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I Live in Two Worlds
I live in two worlds. Two worlds I wish could be one. Two worlds that desperately need each other.
I am speaking of the Church and the pro-life movement.
While exceptions do exist, the Church mostly distances itself from the pro-life movement. You would be hard pressed to find a congregation committed to educating their members about the horrors of abortion and training them to be ambassadors for the unborn.
This divorce often revolves around a fundamental disagreement on the nature and role of the Church and how it should relate to culture. (Please understand I will be speaking generally here since no evaluation of the Church on this issue could be comprehensive.) The Church often says its primary goal is to proclaim the gospel and make disciples. This means that the pro-life movement is often thought of as a “side issue” and a distraction from the Great Commission.
“Only God can Change Hearts. Just Focus on Evangelism.”
And so we reach the purpose of this article – to address the argument many churches and Christians use as a critique of the pro-life movement:
Only God can change hearts, so don’t waste time on pro-life activism. Just focus on evangelism and leading people to Jesus, and their hearts will change on the abortion issue. That’s how we should fight abortion.
This argument has at least five major flaws.
1) Evangelism and proclaiming the gospel verbally isn’t the only role of the Church. The Church is also commanded to love its neighbors.
Christian author and apologist Randy Alcorn writes,
I appeal to you to come to grips with the fact that loving God cannot be separated from loving our neighbor (Matthew 22:34-40). To a man who wished to define ‘neighbor’ in a way that excluded certain groups of needy people, Christ presented the Good Samaritan as a model for our behavior (Luke 10:25-37). He went out of his way to help the man lying in the ditch. In contrast, the religious hypocrites looked the other way because they had more ‘spiritual’ things to do (Alcorn, Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments, 299).
Instead of bandaging the bleeding victim’s wounds, what if the Good Samaritan just leaned over the ditch and began preaching the gospel to him? That may be what the man needed spiritually and eventually, but in the immediate moment, the man needed medical attention.
In the same book, Alcorn reminds us that the Great Commission not only tells us to go and make disciples of all nations, but to also be “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20). Among Jesus’ commandments are “to be compassionate, to take sacrificial action for the weak and needy” (Alcorn 299) and to love our neighbors (which includes the unborn). If we fail in doing this, we sacrifice our witness to the world, which undermines the Great Commission. As Francis Schaeffer said, “If those who claim the name of Christ are not going to be willing to stand up against something as evil as killing a baby, then the world has the right to ask whether Christ is real.”
2) Many people’s minds have been changed on the abortion issue through pro-life activism (including atheists). So either it’s wrong that only God can change hearts or God is in the process of changing people’s hearts on the abortion issue through pro-life advocacy, and therefore committing oneself to abolishing abortion is a worthy cause.
3) The assumption that when one becomes a Christian, they will also become pro-life is not the case.
I have met and conversed with more pro-choice Christians than I ever thought I would, many of whom were a part of the Christian community at Westmont College. The Guttmacher Institute reports that 37% of women obtaining abortions each year in the United States identify themselves as Protestant Christians. So becoming or being a Christian certainly doesn’t guarantee that you’re pro-life and won’t kill your unborn child.
4) “Since only God can change people’s hearts, we should just focus on evangelism.” This type of reasoning is almost only used in regards to the abortion issue and doesn’t suffice.
A Christian who would use this argument against the pro-life movement wouldn’t dare tread so confidently if the issue were sex trafficking or child slavery. Let’s imagine the dialogue: “Since only God can change the hearts of sex traffickers, we should just pray for them and tell them about Jesus.”
Traffickers certainly need Jesus, but it doesn’t follow that we should abandon the cause of rescuing young girls from this evil. We should seek to tell the traffickers about the salvation found in Jesus, but if we did only that, we’d be abandoning the many girls who would continue being enslaved by their “bosses” on whom the gospel fell on deaf ears.
Sex trafficking is a systemic injustice that has enjoyed far too much heinous success, while remaining illegal. Abortion, on the other hand, is legal and enjoys an enormous amount of cultural support. If we wouldn’t dare say that the only legitimate and Christian way to oppose and fight against sex trafficking is to tell people about Jesus, then why would we use such reasoning against a far more accepted and culturally embedded injustice such as abortion?
5) The false dichotomy of choosing between pro-life work and evangelism is deceptive and functionally denies God’s sovereignty in all areas of life – in this case, the pro-lifers work of abolition. Pro-life activism often leads to many different opportunities to share the love of Christ, both in word and deed.
Pro-life apologists who speak to large groups of people comprised of Christians and unbelievers often have fruitful follow-up conversations that lead to discussions about Christ and the gospel. Those who work at Pregnancy Care Clinics have regular, daily opportunities to share Christ’s love with women who they would otherwise never have an opportunity to talk to. Catholics and Christians who stand outside abortion clinics praying, handing out pamphlets, and speaking to abortion-minded women all have opportunities to spread Christ’s love and convince women that they (along with their unborn child) are wanted by the Lord. Families who open up their homes to struggling pregnant women have amazing opportunities to live out the gospel and love these women in a unique Christ-like way.
Acts such as these often speak more powerfully than words ever could.
Let Us be United
I don’t believe that Christians who have used this argument (that only God can change hearts, so pro-life activism is a waste of time) are malicious or evil. Rather, they need to open their eyes to reconsider the role of the Church and the demonic nature of abortion. Gregg Cunningham once said that, “Satan would kill God if he could, but he can’t; so he kills babies because he knows it grieves the heart of God.”
Abortion is a spiritual issue and requires a Christian response, which must come from the Church of Christ.
Let us stop hiding behind the veil of “evangelism” and come into our calling of the Great Commission, which must include the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27). Let us restore the divorce between the Church and the pro-life movement. In becoming one, let us commit to listening, helping, and refining one another for the sake of the gospel and the millions of unborn children who have been and will be slaughtered through legalized abortion if we continue our familial bickers. And above all, may the Lord give us His eyes to see abortion as He does and His heart to be burdened as He is.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
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