Last week, two Baptist colleges in Texas jumped into the debate over women’s health. Baptist News Global reported that East Texas Baptist University and Houston Baptist University objected to “providing — directly or indirectly — emergency contraceptive drugs they believe cause abortions.” A federal court said that the mandate did not violate their religious freedom because it concerned the actions of third party health providers, not the institutions themselves. However, the colleges’ issue, representatives assert, is that “fulfilling the contraceptive mandate via this regulatory option facilitates the provision of contraceptives and abortifacients and makes them complicit in actions that violate their religious beliefs” (emphasis added).
We could talk about a number of debatable facets of this statement. However, the glaring insufficiency in the argument these fellow Baptists have made is the theological one at the end. They claim that what’s at stake here is their complicity in what they believe to be sin.
Such a statement has the foul smell of hypocrisy all over it. Houston Baptist University and East Texas Baptist University are complicit in a number of sins. Yet, they see none of these other sins as affronts to their religious freedom or even worthy of addressing at an institutional level.
Where are these institutions in the fight against forces of racism that are an affront to the message of the gospel? Where is their outrage over housing discrimination, racialized poverty and the innumerable manifestations of racism in the United States? Like the rest of us (particularly white folks), these Baptists are complicit in the evils and sins of racism.
Where are these institutions in the struggle for justice in global economic systems? Do all their branded clothing and apparel come from factories with just working conditions? Do they only buy products from proven ethical suppliers of manufactured goods? Like the rest of us, these Baptists are probably complicit in all sorts of violence against humanity in the global market.
Where are these institutions in efforts to reform our food systems? Does all the food they serve in their cafeterias come from ethical sources? Was the labor that brought it to their table paid a just wage and treated rightly in the fields and in the kitchens? Like the rest of us, these Baptists are complicit in the suffering that takes place to get food to our tables.
I could go on with a litany of sins of complicity that we all engage in every single day, but I think that those few should suffice to make my point. Unless those institutions have taken dramatic steps to divest themselves from, stop doing business with, and are active agents in opposition to these forces of evil in the world, they have little ground to stand on by simply appealing to complicity.
The others sins in which they are complicit does not invalidate their point about complicity in sin, but they do serve to illustrate that complicity cannot be the driving force behind their decisions about contraceptives. Rather, they must have some other objection.
This debate is not about religious freedom and the complicit nature of sin. No, this is a debate about who gets to make decisions for women: their employers or the women themselves. These institutions of higher education, and “faith-based businesses” like Hobby Lobby, want to make the health decisions of their female employees for them.
Rather than rely on the strength of their religious teaching to persuade women to believe as they do about contraception, these (usually male-led) institutions want to make the decision for them. Women cannot have agency of their own when it comes to their reproductive health and neither can they even have the ability to make what others believe is a bad decision. They don’t know well enough to make moral judgments for themselves or women will inevitably make poor moral judgments — those are the implicit assumptions behind these arguments against contraceptive mandates.
Institutions in opposition to contraceptive mandates should be honest about their opposition. It is not about religious freedom. It is not a Baptist argument. It is defense of a patriarchy that desires to make women’s decisions for them. That’s the key complicit sin here, and it’s the argument we should be having.