There’s something deeply unsettling about the Lindsay Clancy case. Not only because a mother is accused of killing her three children, but because of the extraordinary response to it.
Last week, after nearly six weeks of trial, a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.
Clancy doesn't dispute that she killed her children. Her defence has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and was therefore not criminally responsible for her actions.
Prosecutors argued that the killings were deliberate and that she understood what she was doing.
Whatever ultimately happens in court, the case has exposed something much bigger than the question of one woman’s criminal responsibility.
It has exposed a genuine confusion about life, death, responsibility, love and moral authority.
Hundreds of women have rallied in support of Clancy. Some have travelled to the courthouse. Many have worn pink and carried messages such as “Believe”, “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay”. Many of these supporters say the case represents the failure of society to take women’s mental health seriously.
Of course, there’s certainly a legitimate conversation to be had about postpartum psychosis. But there is another question that Christians ought to be asking.
Why does our culture increasingly struggle to distinguish compassion for a person from moral justification for an act?
And why, in particular, does the response become so confused when the person who has exercised lethal power is a woman?
The Garden of Eden is still with us
The Christian story begins with a temptation.
“You will be like God.”
That was the promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
It was not merely a temptation to eat forbidden fruit. It was a temptation to seize God’s authority and to determine reality, morality and truth independently of the Creator.
Eve was invited to reject the fundamental distinction between Creator and creature.
And humanity has been repeating the sin ever since.
We want to determine for ourselves what is good and evil. We want to determine what constitutes a man and a woman. We want to determine what a human being is. We want to determine when life begins and when it may legitimately end. We want to determine what love is. We want to determine who is worthy of protection. We want to determine what constitutes freedom.
And increasingly, we want the state to recognise our personal definitions as objective reality and compel everyone else to live accordingly.
That is not merely a modern mark of progress.
It is an ancient spiritual rebellion.
The attempt to redefine reality
Just consider the cultural revolution surrounding sex and identity.
A person can now declare that his biological sex does not correspond to his identity, and society is increasingly expected to affirm the declaration.
We have seen arguments emerge around “transethnicity” in which people seek to redefine even their racial or ethnic identity according to their internal conception of themselves.
The philosophical principle here is that one’s internal perception determines external reality.
But that is not Christianity. Christianity begins with the opposite proposition.
Reality does not belong to us. It belongs to God.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
God creates. Man receives. God defines. Man responds. God establishes reality. Man lives within it.
The creature does not get to become the Creator simply by asserting that he is.
This is why the modern argument over transgenderism is ultimately about something much deeper than pronouns. It is a question of who gets to define reality.
And the same question lies underneath the modern sexual revolution, the redefinition of marriage and the continuing attempt to redefine the boundaries of human life.
Who gets to define sin?
The same principle applies to morality.
The Bible does not present morality as something humanity collectively invents.
God defines good and evil.
Sin is not merely behaviour that happens to hurt someone’s feelings. Nor is righteousness whatever happens to be culturally acceptable at a particular moment.
Sin is rebellion against God’s order.
But modern man increasingly wants to reverse the arrangement.
We decide what is right. We decide what is wrong. We decide what is acceptable.
Then we demand that society affirm our decisions.
Isaiah warned about precisely this inversion: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
That is the perennial temptation of humanity: not merely to sin, but to rename sin. The sinner wants to become the moral authority over his own sin.
Then comes the redefinition of love
The same thing has happened to love.
Our culture constantly tells us that love means affirmation.
If you disagree with someone’s choices, you are hateful. If you refuse to affirm someone’s self-definition, you are hateful. If you believe that certain behaviour is morally wrong, you are hateful.
But Christianity says something radically different.
God is love.
That means love does not belong to humanity to redefine. God defines love because God is its source.
Christian love is not mere affirmation. Jesus loved people enough to forgive them—and enough to tell them to repent.
Biblical love does not require us to call darkness light. It does not require us to abandon truth in order to demonstrate compassion. And it certainly does not require us to pretend that an evil act becomes good simply because the person committing it was suffering.
The question of life and death
And this brings us back to Lindsay Clancy.
Because there is another authority that modern man has increasingly claimed for himself: the authority over life and death.
The abortion debate is perhaps the clearest example.
For decades, Western societies have argued that a woman has a right to determine whether her unborn child lives or dies.
The Christian objection is not primarily about women’s “autonomy.”
It is about God’s sovereignty.
Human beings are made in the image of God.
Therefore, human life has a value that does not come from its usefulness, wantedness, health, independence or ability to defend itself.
The unborn child does not have value because the mother wants the child.
The child has value because God made the child.
That is why the Christian position on abortion is ultimately a theological claim before it is a political one.
God gives life. God owns life. God defines the value of human life.
Man does not.
And yet our civilisation increasingly believes that human beings can decide for themselves who lives and who dies.
That is the same ancient temptation.
“You will be like God.”
When the right to kill becomes a form of power
There is a disturbing common thread in the modern discussion of life and death: the growing insistence that circumstances can transfer moral authority over life itself to the individual.
The abortion argument says, in essence, that a mother may possess the ultimate authority over whether her unborn child lives or dies.
The Clancy case raises the logical end of that question: what happens when that perceived authority extends to children who have already been born?
The answer cannot simply be that killing becomes acceptable whenever the killer is sufficiently distressed.
Mental illness can profoundly affect human behaviour. It can diminish a person’s ability to understand reality and control their actions. That is precisely why the criminal law must carefully consider questions of mental capacity and responsibility.
But we should be extraordinarily careful about what we teach society through our moral language.
A mother who kills her children is not a victim merely because she is a mother.
Her children are the victims.
Their lives do not become less valuable because their mother was suffering.
And their deaths do not become less tragic because their killer may herself have been psychologically unwell.'
Evil cannot kill God
There is an even deeper biblical pattern here.
Humanity cannot overthrow God. We cannot dethrone Him. We cannot kill Him.
So what does rebellion against God do? It attacks what God has made.
Genesis tells us that human beings are made in the image of God. That makes human life sacred.
And that gives murder its particular horror.
When Cain murdered Abel, he did not merely eliminate another human being. He attacked the image of the Creator.
This is why Scripture treats murder with such seriousness. The target is a human being. But behind the human being stands the Creator whose image that person bears.
Evil cannot destroy God. So it seeks to deface His image. Hence, it attacks the family. It attacks marriage. It attacks children. It attacks human sexuality. It attacks human identity. It attacks the sanctity of life. It attacks truth.
And ultimately it attacks the authority of the God who established all of them.
The problem is not that humanity has become too powerful
The great irony is that modern man believes he is liberating himself.
In truth, he is actually repeating Eden.
We have more technology. More knowledge. More medicine. More political freedom. More individual autonomy. More ways of expressing ourselves.
But beneath all of it is the same ancient desire: I will determine reality for myself.
I will decide who I am. I will decide what my body means. I will decide what love means. I will decide what marriage means. I will decide what constitutes a family. I will decide what is right and wrong. I will decide which human beings have sufficient value to live. And I will decide when killing can be justified.
That is not freedom.
It is the old rebellion dressed in modern rhetoric.
Christians should resist two errors
Of course, we should want women and families to receive excellent care long before a crisis becomes catastrophic.
But compassion does not require moral inversion. We can acknowledge suffering without denying evil. We can believe that a person needs treatment without pretending that the victim does not matter. We can believe that mental illness may affect criminal responsibility without declaring that killing is therefore morally neutral.
Because Christianity does not begin with the sovereignty of man.
It begins with the sovereignty of God.
Back to Eden
Perhaps that is ultimately what the Clancy case forces us to confront. The question is not simply whether Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill. It is not simply whether she should be convicted. It is not even simply whether our healthcare system failed her.
Those are important questions. But underneath them sits a question that Western civilisation has increasingly forgotten:
Who owns human life? Who defines good and evil? Who defines reality? Who defines love? Who determines the value of a child? Who determines when a human being may live or die? Who has the authority to tell us what a human being is?
The Christian answer is not complicated.
God does.
That is why the answer to our cultural crisis cannot ultimately be found in giving man still greater power to define himself.
We have tried that before. It happened in a garden. The serpent offered humanity the chance to become like God. And humanity took the bait.
Thousands of years later, we are still reaching for the fruit.
The tragedy is that every time man tries to sit in God’s chair, someone else ends up paying the price.
Sometimes it is the unborn child. Sometimes it is the family. Sometimes it is the confused and suffering individual. And sometimes, as in the Clancy case, it is the most vulnerable of all: children who trusted their mother to protect them.
The answer is not to become less compassionate. It is to become more truthful. Because only when we recognise that we are creatures, and not God, can we begin to recover the proper order of things.
God is God. Man is man. Life belongs to its Creator. And the image of God in every human being must never again be treated as though it belongs to us to erase—whether that life is inside or outside the womb.