There’s an Elephant in the Living Room

The fundamental issue—
In an interview reported in the New York Times (11 August 2001), Dr. Leon Kass, the newly appointed head of President Bush’s council on bioethics, gives a succinct statement of the challenge posed by stem cell research.  The struggle we face, he says, is to integrate our powerful science which is “absolutely silent on what they [its discoveries] mean” with “a heritage which has been an attempt to express the nature of our humanity.”  As appropriate as Kass’s words may be, the interview overlooks a major element of our heritage, an element so obvious that overlooking it is, as a therapist has written, like ignoring an elephant in the living room.

The challenge is described as one of bringing science and morality together, and Kass traces this tradition to such classic western texts as Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Darwin, Jane Austen, and even Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”  But the interview effectively obscures the fact that a fundamental religious and theological challenge is also posed by stem cell research.  

The three great religious traditions that have shaped western culture—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all believe that humans are created in the image of God.  This is, in fact, their major contribution to our understanding of human nature.  This belief has survived for millennia at the deepest levels of the western cultural psyche, and although it is often expressed explicitly in the current discussion, it also flows as a subterranean stream, unrecognized, in places like the Kass interview.

Belief in the divine imprint on human nature is clearly visible in the arguments advanced by those who oppose research on embryos.  That argument claims that even the simplest forms of life are sacred if they contain the potential to become human, because their destiny is directly rooted in God.  It is not extreme to name the destruction of embryos as murder, if the Almighty has decreed the fundamental nature of human life, it is not extreme to accuse embryo-destroyers of murder.

On the side of the debate usually favored by scientists, the image of God motif is just as powerful on the other side of the debate, even if it has shed its explicit theological vocabulary.  Scientific genius is clothed with quasi-divine sanction by those who call for unlimited research on embryos.  To see what I mean, look at the 17 January 1994 issue, Time magazine introduced the Human Genome Project with mythic portrayals of two leading scientists.  Frances Collins was photographed in black leather riding his Honda Nighthawk bike, reenacting the Great American Quest for truth.  French Anderson was pictured in the act of using his exotic Tae Kwon Do skills to demolish a stack of pine boards in the same way that he was cracking open the secrets of the genes.  A headline reads, “French Anderson’s obsession has turned fantasy into reality.”

If such scientists bear the marks of divinity, so do their conquests.  The aura of sanctity surrounds the lives of those who suffer the diseases that stem cell research can cure.  The presentation of curing possibilities, whether in the halls of congress or in media interviews, carries the sacred charge that in other circumstances is attributed to the Torah, the Qu’ran, or the King James Bible.  Christopher Reeves, Michael J. Fox, and the Catholic Bishops all invoke the same idea of human-life-created-in-the-image-of-God, but in the stem cell debate, they apply it to different segments of the life-cycle.

Plato, Aristotle, and Jane Austen constitute a precious heritage, but they do not live in the deepest recesses of the American soul.  If the current struggle over embryo research revolved around these figures, it would not be so intractable.  How are we to find our way through a controversy in which both sides are driven by the same theological conviction, each interpreting it to support their case?  We will need to clarify the premises that underlie the debate, and free the idea of the image of God from the ideological straitjackets in which each side attempts to confine it.  Either the idea should be discarded as unhelpful altogether, in which case an alternative must be provided, or it must be interpreted in ways that are illuminating for all the parties involved in the discussion.

It does not help us that so many leading voices in the discussion either cheapen the religious issue (as President Bush did in his superficial references to prayer) or speak as if theological issues are non-existent or irrelevant (as Kass and the NY Times writer seem to).  The elephant in the living room needs to be acknowledged.  The theological character of the stem cell controversy may be embarrassing, but that is no excuse for denying it.