The Conservative Evangelist's View on Human Cloning

Excerpted from "Cloning Human Beings: Religious Perspectives on Human Cloning"-- a commissioned paper by Courtney S. Campbell, Ph.D. Oregon State University

The diversity of Protestantism is illustrated by the different views of Joseph Fletcher (Episcopal) and Paul Ramsey (Methodist) on human cloning. This report will try to illuminate some of the diversity, while avoiding oversimplification, by distinguishing between conservative evangelical and mainline Protestantism. The conservative evangelical denominations considered in this report account for some 15% of the American religious population. This includes the largest Protestant body, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which claims over 16 million adherents. The Christian Life Commission of the SBC issued a resolution against human cloning on 6 March 1997. While evangelical theologians and denominations do not speak as one voice, they are united in relying heavily on the Bible as the principal authority for spiritual and moral life. Protestant evangelicals began to take a serious interest in biomedical ethics following the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1973, and their writings continue to focus on ethical questions at the beginning and ending of life. However, partly as a response to the influence of secular, philosophical models in medicine, evangelical ethicists have begun to address all the major questions of biomedical ethics. The Sanctity of Life. Given evangelical emphasis on the sanctity of human life, it is not surprising that J. Kerby Anderson, perhaps the first evangelical author to address human cloning, set it within the context of the right-to-life controversy. Anderson argued that the sanctity of life is violated by cloning in two different ways. First, cloning research would inevitably result in loss of embryonic life. Secondly, although Anderson believes a clone would have a soul, he holds that societal disregard for the sanctity of human life would lead to a redefinition of humanity. In that way, society could treat the clone as a repository for spare organs and tissues. More recent evangelical commentary has reiterated concern about the diminished personhood or humanity of the clone without invoking the sanctity of human life value. The framing context has instead been a critique of the kind of society that makes cloning a valued cultural project, namely, a society that arbitrarily projects certain traits as preferable, particularly those traits having to do with bodily appearance. Parenthood. Evangelical discourse affirms the intrinsic connection between marriage and parenthood delineated in the Genesis creation story. Human cloning is theologically misguided because it breaks this connection so completely. In so doing, cloning no less ruptures critical connections between parent and child. Gilbert Meilaender argues that a marital context of giving and receiving in love is the ideal context for procreation and nurture of a child. This relational context is emphatically severed in human cloning, which “aims directly at the heart of the mystery that is the child.” Thus, the idea of a child as a “gift” is effaced as the child becomes both a project and a projection of the self. Oliver O’Donovan’s argument to root the sanctity of parenthood within the Christian liturgical tradition has been especially influential in evangelical scholarship. O’Donovan contrasts the “begetting” of procreation with scientific “making” in human reproduction; the latter is exemplified by human cloning. Cloning diminishes humanity to “raw material” out of which an artifice can be designed and constructed in our image. Southern Baptist scholars portray human cloning as distinctive and discontinuous from previous methods of human procreation; indeed, it is represented as a “radical break with the human past, and with the established patterns of human life.” The distinctiveness of cloning is manifested in what R. Albert Mohler, Jr. refers to as “consumer eugenics” in which “direct genetic customization” of the human embryo is performed. Moreover, the secular principles of procreative liberty and autonomy that support cloning assault the integrity and social necessity of the family and of marital love: “The possibility of human cloning allows for the final emancipation of human reproduction from the marital relationship. Indeed, cloning would allow for the emancipation of human reproduction from any relationship” (Mohler, Jr.). The Image of God. Evangelical authors directly connect issues of diminished humanity and relationality embedded in human cloning with a violation of the imago Dei. One author, drawing on neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth, delineates the imago Dei in terms of freedom for self-determination, equality, relationality, mutual respect, and solidarity. Scientific inquiry that issues in a research project to clone human beings violates individual freedom by subordinating self-determination to scientific predetermination. The imago Dei is substantively compromised in a clone because of diminished solidarity and the potential deprivation of equality and relationality. Human cloning risks devaluing the person by suggesting genetics is the essence of personhood, or by valuing the clone because of its replication of valued characteristics of another person. In evangelical understandings, society could grant the clone only derivative value, not inherent value. Religious thinkers within the Southern Baptist Convention also invoke the imago Dei as a bar against human cloning. As bearers of this image, human beings gain insight into self-understanding and human uniqueness and receive a distinctive status relative to the rest of creation. This sacred uniqueness is compromised by efforts at human cloning. On 6 March 1997, the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution entitled “Against Human Cloning” that supported the decision of President Clinton to prohibit federal funding for human cloning research and requested “that the Congress of the United States make human cloning unlawful.” The resolution also called on “all nations of the world to make efforts to prevent the cloning of any human being.” Evangelical ethicists contend that cloning can contradict human creativity and innovation embedded in the image of God, rather than express it (as claimed by some mainline Protestant theologians). Instead of reflecting an openness to the future, cloning in fact involves a replication of the past. Thus, it should not be interpreted as creative but rather as “reactionary biological conservatism” (Jones). Cloning perpetuates the past and thereby belies our unwillingness to accept contingency and the unknown. Cloning Research. Research on the human pre-embryo is assessed as “immoral” because of the ascription of personhood with full moral status to the conceptus. Echoing Ramsey’s concern, evangelical authors describe cloning as an immoral experiment on a person without his or her consent. Moreover, cloning procedures are likely to ensue in embryonic death due to abnormalities in the embryo or practical difficulties in transferring the embryo to a host womb.

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