The former veep’s anti-abortion biblical quotation sounded deeply earnest — but it was a stitched-together fake
But to get to this point, the former veep had to make some extremely dubious leaps in interpretation — leaps that probably aren’t obvious to most observers. This short paragraph of Pence’s offered a master class in evangelical biblical interpretation, with all the sloppy readings and false claims to authority that this practice entails.
The first thing to note is that Pence takes two Bible verses, from different books, with many pages and likely several centuries between them, and stitches them together into one Frankenstein quotation. Pence’s interpolated “and see” covers up a major snip, which he uses to connect Jeremiah 1:5 to Deuteronomy 30:19. The first passage is God telling Jeremiah that he will be a prophet to the people of Jerusalem, and letting him know all the plans that God has for his work. The second, occurring hundreds of years earlier, is from the final speech of Moses, as the people of Israel are about to enter into the promised land of Canaan. In this context, choosing life clearly means following all of God’s commandments; death is equated with idolatry.
This isn’t the first time Pence has quoted the verse from Jeremiah 1:5 to support his position on abortion; he also used it in the 2016 vice presidential debate with Tim Kaine. But with this mash-up, he’s doing something different, creating a hybrid verse clearly designed to give the impression of being a single verse. That’s the first sleight-of-hand Pence pulls in this response.
The second is related: ignoring the context of the two verses. In the study of hermeneutics, this is a technique known as proof texting: starting with a particular belief and working backward to find a biblical passage that seems to support this idea. When you don’t have to concern yourself with context, it’s pretty easy to find a biblical statement to support just about any position you like. When literary and historical context become a part of the discussion, however, these proof texts often don’t seem as persuasive any more. That’s certainly the case with Pence’s employment of Jeremiah and Deuteronomy — once you dig a little deeper into the texts, it’s clear that they have nothing to do with abortion. That doesn’t mean that they can’t inform an anti-choice worldview, as the Jeremiah passage clearly does for Pence. It simply means that they do not offer the slam-dunk case for a particular political agenda that they might at first seem.