Americans should all be celebrating the long-overdue demise of the Roe and Casey decisions. It has been long noted that the Roe decision was considered to be judicial activism by the Supreme Court since the Constitution says nothing about abortion. The 1973 court simply created the idea as legal fiction. In undoing Roe, the Court kicked the issue back to the states and recognized that it was beyond the scope of existing federal law to address this issue. Voters will now be able to debate and vote in each state as to what restrictions they put on abortions. The Pro-Life battle has not ended but a major national impediment was removed. So every American should celebrate the course correction brought to the country simply because it rectified a major legal error.
American Christians, specifically, should be rejoicing as well. They were a hard-driving force behind the reversal of this ruling. I was ten years old when Roe became law in 1973. In the mid-to-late 1980s I began attending and then joined First Christian Church in Cumming, Georgia. Gary Armes was the senior minister. He did not shy away from the abortion issue in the pulpit or in his teaching sessions. Other ministers on staff were Randy Smith, Eddie Bowen, and Mark Coffman. All were on board with both teaching and activism. It was Mark Coffman, then the Children’s Minister and who now pastors a church of his own, invited me to my first Pro-Life event. The church was not afraid to take a stand and to put its top warriors in public view on the front lines. Why? Because the sanctity of life is a principle clearly taught in Scripture.
80s Counter Culture
Being outspoken against abortion in the 1980s was to truly be counter-cultural. The Sexual Revolution had firmly taken hold. Cohabitation was becoming normalized. Homosexuality was a growing issue. The political polls showed that more than a majority of Americans supported Roe. In fact, the prevailing wisdom of the day was “Roe will never be overturned. The people support it so just give up the fight. It is a waste of time.” The problem was that well-grounded Christians and right-thinking people knew that abortion was the murder of an innocent baby and that God forbade such murder. These were people who were driven by conviction and could not be dissuaded by mere mortals.
To fight against abortion, against the prevailing feminist arguments, and against an unruly Supreme Court was truly “the road less traveled”. It was strewn with mockery, ridicule, persecution, and a certain amount of shunning in various circles. All manner of false charges were laid upon people simply because they opposed the unmerited death of babies in utero. The term “fundamentalist” was used to project ignorance and backward-thinking on Christians who stood for the sanctity of life. “Culture Warrior” became another defamatory term for those who fought this wicked ideology. Churches were warned by outsiders not to get involved with the culture wars and to avoid politics at all costs. All of us were told that the basic biology about conception that we all learned in 9th grade was to be denied. “Life doesn’t begin at conception,” so they said. “It is just a clump of cells” not to be conferred any value. The humanity of the baby was denied at least until after it was born. The personhood of the baby was denied. It was just an appendage to the mother’s body. Until it could survive on its own it wasn’t a person. A woman’s “right” to kill her baby was viewed as superior to the right of the baby to life. The potential hardships of life – poverty, sickness – were supposedly justification for ending the life of the baby. How is murder compassionate? It was truly dystopian, despicable, illogical, anti-science, uncompassionate, self-centered, and evil. And it became even worse until we had partial-birth abortions and people are even supporting infanticide after birth now! These things amassed weight in our cultural consciousness until they could not be supported by the majority of people. Social activism and religious education have worked.
Crusader Rabbit
When I became News Director at WHNE in Cumming in the mid-1980s, I was a young 20-something. I had been raised in church and in a traditional, fairly rigid home environment with distinct right and wrong and honor and shame values. So I was opposed to all manner of evils, like drinking, drug use, homosexuality, the sexual laxity among heterosexuals, and Roe v. Wade was among those things that I found to be inexplicable. One of my co-workers was about twice my age and she dubbed me “Crusader Rabbit” after a 1950s cartoon character that I had never seen. I gathered from our conversations that she thought I was fighting losing battles. She was concerned then that overturning Roe would lead to more “back alley abortions” and I was never persuaded by that argument. My crusades continued. We ultimately both attended First Christian Church. She was one who encouraged me to attend and we remained good friends over the years.
At First Christian I was very interested in learning more about the Bible and understanding the faith in ways that I had not realized before. I sought out the ministry staff and Gary, Eddie, Randy, and Mark always afforded me time. When Mark invited me to attend a night course at Atlanta Christian College in the fall of 1989 with Dr. Stephen Hooks, I could not resist. I then enrolled fulltime in the Spring semester of 1991. I was formally ordained in 1996 although I had begun serving in ministry at Pleasant Hill Christian Church in the early 90s. The impact that these men had on me was greater than I had realized. Gary preached what he called the “meat and potatoes” sermons. He wasn’t dealing with far-out, esoteric issues or trying to be cute, coy, or crafty to impress the academic elitist crowd. People had a need to know the Bible and the know the Gospel. They reinforced in me that the role of the minister or the godly man is to stand for what is right whether it is popular or not. I heard it from the pulpit. I read it in the Prophets. I saw it in the life of Jesus and in the lives of the Apostles and early church. That fit my Crusader Rabbit personality well. I’ve never ducked those issues and embrace a full head-on collision with them. People . . need . . to . . know and it is my job as a Christian and a minister to tell them whether they be persuaded or not.
Over the roughly thirty years I have been engaged in ministry I have witnessed a decline in dedication among many in ministry as well as in the pew. My first real awareness of this started with issues regarding homosexuality. People in the pews were the first to demonstrate weak allegiance to Scripture as friends or family members started to “come out of the closet” and wanted to be accepted by the church. We then started seeing church leaders and ministers exhibiting weakness because there was turmoil in the congregation and obeying Scripture is hard on these matters. The people involved may be influential, dearly loved, or have some other emotional or power-based attachment that was difficult to fight. Others tried to find “third-way” options in order to both “have their cake and eat it too”, so to speak. Now we see major denominations in decline and splitting because there were not enough Crusader Rabbits among them.
Progressive Christianity
In today’s climate we have “progressives” and “woke” leadership in the church causing problems. This arose, at least in part, as a backlash against what its advocates considered a harsh church environment that dwelt too much on sin and excluded people, particularly the practicing homosexuals. As with all such movements that seek some sort of moderation, it can quickly go too far – and it has. Again, there is a weak allegiance to Scripture overweighted by an undue, emotional allegiance to people who are in violation of Scripture. As the Bible says, “You cannot serve two masters.” Our ultimate allegiance has to be to Scripture even when it sets us against our own friends and family members. In fact, it is hard to detect whether or not some of these people actually believe anything other than “appease the culture and keep the peace at all costs.”
Keeping the Peace
Peace. Calm. Living an uncontested and unmolested life. These are the values that drive many people. They don’t want to face the difficulties of confronting the culture, their friends, their family, or their job. The demands of Scripture are too hard for them. It is much easier to ignore the issue, compromise on the issue, or capitulate on the issue than it is to confront the issue and to fight the necessary battle. You can recognize these people because they stick their heads up like a Whack-a-Mole game and try to quench the enthusiasm of people who are rightly celebrating a major victory. They will say things like, “Don’t celebrate the defeat of Roe”, “I hope you’re ready to take care of all these babies”, “now there will be all these hurting women to deal with”, “you are driving people away from the church,” “this wasn’t a victory for God”, “this wasn’t about life”, “you should have to supply free diapers, childcare, and formula”, and other such assorted nonsense attempting to tamp down the joy of the hard-fought victory.
Church and Politics
The people described above are averse to politics, so they say, but they usually support the liberal, anti-God candidate for one reason or another. They may also vote third party or not vote at all but they view themselves as the high-minded purists who refuse to join the fray because it sullies the church. They will cite from Romans 13 and tell you just to take whatever government gives you and “keep politics out of the church”. They are content to sit by and let things get worse without raising a finger so long as you “keep politics out of the church”. These people were part of the Never Trump or Never Trump Evangelical crowd. Unlike others of us, they could not foresee the benefit of a more conservative President who would appoint conservative justices. Nor do most of them recognize this ex post facto. After Roe’s demise you don’t hear them saying, “Gosh, I guess we were wrong. Trump did appoint justices that would overturn Roe just like he said he would do.” Nor do you see any great number of them say, “Wow! I guess voting in mass actually does change the course of history! Participatory government can work and it doesn’t have to sully the church in the process.” No. There is not that sort of self-awareness, of introspection, of recognition – much less contrition or repentance!
Broken Moral Compass
Such people still maintain their broken moral compass. It doesn’t point to truth or to God. The motto seems to be that it is better to do nothing than get involved with anything that could be considered “political”. They worry about the life of a mother that MIGHT die in a back alley abortion (statistics were exceedingly low on that to begin with) while they can’t muster the same amount of compassion for the babies – all of whom are supposed to die at the hands of an abortionist. As an example, if just 1 in 100 women died it would still mean that 100 babies died. Somehow that doesn’t phase these people. The compassionate appeal to avoid suffering and hardship for the mother and/or the baby if it is brought to term is never measured against the pain and suffering of the baby being chopped up, burned to death with chemicals, or having its brain scrambled in the womb before it is extracted and its parts sold on the medical market.
The appeal to a “nice”, non-confrontational presentation of Christianity is one that neuters it of its power. The “let’s all get along” crowd is not going to last long when difficulties come. Jesus told us as much in the Parable of the Sower. Three-quarters of the people didn’t last because they were not fertile soil or they let the concerns of the world choke out their faith. Jesus told us that there is a broad road with a wide gate that leads to destruction. Many people will take that road. But the way to eternal life will be followed by only a few because that road is narrow and the gate is small. He also warned that not everyone who claimed him as Lord would enter into the kingdom of heaven. The claim was a false claim even though they did mighty things in His name. Doing the will of the Father is the key to the kingdom of heaven.
When the pressure is on people will reveal where there true allegiance lies. After I made a post about the demise of Roe, one of our long-time friends noticed that the people she expected to be celebrating were not celebrating. She wrote, “Today I discovered that I know a lot fewer Christians than I thought.” My reply was, “Far fewer than you want to think.” Moments such as these reveal the weaknesses in many more people than we want to believe. People who profess to be Christians will revolt against the church, its teachings, and its leadership when they get uncomfortable. You will hear them say, “Well, I don’t believe that” when they encounter a passage that cuts them to the quick. The church leaders who stand strong on issues are rejected and defamed by a people unwilling to pay the true cost of being a disciple of Jesus. They take up their cross and put it on the mantle as a decoration. It becomes a showpiece. Something to be admired and talked about but never used. To use the cross means to deny yourself – daily – in order to follow Jesus. We don’t like to deny ourselves especially of comforts, friends, and family. And yet, that is exactly what we are called to do.
Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon minces no words on his Facebook page when he urges all Christians to celebrate:
The righteous should always celebrate when God’s choice of life wins over a sinful human choice of death. Please learn to distinguish between godly and puerile forms of celebration. Celebration of righteousness is not antithetical to love. It is not an either/or.
There should be celebrations in every faithful Christian church in the country, accompanied by fervent thanks and tears of joy. We don’t need more people cautioning us against celebrating too hard. Vigorous celebrations are not antithetical to reaching out in love to violators. I would be more concerned with not enough churches celebrating.
Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon
Dr. Gagnon and I exchanged some messages on Facebook debating the merits of Donald Trump during the Republican primary. As the primary ended we both decided it was in the best interest of the country, its moral and social fabric, and most in alignment with God’s will and purposes to support President Trump in the 2016 election if for no other reason that getting better judicial appointments than Hillary Clinton would give us. All of us who made that decision stand justified by the overturning of Roe and the restoration of a measure of law to an increasingly lawless nation.
Christian Activism
Christian Activism is not new. Apologist, Michael Licona, of RisenJesus.com cites Christian philosopher Athenagoras of Athens from A.D. 177 who disputed with the Roman emperor against the charge that Christians condoned and committed murder. In that argument Athenagoras even brought up abortion as something that Christians oppose as a form of murder. Justifying your faith and defending it against unwarranted attacks is as old as the New Testament itself. Jesus predicted that his followers would be brought before kings and governors and rulers. The Apostles and early followers certainly had to confront the political powers of their day as did the Prophets before them. John the Baptist was executed because he dared to tell the king that his marriage to the woman his brother had divorced was illegal and immoral.
The church and the non-church world frequently clash because we have divergent views on morality. In such cases, as with the abortion debate, the church is not delving into the realm of politics; it is the political that has run afoul of God’s long-established moral values. The fact that Christians then stand up and rebuff worldly powers on these matters should not be seen as anything other than the church having its people doing their proper duty. The church exists to teach, preach, and uphold church doctrine. Apart from that it has no function, no distinction from any social club or charitable organization out there. The men who lead the church need to be willing to stand in the gap against the hordes even when the winds of cultural disapproval and condemnation blow against them. We were always right to fight the so-called Culture Wars. Christianity IS a culture war. It is counter to the culture around us and it is counter to our innate desires. It is a struggle and battle inwardly and outwardly if, and only if, we take it seriously.
We are not called to capitulate to the world but to evangelize it and those fighting Roe did just that – in the streets, on TV, in print, and in church. They won converts, they influenced politicians, and they got the ruling they wanted. This was the church being the church and working to be salt and light in the world. The fight was always about God and defending His position on human life. A more noble cause would be hard to find.