Deception In The Ranks Of Abortion Protestors

Sorry, abortion protestors. When you’re standing in the fire of public ridicule, law suits, or police intimidation, I don’t think the barely visible person standing with you is the appearance of divine presence as enjoyed by Daniel’s friends, Shadrach, Meshak, and Abendigo. More than likely, it’s the one who appears as an angel of light to deceive – to deceive you.

These are fighting words, I know. But, if theologically conservative Christians care about reflecting the heart of God to our society, we must confront ourselves with truth that will likely, at first, anger us, only then to transform us into effective witnesses to Truth.

If God’s self revelation reached its zenith in Jesus Christ, then we must admit that his priority is not to merely prevent abortion, but to rescue all lost humanity. No true Christ-follower can go about ridding the world of abortion in a way that hinders the “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16) and “He does not want anyone to be destroyed” (2 Peter 3:9) mission.

To rescue an unborn child in a way that hardens the mother’s heart to Christ is both un-Christ-like and contrary to God’s redeeming passion for the world. When you do this, you fall into trap of the Deceiver! The God who showed himself in Christ must ache when you picket the homes of abortion providers and directors and employees of women’s centers. You have so successfully projected what Christians, especially Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, are against onto the consciousness of this nation, that the average person on the street hardly understands the holy and transformative love that dominated Jesus’ life and ministry, and compelled him to the cross.
Yes, the child in that mother’s womb is important to God, from conception forward. Why else would God himself (in the second person of the Trinity) come into the world beginning with 9 months of gestation in Mary’s womb?

That said, the 50-million aborted babies since Roe v Wade have received no greater love from the Heavenly Father than far greater number of infant to 5-years olds who have died from preventable diseases in the world during the same period.

Consider these statistics from UNICEF as reported in the British medical journal, Lancet. Worldwide child mortality rates dropped about 2.5% annually from 1960 to 1990. From 1990 to the present, rates of decline have slowed (!) to about 1.1% annually. Even with these declines, death still visits over 10 million children under 5 years old every year! The highest rates of death are on the continent of Africa while, due to population size (1 billion) the largest number of child deaths occurred in India.


If you read the previous paragraph you know that 10 million childhood deaths reflect the lowest rate if deaths since 1960! So do some conservative math. Arbitrarily cut that number to 5 million. Multiplied by 35 years (since Roe v Wade) the math results in 175 million deaths. The majority of these deaths are caused by solvable issues like unsafe water and sanitation, and lack of vaccines. Let’s assume the bare minimum majority, 87.51 million deaths.

Do not be deceived. If conservative Christians had invested the same entrepreneurial energy in preventing early childhood death in the world as we have in the anti-abortion campaign, we would have saved as many or more birthed children from death as we have unborn children, and that despite international hurdles! There is no way to prove this, of course, but I cannot imagine it not to be true.

Are we, are you really interested in saving children?

More important, I believe caring for impoverished birthed children at home and abroad, while speaking the truth about God’s value of children in the womb, would very possibly have prevented much of the contentious cultural warfare that divides the nation today and hardens so many against a “we’re against it” kind of Christianity. I suspect, the same Deceiver who tricked Peter into opposing Jesus’ talk of death (Mark 8:33), has also used the anti-abortion movement to hinder his disciple-making mission in America.

Think about it. The so-called culture war really took off with the creation of the Moral Majority. The major impetus for its creation was what? Abortion. This single issue has done more to polarize the nation and set verbal, and sometimes, physical fists flailing than any other issue since 1980.

Lest you forget, most of our mamma’s lectured us about how many it takes to tangle. If conservative Christians had taken the Roe v Wade decision as a clarion call to get passionate about birthed children around the globe, and had we gotten passionate about making sure health care, living-wage jobs, and quality education is as abundantly available in the inner city as it is suburbs, and had we offered the proverbial cup of cold water in Jesus’ name; tell me the cause of disciple-making would not be further ahead today!

We can’t undo the damage Roman Catholics and Evangelicals (my religious group) have perpetrated in the past 28 years. Still, we could start making some small, yet significant, changes now. Like what?

• Attitudes changed from seeing abortion providers as enemies to persons loved by God.

• Protests outside clinics changed to coffee, donut and cookie kiosks. “Here, enjoy a little refreshment. You’ve got a tough day. Wish you’d make a different decision, but whatever you decide, you can count on our love.” And on the way out, after the abortion, “Care for another cup or a cookie?” And the signs? Let’s start with the slogan, “You are valuable beyond what you can know!”

• Stop giving to anti-abortion organizations and shift that money to organizations like World Hope, World Vision, and CareNet pregnancy centers.

• Elect leaders you believe will best help America’s poor and poorly educated (these are those among whom the greatest number of abortions occur!). Then get involved in ministry to them yourself.

Are we, are you really interested in fulfilling the Great Commission (to make disciples of every nation – literally “ethnic group”) in the spirit of the Great Commandment (Love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself)!?

Christian Men Confront Two Codes

This column appeared in the Morning Call in 2006 and won the Amy Outstanding Merit Award. I think it's worth a reread now and again.

I enjoyed reading the bestseller, “The Da Vinci Code” and anticipate seeing the movie. It’s a thriller with action from the first pages and intrigue until the last. It was hard to put down. However, the further I read the more I felt God using Dan Brown to confront me and my fellow professing Christian men.

This fanciful tale celebrates goddess worship. Brown fictionally charges the Roman Catholic Church of suppressing evidence that Jesus believed in and practiced goddess worship by marrying Mary Magdalene. The church’s motive? To help men dominate women.

Brown rightly reports that religions more ancient than Christianity worshiped goddesses alongside gods. In fact, often ancient Israelites worshiped the goddess Asherah which included sacred male and female prostitution even though God strictly forbade it (Exodus 34:10-17). Sadly, Brown reverses historical truth. Where clans and cultures substituted worship of created male and female idols for worship of the invisible Creator God, their worship reinforced repression and abuse of women rather than freeing them to enjoy a mutual relationship with men.

The Old Testament reveals a God who, in this repressive context, began the long process of lifting woman to the position of equal dignity and rights he originally intended. The ancient goddess worshiping cultures defined women as property. Husbands “kept” them to produce sons. Reproductive success defined their self worth. Goddess worshiping men used them to act out, in ritual intercourse, their hopes that the gods would make their farms fertile. Reading the Mosaic Law against this backdrop, I cannot help but see many ways God began to restore women to the mutual status that pagan religion denied. Not the least of which was to forbid ritual prostitution!

Then came Jesus. He elevated women even further. Rather than seeing them as objects of sex, even ‘sacred’ sex, he insisted on viewing them above their shoulders and deeper than their skin. The New Testament speaks of women prophets and of a woman apostle. Paul, often misunderstood, wrote “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Both are exalted, equally reflecting the Creator’s glory.

Confession. Christian men have often failed to live up to the Creator’s ideal for us. We often misinterpret biblical texts to keep women “in there place.” We often expect women to serve our wants in marriage. And, if Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker are right in “Every Man’s Battle,” most, if not all of us face temptation to view woman as sexual objects. The further I raced through Brown’s novel the more I felt confronted with a reality I didn’t fully appreciate in the past.

At best, every temptation to use women for my own purposes puts me in league with the goddess worshipers in “The DaVinci Code.” At worst, such temptation also tempts me to abandon my commitment to the God of the Bible and his relationship Code. In the words of the Old Testament prophets, I prostitute myself in goddess worship.

Goddess worship exerts its powerful attraction just as much on men today as it did for ancient men. I believe it expresses itself in seeking multiple sexual partners in order to meet one’s own needs. Enjoying pornography turns women into used objects as much as Dan Brown’s curator of the Louvre turned an unnamed woman into an object in a basement sacred sexual ritual.

Rather than creating a wonderful harmony between male and female, a so called yin and yang relationship, goddess worship acts like poisonous gas seeping into our lives, slowly eating away at our ability to experience true and lasting harmony between equal and highly valued persons. Husbands grow dissatisfied with a wife’s body because it is less than physically perfect, too boring and familiar or not functioning the way we imagine it should. The honeyed voice of goddess worship betrays “till death do us part.”

The Bible begins with Adam and Eve setting themselves up to be their own gods. Looking back, the New Testament observes that consequently people exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped created things instead of the Creator. Broken, empty and oppressive relationships with women give witness to the lie that many professing Christian men live.

“The DaVinci Code” is many things. An engrossing read. Bad history. For me, as a professing Christian man, it has also become a powerful reminder that I cannot divorce my sexuality from my loyalty to the God of the Bible and his righteous Code. To view women and to physically interact with them, including my wife, in any other way than God reveals in the Bible, is tantamount to abandoning God for a goddess. In effect, I become a practicing pagan rather than the Christian man I profess to be.

Thanks, Dan Brown, you’ve helped to strengthen my faithfulness to God — and my wife.

A Jekyll And Hyde Christmas

I am schizophrenic every Christmas. And I am determined to stay this way. No medications accepted! In fact I cannot think of a healthier way to celebrate Christ’s birth.

Christmas excites joyful anticipation every year in me. And it should.

That God would love a sinner such as I so much that he would come into my world to make a way for a personal relationship with God, well, “how wonderful a love like this!” Now that’s a perfect gift.

I am ecstatic that God isn’t Santa who checks his “Naughty and Nice” list twice to determine who gets the lump of coal instead of a precious gift. God knows I have been naughty! I don’t deserve anything good from him. Yet by his grace I have been saved rather than by my own merit. “Joy to the world!” Pull out all the organ stops and let the sound reverberate until the Christmas Eve crowd can’t stand the volume. Then quietly sing “Silent Night” as candlelight spreads through the congregation and we bask in the glow of the spreading hope Jesus brought with him.

Sometime during the preparation season of Advent, something usually stirs in my spirit, like a strange chemical reaction. It transforms a joyous man into a brooding one. Dr. Jekkyll becomes Mr. Hyde. The potion that produces the unpleasant change? It spills from the pages of Matthew and Luke.

There is a dark side to Christmas that we fail to celebrate at great risk to the experience of God’s work in us and in the world. So I welcome Mr. Hyde and celebrate an unsung and little recognized triad of Christmas qualities.

Christmas exalts personal sacrifice and loss. Yes, Jesus left heaven, not considering equality with God something to be grasped. But he did not accomplish this great humiliation except through Mary’s own significant loss. Lost dreams of what life would hold for her and Joseph. Lost respect from neighbors who knew better than to believe a teenager claiming to be pregnant and a virgin. We could discuss Joseph’s losses when he agreed to proceed with the marriage. And what of the losses to both sets of parents?

Very often God only accomplishes his work in the world through the willing sacrifice and personal loss of devoted people. No carol celebrates this holy calling of sacrifice. Yet we must celebrate it. Emanuel came not to fulfill our dreams but his. Without this realization Christmas becomes only another occasion for self-amusement or self-pity. Christmas can become a time when we ask ourselves, “Is my Christian life all about me or all about God?”

Christmas, fully told, heaps suffering onto sacrifice. Imagine Mary’s late term donkey ride to Bethlehem and her giving birth attended by sheep and rodents. Now imagine the agony Bethlehem’s parents soon suffered at King Herod’s hand. The Magi visit and the presence of an infant king precipitated the slaughter of their youngest sons. Then came the difficult refugee years in Egypt.

A fellowship rooted in suffering describes the first Christmas context. All year Christians seek God for the elimination of suffering. And we should. It’s biblical. Yet, Christmas offers a time to celebrate the fellowship of suffering that comes to God’s people. Here is wonderful opportunity to meditate on the value of suffering, even its necessity to God’s Kingdom. Paul claimed a desire to “know…the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.” Christmas is an ideal time to ask “What suffering do you need me to experience in order to advance your Kingdom plans?”

Who has not experienced the connection between loss and suffering, and vulnerability? Who of us has not built strong defenses even offenses as a result? We work hard to become invulnerable as persons and as groups.

Christmas flies in the opposite direction. Here an all-powerful God nurses in total vulnerability at Mary’s milky breast. Martin Luther reminded us that we have not begun to grasp the mystery of the incarnation until we have bent close enough to the manger to smell Jesus’ dirty diapers. And God chooses to enter the world through two vulnerable nobodies who must flee to Egypt for their lives.

Dare we celebrate vulnerability at Christmas? What assumptions might the Spirit of Christ begin to unravel if we shift from operating out of strong defenses to risky vulnerability? Dare we celebrate a God who hangs on a breast?

I don’t like my Mr. Hyde Christmas. But I need it. I need the whole truth. Even when I don’t fully understand it or know how to practice it, I need to celebrate it. Only this way can I open my spirit to God’s Spirit and experience the gradual transformation of my life in his image.