Guest Post by Samuel Parkison
As I write this, it is mid-morning in the Middle East. I am looking over a balcony at the ocean, with the Arabian Gulf just a two-minute walk across the street, getting used to the sights and smells and tastes (and heat) of my family’s new home. Some of you know that for the better part of the past year, we have been working to move here for a career transition of sorts. I have come here to be a professor of theology at the first ever evangelical seminary in the Arabian Peninsula. There will be other occasions for me to share more about this particular venture; I’m simply pointing out that this is my new home. I am, geographically speaking, about the furthest away from the United States as I can be. And yet, never have I felt more of a bond with my “kinsmen according to the flesh” (cf., Rom 9:1-2), my fellow Americans, than last night while walking around a giant mall in the UAE when I received a notification on my phone that the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Gratitude for God’s Mercy
The news stopped me dead in my tracks. My knees got weak, I felt woozy and had to sit down to concentrate just to keep the tears from coming out. So much gratitude. I never thought I would see this day. Of course, I have prayed for it. Hoped for it. Spoken and written about the need for it. But even when the now infamous draft-leak of Justice Alito’s opinion filled me with great hope, I confess it was difficult to keep my cynicism at bay. I have learned to brace myself for disappointment. But last night was real. So, while I am settling into my new home in the Middle East, I continue to rejoice with my countrymen.
No matter how you cut it, yesterday was a win for justice, which means it was a win for America, a people who have been incurring a mind-boggling amount of blood-guilt since 1973. We have been polluting the land with our wickedness and have been begging for the wrath of God Almighty. Think I’m exaggerating? Listen to how Psalm 106 describes child-sacrifice:
[Israel] served [pagan nations’] idols,which became a snare to them.
They sacrificed their sons
and their daughters to the demons;
they poured out innocent blood,
the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
and the land was polluted with blood.
Thus they became unclean by their acts,
and played the whore in their deeds. (Psalm 106:36-39)
The blood of innocent children idolatrously sacrificed in demon-worship (which, I would remind you, does not require the conscious awareness of its worshipers for it to qualify as demon-worship, per 1 Cor. 10:20), pollutes the land. My beloved nation has been doing this very thing on a nation-wide scale since 1973, with the body count of some 67 million deaths. The blood of our innocent has been crying out from the earth, calling for the just wrath of God which makes yesterday so great a mercy I can hardly bear it. What do we deserve? We deserve for God’s holiness to be vindicated by a swift and decisive judgment. We deserve to be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah. We deserve to be decimated like Egypt was when God delivered Israel from captivity. We deserve for our walls to crumble like Jericho. And yet, what did we receive yesterday? Mercy. An invitation to repent.
Reactions from the Opposition
Now, as a reminder, we should keep in mind how modest of a ruling came down yesterday. This is important because I have seen a lot of curious reactions. There are two general reactions I want to call attention to here.
Reaction One: “You Aren’t Really Pro-Life Because You Don’t Care for the Vulnerable”
This reaction is represented in the memes and tweets that effectively deride pro-lifers like myself for not really caring about the babies, because if we did we would put our money where our mouths are, stop being so fiscally conservative, and get on board with big government policies that support women in need with medical care, adoption, foster care, etc. My favorite taunt along these lines is, “If you really care about the babies, would you support mandatory child-support for the fathers in every situation? Huh?” To which I reply with a hearty, “Yes! Absolutely! I am pro-expecting fathers to take responsibility for their offspring!”
To the challenge for pro-lifers to support the care of those in our society who are in desperate need of help, I simply agree. The question is, what is the best method for taking care of those in need in our society? My skepticism that big-government policies are the solution for taking care of the needy and vulnerable in our society does not come from my penny-pinching conservativism, it comes from the conviction that the government is intrinsically incompetent to do that work. I say “intrinsically” to emphasize that this is not a deficiency on the government’s part. That’s not what the government is supposed to do, and so it should not be surprising that it’s bad at it.
But even if you disagree with that position, we should point out that it is not as if pro-lifers have been neglecting care for the needy and vulnerable in our society. We have been accepting the challenge to care “holistically” with our dollars and time for decades. On every meaningful metric, it is the religious and pro-life demographics that are the most generous with their time and resources to non-profit organizations that do the work of caring for the orphan and widow without compulsion from their neighbors or government. This is the demographic overwhelmingly represented in foster care and adoption. This is the demographic that starts and funds and operates crisis pregnancy centers whose agenda are not simply to “end abortion,” but rather to care for families in general and needy and vulnerable mothers in particular. However, even if that were not the case, this reaction is a poor argument in favor of abortion. In my recent book, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ, I interact briefly with this line of thinking. Here’s an excerpt from that section:
Let it be known that there is no necessary social prerequisite for getting to speak out against abortion. We should decisively put to death that foolish notion that says before objecting to murdering babies under the banner of “pro-life,” one must satisfactorily establish “pro-life” status by being on the forefront of orphan care, adoption, refugee ministries, homeless ministries, etc. These things are clearly consistent with being “pro-life,” but the increasingly common dichotomy of “pro-life” vs. “pro-birth” should be laughed out of the room. How, pray tell, is it possible to be “pro-life” without first being “pro-birth?”
This is a smokescreen, and to put the matter plainly, Christians who play along are suckers. The goal-post will always change for what constitutes as caring for enough issues to get to care about abortion. Hating “baby-hacking” requires no credentials, especially if those credentials are handed out by those who have no objection to “baby-hacking.” Frankly, I’m quite sure I do not want the approval of such individuals anyway. They can keep it.[1]
Reaction Two: “The Government Has No Right to Control the Bodies of Women“
This reaction seems to assume that what happened on June 24 is the making of a law to illegalize all abortion. But the Supreme Court did not outlaw abortion. All they did was deny that it was a “constitutional right,” which means that if a state chooses to enact legislation that prohibits abortion, that state is not being unconstitutional in doing so. States are not infringing on constitutionally recognized rights by enacting pro-life legislation.
Now, I actually do think abortion should be nationally prohibited, and not only for moral and theological reasons. There is a strong legal argument for the abolition of all abortion on the grounds of, at least, the 14th amendment (this has bearing on the “my body, my choice” argument. Abortion is not merely about a pregnant woman’s body, but also the body of her infant). But the point is that yesterday’s ruling did not force any state to stop performing abortions.
So, think about the mindset that lies behind, for example, protestors in California marching the streets with signs demanding the right to abortion. What exactly are they mad about? What are they protesting? They are mad about the fact that not every state must make abortion legal. That the citizens of a state like Oklahoma maintains the right to elect the representatives they want to reflect their values, which includes a high value for the unborn, is intolerable for these protestors. They do not want Oklahomans to have the ability to establish representatives who will establish and elect those laws. Protestors in California have lost literally nothing by way of “ability.” Their state has enshrined abortion with legislation in anticipation of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. But they are so passionate about mothers having the “right” to kill their pre-born babies that they are protesting other states having the ability to prohibit pre-born-baby-killing. Their own state protecting their ability to kill their babies isn’t enough: they demand that every state everywhere be obligated to do the same. Such a response, frankly, is madness.
Behind the Veil: What’s Really Going On
As a Christian theologian, I have to also point out that this is not only irrational, it is demonic. I’m not calling people on the other side of this issue demons, mind you. No, they are not demons or sub-humans, they are image-bearers of God himself, having more dignity and worth, and value than they themselves could possibly imagine. I am saying, rather, that the spirit that possesses a group to take to the streets in angry opposition to the verdict, “baby-killing is not a constitutional right,” is not a spirit of love and goodness and justice, but rather a spirit that arises from the domain of darkness (cf., Col 1:13). I am quite certain that most of the individuals vehemently opposed to yesterday’s ruling “do not know what spirit they are of,” but that does not make their clamor for abortion any less demonic. The crowd that boils over with rage over the prospect of mothers losing the ability to kill their children is possessed by a dark mindset indeed. What we see (and will continue to see in the coming days) with violent threats and attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers is the removing of the veil. The veneer of love and gentleness and justice is being peeled back and the darkness of the culture of death is showing its true colors. It is losing all motivation to be seen as loving and is perfectly content with showing its rage.
Still, I can’t help but suspect that many of the most passionate men and women clamoring for more death are driven by shame and guilt. They shout for abortion as an effort to shout down their own consciences. They have the blood of abortion on their own hands, they know it deep down, and they wish to silence that part of them that accuses. So they stop their ears and cry out that the evil they participated in is “good,” and the good that would have protected their children from execution is “evil.” Rather than applying the balm of grace to their sinful self-inflicted wound, they ignore the wound and try to convince themselves that there is no sin to repent of. They may be throwing rocks at the windows of crisis pregnancy centers, but they are aiming at that part of their souls that knows what evil they have committed. To those, I would simply say, “Give up trying to silence your conscience. It won’t work. You know what you have done. So go ahead and let your conscience speak. Let it call the sin, sin. Then, and only then, will you be in a position to hear a better word, spoken by the blood of Christ. He does not silence the accusation by pretending like it’s not there, he silences the accusation by answering it with his own blood. He does not invite you to ignore your sin. He invites you to let him deal with it in a decisive way. You are not beyond redemption and forgiveness and healing. But it is only those who know themselves to be sick who will seek out a Doctor. So, seek him out; he is not far.”
Concluding Prayers
What now? Well for starters, we should unflinchingly celebrate this surprising mercy that God has shown us. We should praise God that at least some states in this country will slow down on racking up the unfathomable debt of blood-guilt they have been incurring since 1973. We should praise God for the lives that this will save. We should thank God for the gift of sacrificial saints who have worked tirelessly for decades to see this ground made (while many of us cynically doubted that their efforts would succeed). We should thank them for their faithful endurance, and say, “You were right; God bless you and your longsuffering work!” We should thank God for the common grace of a justice system that does some good (even if it is imperfect).
And we should pray for revival. We should pray that our culture of death would disintegrate and that righteousness be established. We should pray that the hearts of those possessed by the spirit of rage and bloodthirstiness would be turned. We should pray that such individuals would have ears to hear their cries for death afresh, and that they would be shocked by the revelation of what their own voice sounds like; shocked into repentance. We should pray that they receive the cleansing blood of Christ for the forgiveness of their sins (both the sin of abortion and the sin of celebrating abortion). We should pray that God would hallow his name, and make his Kingdom come and his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.
He could do it, you know.
Don’t forget that Nineveh was converted with a five-word sermon. I can’t think of a better invitation to pray for big things like this than the (previously) unthinkable reversal of Roe v. Wade.
[1] Samuel G. Parkison, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ (H&E Publishing, 2022), 105.
*The image for this post is a depiction of Pharaoh demanding the death of Hebrew babies in Exodus 1. It seemed fitting.
Samuel Parkison received his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from @MBTS). He is the Associate Professor of Theology (Gulf Theological Seminary in the UAE). You can find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/samuel_parkison
