Pharisaism and the New Pro-Lifers

It’s become quite common over the past year or two to see articles, social media posts and comments, and other forms of expression declaring that “You can’t be pro-life and…” Exclusions include everything from “pro-death penalty,” “pro-torture,” “anti-immigration,” or “anti-welfare” to “pro-gun,” “pro-war,” and “alt-right.” When it’s not phrased according to the “you can’t be…” formula, the sentiment comes as an admonition or call out of those who claim to be pro-life but scandalously advocate some farther right view of one of these issues. There’s no question that opposing torture, taking care of the poor, etc. are important to the support of life, especially for someone coming from a Christian background.

It’s also common see the terms “pharisee” or “pharisaism” come up in commentary or discussions of this topic. Make no mistake: this is always a serious charge to throw around. After all, the Pharisees were on the receiving end of Jesus’ strongest criticism and serve as some of the chief antagonists of Christ in the Gospels. Their crime? “Hypocrites!” Jesus declared, for the Pharisees did not always practice what they preached. They were also known for getting into people’s business, harshly demanding the strictest adherence to the rules and to the law. “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger” (Mat. 23:4). The Pharisees’ merciless approach was particularly hard on the poor, who often lacked the resources to fulfill the last letter of the law, the vulnerable, and those whose past mistakes had put them in difficult positions.

It makes perfect sense, then, to see accusations of pharisaism in this debate. So many of the items at hand here involve the same kinds of people that the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Torture and the death penalty have as their focus the vulnerable (and indeed, law enforcement and peace keeping too often perpetrate injustices against vulnerable populations). Immigration and welfare policies impact the poor and the vulnerable. Those who rightly stand up for the lives of the unborn, one vulnerable group, but callously discount concern for the lives of other vulnerable groups are certainly being inconsistent. These new pro-lifers, as we might call them, have a point in admonishing and calling out inconsistencies and hypocrisy on these points.  

But there’s something important that these new pro-lifers (and many others) miss about the Pharisees. Most people know that the Pharisees were merciless taskmasters who enforced a very strict adherence to the rules and the law, but far fewer know why they did this. The Pharisees emerged in a time when Judea was only a tiny province within the Roman Empire, making both imperial law and pagan culture obstacles to the practice of the Jewish faith. Their raison d'être was to find a way for the Jews to remain faithful to God under these living conditions and ultimately to be free of the Romans and have their independence once again. Unlike the Sadducees, who favored compromise with the Romans, the Essenes, who practiced total withdrawal from worldly affairs, and the zealots, who saw violent rebellion as the only answer, the Pharisees believed that God Himself would deliver them to freedom once more as He had done in the past – but with one critical caveat: the Jewish people needed to be pure – all of them (or at least almost all).

This belief is the reason that the Pharisees were so strict and so unwilling to show mercy or compassion. In their understanding, the Jewish people were suffering under the Romans as a punishment for their unfaithfulness and only when they had returned to faithfulness would God relent. This did make sense, after all: it was a pattern and theme which repeated over and over throughout the entire history of the Hebrew people, notably in the books of Judges, Samuel, Chronicles, and Kings. The Pharisees were so demanding and unyielding not because they were just callous or for whatever reason instinctively authoritarian, but because they saw every failure to keep even the smallest point of the Mosaic law as one more weight on the scale of judgment angering God and keeping him from freeing them of oppression. They insisted on separating themselves from the rest of the culture (indeed, this is precisely where we get the word “Pharisee” from) and rejected any imperfection or compromise not just as a personal sin, but as something which would be imputed to their entire people. This isn’t to attempt to rehabilitate the Pharisees or to defend their failure to grasp the spirit of the law, something for which Jesus strongly rebuked them. The point is that the Pharisees were severe in demanding total purity of their fellow Jews because they viewed anything less as contributing to keeping the intolerable status quo in place – which brings us back to the new pro-lifers.

While any pro-lifer is to be lauded for standing up for the rights of the poor or the displaced or for rejecting torture, it is a trend of late to see the new pro-lifers go further than this. To many, not only are those who have imperfect views on the broader spectrum of issues to be corrected, but they are to be denied the pro-life name, to be excluded, and to have even their positive contributions be disavowed. Like the Pharisees, the new pro-lifers demand purity from anyone who would bear the name with any shortcomings viewed as mortally harmful to the movement. Those who oppose abortion and may even hold consistent views on most other issues are often demonized as the reason that the pro-life movement has not been more successful. Lest we dismiss the comparison to the Pharisees is too tenuous, bear in mind that it is common to hear or to read these new pro-lifers warn that God will not grant success to the movement so long as such persons are welcome in their ranks.

One need look no further for an example of this than Donald Trump and his supporters. While Trump is far from the perfect example of a consistent pro-life ethic, he nevertheless received strong support from large percentages of the pro-life electorate for whatever he would be able to offer. He may not have been perfect, but to many he was better than the alternative. To some pro-lifers, this was viewed as very questionable. It was unclear just how trustworthy he’d be, for one thing, and even if he followed through his inconsistencies may harm the public image of the pro-life movement. These were reasonable concerns.  Far less reasonable and more in line with the thinking of the Pharisees were those new pro-lifers who went further, condemning any who would vote for Trump as “not pro-life,” as putting party over principle, and as drawing the ire of the Almighty onto the country by electing such a man. 

Trump is one example, but the stakes need not be so grand: this kind of truly pharisaical thinking has become common to see in all sorts of contexts. Worst of all is when this kind of exclusion and condemnation concerns not black and white matters of objective morality but prudential judgments about methods. A person might believe in the need to provide for the poor but reject a particular legislative proposal as a good or effective way to do it. Like the Pharisees who were so focused on the letter of the law that they could not see the spirit, too many new pro-lifers cannot see the good faith of such a person or try to understand their view, but see them only through the jots and tittles of the policy that they have questioned.

In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI made clear that Catholics should work together with people of other faiths where improving the temporal world is concerned. A Catholic and a Protestant can work together to feed the hungry, while a Jewish person is a good an ally in fighting a worldly injustice despite theological differences. That doesn’t mean these differences don’t matter or even that they may not in some ways impact mutual work in the temporal sphere. Such differences need to be acknowledged and taken into consideration, but the ultimate goal is still to be pursued. In a similar way, pro-lifers who recognize weaknesses and imperfections in the views of others should acknowledge them and try to address them, but they must also recognize these persons as the allies that they can be in the ways that they can be.

Too many Christian pro-lifers today have come to regard imperfect allies as bitter enemies. Like the Pharisees, they view them as traitors, as repellants to Divine aid, and even as greater obstacles than the worldly powers which have us under their power. This is a tragic trend which must stop.