Paul Simmons, a medical ethicist, decried the “politics of dying” at a recent gathering of the Virginia chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Simmons specifically cited the Terri Schiavo struggle as an example of the “Religious Right” seeking “a Puritan at your bedside,” by interfering with a sick woman’s “right to die.” In so doing, Dr. Simmons castigated pro-life persons for, of all things, a lack of authentic Christianity.
“Love your neighbor, that’s Christian,’’ he said. “They love abstractions, they love the fetus more than the woman, the stem cell more than the people who are ill.’’
I would like to say that Paul Simmons is an unknown quantity, just one more anonymous “ethicist” in the cabal of death. Simmons, however, is a Baptist. In fact, he is a former professor of Christan ethics at my institution, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (before our revolution back toward confessional orthodoxy). He has also been quite active with the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights and endorsed a most extreme manifesto for sexual liberation published by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.
What is interesting about Simmons’s latest activism is not that he is on the side of death. What is interesting is that he is still claiming that the culture of death is one more part of the Baptist struggle for religious liberty in the United States. Note the “Puritan at the bedside” remark, for instance. Never mind that colonial Baptists would have excommunicated in a moment anyone who would have even dreamed to cut apart a preborn child or starve to death a disabled woman.
The sad case of Paul Simmons, however, is a reminder for all of us of the ongoing work of guarding the deposit of faith. For years, Simmons took the tithes and offerings of Baptist church members to teach such horrifying “ethics” to Southern Baptist pastors and missionaries. The Simmons legacy is purged from Southern Seminary and from Southern Baptist life, but it should remind all of what it took my denomination years to learn: liberalism doesn’t just kill churches. Often it kills people as well.
