Crossroads -- Baptist with incense blesses abortion clinic?

This New York Times feature hints at some important (but unasked) faith questions

Yes, it’s unique to see “Baptist” and “incense” in the same sentence in a news story, unless we're talking about a Baptist being “incensed” about some kind of church conflict. That’s pretty common.

I know a thing or two about this topic. I grew up as a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid in Texas, a state where there may be more Baptists than there are people. As a young adult, I was ordained as a deacon in one of the “moderate” Baptist churches that included the occasional nod to liturgical traditions.

But incense?

Thus, the overture of a recent New York Times feature — “A Blessing for an Abortion Clinic” — caught my attention and became the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. This passage is long, but essential:

A Baptist minister, a Presbyterian pastor and a Jewish cantor held burning incense as they walked quietly through the empty, white-walled clinic. They blessed the exam tables and their stirrups, the boxes of disposable gowns and the cushioned chairs in the recovery room, where women are moved after their abortions.

Religious leaders have been loud presences at American abortion clinics for decades, most often showing up to protest. The ones gathered inside this abortion clinic in rural Western Maryland on a fall afternoon had a different purpose.

Through a ritual blessing of the year-old clinic, they wanted to show that religion could be a source of support for abortion rights.

“You all are blessings to those who come to you for care during some of their most vulnerable and sometimes painful moments,” the Rev. Katey Zeh, an ordained Baptist minister, said to the staff members gathered in the clinic’s colorful waiting room.

OK, I will ask: Did they bless the actual medical instruments used in abortions, or would that have been going too far?

The key to this Times photos-and-text feature was its emphasis on women feeling pain and sorrow. That’s a different tone than the proclamations of female empowerment and freedom that tend to dominate abortion-rights rallies and marches.

What brand of “Baptist” is Zeh? The Times didn’t ask that question. For me, the key — found in an online biography — is that she is the author of the book “A Complicated Choice: Making Space for Grief and Healing in the Pro-Choice Movement.” As the leader of the Religious Community for Reproductive Choice, Zeh’s work has been discussed in The Atlantic, CNN, The Nation, BBC, NBC News, The Christian Century, The Washington Post and, of course, the Times.

In other words, Pastor Zeh is a mainline Protestant star, the kind of progressive leader who practices a brand of faith that is welcomed in elite newsrooms.

Thus, this feature is the kind of coverage that undercuts conservative rhetoric that the Times is an essentially “secular” institution that is hostile to people of faith. Clearly, this rite to bless an abortion clinic was portrayed as a positive, even sacred, event. This was “good” religion.

Did this Times feature include any voices on the “other side” of this national-level debate? Yes, there were a few words from 65-year-old Karen Majors.

More than 30 years ago, she had an abortion. Shortly after, she became a born-again Christian. For years, she didn’t call herself “pro-life,” because she remembered the words from the protesters outside the clinic that had treated her.

Then, a few years ago, she saw a movie about a former abortion clinic director who became an anti-abortion activist after seeing what she believed was a fetus in pain. The movie, Ms. Majors said, changed her mind. She said she asked God to forgive her for “killing” her baby.

Ms. Majors sometimes stops by the Cumberland clinic to sit outside and pray that the patients will change their minds. God loves and forgives women who get abortions, Ms. Majors said, and she herself rejects the idea that abortion can be a blessing.

In other words, Majors is a kind woman whose mind was changed by an anti-abortion movie and, here is the key, she has “asked God to forgive her for ‘killing’ her baby.”

Once again, the common theme in the article is the reality of pain and suffering in the lives of women who choose abortion. And many may seek “forgiveness”?

That’s the Big Idea in this piece and, in the podcast, I argued that this is not an essentially “secular” point of view. For the Times, abortion is clearly a sad, maybe tragic, necessity.

This made me think about “The Gospel According to the New York Times," a book by journalist William Proctor — a Harvard Law School graduate who is the former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Here is a key passage from my 2001 column (“The Gray Lady's gospel crusade”) about that book (based on Proctor’s study of more than 6,000 Times articles over 25 years):

… Critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward "fundamentalists." Thus, when listing the "deadly sins" that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world's most influential newspaper condemns "the sin of religious certainty."

"Yet here's the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths," said Proctor. Its leaders are "absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right."

The issue looming over the Times’ abortion-clinic blessing feature is whether there is any transcendent, absolute, truth linked to the act of abortion.

This feature makes it clear that abortion is a painful, even tragic, reality in the lives of many women. Readers can see that in the personal experiences of the women quoted in the piece.

But is abortion a positive, even “blessed” act? Or is it possible that abortion is “wrong,” or even a “sin”?

Does the Gray Lady provide any hint at certainty on these questions? Here is how the story ends:

As the ceremony wrapped up inside the clinic, there were signs that patients there had been making their own appeals to God. On a table in the recovery room sat a notebook where patients could write messages to one another. They described hard choices and uncertainty about God’s plans for them.

One patient wrote: “God will forgive me for my decision.”

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