I've been writing about mercy recently, spurred on by the quote-meme my friend posted on FB a couple of weeks ago. I'm at the point where I think I need a hypothetical situation to analyze, a situation where one party stresses the importance of the message "this person is very wrong and we are right," and in the process utterly--and needlessly--fails to display a loveliness that might draw anyone in.
Let's call this situation "the pregnant student at the Christian school," a situation that must happen far more often than it makes the news. Here are the features of this hypothetical:
- A girl attending a private religious school, which may or may not have a written moral code forbidding nonmarital sex, becomes pregnant.
- When school officials learn of the young woman's pregnancy, they either expel her or punish her by removing her access to certain school functions.
Here are typical arguments put forward by defenders of such a punishment policy:
- The school has a moral code, written or unwritten, to which the family agreed explicitly or implicitly upon enrollment; the pregnant girl has clearly violated said code; the punishment is justified.
- The policy is not sex-discriminatory because the school would of course punish in the exact same way a boy who fathered a child, if the mother decided to carry to term.*
- The girl's education is not being restricted by anyone; she has lost nothing to which she has a right, only privileges.
- The school's intent is not to punish, only to prevent her from being a scandal to other students.
- The school's intent is not to punish, only to prevent her from representing the school to the community.
- The school claims to be acting in the pregnant girl's best interest.
- The school claims that they must punish her because otherwise the school would be teaching the falsehood that nonmarital sex is permissible, something they may not do even for good reasons.
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I oppose the punishing of students for pregnancy at Christian schools.
This won't surprise you, I think, but I would like to offer some analysis that goes beyond the two obvious reasons (namely, "punishing students for being visibly pregnant encourages abortion" and "punishing students for conceiving children is de facto unfair to female students.") These two concern justice alone, and I'd like to move beyond justice to mercy.
But again: don't get hung up on the specifics. The whole reason I bring this situation up is to move back out to general principles that can guide us in other situations of messaging vs. mercy. So let's begin. I can think of several principles at work here, moving from the specific to the general. All of them at least permit the school to decline to punish the pregnant student; I think they all argue against punishment, too. See what you think.
In the following I draw on Catholic sources to back up my doctrinal arguments, but I believe them to apply broadly.
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(1) No pregnancy is a scandal.
Scandal is a technical term; it is defined (CCC 2284) as "an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil."
There's a bit more to that: people are guilty of scandal if they "establish laws or social structures" which degrade morals or religious practice or which make it "difficult and practically impossible" to obey the Commandments and conduct a Christian life (CCC 2286).
Pregnancy cannot in and of itself constitute a scandal for a very basic reason: it is neither an attitude nor a behavior; it establishes nothing. Rather, it is a biological state which naturally progresses to its end.
Furthermore,
(2) An unmarried woman's pregnancy is not evidence that she is in violation of any life-affirming moral code.
Simply put, the pregnancy is not sufficient to "convict." You can hem and haw all you want about likelihood and about gullibility and about these kids today, but it is true: a girl's pregnancy is not evidence that she is in violation of any life-affirming moral code.
- Sexual activity is not always freely chosen. The fact that a pregnancy is in progress says nothing about whether the pregnant young woman exercised full freedom in the sexual act that resulted in the pregnancy. And there are degrees of freedom, coercion, and competence
- Even if freely chosen, sexual activity that is (by Christian standards) illicit has the same character as any other sin: its guilt can be absolved via repentance and (for a Catholic) the sacraments. Pregnancy says nothing about whether the pregnant young woman is in a state of grace.
- It would be a grave violation of the student's dignity for a school official -- in fact for anyone who is not her parent -- to attempt to coercively extract from her a confession about the freeness of her choice, the degree to which she regrets or repents her choices, or the identity of any persons who have had sexual contact with her**. If she freely seeks the sacrament of confession--which she cannot be made to seek -- then she is protected by the seal of the confessional.
Objection: "But the pregnancy is only part of the picture -- can't there be additional evidence that proves the student is in violation of the moral code?"
Reply: Sure, this is a hypothetical, so we can imagine more information. A student might brag about bad behavior (not just sex; could be drug use, shoplifting, bullying), or get caught in a banned activity, or be overheard pressuring other students to misbehave, or parents could choose to bring problems to the school's attention in an attempt to get help. But if you've got any of that, a pregnancy doesn't add any information relevant to "Should we punish this girl?"
(3) All Christian ministries, including schools, can distinguish between the people they serve and the people WHO serve.
What I'm getting at here is the notion that a pregnant or parenting student is disqualified from school activities because she cannot represent the school the way that the school wants to be represented. The ministry of a Christian school is to provide a Christian education to the young people who are enrolled in the school. The students do not bear the burden of "representing" the school. The school is represented by its board, its officials, its employees, and its volunteers: grownups.
Schools sometimes tell young people that they are "representing" the school when they travel outside of it for extracurricular activities, and so they should be on good behavior. This is faulty reasoning. They should be on good behavior because good behavior is good. They should practice good behavior as a student because that is how one learns to behave. It's not for the institution's benefit that the institution teaches good behavior, but for the clients of the institution: the people served by its mission.
The real representatives of the school are the adults who serve students through the school. The school protects its identity in part by vetting its employees and volunteers for their commitment to the institution's mission.
Even extracurricular activities are means by which a school serves the children it is teaching, not means by which the children are meant to serve the school. An institution does not need to require correct moral character of the people it exists to serve; it does need to require good moral character of the people doing the serving, because that is how it ensures good service that is aligned with the mission. Unless you want to come right out and say that your mission is only to serve people who are of good moral character; in which case, I commend you for your honesty, but not particularly for your charity.
(An institution does, however, need to require clients to refrain from obstructing other clients' receiving service safely. More on this below, so as not to leave a loophole.)
All this is to say: Yes, you can expel or punish students for violating the moral code; reasons may exist why this makes sense. However: "because they make our school look bad" is not a Christian reason.
If you persist in thinking that this is a reason, you might rather unjustly think that visibly pregnant students, because they make your school look bad (to people who haven't thought it through), must be expelled or punished too -- even if you somehow knew the student to be repentant or not at fault!
Now I want to address the notion that a school must punish a pregnant student in order to avoid inadvertently teaching that freely engaging in nonmarital sex is okay. "We could give scandal if we don't respond punitively," the school might argue, and since a school (unlike one pregnant girl) is an institution that is capable of establishing social structures within itself (cf. CCC 2286 again), it's true: a school can give scandal. And they are supposed to try to avoid it.
This is the most difficult to answer, because it is undoubtedly within the school's mission to convey Christian doctrine regarding sexual conduct, and they are right to want to avoid scandal. However, we can be guided here by a sound principle of moral reasoning: the principle of double effect.
(4) The principle of double effect permits a Christian institution to decline to punish a student for reasons aligned with their mission, even if giving scandal and leading others into error is a foreseeable outcome.
There are many good reasons for a Christian school to accommodate a pregnant student without reservation. It provides the girl -- like any other student at the school -- the education that she and her parents have chosen and that the school thinks best. It welcomes her child into the world. It teaches by example that unborn children are a gift and not a burden, and that supporting women in difficult pregnancies is a work of mercy. It lets other students know that, should they become pregnant, they need not have an abortion to finish their education at the school.
Although it's obvious, it's necessary for completeness to note another condition upon the principle of double effect: accommodation of the girl is not itself illicit: there is nothing inherently wrong about educating pregnant girls. The school needs to do nothing whatsoever that is inherently contrary to its mission.
It is foreseeable that some people -- perhaps students, perhaps parents, perhaps members of the community -- may interpret the school's declining to punish the girl as teaching that Christianity passes no judgment on nonmarital sexual activity. But because this outcome -- which would indeed be, technically, the school's giving scandal -- is a foreseeable side effect of the charitable and merciful act of accommodating the pregnant student, and not an intended outcome, the accommodation is permitted under the principle of double effect.
Not only that, but the school is in an excellent position to use its foreknowledge to mitigate the outcome of possible scandal. It is a teaching institution, after all; it can, you know, use its words to teach Christian doctrine about both sexuality and mercy to the rest of the school and to the community even as it is using its powers of administration to try to enact Christian teaching in the lives of one of its students and her child.
If the school actually intends to teach that nonmarital sex is not grave matter, or if they try to accommodate the student by the inherently illicit means of teaching "Nonmarital sex is not a big deal, there is no shame or guilt in it" -- well, then, they would be guilty of scandal. But concern that people might get that unintended impression is not, actually, a reason that requires school officials to punish the student.
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A possible objection: "Technically, the principle of double effect could also work in the opposite direction. The school intends to firmly teach a Christian moral code. The school does not intend to encourage students who become pregnant to try to hide their pregnancies or to seek abortions, either. Nor does the school intend to block a student from receiving an adequate education. Nor does the school intend to teach the error that carrying a pregnancy to term is the real sin. Therefore, the school officials, who intend to promote morality and discourage nonmarital sex, are permitted to punish students whose sexual contact is discovered because of carrying their babies to term. That other students may, for example, conclude that abortion is the better option, or that babies are unwelcome, is a foreseeable but unintended effect of the school's visibly consistent enforcement of its moral code."
This reasoning is, as far as I can tell, correct; so it becomes a matter of deciding which of two paths are better.
- Let us stipulate that to punish a pregnant student directly teaches that chastity is important while at the same time it risks indirectly encouraging other students to destroy the living human evidence of their sexual activity.
- Let us also stipulate that to accommodate such a student directly teaches that unborn children are welcome gifts while at the same time it risks indirectly encouraging other students to view nonmarital sexual activity as permissible in the eyes of Christian authorities.
If we accept both stipulations, then it is impossible for the school officials to choose a path that certainly avoids all scandal, since how others receive their messages is ultimately out of their control.
We must turn then to CCC 2287: "Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged."
The school must choose which evil it would rather risk being held responsible for.
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I'm going to write more about double effect and double messaging, I think. I suspect there are more applications, anytime we feel that we are caught between showing truth and showing love.
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*N. B. Try googling to find examples in the US of such a policy being enforced against a boy.
** (If a crime is suspected, law enforcement and child protection should be involved and the student should have legal counsel; it's not a job for school officials).
I suspect, and I have nothing to back this up except a gut feeling, that a significant reason there is a dearth of punishment for the boys who father these children is because the 'boy' is an adult man who is not a student at the school.
Not to detract from your larger point, which I totally agree with.
Posted by: Jenny | 20 July 2017 at 08:01 PM
Jenny, I mean: look for a case where a male student at a Christian school was disciplined because it became generally known that he had fathered a child (with a girl or woman who may or may not have been a student at the same school).
Posted by: bearing | 20 July 2017 at 08:51 PM
Here are a few results of the male student being expelled as well. I cannot find the specifics you are looking for, and note that the first link states that the male student was reinstated, while the female student was not.
1. href="http://www.alternet.org/education/10-frightening-things-happening-conservative-christian-schools-may-be-funded-your-tax"
2. href="http:/lovefm.com/2017/04/05/pregnant-teen-and-alleged-father-expelled-from-school/
3. http://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/4030335.Pregnant_girl_and_boyfriend_expelled/
Posted by: Chris Tyler | 21 July 2017 at 11:21 AM