Dobbs and Democracy and God
Instinctively to many Americans on both sides of the abortion debate the issue seems somehow too important to be decided in state legislatures and other democratic arenas. With the Supreme Court having declared the question of abortion "returned to the people and their elected representatives," there's a sense of bracing ourselves for the all-out political brawl to come, state by state, election by election, voter by voter. Is this really the way important moral issues should be dealt with? Shouldn't there be an authority somewhere who can take the pre-born child's basic right to life (for some of us) or a woman's basic right to control of her body (for others), and enshrine that right somewhere out of reach of debates and tv ads and ordinary voters? Of course this is exactly what the dissenting justices bemoaned about the Court's decision to overturn Roe and Casey.
The instinct that the ordinary process of lawmaking, which might otherwise be fine for tax codes and speed limits, is inappropriate for a question of such moral magnitude, points us to the reality of our deep convictions about absolute morality, and in fact our unshakeable awareness of God.
Of course the question is inappropriate for legislatures and referendums! (It's also beyond supreme courts). No body of legislators, or any group of people anywhere, actually gets to decide if the inhabitant of the womb is a person or not. Personhood is an objective moral fact to be acknowledged by laws, not decided by them. Or, for those with the opposite perspective, if it is wrong for a woman to be obligated to carry a baby to term, then it is wrong no matter what politicians in Texas or Mississippi have to say about it. One side or the other is right about abortion, and the other side is objectively wrong, and the whole fight is to make sure that the side which is already right is also the one that comes out on top in law and policy. A few minutes of honesty with ourselves reveals that we all believe, with the core of our being, that there are such things as objective moral facts whose truth does not depend on any man's opinion or all men put together.
These objective moral facts that we all believe exist (even if we differ over what some of them are), are incompatible with an atheistic universe. Morality has to do with persons (there are no immoral rocks), and if moral facts are part of the fabric of reality, then reality itself is dependent on a moral Person. Objective facts need a reference point - a standard to measure our opinions by to see if they correspond to reality. The physical world provides our reference for physical facts. Moral facts demand a moral reference point to provide this objective standard. In short just as our senses of sight or hearing allow us to perceive reality on a physical level, so also our conscience allows us to perceive reality on a moral level and thus leads us to reality's God.
Not only is our instinctive aversion to democratizing moral questions a pointer to absolute morality, it also expresses our deep desire for God himself to judge the earth. We long for an authority to step in who can decide all these questions correctly once and for all, without the fear that the next election cycle will undo all our progress. Nobody actually likes democracy - the idiotic, unending back and forth argument with no fallacies barred, the machine of fundraising, personalities and hypocrisy, and as often as not the wrong answer at the end. Wouldn't it be great if God, just like good king Richard, could just come back and put everything to rights? Deep down we feel it must be true, that somehow the just will be vindicated and the wicked judged. Deep down we know that God is coming, and whether we ever realized it or not, we want him to.
Let the rivers clap their hands;
let the hills sing for joy together
before the Lord, for he comes
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.Psalm 98:8-9
Header Photo by Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16959908