What to do about abortion today

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and, as someone who has always despised legal abortion as well as the excesses done to combat it, I'm still not sure how just how to respond. It seems as though nothing has been effective -- rallies, marches, voting -- in causing a groundswell of grass-roots opposition from the public.

And it's not that folks haven't tried -- I personally know two people who were arrested in Operation Rescue demonstrations in 1988; locally, it was centered in the church that they attended at the time.

It could be that part of the problem with fighting abortion is its prominence in the "culture war" because, outside of some religious types, not all that many people care enough to cast their votes on the issue -- I've seen abortion become an issue in just two political campaigns, ever, and one of those was last year.

I know what you might be thinking -- We're talking about human life here. Isn't there anything more precious than that?

Well, yes, there is -- a walk with God. If your activism no matter the issue detracts from that, it's frankly idolatry and needs to be put away. You simply can't assume that you're obeying God just by being involved because the devil can certainly disguise himself and worm his way in there. Remember that the only thing that Satan cares about is disrupting God's agenda and will use anything, even His Word, to do it.

For that reason it's probably a good thing that abortion isn't even directly mentioned in the Bible, although you can certainly make the case that it is indeed evil.

I do have one prediction: Abortion will not become illegal again unless and until the culture war ends -- with a loss. I say this because only when it's freed from what might be considered its exclusively religious context will folks begin to consider when life truly begins. However, for that to work it also has to be coupled with "quality of life" issues such as poverty and pollution, thus embracing a more comprehensive "pro-life" approach.

And doing that costs time, money and power -- things that folks don't want to give up.

The book "Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?", which was published in 1999, mentioned how abortion came to be banned before -- around the turn of the last century, and that had to do with men who played the "use 'em and lose 'em game" and left the women that they had seduced in a lurch. The churches weren't involved in banning the practice, simply counseling people about sexual activity; meanwhile, abortion laws were enacted in every state with popular consent.

Times are different today, of course, with women often now seeking sexual fulfillment for its own sake and abortion seen as a "right," but the premise still applies. Deal with the issues between men and women and you deal with the abortion issue.

Evangelicals and King

I am deeply heartened that we in the evangelical community are beginning to give the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. his due as not only a civil-rights leader but as a man of God. We recognize him as such in my church, which is socially progressive but theologically conservative, and the Christian Leadership Concepts program, an intense two-year course for men which is winding down for me, has as part of its curriculum "Strength to Love," his classic series of sermons that was first published in 1963. On top of that, many of you know that Dr. King is a large part of my Christian testimony; it was he who showed me in a practical sense just what the Gospel of Jesus Christ was about.

That being said, however, it would behoove us to admit that, when he was active, many of us dismissed his Biblically-based efforts toward justice and reconciliation. Now that he's gone to his reward it's easy to see that he was ultimately right, but even today many of us run away from the historical fact that evangelicals for the most part generally ignored him, with many even opposing him. Indeed, in that day only Billy Graham recognized who he was and took a lot of heat for his own commitment to integrate the Body.

I'm hoping that embracing this reality will cause repentance.

Many conservative Christians, for example, will insist that Dr. King was a committed Republican who would by inference likely support the modern conservative agenda were he here today. History and his own words, however, suggest otherwise.

He didn't even get involved in political campaigns until 1964, when he endorsed President Johnson's election to his own full term and, in an interview with Playboy magazine, denounced Republican challenger Barry Goldwater afterwards as "the most dangerous man in America [who] gave aid and comfort to the most vicious racists and the most extreme rightists in America." However, he ended up breaking with Johnson over the war in Vietnam and in 1968 was considering throwing his support to either Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy. (Of course, he didn't live to see the results of that election.)

In his 1956 address "Facing the Challenge of a New Age," he complained, "The Democrats have betrayed us by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the southern dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed us by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing reactionary northerners. This coalition of southern Democrats and northern Republicans defeats every proposed bill on civil rights."

I also find it ironic that it was President Reagan, the first candidate whom evangelicals openly supported, who in 1983 signed the legislation making Dr. King's birthday a Federal holiday -- upon doing so he responded to political ally Sen. Jesse Helms, who voted against it on the grounds that King was a Communist, “We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?”, referring to FBI files that would supposedly prove his alleged pro-Communist activity. Indeed, according to an editorial in the Boston Globe, Reagan, no fan of Dr. King's, upon his assassination referred to the civil-rights movement as “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break,” never mind that Dr. King broke the law only reluctantly and only when all other options were exhausted.

Clearly, certain folks just didn't "get it," and it's one reason the church is still sadly divided along racial lines (though that is slowly changing). I just hope that we evangelicals eventually begin to abandon our commitment to a socially divisive ideological agenda for the sake of the reconciliation that our LORD and Savior Jesus Christ not only called for but also died to promote.

The Republican Party's real diversity problem

Six years ago a couple of conservative Republican friends excitedly sent me an e-mail that they were sure would foster "reconciliation of the races." I decided to click on the link, and it turned out that it was touting the candidacies of Michael Steele, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland; and Ken Blackwell and Lynn Swann, who were each running for governor in Ohio and Pennsylvania respectively -- all African-American and all as Republicans.

I quickly dismissed the publicity as irrelevant, saying that the conservatives who run the GOP wanted capitulation, not reconciliation. It turned out that they had the bad fortune of running for office during the Republican "meltdown" of that year, all of them losing easily and with Ed Rendell, the victorious Democrat in the gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania, even saying that he received a lot of votes because Swann was black.

I bring this up because South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is planning to nominate Tim Scott, touted as the first black Republican to enter statewide office since Reconstruction, to the Senate to replace Jim DeMint, who is taking a position with the Heritage Foundation. Some folks are making this appointment into a big deal -- which it isn't, especially when you consider that Scott is a hard-core conservative and a tea-party sympathizer. In that context, in many eyes nominating Scott to such a position is a lot like nominating an ex-slave to promote the positions of the slavers.

But the problem with Scott being in the Senate is not merely, or even primarily, about race. Rather, it's about the unwillingness to address ideological diversity -- or, more accurately, the lack thereof -- in the party.

Since the 1980s, when the political right began to take firm control of the former "party of Lincoln," it has systematically pushed out "apostates" who dared to deviate from its ideological line. Even after it took unexpected losses, especially in the Senate where tea-party adherents ended up being crushed at the polls, last month, it still remains committed to the death to the principles of "less government." (In practice, however, only for themselves.)

Such an unyielding stance was bound to cost it politically because it willfully, and in some cases deliberately, alienates much of the electorate, as evidence by last month's election. Trouble is that it doesn't get that, always blaming its defeat on "political correctness," hostile media or a lack of understanding of its views, nor does it talk or listen to anyone else.

Some have said that the Republican Party will soon become a relic of history à la the Whigs, which it eventually replaced. That may be overstating things a bit, considering that it still remains strong in the South and rural America, but unless it makes an effort to communicate with the rest of the country it will be relegated to permanent minority status as a whole. And nominating racial minorities to prominent posts won't change that.

No easy answers: We can't just run away

Last week's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. is still very much in the news, if for no other reason than people are trying to figure out how to keep that from happening again. Such things as re-instituting a ban on assault weapons, obliging teachers to be armed and even "returning God" to public schools have been proposed.

What should be obvious to us Christians is that, since we live in a world full of evil, things like this happen and all the security in the world won't change that. However, it isn't obvious because too many of us have a worldly mentality in that we think that we should sail through life without any serious difficulty -- massacres happen only to them.

More to the point, it seems to me that too many believers have forgotten that there is an invisible war going on all around us. We may pay lip service to that from time to time but don't have a handle on its full import, which is why we offer simple political and cultural solutions to what is, ultimately, a spiritual problem.

Which may get you to thinking: If we had a return to Godly principles or even if people had converted to Christianity, could this have been averted? Wrong question. One parent of a victim who had moved to Newtown from the New York City area said they had done so because they thought it was "safer." I don't claim to know the spiritual condition of that parent, but if that person were really following God he or she might not have moved to that town in the first place. (Recall in Genesis that Lot had moved to Sodom because it was a wealthy place and he thought he could make money there.)

Indeed, I've noticed that the majority of these recent massacres since Columbine High School in 1999 have taken place in "safe," upper-middle-class areas, not the 'hoods that are considered cisterns for violence. That was even the case here in Pittsburgh, which saw two in 2009, with one young man mowing down three city policeman in April and a middle-aged man spraying gunfire at during a women's fitness class at a suburban shopping mall in August.

I think it would be more appropriate to focus not on the actual tragedy but the aftermath of such -- what God does in response. Most of us have experienced bad situations where He in His perfect timing had to intervene and did. As John Eldredge once said, "God loves to come through." So while we wait and grieve with those who have suffered loss and violence, we also know that God will come out of it.

That can't happen, however, if we try to escape it.

A new strategy to fight abortion

It appears that, at least for now but perhaps permanently, the fight to restrict legal abortion has finally been lost.  Many of us who want to see it banned once again pinned our hopes on a Republican winning the presidency and the Senate but saw them dashed earlier this month, with President Obama decisively winning another term and Democratic representation in the upper chamber increasing.

One thing that was clear to me years ago and I hope others eventually understand:  From the start we've pursued a flawed strategy, which will have to change if we're to make any headway.  Bottom line, today we need to be focused on a "consistent life" approach rather than just focus on ending legal abortion.

Our original mistake was to allow abortion to be deliberately uncoupled from issues of poverty, racism and other forms of social injustice when some of the organizations we supported adopted abortion as its primary moral crusade.  That had the effect of forcing people to choose between supporting candidates who were "pro-life" but failed to address those other issues, leading to massive internal conflict.  (It's how the overwhelmingly anti-abortion African-American community ends up voting much of the time for pro-choice political candidates, such as Barack Obama.)  That's why we end up being accused of "having a love affair with the fetus," as former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders said about two decades ago.

We also didn't focus very much, if at all, upon the bad relationships between men and women that cause unwanted pregnancy in the first place -- and I don't necessarily mean between a couple, either.  Probably most of the girls who get pregnant in the first place, as well as their mothers, have bad relationships with significant men, often their fathers, and are looking for warmth and nurturing.  What causes those?  Well, way too many factors to say.

Then you had the two Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate who made inappropriate comments about pregnancy and rape, one wrongly suggesting that a woman's body can shake that off and the other saying that pregnancy from rape "is a gift from God."  (On a theological level that may be true, but it's simply not kosher for a politician to say that.)  Both ended up being crushed at the polls after leading their respective races.

I think that, if the anti-abortion movement wants to be viable, it ought to leave the conservative movement and the Republican Party altogether.  Well, isn't the GOP the "party of life?"  Oh, no, it isn't.  Remember that the vast majority of registered Republicans, especially those who aren't Christians, couldn't care less.  (There's a reason you don't see the issue of abortion addressed in conservative secular media.)  Rather, the movement has used the issue to get our votes for the sake of its true agenda:  Political dominance by any means necessary.  But with the GOP on the ropes politically, it's taking us down with it.

Want to be truly "pro-life"?  Then show concern for the environment in which we will have to raise those children.  Air and water pollution, economic injustices, lack of social opportunity -- these things also affect the sanctity of human life.  If we do so we actually might convince others that abortion is indeed a bad thing.

Misplaced worship

A video clip of a recent remark by actor Jamie Foxx referring to "our Lord and Savior Barack Obama" has been burning up Facebook, to predictable outrage from folks who didn't vote for him.  "He's not the savior of anything," they're sneering.  Of course not, and I don't think either Foxx or the audience who cheered that statement truly believes that, either.

Rather, I think that Foxx was trying to make a point -- recall that his adversaries spent the past four years trying to defeat him by whatever means they deemed necessary and in the process focusing on issues that had nothing to with governance.  And even now people are saying "I fear for my country ... " just because Obama was reelected earlier this month despite their aggressive campaign to keep him from a second term.

Foxx's point?  He was saying to the haters, "You ain't boss here."

Going deeper, too many of us Christians who lean conservative have convinced ourselves that adhering to that agenda was key to our nation's economic and spiritual prosperity when the Scripture doesn't even come close to saying that.  Worse, we have our own demigod, Ronald Reagan, to justify our nostalgia kick, never mind that he paid only lip service to the "culture war" and that his economic policies ultimately resulted in disaster.  Remember that he raised Federal taxes many times more often than he cut them, a sign that "supply-side economics" just didn't work, and -- horrors! -- even cut deals with Democrats.

To this day many Republicans say when they find themselves in a quandary, "What would Ronnie do?", never mind that it was Reagan himself, not the ideology he championed, that was popular.

But we also have become idolatrous in believing that the removal of the folks we consider God's "enemies" (read:  liberals and Democrats) would be efficacious to God's intent.  That we were unable to dislodge Obama and, before him, Bill Clinton from their places of power should give us pause.  But I doubt that it will.

And that's the message that Foxx was trying to deliver.  It's not that Jesus was on his side -- He wasn't on ours, either.

A call for repentance

The 2012 general election proved to be a disaster for Christian culture warriors.  Not only did President Obama, whom they bitterly opposed, win another term but Democrats also picked up seats in the U.S. Senate and -- more ominously -- voters in three more states approved referenda allowing same-gender matrimony.  As can be expected, some of them have called on the nation to repent.

They, however, forget one thing:  Judgment always begins with the household of God -- that is, with His Body, the church.  And before it calls on the nation to repent of its sins, it needs to get its own house in order.  It is my conviction that its failure to address its own sins at least indirectly caused the situation about which they're complaining today.

Let's go through the Ten Commandments to show you what I'm talking about.

1) "You shall have no other gods before Me."  But look at just how many folks have made politics into a god, with folks making statements that God would judge us because we didn't outlaw abortion or send gays back into the closet.  Anyway, there is one thing that God will judge us for -- and (surprise, surprise) it's not those big two.  (I'll get to that later.)

3)  "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God."  So how do we place His name on policies that He never endorsed, even implicitly?

7)  "You shall not steal."  That also includes hope for the poor, which I'll also deal with down the road.

9)  "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."  If you haven't heard, the gossip about President Obama counts as such.  No, he's not a Muslim or a socialist -- the true socialists will tell you that he's certainly not that -- and he was born in this country.

To their credit, the majority of evangelical churches keep their pulpits politics-free and are not participating in the hand-wringing I referred to earlier.  Now, this is not the same as avoiding political issues -- last month the pastor of my church preached a series on homosexuality -- but he never intended it to divide people in that way.  The problem with the culture war is that every victory represents gloating and every defeat means depression ("What's going to happen to us?"); however, that speaks to a lack of trust in God to preserve His people.

The primary criterion on which God does judge is -- wait for it -- how nations treat the powerless, and that's where the church has definitely fallen short.  For the past three decades many conservative Christians have pursued a corporate-friendly ideology that has had the effect of damaging the economic and political prospects of those of lesser means, never mind that the Old Testament prophets denounced unjust economic systems; I see nothing in the Bible that suggests that following Christ means that you have to oppose, say, labor unions.  Even with Sodom and Gomorrah, God took them out primarily because of how their citizens neglected the poor; the sexual perversion came out of that (Ezekiel 16-49 and 50).  And it seemed that Lot, nephew of Abraham, even moved there because he saw it as a place where he felt he could make money.

Going farther, while many of us actually talk about caring for them, the best thing that can be done for them is to give them the dignity, opportunity and power to make their own choices.  But that also includes voting, and it's an open secret that, over the past couple of years, Republican-dominated legislatures passed voter-ID laws (many struck down or, here in Pennsylvania, delayed) ostensibly to keep them from voting again for Obama -- and, perhaps more telling, against them (their often-transient lifestyles lead to the lack of ID).  However, I can't think of any Christian leader who spoke out against the true intent of such laws -- did they really believe the spin that they were needed to combat fraud (which in practice is virtually non-existent)?

Which leads to another issue:  Why aren't we concerned about the rights of others?  I still haven't forgotten that many of the opponents of the civil-rights movement were conservative Christians -- perhaps even then they feared the loss of their privileged status -- and the words of Martin Luther King Jr., in their proper context, would still convict them today.  They've over the years tried to sanitize him, his "I Have a Dream" speech supposedly declaring color-blindness when he meant nothing of the sort and insisting that he was a Republican partisan (not in 1964 he wasn't).

Bottom line, we in the church need to repent of one thing:  Selfishness based on idolatry.  We need to remember that whatever we have -- a house, a car, money in the bank, the social status that come from them etc. -- are but gifts from God and still belong to Him to be used for His purposes.  It seems to be that, for some of us, government exists only to protect "my status and my stuff," and that has to change before God can move the way we want Him to (and in the way He Himself desires).