The Church’s Idolatry of Abortion
The two greatest issues holding the Evangelical conscience hostage to the Republican Party are Israel and Abortion.
The Churchs Idolatry: I have wanted to write this article, and with this exact title for many years now but have never gotten around to it. For one thing, I knew it would be a long one, and people just don’t like to read nowadays, let alone long articles. I also knew it’s a big subject, one you can’t do justice to without an adequate statement, and that it would deal with some real intellectual challenges. And it would be a thankless task, a kind of Murphy’s Law/”no good deed goes unpunished” exercise, branding me as even further outside the mainstream of polite Evangelical company than I’ve already been for decades.
Truth be told, to come across as less than fully committed to the fate of the unborn, “the most innocent among us” as pro-lifers have framed the debate, is intimidating. Abortion procedures seem calculating and gruesome, since it involves the termination of a potential human life. If I were a married man, I would try to dissuade my wife from getting an abortion. Nevertheless, it’s easy for me as a man to say anything about something that is so exclusively a woman’s burden to bear.[i]
Nevertheless, I am still not convinced this issue is the moral absolute we’ve made it out to be, nor are the “pro-life” arguments as bulletproof as we might assume. After all the years of controversy, the way right-wing Christians are pursuing this pet doctrine of theirs is just one more example of how willing they are to resort to literal fascism and religious authoritarianism to get what they’re so convinced is a mandate from God.
To wit, having told Christians “the judgment of God” will fall upon the United States for this “50 million baby Holocaust” and the like, has terrorized Church people into accepting the absolutist viewpoint. The new Speaker of the House for instance, has supported a House Resolution, the “Life At Conception Act,” which would confer personhood from fertilization. That’s not only way out of the mainstream, it’s dishonest as we shall see, in spite of how purist its posturing is.
Conscience or Law?
The Churchs Idolatry: And that is the bottom line of this controversy. You can debate all you want over when life begins and the like, but it’s really a question of public policy. How far should one group’s personal convictions be imposed upon everyone else in society?
Any Christian woman is free in the United States to reject abortion and have a baby if she wants. But does that mean all other women must become subject to her scruples? For a political party that slaps “freedom” on everything it does, like it’s their exclusive brand, it’s amazing how willing they are to revoke the liberties of others just because they believe this will bring down the “wrath of God”[ii] on everyone.
I’ll tell you what will bring the wrath of God down upon America. It’s what happens to the weather when you don’t take fossil fuel pollution seriously. It’s what happens when you claim the answer to so much violence is even more guns. It’s what happens to the general welfare when it’s starved so plutocrats can get another tax cut (James 5:1-6). It’s what will happen (Rev 17:16) when MAGA America straps itself to the back of the Antichrist (17:3), and goes for a joyride of “astounding devastation” over the earth (Dan 8:24).
In the meantime, the public is increasingly being offended and embittered to Kingdom evangelism. And it’s all being done at the expense of the liberal, pluralistic democracy the Founding Fathers bequeathed to the American people, heretofore considered one of the few things that truly made America great.[iii]
What Exactly Is “Biblical Morality?”
The Churchs Idolatry: Maybe I should start by explaining “where I’m coming from” on this subject, and how I look at it. Although I have not made this a big focus in a life of studying Christian doctrine, I do have a little personal experience to bring. Around 1990, at the height of Randal Terry’s fanaticism and popularity, I participated in a protest at an abortion clinic in Tulsa, and allowed a young guy to persuade me to crash the building and chain ourselves to some machinery!
I came so close to doing so, and committing a felony in the process, but thankfully chickened out at the last minute! As we drove away in the police car, I could not believe how arrogant this kid was toward the cop, lecturing him about the subject.
The next day as I was praying, I had a vision of myself standing across the street, just holding an American flag. I had the sense God was showing me that’s all I had to do to register my opinion. I’ve never felt any obligation to stress out over the subject since.
But that conviction is not shared by many Evangelicals. Their fateful decision, circa 1980, to “save America” through right-wing, highly-partisan politics has led us to this absurd moment. They see the “social issues” of our time, the “culture war,” the “battle for the soul of America,” to be all-consuming. It’s this side of politics that most animates them.
At the heart of these social issues are sex-based matters, perhaps the one subject Christians are historically most famous (or infamous) for. In our time they include same sex and sexual identity issues, sexual deviancy, extra-marital and pre-marital sex, fetal stem cell research, etc.
But nothing is more central to them than abortion, it being the greatest of all moral issues and the hill to die on, since it deals with the most innocent of victims among us. Or so the logic goes.
But I just don’t see it that way. I think greed and the inequality it has brought is the great moral crisis of our time, the greatest factor in all other cultural degeneration. It’s so central, it’s mentioned in the prophecies as a prominent characteristic of the end times (James 5:1-6),[iv] with the callousness only getting worse.
Paul further tells us that it’s the (inordinate) love of money that’s the root of all other evils, or kinds of evils, depending on how you interpret that (I Tim 6:10). Why? Because money buys power in a fallen world, and it’s the misuse and abuse of power that most makes this world the fallen place it is.
I believe history generally bears witness to this. It’s when societies become prosperous that they often become decadent, degenerate and oppressive. Witness the fall of Rome, or what Solomon did to his people to support his lavish lifestyle (I Kings 11:4-6; 12:9).[v]) In the Bible, it’s when an evil king ascends to the throne that, like in a Disney movie, the whole realm is plunged into darkness, as he pursues injustice or inequity (“iniquity” in old English). It generally does not start with the lower classes “forgetting their place.”[vi]
Still, There’s A Lot of Sex On The Brain
The Churchs Idolatry: It’s not that I don’t think the Evangelicals have a point. Our age is way too neurotic and obsessed with sex in general, which always does have social implications. The advent of photography alone has made sex a ubiquitous atmosphere, and something of a weapon. Just one example is the presence of sexy photos while you’re trying to read something online. They’re intended to distract you and break up your concentration, to either get you to check out their product or interfere with your ability to absorb content and self-educate.
There are of course other factors. The advent of The Pill revolutionized birth control and made possible the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, bringing the long-standing feminist movement to a new level. The advancement of science likewise moved knowledge of fetal development beyond the “quickening” rule of earlier generations.[vii]
On the other hand, Evangelicals may not even be aware of how much they’ve already changed “the culture” they so decry. Although they view the 1960s as being nothing but an unmitigated disaster, the success of Republicans in dominating politics since then, mostly effected through a lot of cheating, has thrown cold water on the excesses of the “sexual liberation” ethic of those days. According to recent studies, young people are having less sex these days than their parents or grandparents. If these are the things that bring the “wrath of God down upon the country, last I checked it’s still standing. And even prospering, in spite of the lies and hysterics of the right.
I understand the outrage over transgenderism, “drag queen story hour,” and the other ridiculous liberal obsessions that disturb the average American parent especially. All these things are the fruit of the natural logic that follows a rejection of the simple Divine ordination of a two-sex paradigm for the human race (Rom 1:24-32).
I also believe the pro-life movement did bring some added balance to the attitude and practice of abortion early on. The country was surprised at how much abortions spiked once Roe v. Wade made it a Constitutional right. Feminists were touting it as just another form of birth control, and even “partial-birth” and late term abortions were legal.
It all hit a peak around 1990, just as the rise of the pro-life movement acted as a counterweight to these extremes. But even with all these things, I wonder how much of this purported cultural Marxism is designed to tweak the noses of uptight Evangelicals, to “own the conserva-tards”?[viii]
Not a problem though. We’ll just “engage the culture” another 50 years, trying to brow beat it into submission, until they “better understand” abortion and our other pet sins. That’s not going to happen, and maybe it’s because they better understand the subject than we do. The truth is, our views on abortion are more formed by religious and metaphysical speculation than we may care to face—things we are unable to prove, and they are unwilling to take by faith.
More Than Meets The Eye
The Churchs Idolatry: There are in fact, a number of assumptions typically made by Church people that either read into the Bible more than is actually there, or outright ignore the implications found in modern science. As such, abortion is the perfect wedge issue, simply because it’s more complicated than purists on either side want to admit.
It has to do with a complex process of morphing and gestation, ordained by God in the reproduction of human beings, and as such can be a playground for either side in the debate. To the committed feminist, it starts out as a fertilized egg, a “clump of tissue” as it’s unartfully put. To right-wing Christians, it’s a human life from conception, and as such, a form of murder at any stage.
But a “human life” is a vague and equivocal term, and typical of the confusion and manipulation that can reign here. It can mean three different things—an actual human being, the potential to become a human being, and the lifespan a human being has lived out.
Obviously, it can’t refer to the last since it hasn’t even become a baby or been born yet. As for the second, the potential to become an actual human being is true enough, though whether the mother has the right to abort that potential life is another question. Pro-lifers will bring up the loss of a potential Einstein say, who could revolutionize the world for the better. Yet it could be a life that causes a lot of destruction as well. (As in “Why, oh why Lord, did Fred Trump Sr. have to have three sons and not two?”)
In the end, none of us knows how any given baby may turn out, for the better or the worse. Thus it’s pure speculation, and not really something we can know. And unless you believe in reincarnation, you can’t say you’re robbing that life of their choice, since they have no consciousness yet. As for the matter of “playing God,” or robbing Him of His Divine prerogative, we’ll get to that later.
The Scientific Approach
The Churchs Idolatry: The first option above then, that an actual human being begins at conception is absurd. It may have the potential to become a human being, but it’s not one yet. It may be a form of life like that of plants, or like the potential for an egg to become a chicken. But by law, an egg and a chicken are two different things.
Thus, a fertilized egg is not yet a human being, a human life, whatever you want to call it, and therefore not entitled to human rights under the Constitution or international law. At what point in that nine-month gestation period then, does that developing life become a human being, if before birth?
It’s a question that leads us to a wedge issue road to hell with plenty of good and bad intentions, talking past one another, deceitful dodging, relentless hair-splitting legalism, and lots of frustration. So by all means, let’s dive in![ix]
The Science
The Churchs Idolatry: Let’s consider what science might tell us first. There’s a lot of scientific knowledge that’s been gained in recent decades very relevant here, that pro-lifers seem to want to skirt around or ignore, facts I know I was not aware of:
“Laws that are written by nonmedical people to regulate the practice of medicine, or dictate what clinicians have to say to their patients, are dangerous and affect our ability to care for patients,” said Dr. Nisha Verma, a fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has objected to the idea that a fetus has a heart at six weeks…
The heart is one of the first organs to start developing, because the embryo’s growth and survival depend on the circulation of blood carrying oxygen and nutrients. The electric activity begins at around six weeks in a tube of cells that will become a heart, after multiple gyrations.
It will bend and loop and twist itself into an S shape. Thick cushions of embryonic tissue will grow toward one another to create walls, and a ridge on the floor of the ventricle will rise to meet them to partition the heart.
If all goes well, four chambers and valves will form by the ninth or 10th week of pregnancy, and the heart will continue developing throughout gestation. But a heartbeat’s familiar “lub-dub, lub-dub” sound is created by the closing of the heart’s valves, which do not exist in the six-week-old cardiac tube…
To opponents of abortion, that is a distinction without a difference. “It is a heart tube, but it is still a heart,” Dr. Francis said. “The shape is different, but that doesn’t change the essence of what it is,” she added…[x]
No, there is a difference. The electrical activity that can be detected at six weeks is not a functioning heart. That doesn’t form until the 9th or 10th week. But it all still begs the question—is a beating heart the indicator of a human life?
This idea of a “beating heart” at six weeks when the embryo is “the size of a pomegranate seed,” pro-lifers have latched onto and have literally marketed because they found that it “pulls at the heart strings” and sells in the public’s mind. They have succeeded because legislators, succumbing to campaigns like this, claim to know better than professionals who actually work in the field.
Fourteen states have passed such a law, though most are tied up in court. Texas still has one that notoriously empowers private citizens to collect a $10,000 bounty on anyone enabling a woman (but not the woman!) seeking an abortion in or out of the state.[xi] (What?!) The Washington state, far-right attorney behind the Texas law has now demanded the private information of all patients, clinics, “the names of the abortion providers, and the identities of nearly every person who helped the patients access abortion care.”
In other states, women are being forced to carry stillborn babies to term, risking their own lives. Some are forcing women to buy rape insurance. Ten-year old rape victims are forced to go outside their state for an abortion. When Jordan Sekulow declares the ACLJ is now fighting “barbaric new abortion laws” state by state, one wonders, “Laws being made by whom?”
And Christians still wonder why they’re “being persecuted.” In spite of all these Pharisaical “death-by-a-thousand-cuts” tactics, the question still remains: are we talking about a 1950s Frankenstein-type movie here, or a reasonable assumption from available science? I would think the first sign of consciousness would be the point indicating this is now a human life. Thus, it would have more to do with the development of the brain than the heart:
“But when does the magical journey of consciousness begin? Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components, nerve cells. Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. Roughly two months later synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester.”[xii]
Twenty-four weeks? That’s nearly six months in. Nevertheless, I think it’s at six weeks that the first nerve endings start forming, with indications that the tiny embryo can react to pain at that point, even though it has no brain to process any of it. It’s like a severed frog leg in a lab that will twitch when prodded. And since my overriding consideration is that an abortion would not in any way be painful to that life form, I would think its death between a woman’s missed period and six weeks would be a no-consequences outcome.
And that’s a really narrow position. Others would feel no qualms about extending the time farther out. But again, it doesn’t matter. We’re not talking here about a religious person’s convictions. What we’re considering here is public policy which includes the rights of women who don’t see things in the way Christians may. At the very least, the opinion of experts and not religious ideologues should be uppermost in crafting abortion legislation.
What Can We Learn From The Bible Then?
“…the vast majority of U.S. abortions — more than 90 percent — are performed within the first 13 weeks and pose little risk of death.”
The Churchs Idolatry: Evangelicals don’t really care about the science that much, even though they would deny that. So much of their approach to this is based upon, what else, the Bible! That’s a nice sentiment, but it illustrates so much of what is wrong about Church people’s false mandate for dominion over the rest of the world—the Bible is not a book of exhaustive truth, so it is an insufficient guide for most political matters.
It’s hard enough to “rightly divide” (discern) the Bible’s spiritual and moral lessons. It’s doubly hard to practically apply them to the modern world in a way that is actually benevolent to all people. Humanity’s knowledge has progressed and evolved over the centuries, and most of the time does not conflict with Biblical morality if we interpret it right.
As regards the metaphysical makeup of humans, the Bible does imply some things without revealing a lot of detail. According to it (and to some degree, our own consciousness), a human being is a tripartite creature comprised of a spirit, a soul and a body. We are very familiar with our bodies, but our soul and spirit make up the immaterial part of us, which is more elusive to define.
According to Genesis 2, God made a body for Adam out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him “the breath of life.” This is considered within Christian doctrine to be a created human spirit that had no pre-existence (contrary to reincarnation theory).[xiii] And thus, “man became a living soul” (Gen 2:7), implying that the soul is something of an amalgamation of the spirit and body.[xiv]
I would assume then that, although the making of every new life since has come about in a very different way, with a long process of growth into adulthood, it is still something of the same principle. A man and woman procreate a body, God at some point gives it a created human spirit, and that child becomes a living soul (i.e., a human being).
Which brings us to the all-important question of, when does a person become a human being or, as I’m framing it here, that point of spirit/soul infusion? According to Jewish tradition, it’s at the first breath, at birth. Their thinking on this comes from the fact that “spirit” in Hebrew, naphesh, means “breath.” For all I know, they may be right, and may explain the generally more liberal attitudes Jewish people have toward the subject.
That is certainly far removed from the current dogmatic Evangelical stance about life at conception. Perhaps they’re confused by the very unique case of Jesus Christ, Who literally did have spiritual pre-existence. Or maybe they justify it by the verse in Jeremiah where God says, “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee” (Jer 1:5).
Myself, I take that rare kind of statement to mean just what the rest of the verse says, that it was God’s intention to make Jeremiah a prophet to the nations. In other words, although it may be true that God has a life purpose in mind for everyone who gets conceived, it’s a rare “chosen instrument” that has a pre-ordained and special Divine purpose like Sampson, Jeremiah, John the Baptist and others. People like that usually experience a lot more protection and the like, until their work on earth is through.
There are also “miracle children” in the Bible such as Samuel, where God promised his mother Hannah that she would have a boy, even though she was barren. You could call that a special intervention on God’s part or a miracle. Otherwise, the fertilization of an egg is the normal process of Nature God has ordained when a man and a woman come together, after which He gets involved.
But if you believe that God grants a created human spirit, do these spirits exist beforehand, as in reincarnation? What do you do about cases where the conception took place outside of God’s ordained boundaries (marriage)? Are we to conclude that God wants people to break His laws governing sex, simply because He has a particular soul in mind He wants to see come into the world? Does He secretly want people to break His law? This is why I say the process starts with the man and the woman who choose, or accidentally, procreate a body.
None of this is getting into the real weeds when you start asking the question, does God determine which of millions of sperm will impregnate an egg? You might as well get into questions about predestination,[xv] about whether God micromanages the weather or whether it operates under general laws of physics ordinarily, etc. If it were not that way, what does a miraculous weather event mean if it’s not the exception to the rule?
Having fun yet? And we’re just getting started!
Eternal Fates
The Churchs Idolatry: But let’s get back to our question, when are we given a spirit? If the Evangelical claim is correct, it opens the door to a lot of thorny problems, but does explain a lot about their moral obsession over this one issue. For if a fertilized egg is a human life, then abortion at any stage is murder. And not just murder, but the murder of the most innocent among us, children who never even got to make moral choices.
Afterall, this is one of the great Christian doctrinal idols of all time here as far as I’m concerned—being “born sinful.” Ever since St. Augustine got pushed into a corner about free will by a monk, he just had to add to the death penalty we all inherited from Adam and Eve, being “born sinful.” Ergo, since aborted babies never got the chance to be sinners, how innocent is that!?
OK, I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now. Maybe some future article if I’m feeling sufficiently masochistic, and you’ve got nothing better to do. So let’s move on.
What are we to make of miscarriages or still births then? If it’s not the mother or any other person’s fault, does that then make God a murderer?
I once heard a feminist claim that women get pregnant a lot more often than we realize because 80% of all fertilized eggs never get implanted in the uterus, they just wash out of her body. Maybe that depends on how much unprotected sex she has. But does that make God a murderer again for designing women this way?
I understand the moral implications of third term abortion as a form of infanticide, especially partial-birth abortion, which was outlawed in 2003. And as I said, I am most concerned about the child not having to undergo any consciousness of pain.
But again, when does God give the spirit? I would assume that’s the beginning of human life. What if it’s somewhere between conception and birth? The answer is, I don’t exactly know, and neither do you! If anyone ought to have figured this out, it should have been us. Certainly, we can’t expect the secularists to figure it out for us.
Furthermore, if that fertilized egg or fetus dies and it already has a soul, where does it go? To Heaven? I would assume a child dying before some kind of age of accountability would go to heaven, regardless of whose child it is. And if it does, in what form does it appear? A fertilized egg? An infant? A baby? A young child? A grown adult? Again, there’s an awful lot of speculation here.
The Bible Is Not Exhaustive Truth
The Churchs Idolatry: The Bible is not a book about anatomy, nor anthropology, nor a detailed revelation on the tripartite makeup of human beings, nor on the details of the eternal destiny of the redeemed. It is largely a history book consisting mainly of (“His”) stories of God’s redemptive interventions in human history. It is sufficient for salvation; it is insufficient as a textbook for much more, no matter its claim to spiritual preeminence over all other books.
I understand that some moral questions go beyond personal convictions and spill over into social controversies. These sometimes make for very contentious issues, hence what I said about the perfect wedge issue. Laws made by our government should be based on the widest consensus possible.
Otherwise, you better make sure your passionate stance on something is truly a “moral hill to die on.” If it’s not, you’re just being a divisive, obnoxious pest in the minds of the fish you’re trying to catch, and the more they reject you, the more you’re tempted to think you’re being persecuted.
Case in point. Republicans just elevated a man to Speaker of the House, second in succession to the Presidency, who has stated that all he needs to know about government is in the Bible. Yet David French, a former ministry colleague of his, had this to say about him:
Though the Bible isn’t a clear guide for American foreign policy, American economic policy or American constitutional law, it is a much clearer guide for Christian virtue. Here’s one such virtue, for example: honesty.
Which brings us back to Johnson’s refusal to answer a question about the effort to overturn the 2020 election. There is a reason that effort is called the Big Lie. It was one of the most comprehensively and transparently dishonest political movements in American history. And Johnson was in the middle of it. He helped mobilize Republican support for Texas’ utterly frivolous lawsuit to overturn the Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin elections [he actually spearheaded it]. According to a comprehensive Politico report on Johnson’s efforts to steal the election, he was a “ubiquitous contact for Trump at key moments” during the plot.[xvi]
That’s pretty elitist, wouldn’t you say? To tell 66 courts and the rest of the country that they don’t know what they’re talking about, nor what’s good for them?
The Pro-Life Pyrrhic Victory
The Churchs Idolatry: After all these years of selling our political souls for the sake of conservative judges on the Supreme Court, we’ve managed to overturn the 1973 ruling only to find it’s been a Pyrrhic victory.[xvii] Pro-life people love to refer to Roe v. Wade as the product of “activist liberal judges” who wanted to “create Constitutional rights” out of thin air, and truth be told, Harry Blackmun may have done just that. In fact, it has a long history that led up to that ruling. You can read all about it here.
People forget though, the conditions of the time the Supreme Court justices were trying to address. Abortions before 1973 were truly “in the back alley,” and the concern was that, not only was the baby being killed but possibly the mother too. Thus, making the conditions safer by being under professional medical care was the focus of the Court.
Groups like Planned Parenthood, which were founded to liberate women from being mere baby-making machines, to being able to plan a family more intentionally, and provide safer conditions for women determined to get an abortion anyway—(sometimes being forced by the man involved, especially if he’s prominent or rich)—we have assailed as “The Abortion Industry,” as if all they do is murder babies for a living.
Roe v. Wade divided the matter up into three trimesters as a general rule. Their ruling was considered such a non-event by churches at the time, that no less a fundamentalist denomination as the Southern Baptists hailed it as a great decision. How then did it become such a controversy?
Some Sordid History
The Churchs Idolatry: The moral question first arose with Francis Schaeffer it seems, who was concerned that abortion could lead to other breakaways from Divine limitations imposed on man that would be a form of “playing God.” His once-radical son Frank, gave a fascinating account to NPR of how his father joined ranks with the Christian right and became a walking contradiction.
The only problem with Frank’s account is that he believes his father inspired and thus created the Christian right. The real truth is far more ignoble. Paul Weyrich,[xviii] a staunchly conservative Catholic, tried for years to harness the latent power of disorganized Evangelicals to become a right-wing army to get the unpopular Republicans elected.
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.[xix]
It wasn’t however, until he stumbled upon something that had gotten the Christian private school world enraged, Nixon removing their tax-exempt status if they refused to de-segregate, that he found the allies he needed. Joining forces with direct mailer Richard Viguerie, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and others, they reframed the issue as a matter of “religious freedom,” since blatant racism in the 1970s was such “bad optics.”
Even though Jimmy Carter, a fellow Evangelical, wasn’t even in office when Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status, taking these religious leaders from annoyance to outrage, they decided to do a real Christian thing—blame Carter and replace him with a real conservative, Ronald Reagan.
And Reagan didn’t disappoint. Just as Trump kicked off his re-election campaign in Waco, Texas on the anniversary of the David Koresh standoff, so did Ronald Reagan announce his candidacy from Philadelphia in 1980. Not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but Philadelphia, Mississipi, where three civil rights workers were killed in 1964 trying to register black voters. No subtlety there.
Nevertheless, Reagan was swept into office, instituted a decades-long $51 trillion redistribution of the wealth from the middle class into the pockets of the morbidly rich as Thom Hartmann calls them, and the country’s in turmoil now.
Conclusion: The Churchs Idolatry
Weyrich and his cadre were vexed that they couldn’t come up with a reputable-enough veneer to cover up their real motives, until they latched on to abortion to sell to the Christian public. By making abortion a moral absolute and the Christian hill to die on, they could rally the churches to join in on their crusade. This excellent article from Politico tells the whole sordid story.
But we sure got those conservative judges and Roe v. Wade overturned! And, oh yes. A half dozen sometimes-corrupt reactionaries who want to take us back to the 18th Century or beyond. And yet do they frame their suppression of voters’ rights as “saving the Constitution” from the “Democrat Party Marxists.” The tree is known by its fruit.
After all these years of the Christian Right selling its soul for the sake of conservative judges on the Supreme Court, the overturning of Roe has only resulted in Republicans losing one election after another since Dobbs. For over 40 years now, preachers have been making dire predictions of Divine judgment to come upon America for the “slaughter of 50 million unborn babies,” but we’re still here. If Christians can’t liberate their consciences from the idolatries of Israel and abortion, that judgment will surely come in the form of the re-election of Donald Trump. And if you’re that willfully blind, you get what you deserve.
Update, Dec. 14, 2023
The Supreme Court just announced it will take up the Kate Cox Texas abortion controversy case, and Republicans are seeking to not just ban all abortions nationwide this way, but all forms of contraception as well, using the antiquated Comstock Act! You can read all about it here in a Thom Hartmann article, “The Toxic GOP Plan To Ensure Their Ownership of Women’s Bodies.”
Notes:
[i] I’m sure the push to find ways for biological men to carry babies must be the liberal effort to empathize with or equalize the female burden to fulfill this function in the human race.
[ii] While not going into a deep discussion of figures of speech like “the wrath of God” or the judgment of God here, (I really should write a separate article), we could note in passing two connotations here—a miraculous destructive intervention by God, or the natural consequences of violating His “laws of Nature” (scientific) and laws of “Nature’s God” (moral). In the next paragraph, I show a few examples of how the rest of the country might interpret “the wrath of God,”
[iii] A rule of law rather than kings, liberty within that rule of law, democratic self-determination—these are the things that made America great, the closest things to something of a spiritual mission you’re going to get. Crass materialism, violence and inequity such as Donald Trump wants, are not.
[iv] Concurrently, I don’t see any prophecies about abortion beyond just some general mentions of sexual immorality (Rev 9:21).
[v] This excellent multi-series article about Solomon shows how he oppressed so many to fund his lavish lifetyle. https://claudemariottini.com/2010/09/22/solomon-and-social-oppression-part-1/
[vi] Even the one-upmanship found in societies with great inequalities may be a factor. Case in point, the former President asking his wife to walk around Mar-a-Lago in a bikini, “so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing.” Such a classy guy. She is reported to have shot back, “I’ll do that when you walk around with me in your bikini.” Gutsy gal. She knows how to deal with him better than all the sycophantic men and religionists who surround him.
[vii] The general rule for centuries was that abortion was allowed before “quickening,” or the apparent sensation of a baby moving in a woman’s womb. There’s a long history available to read up on if you’re so inclined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States
[viii] Truth be told, it is a difficult issue to ignore. But even here the hype and hysteria never end. As the FBI began to rightfully investigate irate individuals threatening school board members with bodily harm, agit prop specialists like Jay Sekulow framed it as “an attack on parents’ right to free speech.” But of course. Heck of a witness.
[ix] “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” Science tells us that the human body is mostly water along with the same minerals found in common dirt.
[x] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/health/abortion-heartbeat-debate.html
[xi] https://versustexas.com/texas-abortion-law/
[xii] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-consciousness-arise/
[xiii] I’m giving you here my understanding of orthodox Christian doctrine regarding these very speculative subjects (e.g., that a human spirit is not a “little piece of the Holy Spirit,” etc.).
[xiv] What processes come from which part has been the subject of endless debate throughout the ages (e.g., intellect, will, emotions, etc). Regardless, what we do know is that the soul and spirit make up the immaterial part of our being, and death is the separation of them from the body.
[xv] The only predestination I see in the Bible is exactly what it says in Rom 8:29, that all those that come to Christ, God has predestined or pre-determined, that they all enter into the same process of being conformed to the image of Christ (sanctification). I believe what He foreknew there in that verse is the Church as a whole. Otherwise, whosoever will can join it (I Jn 2:2; Rev 22:17).
[xvi] “’MAGA Mike Johnson” And Our Broken Christian Politics,” by David French. Emphasis added. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/opinion/maga-mike-johnson-christianity.html
[xvii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
[xviii] I’ll never forget painting someone’s basement around 1995 I think, listening to Weyrich’s famous “Goo-Goo Syndrome” speech for the first time. In it he said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Too many Christians suffer from the Goo-Goo Syndrome. You know—good government. They want as many people as possible to vote. I don’t. Quite frankly, the more people vote, the more our side loses.”
Well, at least he was honest about his contempt for democracy, the cause all those soldiers fought and died for in World War II https://donclasenseriousguy.com/martial-law-and-the-2020-election/ to make the last 80 years of relative peace, prosperity and freedom possible. You could cut that man’s cynicism with a knife, but then again, cynicism is a Republican specialty.
[xix] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
