishment by the courts.

Dutch criminologist Chris Rutenfrans says, “Because euthanasia is politically correct, prosecutors are often unwilling to press charges.” But it goes deeper—in many cases, a patient's "right to die" has subtly become a duty to die. Amsterdam psychiatrist Frank Koerselman says, "I frequently see people pressurized into euthanasia by exhausted and impatient relatives.” He tells of a woman whose relatives had gathered in Amsterdam for her planned euthanasia. One came from overseas. When the patient had last-minute doubts, the family said, "You can't have her come all this way for nothing." Instead of ensuring that the patient's true wishes were observed, the doctor carried out the euthanasia.

Euthanasia laws also fail to recognize who in each case is best able to decide for the sick person. Doctors have testified personally to more and more frequently overriding the wishes of patients and the family for the sake of economy or convenience, as the Dutch health care commissioned Remmelink Report found. Worse, in some hospitals there are committees being established to decide individual cases. The Weekly Standard published an article which reads, “The establishment of "independent committees" to dispatch non-consenting humans is nothing but a death penalty committee for innocents. Once begun, it is impossible—simply impossible—to limit the concept with any bright line. Abortion, of course, has always been limited by the physical act of birth… But now the Netherlands has gone much, much farther. If the "severely retarded" may be killed upon appropriate motion, second, debate, and majority vote, why not the moderately retarded? Why not the mildly retarded? Why not, in fact, anyone the "independent committee" deems as usefully dispatched?”

A former governor of Delaware described it in the Wall Street Journal as “granting the state legal authority to kill innocent individuals.” He said, “It is an abhorrent concept, with profound moral consequences. Its purpose was chillingly summarized by German cancer specialist Stephan Sahm, who is opposed to the statute: ‘Where continuing to live is only one of two legal options, everyone who burdens others with his or her continued existence is held accountable.’ The Dutch have changed the equation; life is now "only one of two legal options," and if we choose to live we will be "held accountable."

One of the most disturbing examples of euthanasia in practice occurred when a doctor—a gynecologist, not a pediatrician or expert in the disease—killed a child suffering from spina bifida, a condition in which there is an opening at the spine that may cause disability or death. He killed the child at the request of her parents, because, he later testified, she screamed in agony when touched. It’s no wonder the baby was in pain! He never closed the wound in her back. In other words, the doctor killed his patient without first attempting proper medical treatment. Yet, rather than punishing him, the trial judge praised him for his "integrity and courage," wishing him well in any further legal proceedings he might face.

But the story of Ineke Verloop, now deceased, offers us hope. She learned neither surgery nor chemotherapy was likely to cure her cancers of the throat and stomach. But the two options available to her--a hospital or a nursing home--did not appeal to the 65-year-old widow, who feared her own wishes would not be respected there. I'm not afraid of death, she said, but I don't want someone else to decide how I should die. She seriously considered euthanasia. Like most Dutch people, she knew little about the option of palliative care. Then an acquaintance told her about Hospice Rozenheuvel. Five weeks later, under the care of anti-euthanasia doctor, she was resting easily in their sun lounge. She considered herself blessed. "When I came here, I could hardly walk or talk, and I hadn't eaten for a month," she said after her arrival. "After ten days, I chat, walk and feel relaxed. I know I'm not leaving here alive, but I feel like a human being."

Ineke was finally feeling the effects of an environment that does respect human dignity. But how is it a society can move from a limited used of euthanasia in extremely severe medical cases to euthanasia as a common practice that threatens the autonomy and dignity of its citizens?

There are a few thinkers in relatively recent history who have shaped the whole course of philosophy, and the philosophy of the layman; that is, most modern views of the world start with the kinds of assumptions about reality that these thinkers proposed. David Hume’s division of knowledge into analytic and synthetic facts renders non-empirical questions irrational and irrelevant; so many people give up on ethics. Immanuel Kant’s world of joyless dedication to duty and fundamental absolutes leads many to assume that since there are too many “exceptions” in life for absolutes, there must not be any; therefore, ethics must be relative. The group-pleasing, pleasure-oriented Utilitarianism is often identified with practicality, and popular because it gives nobility to the idea of pleasure seeking while sanctifying the will of the majority. Interestingly, the simple mathematical equation of ‘will of the majority’ with ‘social good’ is directly contrary to one of America’s revolutionary laws: the respect and equal treatment of the minority.

Then there are the current thinkers who seem to have combined elements of all of these into apparently workable models of social ethics. One such is Tristram Engelhardt. His philosophy of bioethics is so close to the consequences of pushing back medical boundaries in the name of humane action demonstrated in the Netherlands, the Dutch philosophy could have been modeled off it deliberately. Why the consequences of his philosophy are so different from his well-intentioned premises becomes clear with a critical analysis of his position.

Engelhardt is not subtle about his essential thesis: “Not all humans are equal.” His goal is to redefine the parameters of the abortion debate and so-called medical “gray” areas concerning “defective” newborns, children, teens, and disabled adults. The reason for this is to promote abortion and euthanasia.

He does this by making a distinction between persons and humans. He separates ‘human’ from ‘person’ as simply a general biological category. He defines a person in two separate ways: as a self-conscious rational moral agent, and as an economic factor in society. He says when moral agents act together, the result is the “peaceable community,” a “a moral standpoint in terms of which self-conscious rational entities can speak of blame and praise.”

One interesting point is nowhere in this writing does he raise the question of what anchors this potential moral standpoint. What standards are being used by these self-conscious rational entities to make their moral judgments about praise and blame? He claims to have created an entirely legal and non-metaphysical position, but by leaving questions like this wide-open he is revealing an unspoken bias: that morality is relative; that there is no standard, divine or otherwise, to anchor our opinions about what it means to be human except biology and our opinions; and that the law, legislature, is the ultimate moral authority. This last position has already been adopted, by a philosophy called legal positivism. The consequence is that if ethical behavior is whatever the law says it is, there can be no unethical law. It makes the law our master, instead of keeping it in its rightful place as tool. This isn’t even the “it’s right because it works” pragmatic justification. Of course, the question for that proposition is—works for who? The people? Or the state?

There is also the curious fact that his two definitions of what constitutes a person are not used consistently. Although Engelhardt defines persons internally as ‘rational self-conscious moral agents,’ this is related to the external world only in terms of function; he poses himself the problem of sleep. Is the sleeping man still a rational creature? He is not currently being a self-conscious, rational moral agent, or arguably a contributing economical factor. Engelhardt answers this in terms of probability, the same solution he denies to ascribing personhood to fetuses and defective infants: the sleeping man will awake. (He ignores the fact that is also possible for a sleeping man not to awaken.)

As far as that mere function of personhood goes, he describes its worth only in terms of utility: how we are participating economically in society. This is what causes him to draw the line of personhood much farther inward in human development than even abortionists do. Supposing a child of twelve years to be rational, he is still not a person because he does not have a job, and thus an economic status, except as “burden.” His lines through humanity are arbitrary. There’s nothing in his worldview to distinguish between infants and fetuses; but infants he accords a kind of inherent status as “more” than fetuses. There’s also no difference, the way he’s drawn the defining lines, between this group, young children, or adolescents. “Worth” then becomes something that can be given and taken at will. When worth becomes a matter of performance, having meaning only in its relation of beneficence to the law, there is nothing stopping the state from redrawing the lines of “worthiness” so that any time, if it benefited the state, your ‘personhood’ could be in danger of denial. If you fail to perform well, say if, on the economic side, you become bankrupt, you are no longer a value to society. Simply put, Engelhardt’s philosophy is a reincarnation of the once-popular theory of Social Darwinism.

Engelhardt’s vision of the wanted disabled humans immunity to state-sanctioned euthanasia coming through their guardians’ protection, this idea that we can “choose” whom we want to protect to prevent injustice, ultimately fails. If the law tells us we can choose who we want to be human, the law can tell us we don’t have that right in circumstances where the state says we don’t. Why? Because in that case it’s more beneficial for the state to define that person as a thing. If every human life isn’t respected as personhood—however limited that life is, in the case of persons with disabilities, small children as yet mentally and economically undeveloped, or, as Engelhardt himself points out, the sleeping person—there is no limit to where the line for respect cannot be drawn. This redefining takes away a fundamental American idea: that each human being has rights simply because they are a human being. If we abolish that distinction in our definition of personhood, rights are no longer to be protected by the government but granted by the government. What can be granted can be taken away. Only that which is inherent is inviolable. The first makers of American law understood this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” What happens when we become dependent on the law for moral definitions is that the government determines how we exist as people. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have.” By making your life seem a burden to the state, he can justify the death of any number of individuals to achieve a goal Utilitarianism is proud to call its own: the greatest good for the greatest number.

In the same vein, Engelhardt says, “A balance must be struck between the likely benefits and costs to be incurred by allowing parents to choose the circumstances under which they will become the guardians of persons, (i.e., children who are persons in the social sense and who may become so in the strict sense.)” Engelhardt has maintained that this is not a metaphysical proposition but a legal one, yet this statement defies that claim. Here he asserts two things: first, that human worth is assigned to certain humans by other humans, that it is not inherent, and second, that such worth is measured by the convenience or inconvenience it causes others. These are metaphysical suppositions about what the essence of humanity consists in. This argument has taken concrete form in the Netherlands where in practice it is not the parents but the doctors who decide whether an infant will live or die, and people considering euthanasia are reminded that their continued existence is a burden to society.

In short, Engelhardt fails to differentiate between essence and accident; between capacity
and ability. The great philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas describes the difference between a lack and privation. Something is a privation when it ought to be there, and is not. For example, blindness. It is in the nature of humans to be able to see. It is not in the nature of rocks to see. A rock not seeing is a lack; blindness in a human is privation. This relates to capacity and ability in this way: the mentally disabled person, as a human being, has the necessary “packaging” so to speak—a body, eyes, a brain. These are the physical things needed to be a self-conscious rational moral agent. They have the capacity. Because of an imperfection is the body, eyes, or brain, they do not have the ability. Because Engelhardt fails to make this distinction, it is not clear whether the people who “have rights to forbearance and who may not be used without their permission” are those who are merely capable of making moral decisions, or those who actually do participate in the peaceable community, i.e., the society with all its attendant laws. The sleeping man is considered a person because he is capable of being a moral agent even though while asleep he isn’t actually being one. But there are people who while awake disavow their identities and responsibilities as self-conscious rational moral agents. Everyone has met at least one person like this: the kind who doesn’t care about the law, about whether he’s doing good or bad, but only about doing and getting what pleases him. Are these humans “persons”? They have the capacity to participate in the peaceable community, but they do not.

Engelhardt also discusses wealth as being in “the central fabric of health care concerns” and says ,“states claim special moral prerogatives.” But why to either of these? Wealth disparities are a fact of life, but does that mean the doctor should attempt to heal his wealthy patients and not his poor ones? If the answer to this question is yes, then we are assuming that the patient is there to benefit the doctor—and not the other way around. This is a backwards relationship that flies in the face of the point of pursuing medicine. Think also about people with this capacity for economic participation but who are not active forces in the economy. They are technically non-persons; is it then not murder to kill, say, a bum? A homeless person? A bankrupt man?

Engelhardt speaks in terms of “morally relevant inequalities.” But in terms of capacity, what’s the difference between a healthy infant and someone severely mentally disabled? Elsewhere he talks about “will” verses “probably” verses “might.” He says a sleeping person will wake up again and be normal; but what about a healthy infant? They are just as incapacitated, by underdeveloped-ness, as the mentally disabled, but a healthy infant, in the normal course of biology, will become a functioning adult as surely as the sleeping adult will awaken. What this brings the difference down to is not simply “capacity” but stages of development. The earlier stages deserve less respect. This is a self-defeating position. If society undervalued its young members in the same way Engelhardt wants it to undervalue its disabled persons, there would eventually be no functioning adults left to make any decisions or be a society at all.

His lines through humanity are arbitrary. There’s nothing in his worldview to distinguish between infants and fetuses; but infants he accords a kind of inherent status as “more” than fetuses. There’s also no difference, the way he’s drawn the defining lines, between this group, young children, or adolescents. Yet someone who feels they can terminate a healthy fetus with impunity might have a hard problem doing the same to a healthy infant, toddler, or teenager.
The only reason to distance ourselves from those in need of medical aid by declaring them not to be people is to prepare ourselves for justifying their deaths. Essentially, Engelhardt asserts that an individual must ‘pull their weight’ in one or both of two ways: by acting as a moral agent and by being an economic contributor to society. If you don’t do these things, you are essentially dead weight, and not just can, but ought, to be removed.

What this conception of ethical law fails to recognize that you can compartmentalize societies but not people. Futuristic Orwellian disaster scenarios begin because those in charge fail to recognize this. In Christian terms—as phrased by an atheist who’s ethics are extremely Christian – it’s “treating people as things,” and that is the bottom line definition of sin. For a modern example, take President Obama’s removal of the “conscience clause” concerning medical activity like abortion. The conscience clause allowed pro-life medical practitioners to refrain from engaging against perceived unethical behavior against their will. With this clause removed, the state now dictates personal medical morality. Yet the conscience clause was based off a dearly beloved American freedom and cornerstone in American law: freedom of religion. The state is not to dictate where the consciences of its citizens should be directed.

The kind of utilitarian thinking Engelhardt espouses justifies everything from the current situation in the Netherlands to genocide to 1984. Everyone is so keen to avoid religion in modern philosophy they’ve backed themselves into a corner. This kind of future, the kind the Netherlands has begun to embody, is a lot closer than it appears. The ideals of what has come to be called the culture of death are already in our schools, our hospitals, and our pop-philosophy. We push away cultural expressions of Christianity because we don’t understand it anymore; and in doing so, we push away the only ethical alternative we have to Engelhardt, to the health- and freedom-destroying euthanasia of the Netherlands.

We want a guideline about what to do in difficult cases. But the guidelines he proposes make the difficult cases… easy. The guidelines are easily misapplied. They take away the safety law is supposed to provide; they make justice the whim of the powerful; they make “humanity” a committee’s slap-on-wrist rebuke to a murderer disguised as a doctor. How many of you, regardless of your attitude toward religion, don’t want to live in a safe, just, humane society?

The Christian Ethics so many are rejecting without first understanding is a viable alternative to Engelhardt and the Netherlands, one that does allow for a just social order. Rejecting what is common to ethical philosophy and Christianity in an attempt to avoid theology and separate church and the state is the embodiment of an old adage you might have heard: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Which brings us to my last point: Because Christian ethics are necessary for the building of the very kind of society religion-rejecting secularists are after, current interpretations of the valued “separation of church and state” principle are entirely counterproductive.

It is important to be clear. This is no way advocating the removal of the separation between church and state. Such a separation is crucial for the well being of a legitimate and benevolent government, particularly for a people as diverse as Americans, and so loyal to the ideal of the democratic republic.

It is a criticism of the recent ways that just law has been unjustly applied. Mostly this is in the attitude public officials and out-spoken private citizens bring to the discussion of where the line should be drawn. There are several misunderstandings clouding the issue, that, when dispelled, allow us to understand the whole controversy in a new, more productive way.

One such confusion is over the nature of what aspects of Christianity are being included, and where. But this in turn stems from confusion about motive: the why. The underlying assumption is that Christianity has no relevancy for our law and public life; that anything even resembling it is harmful to the public sector because the only reason to continue including any element of it is so Christians can maintain a kind of majority, or ‘cultural superiority.’

My previous two points have already shown you that this attitude cannot reasonably be held in face of the evidence. There is a difference—although, for believers, a necessary link—between the faith of theology and the philosophical ethics of Christianity; and where those ethics are missing from the current discussion about what society ought to be doing, we end up with harmful consequences.

Are there arguments against this kind of reasoning? Certainly. And that is as it should be; the engaging of reasonable arguments based on evidence and logic is the common denominator and grounds of interaction among all humanity—believers and non-believers alike. What is ironic is that many shown this reasoning simply refuse to believe it—an act of faith rivaling the kind they criticize in their believing opponents.

The problem is not one of a secular society fighting a religious minority still trying to make it religious. Our current problems with interpreting the separation of church and state law followed only after the corruption of that secularization into being synonymous with a jealous atheistic worldview relying on a conception of reason and rationality limited to empirical evidence for support.

I use the phrase “jealous” deliberately because I don’t simply mean a secular culture become dominantly atheist—I’m talking about a point of view with an agenda, just as militant as the fundamentalist Christianity they despise.

Let us take a concrete example. Recently, a representative from Georgia proposed a so-called “Bible bill.” The bill declared the coming year a “Year of the Bible,” a time for reflection on values and faith for the religious among the American people. Many took offense to the proposition because they believe it inappropriate for legislature to regulate religious thought and activity in any way. Some argued the acceptance of this bill would leave it open for any religious or philosophical point of view to do the same—we could end up with a year of the Koran, or a year of the Book of Mormon. They said it’s more equal, and more fair, to not allow anyone to legislate that kind of public awareness.

These are all reasonable arguments. But what really fueled them? And what motivated the other objectors, the people who insisted that this bill is inappropriate because it’s Christian?

This shift in public opinion—from secularization to militant atheism—becomes more visible as we consider basic American history. The fact is—we’ve already had one. 1983 was declared the Year of the Bible by Ronald Reagan—complete with the blessing of Congress.

The same observation applies to the debate, several years old now, about whether it’s permissible to display the Ten Commandments in a government building. Aside from the Old Testament connotations, there’s nothing harmful in these simple statements; most of them declare what our own legislation enforces: ideas such as stealing, murder, and adultery are wrong.

What it comes down to is how people are on the defensive against Christianity. They hate it; they fear it. Why? It rarely has anything to do with its ethics, although the word “morality” has become taboo. You may have noticed this is the first time I’ve used it. It’s come to be associated with the Christianity of our childhoods—the demands on us: go to church, listen to authority, pray. We avoid it the way we avoid accumulating obligations to other people; the way we avoid calling our parents.

In short, we associate our individual experiences with a particular way of thought; we associate our experience with particular representatives of those ways of thought, with the reality of that philosophy. But for every fundamentalist who tells you you’re going to hell because you don’t believe like them, there are a hundred Christians out there living and teaching the mercy and love of God; for every opponent of evolution who hasn’t done their scientific homework, there are hundreds of believing scientists and educated lay people engaging with each other and nonbelievers alike in fruitful discussions with facts, evidence, truth. For every abusive Catholic priest there are thousands of righteous men whose wisdom, love, and Christ-like lives are fighting against that corruption, living examples of ethical behavior and justice.

When it comes to our society’s ethics, or lack thereof, when it comes to religion’s place in our society, the question is not if you believe in God or Christianity—and it never was. The question is what attitude do you bring to Christianity? Your beliefs aren’t being hindered; your freedom is not impaired; but in your denial and restriction of the religious to speak appropriately in the right setting, their rights are.

A society that rejects all public mentions of religion because it “infringes” the rights of the nonreligious to not hear it, denies the laws of equality and freedom it claims to uphold. This is the non sequitor of modern “tolerance,” an ethical principle based on an irrational prejudice. This is the message this so-called rational society sends: ‘We will be tolerant of your belief as long as it does not contradict what we believe.’

This is an interesting rift between what society claims and how it acts. Individual Christians and the concept of Christianity as a whole are both offensive; but while many may scorn at the idea of religions in general as “sops” for un-rational people, the individual Hindu or Buddhist or Jew is mostly respected; not to do so would be intolerant.

But this double standard says something more about modern people than just their religious difficulties. It says something about our concept of the individual; about our individual self-images.

Some critics of contemporary society have traced Western culture’s concept of what it means to be an individual from its earliest conception through its loftiest definitions, along with all attendant ideas like freedom and responsibility. This development in thought has led today to philosophies like Engelhardt’s, that personhood is whatever we define it as, and the popular lay person’s idea of personhood.

In a recent a conversation with a friend of mine, a highly intelligent and committed atheist, he mentioned something he’d been noticing about this. He said, “There are two incredibly common phrases that come up in pop culture and out of the mouths of most people. They are, "just be yourself" and "I have to find myself" - which are two completely antithetical ideas. The first suggests that the key to the "self" lies within; the other suggests that the "self" is to be found exterior to us and we have to discover it through external investigations. That clearly expresses the complete and utter confusion of modern thinking pertaining to one's self.”

That got me thinking. I realized, both these phrases indicate that we have lost something: identity; certainty. Why? You could say our sense of identity went when we gave up on the idea of an ultimate purpose, like God, or that human beings have souls. As my friend and I continued talking, we found a third possible reason.

While the standing idea is that we are a nation of consumers, what’s really going on, behind the product advertising and commercial ads mentality, is that the consumers are actually the consumed. “We, the people” in our role as “We, the consumers,” have become the ultimate product.

This very consumerism is Engelhardt’s justification for the arbitrary lines he’s drawn through humanity and human dignity. As we’ve seen through the applied consequences of his so-called ethics, it’s inadequate as a humane system for real people.

So what’s the alternative to this Engelhardt consumerism, to the helplessness of Hume, the pessimism of Kant, the cold practicality of Utilitarianism? Christian ethics. You may not accept the theological justification, but the whole point of these ethics is the respect of human dignity. Which is what everyone’s after, one way or another. Why else is there a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.S. Constitution, or even the very idea of a people legally sovereign over themselves, legitimizing a government whose only purpose is that peoples’ welfare? So you don’t want to believe in a God, but you want to live in a world where people are respected, where rights aren’t taken away because a new philosopher has the ear of the law, whispering sweet nothings about “practical” cheap solutions high in the only cost that matters: our humanity. Whether you can accept the idea of divine inspiration and endorsement for the worth and potentiality of human beings or not, the fact is Christianity is the last coherent system of thought and ethics that recognizes that inherent dignity and makes any provision for it at all. Are the plastic ethics of our secular prejudice so inviolable we are no longer capable of applying those beloved methods of reasonable thought to the problem at hand?

I mentioned at the start that we are a ‘post-everything’ society. What does that mean for where we hope to go? If there’s nothing we haven’t already been through, the future is a void. But there is another vision: the idea of our world brought together by a common notion of what it means to be just. This is an extremely relevant observation for anyone considering the real-life development of societal ethics. We’ve been through eras defined by technology, information, disaster, violence—as rising and falling civilizations sought to define the best way to exist, internally, and internationally. What haven’t we tried? The one thing we are not—the one thing we can never become if we value our survival—is a post-justice society.

It’s your world for the making. But to make it right, you must have all the facts. That’s why I challenge you to re-evaluate your blanket judgment that all of Christianity is worthless and out of touch; to re-examine your attitudes toward this last basis for ensuring human worth in society. The consequences for each of the ethical systems we have examined here today demand your verdict. Are you willing to settle for a government that derives its legitimacy from a people it brashly manipulates to its own will? Are you willing to settle for a philosophical system that justifies only its own existence? Are you willing to settle for a society that gives only lip service to human dignity?

Or do you, as a human being, require something… more?

When all is said and done; when we, our children, and our children’s children are living out the choices we are making here, today, I hope you will still be so confident you made the right one.