I was happy Obama won. I know a lot of people who were not. Of those people, there was one issue that came up again and again: abortion. I share the pro-life position, but I voted for Obama partly in the belief that the president does not have as much influence over abortion as campaign rhetoric suggests.

Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1916, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection, Vienna.

For the last eight years we have had a strongly pro-life president, yet when anti-abortion measures came to a vote this year—even in Red State South Dakota—they were defeated.

Yet many of these anti-Obamites tell me (if we’re still talking at this point) that the defeat of these particular initiatives was a failure of politics, not a lack of support.¹  Their real concern now is that Obama is going to undo the progress already made and that he will encourage a shift away from anti-abortion positions because he promotes a “culture of death.” The country requires a leader who will help create a “culture of life,” they say.

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether Obama does promote a culture of death, this raises an interesting question: what is a culture of life?

The idea of “a culture of this or that” is used a fair bit in our society. My own college recently pushed to improve assessment at various levels. The administrators promoted the idea that we needed to create “a culture of assessment.” I could only imagine the rituals or ceremonial life that would accompany it. When I asked people to define a “culture of assessment,” it often came down to this: in a culture of assessment, people would automatically (unconsciously?) feel compelled to assess. They would never forget to assess their work in the classroom or project or major. It would be reflexive—unthinking, even—that members of the college would assess everything they did.

Perhaps there is something of this in the idea of a culture of life as it appears in current political language. To call something “a culture” is meant to go beyond majority opinion, ideology, or common practice. The culture concept is always more encompassing than that.

In the past, anthropologists considered cultures to be fairly discrete, stable things. The earliest anthropologists produced many studies of people on islands. The culture of those people included all the beliefs, behaviors, and institutions encompassing their lives.

Yet even in those early studies the appearance of boundedness and homogeneity was a fiction. In the decades since Branislaw Malinowski wrote his magnum opus describing “the culture” of the Trobriand Islanders, anthropologists have come to see that culture has always been a far more amorphous and dynamic thing, though no less encompassing or pervasive. In addition to the artifacts, beliefs or world views particular to a given group, culture refers to a process, the work that human beings do as they interact with each other and the world.

It is not only the unconsciously held beliefs that mark people as different. It is also those things they debate, contest and adopt. For many anthropologists today, to study culture is not to study the rituals, traditions, and kinship systems of some remote people. It is to study the struggles through which they define these practices, observing who wins out, which arguments carry the day and how these choices get lived out.

For this reason, anthropologists today are less likely to speak of “the culture” of the so-and-so or “a culture” as a singular object, and more likely to refer to “cultural behaviors” and “cultural processes.” Culture here is used adjectivally, rather than as a noun. To speak of “a” or “the” culture of life strikes me as overly determined, if not overly optimistic.

This phrase is perhaps most famously used in the 1995 Papal Encyclical Evangelium vitae.²  It is a beautiful and complex document that even a guy raised United Methodist can appreciate. I would not be so presumptuous, nor would I want, to attempt a full-on critique here. But drawing only on my modest standing as an anthropologist, it does strike me that, at points, the Encyclical takes the idea of culture and works it into something that may overreach.

The document argues powerfully how the practice of abortion, as well as the oppression of the poor, economic and social inequality, racism, the degradation of women, and exploitation of the earth, is rooted in an unchristian social ethic rooted in individual satisfaction, the will to power, and nihilism. The document offers a wealth of theological depth for any Christian. As it returns to the notion of a “culture of life,” however, I feel it goes too far. Surely the roots of this distorted freedom, which ends up becoming “the freedom of ‘the strong’ against the weak who have no choice but to submit,” is human sin, rather than a cultural or social flaw.³

Let me be clear: sin has cultural consequences. The church and her members are called to work against these consequences in personal ethics and public policy. In some instances, legislation (e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1964) has served as a crucial step in cultural change. I am not suggesting that Christians should abandon legal and political efforts against abortion. However, it is far from given that illegalizing abortion alone will necessarily bring us closer to a culture of life.

I recall that in the late 1980s, during my days at über-liberal Wesleyan University, there was not much debate about abortion on campus. Abortion was morally neutral at best, and for some, a social good. Women choosing to have abortions were resisting patriarchy, refusing the myth of feminine subordination and rejecting a cult of motherhood. In the public discourse, having an abortion was no more morally problematic than having a tonsillectomy, but with greater political importance.

Today such views are considered too extreme to gain much of a hearing in the public sphere. That’s not to say they are entirely gone. The Democratic Party platform committee decided to leave out language advocating the reduction of abortion, reportedly out of a fear that it would cast a moral stigma on the practice.⁴ Democratic presidential candidates, including Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, had no such qualms. All of them have spoken of the need to reduce the number of abortions, implying or invoking the Clintonian language of “safe, legal and rare.”

This is a cultural shift, to be sure. One that I would attribute, in part, to the work of such groups as CareNet and Birthright, whose approach in the 1980s was to promote adoption and provide medical care to pregnant women. It is also surely attributable to medical advances in ultrasound technology, giving a window into the womb where a developing fetus can be seen in greater clarity (and thus greater humanity). Perhaps it can also be connected to the increasing maternal age of many women and the higher profile of infertility and fertility technologies. It is harder to maintain the idea that a fetus is just a lump of tissue when Brooke Shields publicly chronicles her struggles with infertility and the thousands of dollars she spent to become pregnant.⁵

Transformations within our culture have occurred, and will occur, largely through the engagement of millions with the ideas and discourses of our lives. As Andy Crouch has advocated in his book Culture Making, Christians (or anyone) transform culture not principally through critique, but by offering an alternative, creating new visions.⁶ The church has, in fact, been at the forefront of some important aspects of protecting and enhancing new life, most notably the celebration of adoption. It strikes me that changing culture happens most fundamentally in this incremental, piecemeal approach.

Rather than pitting the culture of life against a culture of death, Christians should employ a more concrete ethic of life, a way of living and acting that consciously, overtly and in well-articulated ways speaks to complex questions of life, death, suffering and oppression. This emerges in radical forms, such as Shane Claiborne’s Simple Community, or in the choice, made by thousands of Christians each year, to adopt. But it must be conscious, intentional, and connected. To speak of a “culture” is a totalizing phrase that obscures the intellectual and theological thinking and acting we need to undertake. In our political life, the phrase “a culture of life” (or death, or assessment for that matter) can quickly become a catchphrase. While the multi-page theological treatise of an Encyclical can work through thorny issues is using such a term, in the political realm, this type of lingo becomes highly problematic as a catchphrase.

As pleased as I was about Obama’s victory, a part of me registered a sadness for a campaign season that spoke mostly in general and fleeting ways of protecting vulnerable members of our society. Whether it was McCain’s vague pledges to give the poor an “opportunity to achieve the American Dream”⁷ or Obama’s use of stem-cell research as a cynical wedge issue,⁸ we have not seen complex issues addressed in complex terms. We did not see, or hear, as much meaningful discussion of a culture of life or dignity, or justice, or love on either side as we should want. But then, to expect cultural transformation in contemporary national politics may be naïve at best, and an abdication of responsibility at worst. A cultural shift will come to some degree in fits and starts as we—citizens and Christians—live out an ethic of Christian love in the large and small contexts in which we find ourselves.

Roe v. Wade is not the only, and perhaps not even the main, obstacle to the eradication of abortion: popular opinion is. Changing the terms of the conversation is an important move in changing the ways we think of issues of life. Let us push President-elect Obama and other elected leaders to speak about the most critical issues of our day with the complexity and concern they deserve. As a church, let us act in a way consistent with this push, living out an ethic of life in our own homes, workplaces, congregations and neighborhoods where we can exercise such influence. Promoting a culture of life must cease to be an abstraction rooted only in legislative victories or national priorities, but become, also, and perhaps primarily, a local habit—an ethic—of Christian life in word and deed.

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¹Steve Ertelt, “South Dakota Pro-Life Advocate Ready for Next Battle After Abortion Ban Loss,” November 7, 2008, lifenew.com, http://www.lifenews.com/state3627.html. <12.6.2008>
²Pope John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, March 25, 1995, vatican.va, http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0141/_INDEX.HTM. <12.6.2008>
³Vatican.va, http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0141/__P8.HTM. <12.2.2008>
⁴Democratic National Committee, “Democratic Party Platform: Renewing America’s Promise,” democrats.org, http://www.democrats.org/a/party/platform.html. <12.6.2008>
⁵Brooke Shields, Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression (New York: Hyperion, 2005).
⁶Andy Crouch, “About Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling,” culture-making.com, http://www.culture-making.com/about/book/. <12.6.2008>
⁷Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life, “The Candidates on Poverty,” December 5, 2008, pewforum.org, http://pewforum.org/religion08/compare.php?Issue=Poverty. <12.6.2008>
⁸“Obama’s Stem-Cell Spinning,” September 30, 2008, factcheck.org, http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/obamas_stem_cell_spinning.html. <12.6.2008>

Brian M. Howell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.