Abortion

The American Conscience and the Horror of Denial

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Anonymous businesswomanJocelyn is in her final year at an Ivy League law school. Though she came from humble roots and didn’t enjoy the birthright of a silver spoon in her mouth, Jocelyn took a can-do approach to life. Valedictorian of her high school class, her establishment  as a 17-year-old of a hospice program in Charleston, S.C., geared specifically for the poor was a deciding factor in her acceptance to every notable university to which she applied. Perfect SATs and an IQ of 142 fast-tracked her for great things post-grad school. You can recognize Joceyln on campus by the designer handbags she indulges in and her winning smile. At 5′ 8″ and 118 pounds, the willowy brunette has the looks to match her intellect, as her offers from international modeling agencies will attest. Several of her professors remarked that with her combo of stunning good looks and brains, Jocelyn could write her ticket anywhere.

In contrast, Jessie didn’t make it past 10th grade, which was a disappointment to upperclassmen at her high school who expected the easy source of a good time to keep producing for another couple years. The hair color comes from a bottle, and the attitude is pure sass—pretty much the only thing pure about Jessie. Looking for more, she left her small town in Indiana and headed for the big city, where’s she’s a common sight in local bars and on street corners. Her weapon of choice is a pair of crimson stilettos she found on sale at DSW, and with her long legs and short shorts, Jessie attracts a lot of attention. Or she did. A couple face-busting fights with that guy who hangs around her, a meth bust or two, and some other hygiene issues have taken the luster off the small town transplant. You’d guess 40, but she’s actually just 26. And if you had to conjecture about her life trajectory, the angle is downward, with the streets looking meaner. The other day, she got bypassed up for a younger girl, with the man tossing off a “skank” after looking her way and deciding no.

Now if I asked you which was a prostitute, would you say Jocelyn or Jessie?

The answer? Both. Sure, Jocelyn’s clientele is more upscale and her prices higher, but law school isn’t cheap.

Which brings us to infamous abortion “doctor” Kermit Gosnell.

The New York Times blog ran a post called “What the Gosnell Case Doesn’t Mean.” I find it telling that the URL slug for that post is “what-the-gosnell-case-doesnt-tell-us,” a surefire sign that even the writer knew better. You see, anyone breathing knows exactly what the case tells us. Better that our enlightened betters now inform us of what that telling actually means. And so goes the media’s infatuation with its own moral brilliance, informing the great unwashed of meaning.

The only difference between Jocelyn and Jessie is the pretense we constructed in our own minds about the virtue of one over the other. Both women made their money selling their bodies to men. Strip away the settings and the details, and the outcome is the same.

The only real distinction between the Gosnell case and the typical abortion mill that escapes our collective judgment is the level of sloppiness.

The great lie of denial that happens every day in America is that seemingly rational people can’t bring themselves to be aghast at the Jocelyns of this world. Same for abortion. The abortion doctor in Beverly Hills is no different than Kermit Gosnell, save for a cleaner operation and better quality K Cups in the waiting room. The outcome is the same: Two people go in, and only one comes out. Context means nothing to the one who doesn’t leave alive.

That Americans, for the most part, can’t understand this is why The New York Times blog writer can get away with the denial he spews all over the monitor. By insisting that Gosnell is NOT the typical face of the abortion industry, he perpetuates myths and salves the conscience of a country. Vilifying Gosnell is our contemporary version of “one man must die for the good of the nation”–except we feel better about our choice over that of the Jews and Romans, because our scapegoat is so obviously guilty.

We tell ourselves how enlightened we are, that we can’t be fooled by mere facades, and then we declare our support for the “right to choose” and ask for Jocelyn’s number.

Rethinking Evangelicalism’s Tropes #1: “Rescue Those Who Are Being Taken Away to Death”

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In the late 1980s, I was an active footsoldier in Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion organization. Not a leader. Not an organizer. But one of the grunts who did the protests and paid for doing so. I have the battle scars. You may disagree with me if you will, but you can’t challenge my experiences.

I met some of the most concerned and dedicated people in Operation Rescue. Better people than I am. I was committed to the cause. For those others, though, the cause was their life.

I think there’s a powerful spiritual delusion that accompanies the pro-“choice” side. Planned Parenthood used to hide behind the mask of “helping women,” but their rabid opposition to General Electric’s 4D sonogram technology tore away that mask several years ago. Though the 4D technology would help women immensely, especially healthwise, it has the side effect (a negative one from Planned Parenthood’s perspective) of showing the developing fetus in crystal clarity. Makes it much harder to abort one’s child when that child flashes you a winning smile from the womb.

In short, Planned Parenthood doesn’t give a damn about women’s health. They love the money that comes from killing babies.

As for Operation Rescue, while it had a large Roman Catholic contingent, the most conservative of conservative Evangelicals made up the rest. A Rescue meeting had a lot of Bible in it, at least the ones I attended. Rescue’s name and rallying cry come from this passage in the Bible:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?
—Proverbs 24:11-12

The first sentence was the major theme, but what followed was often used for garnering new recruits for Rescue.

Today, I’m not active in Operation Rescue or the prolife movement. I haven’t been in 20 years. That said, I didn’t leave because of grudges or snits. I left because I felt there had to be a better way.

It’s not that babies weren’t saved. They were. But it seemed a lot of effort went into Rescue that could have been more effective if channeled into the mission Jesus gave us:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
—Matthew 28:19-20

Jesus adds this insight:

For the one who is not against us is for us.
—Mark 9:40

We tend to interpret the Bible willy-nilly. Whatever suits our position winds up quoted.

But how can we as the Church interpret anything from the Bible without a reference back to the mission Jesus gave us? I would contend that everything we do as Christians must be viewed through the lens of Matthew 28:19-20 or else we are off our mission, the mission the Lord gave us straight from his lips.

In light of this, how then should we interpret Proverbs 24:11-12?

Are we to rescue babies alone? No, we are to rescue anyone being led away to death. And since anyone whose name is not written in the Lamb’s book of life will taste the eternal agony of the second death, working to rescue those stumbling toward it becomes our primary job. The only way to interpret Proverbs 24:11-12 is that we are tasked to ensure that no one, no matter how deserving, ends up being led off to that hellish slaughter.

Physical death is horrible. In the case of the death of the unborn, babies being ripped apart in the womb should shock and horrify anyone whose soul hasn’t been seared. But the second death is an order of magnitude more horrifying than any of that. We just choose not to think it is.

Leonard Ravenhill, a favorite of this blogger, wrote this:

Charlie Peace was a criminal. Laws of God or man curbed him not. Finally the law caught up with him, and he was condemned to death. On the fatal morning in Armley Jail, Leeds, England, he was taken on the death-walk. Before him went the prison chaplain, routinely and sleepily reading some Bible verses. The criminal touched the preacher and asked what he was reading. “The Consolations of Religion,” was the reply. Charlie Peace was shocked at the way he professionally read about hell. Could a man be so unmoved under the very shadow of the scaffold as to lead a fellow-human there and yet, dry-eyed, read of a pit that has no bottom into which this fellow must fall? Could this preacher believe the words that there is an eternal fire that never consumes its victims, and yet slide over the phrase without a tremor? Is a man human at all who can say with no tears, “You will be eternally dying and yet never know the relief that death brings”? All this was too much for Charlie Peace. So he preached. Listen to his on-the-eve-of-hell sermon:

“Sir,” addressing the preacher, “if I believed what you and the church of God say that you believe, even if England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would walk over it, if need be, on hands and knees and think it worthwhile living, just to save one soul from an eternal hell like that!

For all the time and energy the prolife movement has invested in fighting for the unborn, I keep wondering how many more gains we could have made if we focused on ensuring not one soul ended up in hell forever. Converts to our faith don’t tend to abort their unborn children. And in making those converts a priority, aren’t we in fact rescuing two people?

Sometimes, the good is the enemy of the best.

Fuzzy Church

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The times we live in are growing increasingly difficult for people to navigate. It’s hard to  ignore the cultural and societal breakdown. The wicked seem to flourish, and the righteous increasingly find it tougher to cope in a world where truth is called a lie and love is considered hate.

The anger in this country runs at a fever pitch, and as Christians, who claim to have citizenship in a different world, the tendency to want to fight back becomes overwhelming. Don’t we have rights? Don’t we have a mandate to right wrongs? Are we not Americans, too?

With so many conflicting voices out there, sorting through the noise takes concentration. It demands focus, a singleminded devotion to what is core—especially core to Christianity.

For that reason, I want to state the obvious, because with all the shrill voices we hear daily, what is obvious is proving harder to remember.

So here is the obvious:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

And to that I must add this one truth that we must also never forget:

Any other mission is a distraction.

Do we understand this? I don’t think we do. When I look at the American Church today, it looks fuzzy around the edges, out of focus, blurred. Our goals are nebulous. We’re pulled in a million directions, with each of us dedicated to some pet ministry project that doesn’t intersect any other ministry project. In addition, we daily add some other front to the culture war. We’re already fighting this agenda and that, yet each day another agenda from some godless group crops up and we have to open a new war front.

Countless Christians fight the cultural, political, and societal wars. It used to be that just raising awareness of some new sinful agenda was enough, but when that didn’t work, counterattacks had to be devised. People were encouraged to join the cause. Church gone fuzzyFires were stoked in the faithful. Write and email our congressman; demand he or she take action. Protest. Get on the picket lines. Let the world see our faithfulness by how hard we fight godless agendas. And when that fails to work, let’s get angry. Our foes are angry, so why not show them we can be even nastier. If they fight with a lit torch, then we counter with a flamethrower! They get their lawyers, but we get twice as many! Sue! File lawsuits!  Shout, yell, scream! And when that doesn’t work, just do it longer and louder! Keep raising the stakes! If they want martyrs, then martyrs they shall have! Let the blood run in the streets if it has to, but the cause of Christ must be established in America, come hell or high water! And if it takes bashing a few heads to get there, then let the bashing commence!

Somewhere, amid all that seething Christian anger and frustration, buried by using the mechanisms of the world to fight the world, two vital truths at the core of everything we are to be about as Christians get lost:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

It seems to me that we Christians don’t seem to be learning that it’s not by might nor by power but by God’s Spirit. (I think God said that, so it must be trustworthy.)

The Church in America has gone off message. Fuzziness becomes inevitable. We’re not effective at stemming the tides of all these social, political, and cultural dysfunctions we want to see corrected because we’re trying to fix them apart from the core of what we are about:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Many Christians talk about taking dominion, but the only way that dominion comes about is by meeting the enemy’s footsoldiers and converting them into Christians. If the opposing army is now on your side, you’ve won the war.

It’s so simple.

But instead of focusing on Jesus while we lead people to Him and disciple them into maturity, we Christians go all fuzzy. We dilute our efforts and our focus by going after agendas, many of them longtime agendas against which we have made little progress despite millions of hours devoted to fighting them.

What would happen if we took all the effort devoted to fighting all these fronts and devoted it to active evangelism instead? What would be gained by millions of hours of dedicated evangelism and training up new believers into Christian maturity?

I ask those questions because our country has never experienced less evangelism and discipling to maturity than in these times. Statistics show that fewer Americans attend church and have never been less interested in the Christian message than today. Not only have we lost the culture wars because we focused on them to the detriment of our core calling, but by jumping on so many bandwagons that are NOT core, the pews in our churches emptied faster than in any time in our country’s history.

Want to end abortion?

Want to stop the homosexual agenda?

Want to restore ethics to business?

Want to fight indecency all around us?

Want to restore the principles that made America a great nation?

Want to see the Church grow and lift Jesus up?

There is only one answer:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.