Rev. James Lawson: Pro-life movement is attempt to dismantle equality
The Rev. James Lawson compares today’s Christians who argue to end abortion rights to the ones who supported Jim Crow laws 50 years ago. He also compares them to people who used the Bible as justification for the slaughter of Native Americans, the Salem witch trials and slavery.
“That may seem hard,” he told me last week. “But, I have a hard thesis that, if the Bible is not explicit about a certain issue, we should be very cautious about moving forward, because then we are moving forward through deduction.”
He is one of the nation’s most respected religious figures and has been for decades. Martin Luther King Jr., Lawson’s friend, called him “the leading nonviolence theorist in the world.” Lawson trained legions of young African-Americans, starting with those in Nashville, how to desegregate the civil-war era South through nonviolence.
At age 87, long retired from his job as pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, he’s nowhere close to retirement on fighting battles over inequality. Instead of seeing a conflict between Christian faith and supporting a woman’s right to an abortion, he considers those values complementary.
He briefly mentioned his stance when I interviewed him at Holman in 2013 for a series of Tennessean profiles on Nashville’s iconic civil-rights leaders. He discussed it again at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day lecture at Vanderbilt University this year: “We have a movement that says it’s pro-life but nevertheless is an anti-woman display of despising, wanting women to be under our male management rather than free agents of creation.” The capacity crowd nearly drowned him out with applause.
Lawson’s stance becomes even more relevant considering presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio’s vows to defund Planned Parenthood and recent arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court over extremely restrictive Texas abortion laws.
Last month, Southern Baptist Convention President Ronnie Floyd wrote a list of five issues Christians should consider this political season. At No. 1: “The sanctity and dignity of human life from the womb to the tomb.” That denomination’s policy wing launched an Evangelicals for Life conference this year in conjunction with the Catholic-dominated March for Life.
Pro-life organizations frequently claim that abortion clinics target black communities and operate at odds with the Black Lives Matter movement’s values. That’s nonsense, Lawson said, and he should know. He served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles for 10 years.
In our recent interview, he reiterated that the anti-abortion movement was simply a back-door attempt to dismantle women’s equality, allowing men to stay in charge of how many children women will have and when. That’s not reflective of Jesus’ own feelings toward women, Lawson said. Many scholars now believe Mary of Magdala possibly was Jesus’ closest friend — and we know she’s listed in all four gospels as being present at both his death and resurrection.
Decisions on abortion, Lawson said, should be left to the woman and made in conjunction with her pastor, her family and her doctor, “not with Greg Abbott of Texas or Rick Scott of Florida or Rick Snyder of Michigan.”
On the other hand, the Bible is explicit about some other concepts, Lawson said: grace and love of neighbor.
Heidi Hall is the Tennessean’s former religion editor. Contact her on Twitter @HeidiHallTN.