It's In the Code Ep. 94: How Christian Focus on Death Affects Reproductive Rights
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In this episode, Dan continues talking with Beatrice Marovich, author of Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying. In this episode, she talks with us about the concrete social and political effects of a Christian and cultural fixation on death, particularly as it relates to reproductive rights. She also talks with us about ways of thinking beyond death that move away from the traditional Christian notion of an “afterlife.”
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Welcome to It's in the Code, a series in the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, and I have low blood sugar and can't string together a sentence today.
But I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, your host.
I am joined again today by Professor Beatrice Marovitch.
She is Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Hanover College.
I had a first interview with her in the last episode—invite people to check that out if you hadn't had a chance.
We're going to be discussing, again, her ideas that she has developed on life and death and the relation to It's a popular religious thought, but also, you know, really diving into some of the social issues we talk about a lot in this series.
Before we dive into that, as always, I want to thank everybody for listening.
I'll say at the outset, I love the insights.
Keep the ideas coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com is how you can reach me.
You can find us lots of places.
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We couldn't do it without you.
Appreciate you in so many ways.
Want to begin, Beatrice, by welcoming you back to the show.
Thanks.
Last episode, you talked a lot about this idea of life and death being entangled and needing to move past seeing them simply in opposition, not to a point of seeing them as like happy friends that move together, but right, this kind of tensive relationship and kind of entanglement between them.
You can't have the one without the other for good or bad, right?
That's just how it is.
And talking about this is something that a lot of secular culture misses, but also a lot of sort of popular Christianity.
And you've also written some things like in Religion Dispatches.
Invite people to go take a look at that.
Great stuff.
Online publication, if you're not aware of it.
I publish there sometimes.
Brad Beatrice had some work there recently.
But one of the things we talk about a lot on straight white American Jesus is the rhetoric of being quote-unquote pro-life or having a culture of life, the rhetoric that comes out of the sort of political and religious right and what that means.
And you and I have talked about this some, you've written about this some, but you suggest that in many ways that's a death-dealing rhetoric or discourse or way of thinking about life and death.
And I just invite you to take us into that.
What do you mean by that?
And I think in that we're going to see how does all this stuff about life and death start impacting the way that we see the real debates and culture war issues that are going on around us.
Yeah, so I think what I really object to in the Christian views on death that we're talking about is, like, the arrogance of the belief that anyone can be pro-life in a pure and exhaustive way.
And I actually think that, like, the maintenance of that kind of a pro-life posture that so many Christians try to uphold, when you look closely at it and peel back the layers in the end, it actually looks death-dealing.
So I think one of the most obvious sort of political consequences of the Christian attempt to enforce and maintain this pro-life politics is what we've been watching happen with reproductive politics in America.
So I think, you know, that the pro-life ideology has hidden from Christians the fact that, like, birth is a phenomenon of what, you know, Jack Derrida called life-death, and I use that term in my book, right?
It's not just a phenomenon of birth, of life.
So I think birth is often treated by Christians as if it's just a program for making more life, right?
But that's just never what birth has been.
I mean, birth has always, always been a process that sometimes results in life and sometimes results in death.
It's just what it is.
So it's not always and simply a life-giving phenomenon.
It can also be death-dealing, right?
Many babies have died in the birthing process and many women have died giving birth, right?
This is just a fact of life.
But I think pro-life Christians want to pretend like this isn't the case.
And I think abortion is a form of technology that can often mitigate the damage that a birth might do.
Not always the case that a bird causes death, but it can.
And so when we see this happen, or when we see the possibility of this, then I think, you know, abortion can be a kind of harm reduction technique because it can help to support life and living.
I think one of the things that's really profound to me in that is, excuse me, that this technology that can be seen as death dealing in a certain way, terminating a pregnancy, can also be life-giving, right?
And life-sustaining in that.
I think it's a really strong illustration of what you're talking about, right?
That entanglement between the two, that it is never as simple as Just a straightforward either or, and this is a thing we've talked about a lot in the series and on the podcast for years, right?
Just the sort of simplicity of that.
But another thing that we talk about a lot in the podcast is that simplicity is attractive, right?
There is something, the fantasy that life is black and white and it's good versus evil and it's life versus death, right?
All of these oppositions.
That's a draw.
People are drawn to that.
Can you say more about that, that draw, and how it is that we need to rethink that or imagine that differently, how that relates to, I think, both the work that you're talking about, but also in those concrete terms, how that might affect how we think about these sort of cultural politics issues?
It offers like a very clear sort of organizing structure.
So, you know, viewing death as the greatest enemy of God allows Christians to define their enemies as friends and enemies of God.
Throughout Christian history, there have been people who, because they're enemies of Christians, essentially are considered more killable.
Yeah.
So the enemies of God are destined for death, and so they can be killed with impunity, right?
They're not destined for any form of eternal life outside of this life, a superlative life.
These people might just be the non-believers, but, you know, they've often been Jews, other Christians, they've been people who've been considered racially other to the Euro-American lineage of Christianity that's so championed this politics of life and death.
And I think in this contemporary American context, these friends of death include those people who've performed, or even just support abortion, right?
So I think that there are many Christians who believe that these people actually deserve to die, right?
Their people have been murdered.
For performing abortions.
And there's been legislation under discussion in the U.S.
that would impose the death penalty on people who aid in abortions.
So I don't think you can really find a better illustration of the total lie of pro-life politics than that one, quite honestly.
So I think we're all suffering right now from some of the political consequences of these Christian views on life and death.
Yeah, I think another thing that comes up that I have stumbled into in your work, right?
I've seen it.
I've seen it in others.
I think I've tried to grasp toward it myself, but not all that coherently, is one of the ways that this constant focus on death.
So, for example, thinking of abortion only in terms of death, right?
Not in terms of the life of the mother or the The flourishing of a family, or all the directions we could go with that, right?
The social realities that underlie all of this, all of which I think are implicated with life and death and so forth.
But the way that there's this vision of overcoming death in a kind of popular Christianity, but this sort of constant demonizing of death, right?
Literally, it's demonic, it's satanic, it's the enemy of God, what have you.
That it makes it almost powerless to overcome it, right?
It undermines its own promise in some ways.
Does that make sense?
Is that a line of thought that makes sense?
Is that something that you see in your work?
And can you tell us more about that?
I mean, I think it's important for all of us to point out the hypocrisies of this pro-life.
I think that it's a position that affects our politics in the United States right now.
And I think that, I think especially the hypocrisies of this pro-life position are so violent that there's a real urgent political need to confront this and to critique this.
And I think that all of us, as a broader culture, have a lot of work to do to help One another break out of this sort of life's death opposition that I think has been handed down even into secular cultures as part of this cultural heritage.
And I think it's just not the case that that's just not how life works.
You know, this idea that life and death are in some kind of permanent opposition isn't how nature works.
And, you know, we can talk about protecting one another from death.
We can talk about saving one another's lives.
We can talk about survival and staying alive.
But I think we can do that in ways Don't presume that life and death are involved in a great battle against one another where, you know, the final outcome is going to be a victory for one and defeat for the other.
I think of a lot of thought about these themes of life and death and entanglement and not just, you know, human relations or kind of human, but like a sort of the way that these have a planetary right dimension to them.
And it feels to me like what you're saying is relevant, not just for things that are really important, like Abortion or we could talk about gun debates or as we record this, you know, things going on in Israel and Gaza, just any number of things that are relevant to this.
But also the fact that this life death thing, we're sitting, you know, mass extinction events and like exhausting a planet and making it unlivable for ourselves.
I feel like there's a I don't know, it feels like as a human, right, maybe the biggest level of concern about needing to understand the implications of these things.
And I know that you've given some thought to that without driving us in like a whole nother book, right?
Because obviously that would be a fantastic follow-up to this.
How does it relate to some of those bigger issues?
Really, for lack of a better term, and like literally existential issues for humans and the planet that birthed us, if we're talking about life and death.
They're absolutely existential issues.
And I think, you know, one of the biggest things that we have to confront right now is our collective mortality, right?
As Earthlings, we wake up every day and we're dealing with the fact of climate change and the fact of, you know, the active destruction and erosion of our home environment.
Economic and political forces that always seem far outside of our control, right, even in so-called democratic cultures.
And maybe this is why so many people think to be just giving up and going for fascism.
I don't know.
We're surrounded by constant predictions about the coming end of the world, right, in both Religious and secular and fictional and non-fictional context.
So I think there's just a general and broad awareness of the fact that things are bad and that many people feel like things are just ending.
But I also think that when it comes to the end, like our culture tends to either claim that it's about to happen or deny that it's here.
And we're not always as good at talking about ourselves as like an aging mortal species that Might be past its prime, but can still do a lot of things to adjust to the new conditions we face, you know, as both an aging species and an aging planet.
We're not always good at thinking about ourselves as a species that's living out a lifespan that knows it's not going to be here forever.
That knows that the planet itself and even just like the sun that the planet depends on, none of these things are going to be here forever, right?
You know, we can try to figure out how to adjust to life in a changing body and how to help adjust to our environment so that we can make them livable for as long as they can realistically be that way.
And I think, you know, so many people either want to imagine that we're going to be here forever and live forever.
Or they want to take the easy way out and maybe they think that it's just game over.
But I don't think as many people want to do the harder thing, which is to figure out how to, like, proceed as living, dying beings who might have a long time to be here, but not forever.
It's interesting as a middle-aged guy having to come to terms with all those things.
I remember a couple years ago, I hadn't been to the doctor in forever.
I didn't have a physician.
I wake up one day and I'm like, oh, I'm middle-aged now.
I'm supposed to get screenings and things and everything on me aches.
I say all that sort of tongue-in-cheek, but it's real.
We have to come to terms with our own development, our own aging, and that can be really positive in ways.
It can be really complex in ways.
A profound and really big idea to think of that in terms of a planetary scale or a species kind of scale.
It's something I don't think until you're looking over your work and listening to you now, I don't think I ever thought of it as like what is it like to be, I don't know, a middle-aged species, right?
But it's a really interesting idea and it's a really big shift and I think it ties into so many things like The technologies we depend on that are life-giving and death-dealing and, you know, just all kinds of other things like that.
I think it's a really profound line of thought that if the aim, an aim I take from you and I think is really positive is this breaking out of this either-or, right, of finding new ways to think about it.
I find it really profound for that, really a sort of profound line of thinking.
It's hard to think about a lot of this stuff differently because I think we, you know, end up falling back into really familiar existential scripts because existential questions are big and scary.
And I think science has done a lot to change how we think about the Earth.
And it's really incredible.
And we've learned so much about, you know, who human beings are in relationship to the earth and just how we've evolved and how we've evolved in relationship to other species and plants.
And, you know, I think it's really tragic that so much of religion has just set itself up in total opposition to people.
And I think it really just keeps people fixated on this story of this very old story about a certain type of specialness that we have as a species.
But I think that there are lots of other amazing and beautiful stories we can tell about our specialness.
And I think even in, you know, secular cultural contexts, the stories don't always get as complicated as they could be.
In Christianity, there's this figure of the divine human, the man-god, the god-become-man, right?
This fully human guy who could also be fully divine, right?
And this really had a powerful impact on the humanist tradition that thought humanity as maybe if not quite so god-like, then almost.
Almost.
And there's been a lot of critiques of, you know, this way of thinking about humans from both ecological and post-human perspectives.
And they critique the way that this has created some, you know, massive cultural delusions that are both falling apart and causing emotional and psychological damage as our planet is rapidly changing.
But I think now is a time when it's really, really important to be able to think in very different ways about what humans are.
And I think that that includes our collective mortality.
I think one of the things that, excuse me, that I talk about with clients that I coach or that, you know, mental health people will talk about is I think sometimes the reason, because you mentioned fascism, right, or neo-fascism as this response.
And one of the things, a question I'll get from you is like, why are they so angry?
Like all the time, so angry.
It's always, and I think that anger is often a defensive response because it is much easier, or I think we often feel like we have more agency if we're raging about something than having to sit back and acknowledge that we are scared, or that we are mortal, or that there is an end, or that there are things that are beyond our control.
And I think, I don't know, I feel real power to what you're talking about of coming to terms with that, accepting that.
Changing the frame, seeing ourselves as part of a constantly renewing process that involves both life and death.
I think it's a really powerful image.
I wonder though, as you talk about this, this will bring us to the end, Are you the death person?
Are you the person now who walks in the room and like, you know, you go to some academic conference somewhere or like, I don't know, they have like the publisher table and you go over to like the publisher table and they're like, Oh, you're the death person.
Are you, have you become like the new Morbid Nietzsche?
Like, do you have to deal with that of like, in trying to talk about this, rethink this Do you find that people are like, oh, you're you're just the morbid death person.
That's that's who you are now.
Like for Halloween, you have to be like the Grim Reaper or something like that.
I can hear that part of something like that sounds all really interesting.
But yeah, it's the morbid death person.
Of course, that's what that's what she's going to say.
Yeah.
How is it more than that?
And is that something that you get right?
We all get typecast into these things.
Yeah, no, I do have a little bit of anxiety about becoming the Death person.
I certainly like things to say about it, but I don't necessarily want to only talk about death.
And yeah, I think one thing that I that I didn't write about a lot in my book, in part because I felt like it was maybe another book.
Right.
We also get editors who are like, stop writing, like, you know, because left to our own devices, all our books will be like 600 pages long.
But yeah.
Never ending like a ream of papers.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, but yeah, I'm actually interested in talking about life after death and the afterlife.
It's something that I've always been interested in, not in spite of, but in part because I'm interested in talking about death.
Christianity has often been critiqued for its view on the afterlife because the idea of heaven is so divorced from the earth.
Right, as if there's this place where we can go to escape this horrible world.
You know, and even the idea of resurrection seems to promise that God will potentially, like, hit the reset button and maybe make Earth great again.
And I'm not really interested in either of these views, personally.
All right, I've just got to jump to make Earth great.
It's like the MIGA movements instead of the MAGA.
Make Earth great again through resurrection, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I think that there are so many other ways of thinking about the enduring bond between the living and the dead.
I think like reincarnation, for instance, offered like a really different view about the ongoing relationships between the living and the dead.
And there are many other ways to think about life after death, you know, that don't necessarily promise us like The infinite survival of our own personal consciousness or our embodied experience.
I think some people would argue, well, then that's not life after death.
But I would disagree, right?
I happen to think that like having conversations about this stuff, creating visions about all of the many ways in which the bonds between the living and the dead endure and like both practical and also just totally fantastic ways can actually be like a really important part of also processing our collective mortality because
Part of being mortal is understanding that we die, of course, but another big part of being mortal is, you know, feeling connected to, you know, powers or forces or movements or passages or temporalities that are bigger than you.
So I don't think that that's something that we have to surrender or give up if we're going to take death seriously.
I think we can still talk about this stuff.
Yeah.
One of the things that occurs to me is that instead of the term afterlife, it's almost like the afterlife with the space or a hyphen, the what comes later than life or what follows upon it.
And I think that that's really powerful.
I want to thank you for joining us again.
I look forward, I think that does sound like a great second book.
Maybe you've already got like half of it written because of all the stuff the editor made you take out, or maybe there's more work to do there, but I think it would be great.
I look forward to reading whatever the next book is.
Again, I've been joined today by Professor Beatrice.
Her book, Sister Death, just a lot of great reflections.
She's also done some things with like religion dispatches and some Things aimed at a more general audience, if you want to take a lighter dip into the pool to start.
But Beatrice, thank you so much for joining us for some really interesting reflections and some things that certainly have me thinking a lot about that language of overcoming death, about, I don't know, being a middle-aged species, which as a middle-aged man is now feeling pretty comfortable to me.
Thank you for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me.
Yeah.
Again, thank you to everybody who listens, everybody who supports us, whether you're a patron, whether, as I always say, you just suffer through the ads.
We can't do it without you, so thank you.
Would love to hear your thoughts, other ideas, topics, points of disagreement, and I do get them, especially grad students.
That's you that I'm talking to, all the grad students who send me the five-page emails.
Keep those coming.
DanielMillerSwag at gmail.com is where you can reach me.
As always, be well until we have a chance to come together again.
