David Against the Goliath of Abortion

Today, in the United States, is a day of prayer and fasting for the legal protection of unborn children. Not coincidentally, it’s also the 47th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The first reading today is the famous story David and Goliath, and although it wasn’t planned this way by the Lectionary, it’s a perfect fit.

One of the most fascinating reflections on the story of David and Goliath is by The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, who was so inspired by the account that he wrote an entire book on Davids and Goliaths, through which he was converted back to the practice of Christianity. You can read a longer excerpt of his take here, but here’s the gist:

Goliath is heavy infantry. He thinks that he is going to be engaged in a duel with another heavy-infantryman, in the same manner as Titus Manlius’s fight with the Gaul. When he says, “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,” the key phrase is “come to me.” He means come right up to me so that we can fight at close quarters. When Saul tries to dress David in armor and give him a sword, he is operating under the same assumption. He assumes David is going to fight Goliath hand to hand.

David, however, has no intention of honoring the ritu­als of single combat. When he tells Saul that he has killed bears and lions as a shepherd, he does so not just as tes­timony to his courage but to make another point as well: that he intends to fight Goliath the same way he has learned to fight wild animals—as a projectile warrior.

He runs toward Goliath, because without armor he has speed and maneuverability. He puts a rock into his sling, and whips it around and around, faster and faster at six or seven revolutions per second, aiming his projectile at Goliath’s forehead—the giant’s only point of vulnerability. Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-size stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of thirty-five meters would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of thirty-four meters per second—more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, that is equivalent to a fair-size modern handgun.  [….] “Goliath had as much chance against David,” the his­torian Robert Dohrenwend writes, “as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an [oppo­nent] armed with a .45 automatic pistol.”

Gladwell’s insight is that the story of David and Goliath reveals to us an eminently practical point, that our conceptions of weakness and strength often depend upon overly-narrow, conventional thinking. The small start-up often has a freedom to innovate that the already-successful company doesn’t – so the question of which is “strong” and which is “weak” depends on the metric being used. As Gladwell points out, “the reason King Saul is skeptical of David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.”

I’ve said before that legally outlawing abortion is important, and that’s statistically true. Where strong abortion regulations exist, the total number of abortions goes down. If that weren’t true, neither side would care about the abortion debate. That is, if pro-choicers really were convinced that the same number of abortions would happen one way or the other, the stakes of the abortion debate would be pretty low, since nobody would be “denied an abortion.”

So it’s not that the legal fight is unimportant. Instead it’s that, as Christians, we have to be so careful to remember that (a) our success isn’t ultimately a legal one, and (b) our weapons aren’t the weapons of the world.

In other words, even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, the victory isn’t won. Even if every state outlaws abortion, or the federal government outlaws abortion, or there’s a constitutional amendment against abortion… those things would be amazing successes, but they’re not the ultimate victory. The ultimate victory is the creation of a world in which every human person is savored and valued from the moment of their conception to the moment of their death, a world in which we see in one another the beauty of creation, and the image of God imprinted upon our neighbor. It’s the creation of a world in which the strong serve the weak, rather than exploiting or eliminating them.

And so while we must needs turn to the courts and the legislatures for relief, we can’t just stop there. Such a reminder strikes me as particularly timely at a time in which the Democratic Party is openly against pro-life goals, and many members of the Republican Party are (if Senator Rand Paul is to be believed) also quietly working against the pro-life movement. We must remember, as the Psalmist (possibly David himself) said, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help” (Ps. 146:3). Politicians are going to try to use you, so you can use them, but don’t trust them. The difference between GOD and GOP is more than a letter. If we try to win exclusively by the sword of politics or the courts, we can expect to lose, just as David could expect to lose had he gone up against Goliath in hand-to-hand combat.

There’s a helpful rule of thumb from Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris, in which he points to Acts 17:23, in which St. Paul uses the inscription on an Athenian temple, To an unknown God, as a starting point from which to proclaim Jesus to the Gentiles. Leo says:

Paul, the leader of the Christian army and the invincible orator, battling for the cause of Christ, skillfully turns even a chance inscription into an argument for the faith; for he had learned from the true David to wrest the sword from the hands of the enemy and to cut off the head of the boastful Goliath with his own weapon.

David is happy to use Goliath’s sword to behead Goliath, but he doesn’t fall into the trap of being reduced to a swordsman. Paul is happy to use the Athenian temple inscription to preach Jesus, but he doesn’t fall into the trap of thinking all of his knowledge of God has to come from Greek paganism. And we should be happy to use the courts and Congress to advance the cause of Christ, but we should never mistake these things as our primary weapons.

David’s primary weapon, of course, is the sling, in which Scripture says he placed “five smooth stones” plucked from the river (1 Sam. 17:40). St. Jerome points to this smoothness as evidence that “even amidst all the eddying currents of the world, his feelings were free both from roughness and from defilement,” and St. Augustine sees in the five stones being taken into one pouch a symbol of the Torah, the five Books that became the Mosaic Law. Augustine also sees David as prefiguring Christ, which fits Fulton Sheen’s commentary that the five stones also prefigure the five wounds of Christ.

And so, we should recognize that the true Goliath we’re up against isn’t Planned Parenthood but Satan (cf. Eph. 6:12), and our weapons against him are not primarily legislative but spiritual. Marching for Life is great, prayer and fasting is better. We use Goliath’s sword when it suits us, but we’ll never beat Goliath in hand-to-hand combat that way. As David said to Goliath, “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied” (1 Sam. 17:45). And so, instead of the armor of Saul, we take up the armor of Paul (Eph. 6:14-20)

Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; above all taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me…