What Is The Deal With Christians And Choice?
By: Christyl Rivers
Tags: Spirituality, Nature, Believing, Science, Better Living

Do you have a choice?

Choice and the concept of having a choice, show up early in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible. It comes before the snake. It comes before the fall from grace. It comes before Adam and Eve have Cain and Abel. It comes, in fact, in Genesis two. That is, it follows quite quickly after “In the Beginning…”

Two trees and all choice

It comes in the form of two trees. One is the tree of life. The other is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The creator liked everything that He had made and declared it good. The waters, land, creatures, and gardens were good. The two trees were good. They are, after all, like all of Creation; “Made in our image.”

Choice, then, is of supreme importance. Free will matters. Choosing or rejecting rules is crucially central to all spirituality, if not every religion, everywhere.

But Christianity has a real problem with choice. They often want to save souls by denying choice. This is evident when adherents to any religion try to convert through brutality, inquisition, conquest, pillage, theft, rape and murder.

But it is also evident when a ‘Christian’ would deny full humanity through simple prejudice, discrimination, and disenfranchisement or when we deny another human being, equality. And, of course, not just humanity suffers, all of the Creation, the “Us” in “Let Us create man in Our own image” suffers when we choose extinction, deforestation, pollution and contamination.

How do we know the “Us” in “Let us create…” is the biosphere? It is because only God, not angels, or unseen ‘creators” is present in the origin story of Genesis.

Besides a heavenly creator, only the glorious and miraculous creation itself has the power to reproduce lifeforms, if Genesis is to be believed.

A New Covenant of choice

Then, there is the entire New Testament. The New Testament, according to Jesus Christ, was created to create a new covenant. This new covenant depended, as the old one did, upon choice.

Humanity fell short of God’s hopes and lost the promise of eternal life by making bad choices.

Everything about the Old Testament is re-invented in the New Testament except this issue of choice. Choice, the option to choose eternal life through salvation, is the central feature that God presents to all people on either side of the BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) timeline.

When I was a young Jesus Freak, I took the radical approach that Jesus had for loving and forgiving very seriously. It was evident that he was adamant about choice, and of course, about allowing men and women of every hue and gender, full equality.

Why, then, do some Christians, then seek to diminish this issue of choice? Obviously, the most common application is in denying women the right to choose whether or not they have enough babies. Or whether they should have the free choice to have no babies.

The thinking goes something like, the unborn baby does not have a choice, therefore the woman should have no choice, either.

This seems a very twisted, and un-Christian way to look at choice. It is judgmental. It is restrictive based on female body mechanics. It is punishing to the woman, but not so much the man. It is the basis for divided love among families, political parties, and even entire nations.

It is also easily manipulated to attain power and persuasion. Most people support a woman’s right to choose just as much as they would support a man’s right to his bodily autonomy.

But many people are against choice and free will think that access to birth control somehow supports the frequency of abortion. In fact, access to women’s health and reproductive care prevents a great number of abortions performed.

But what about the sanctity of life?

More than half of all women seeking such a choice already have children.

Given a choice, many of these mothers would opt to provide their present children with all the best resources, time and attention that all children deserve. Who is to choose whether a family is too poor, or too busy, to have more kids? It is those most affected who should choose.

When a mother has enough kids, those children, all children, deserve to live in a clean, green, lovely world. We have to love one another and choose life — biology — if we are to honor a creator at all.

Human life cannot come first, because there is no first.

There is connection, shared DNA, and a web of life. There is no strand apart from the continuation of the biosphere. If you cannot feel the breath of God upon the wind, you may well have lost the true sense of choosing life that the creation offers.

We are not a species apart. Even if this were not obvious with science, it is obvious in every lesson of humility. Humility is a lesson we are meant to learn from humble stables, a King without a gold crown, and a reward that only comes from a willingness to kneel before something greater than yourself.

Choosing and honoring God and Life

The creation is in trouble here in the Sixth Extinction. Life, like it was in the original garden is an important connection to God. A cathedral may be splendid, but compared to the beauty of the natural world and our connections to stars, flowers, and all the beasts with which we share our domain, (and are requested to protect and defend), a church is just a pile of dead forest and dug up rocks and clay.

More than that, of course, the Kingdom of God is not a place, but a free choice within us. It is the beating heart of all beauty, righteousness, and glory.