Avoiding Kevorkianism And Economy-Assisted Suicide

We are in a new era as Christians.  The human cost of our day-to-day decisions is much greater. We cannot abandon the most fundamental of biblical principles, that man is made in the image of God. It is the first thing that God said before he created man.  “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

In our decisions, we have a tension that must balance the rights of the elderly, the vulnerable, and health care workers with those of the working class.  We have to be careful that we don’t advocate a Christian-justified” destruction of life or an economy-assisted suicide ethic. 

Kevorkian once said that, “Dying is not a crime.”  However, killing people is. We as Christians need to be strongly vocal for a solution that does not minimize a life ethic.

We never want to be associated with the Levite and the Priest who stepped over the wounded traveler on the Road to Jericho. It might be important at this point to go the costly and slow route of putting the sick man on our donkey and carrying him to the inn like the Good Samaritan. We never want to get to the point where we let the disease-spread escalate and force people to languish outside of hospitals without beds and we figuratively step over them to keep on going about our jobs. Surely there is a balance here somewhere. 

We cannot disregard health care workers and close our ears to people who have actually experienced the death of a loved-one, put people on ventilators, ridden in endless ambulance-runs picking up people with double-pneumonia, risked their lives to mitigate trauma, and stared death in the face through serious misery.   

I would not be surprised if the greatest value that America has, liberty, will actually be the death of us.  A failure to suspend our liberty or curb our financial drive will surely produce a second wave and renewal of death after the flattening of the curve. 

Leadership is about saying the difficult thing and living by difficult restraints, even imposing them on those who follow, if that is what is best for the whole.

Lately, the resounding chorus we are hearing is that we as Americans are free. “No one imposes restraints on us. Let us go back to work!” Actually, self-denial, self-restraint, and voluntary abdication of liberties is what Christianity is all about.  That’s what Christ did.  He died for us. He did not leave us to die. That what it means to be essentially Christian.

I run a school. If I knew that a child could lose his or her life, I would clear the building to keep that child safe, even if it meant putting the school population in the parking lot in the rain. If I put even one of our precious children at risk, it would be unacceptable. If parents complained that their children came home with wet clothes, were disrupted in their normal routine, lost precious time from their school day, and lived a life-altering, traumatic evacuation, I would rest easy at night because I saved a life. Most parents would say their inconvenience was insignificant compared to the preservation of life.  Mind you, I would probably get texts telling me it could have been handled differently, however.

With this cultural challenge of COVID-19, it is generally the elderly and health-compromised that are suffering.  The narrative is evolving that we should let this disease run its course and mitigate with testing.  If a few old people die, it will be of natural causes. I say, let this not be how we forecast the future.

For me, the benefits of moving fast are not good. We would have to say something like this: “People are working. The economy is moving again, and this seems great for insurance premiums because the high-cost, sickly-people have passed on.  The drain is opened and we are removing the seriously sick from the health pool.”  I am just not able to endorse this.

I admit that the choice to slow down the death rate and hospitalization rate has created new problems: unemployment, sorrow, isolation, mental health decline, and poverty.  There is no denying this. It has even increased death rates in other respects.  It is not an easy choice to advocate one set of problems for another set. However, when the core value is life and the preservation of life, we must suspend our liberty. In our country, the order is “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If we place liberty before life, this will lead us to other values-decline. Fortunately, we don’t seem to be there yet, but we are close.

To those that have taken the time to read this, I implore you to think about your messaging.  Do your words communicate value to the weak, the poor, the racially disadvantaged, the elderly, and the sick? 

As this tension evolves between quarantined self-restraint and the people’s right to work, there will be a values-tension between my freedom and another’s right-to-life.  Intense levels of sickness with work-resumption will also perpetuate the risks not only in nursing homes and among those with underlying health conditions, but also in the general population.  There is no denying this. So, while people will be going back to work, eating, and resuming their lives, others will continue to be exposed and lose their lives.  The Right-to-Life Movement may very well be buried by many of the same people who once protected it.

We as Christians need to stand where God stands, preserving the lives of those that are made in His image.  Fragile that they are, costly that our road is, this is where Jesus would be, were He here among us.