Courier Conversations
This Podcast of Courier Conversations will be a conversation of topics with a variety of guests that concern, inspire and inform Christians about current events Worldwide. We hope you'll find our stories informing and encouraging in your daily walk with Christ.
Courier Conversations
Navigating the Abortion Debate from a Christian Perspective
Is the current abortion debate in America a reflection of the sexual revolution's consequences? Jeff Robinson and Travis Kearns invite you to explore this provocative question as they dive into the ethical and political complexities of abortion from a Christian perspective. Sparking from William McGurn's eye-opening editorial in the Wall Street Journal, we dissect the dramatic shift from a predominantly pro-life stance to a more prevalent pro-choice sentiment nationwide. This discussion transcends the typical narratives of women's health care and reproductive justice, focusing instead on the moral responsibilities that accompany sexual activity and the potential creation of human life. We also take a critical look at an opinion piece from Baptist News Global, challenging its scriptural interpretation that suggests Christian support for reproductive justice and abortion access.
In a political landscape increasingly dominated by pro-choice rhetoric, how do Christians navigate their advocacy for the protection of innocent life? This episode delves into the challenges faced by Christians in a predominantly pro-choice environment, emphasizing the importance of political engagement, strategic voting, and unwavering support for pro-life organizations. Join us as we underscore the necessity of sharing the gospel message to inspire true spiritual transformation, recognizing that real change begins with the heart. Despite the daunting reality of being the minority, we discuss the imperative of standing firm in our beliefs, advocating for truth, and remaining a vocal force in the quest to protect life.
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Welcome to the latest episode of Courier Conversations. I am Jeff Robinson, President and Editor-in-Chief here at the Baptist Courier, and with me is my co-host, Travis Kearns. And Travis, tell them again who you are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, travis Kearns, I'm the Associational Mission Strategist for the Three Rivers Baptist Association. I cover northern Greenville County and western Spartanburg County.
Speaker 1:Well, as you hopefully know by now, we are trying out a new format here which we've enjoyed so far immensely, and we're going to really enjoy it this week. We're not going to talk about football. This episode is not about that. It's about something very serious. But I would be remiss, I think, if I didn't mention what's going to happen Saturday in Atlanta, I would be remiss, I think, if I didn't mention what's going to happen Saturday in Atlanta.
Speaker 1:My friend is here decked out in his orange tennis shoes and his orange shirt. You did this just for me, just for you I greatly appreciated that.
Speaker 2:I appreciate your UK blue that you're wearing. That Kentucky blue looks good on you.
Speaker 1:My son's high school team in Kentucky was this blue. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'm no Kentucky fan, but yeah. So we're going to have a kickoff classic in Atlanta this week. I will be privileged to be there, and I guess we'll see if we're speaking next time this episode rolls around.
Speaker 2:I suspect we will. Oh yeah, the game will be over, We'll be fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're probably about 50-50, since we've been friends in terms of Clemson and Georgia winning. And it's more of a fun. Back in the 80s we really hated each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, that was some pretty significant hatred beginning first game every season.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And that's the hatred. Is not you and me, that's Clemson.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was like 12 and you were whatever you were. I don't even think I was born yet. I don't think you were. So we're all going to get into ages and things like that, no, but anyway, we'll look forward to talking about that later. But today we're actually talking about something that's a serious matter. We're going to talk about abortion and the reason we bring this up.
Speaker 1:We're in election season and a very compelling editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week, written by just yesterday actually, william McGurn wrote Confessions of a Pro-Lifer and he raised a good question. It's one that I've just pondered, really privately. I've not written about it or really worked through it with anybody recently, but really the question is are the two parties being where they are? Democrats, of course, being pro-choice, and if anyone saw the DNC, it almost felt like a bloodthirsty revolution. I mean, I don't know that I've ever seen such a celebration of women's health care and a woman's right to choose, all the things that buzzwords are used, and of course, the Republicans who and unfortunately this is no longer part of their platform, it seems.
Speaker 1:And so the question I think before us is what is a Christian to do? What are we to think as pro-life Christians. I mean, do we retreat? Are we in retreat? It seems the nation has embraced abortion, I think what? Maybe a decade ago or so we were still majority pro-life and now at least the polls show that we are not. So that's kind of. I think the question before us today is that is a big, a major question during this political season, and so we approach it from Christian ethics and not so much from politics, right?
Speaker 2:So I think there's a few things that we need to talk about before we actually discuss abortion. A lot of times, we hear about either women's reproductive freedom or reproductive justice, or women's health care. I don't think any of these things are actually what are on the table. This is not about reproductive justice. This is not about reproductive freedom. This is not about women's health care. I have never met a conservative in my life who would say women don't deserve health care. Never met a conservative in my life who would say women don't deserve health care. I've never met anybody in my life who would say that there shouldn't be such thing as reproductive freedom in the way that a number of talking heads in the US are talking about it now. I think this is nothing more, nothing less than the natural outworking of the sexual revolution in the 1960s. This is about sexual freedom and a lack of wanting to take responsibility for one's actions. If we want to talk about reproductive freedom, then the freedom and this is a little crass to say it this way, but the freedom is to go to bed with somebody else or not. It's to keep your pants on or not. That's where the freedom comes in, once the decision is made to go to bed with somebody else if human life is produced based on that relationship. There's no more freedom in this choice. The choice has already been made. So there are no longer two persons involved, now there are three, because I think we would both agree and I think the vast majority of Christians would that a person is fully human from conception. It's not in the womb as something different than outside the womb. So I think these phrases that are used are just little weaslers trying to get people to thinking in terms of something nicer than what we're really talking about, which is the destruction of innocent human life, the killing of children. In fact, jeff, I sent you this a few days ago. Baptist News Global, on August 25th, released an opinion piece from a writer named Susan Shaw, who's listed as a senior columnist, and the piece is called why Christians Should Support Reproductive Justice, including Abortion Access, and she even makes the argument in there that when Scripture talks about God forming actual humans in the womb, that it's not really being a medical textbook. There's no way people back then, she argues, could have known medical terminology or understood what a fetus was or anything like that. A basic hermeneutics class, a first-year seminarian, would understand that this is very poor hermeneutics. And again she's arguing for sexual freedom and freedom from responsibility. So you know you've got people on the left side of Christian faith generally who are arguing we should support abortion, which is absolutely antithetical to scripture and it's just ridiculous. So I think that's important to talk about before we actually jump into what this abortion conversation is.
Speaker 2:When you come to the question of what is a Christian to do, there are a number of options that have been presented, from choosing the lesser of two evils. If you just look at US political elections as a strict two-party system, which we all know, there are more than two parties, but the two major parties the Republican Party, the Democrat Party do you pick the lesser of two evils? We've seen some Southern Baptist scholars argue for choosing a greater good. So it's not a lesser of two evils, but which one can do greater good in the long term. And then some Christians going as far to argue that if you can't find a candidate who supports exactly what you support, then don't support any of them at all. Don't vote for the Republican or the Democrat if one of those two does not support everything you do. So yeah, it's a difficult question to deal with.
Speaker 1:And I think it seems like it's changed in just the last four years. I mean the DNC. You remember the? I think the buzzwords used to be safe, legal and rare.
Speaker 1:Now it seems to be a celebration of reproductive rights, and I didn't watch a lot of the DNC, but every single time I went over there I would sort of check in on it. At night my wife and I would do this. They were talking about abortion and as if this is winning the lottery or something. It was frightening. I mean, it really, really was, and so I do think we've moved. And then the Republican National Convention. They just didn't deal with it, they just run from it. It seems like One celebrates it to a point where it feels bloodthirsty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even at the DNC, Planned Parenthood set up an abortion mobile clinic outside. I don't remember how many they performed, but performed abortions while they were there and they set up an inflatable IUD, an intrauterine device, and they set up an inflatable IUD, an intrauterine device, which many consider to be an abortive device, outside the DNC building where they met there in Detroit or in Chicago, rather Just mortified to see those sorts of things that people in America today would celebrate the death of innocent life like that.
Speaker 1:Well, and these so-called pro-woman forces Right, this is actually anti-woman. If you can look at the, you know you can read. There've been books, lots of books and articles written about this over the years. But the wreckage from the lives of those women who I would call them victims of abortion, of what happened next and what happened after that, and even some who fell into promiscuity. They just felt that their life was not worth anything. They felt the guilt and, not being Christians, they didn't have the guilt dealt with as we do in Christ, and so they had to deal with it in the only way they knew how. And so it's really anti-woman.
Speaker 1:But that's the irony is these people are very pro-woman. Have a pro-woman, a female candidate, all these things. It feels very anti-woman to me. And then you go to conservatives and they're, frankly, not a whole lot better because they're just retreating it seems like in full retreat from it. Of course there's a lie that one side tells that there's going to be a full nationwide ban on abortion. That's not true. They want to throw it back to the states, which is to say we're not going to deal with this because we know it's a loser.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. I've seen some street-level interviews done of people that were at both the RNC and the DNC obviously more at the DNC, but one young lady in particular really struck me. When she was interviewed about abortion she said I want to go get pregnant just so I can have an abortion. I can't fathom that type of mindset. Let me go create a life just so I can take it, just so I can kill it. That's mind-blowing to me. This is a whole new conversation that probably has not been had like this since Nero was burning Christians on poles for light for his circus in the backyard. This is the worship of Molech, absolutely, with taking a venison human life and celebrating it. This is something completely different than we've ever seen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it is as if this is a moral good, right, Right. And, of course, the same discussion. This is connected to the LGBTQ plus whatever you know. Add to all that alphabet soup. It's the same discussion and is connected to the LGBTQ plus whatever you know. Add to all that alphabet soup. It's the same discussion and you hit it. It goes back to the 60s and sexual freedom, because even the freedom to define yourself and it goes even beyond, almost beyond expressive individualism I guess that's what we call it. But it is sexual freedom, every bit of this.
Speaker 1:I mean one of my sons. We were riding somewhere this summer. Earlier I was visiting him in Louisville and he said you know, dad, I've been thinking about this. He'd had to write a paper for college on this and he said this really just comes back down and goes down to who you want to sleep with. And he said it's amazing that our country's divided over that and there's some who are fomenting for this whole slate of rights over that question. And I said no, that's common sense. You're actually thinking of common sense.
Speaker 1:And I saw a cartoon somewhere that said there used to be conservatives and liberals and now there is sense and nonsense. Those are sort of the two sides and it really seems that way now when it comes to abortion and sexuality and gender and these things. Again, I think they're all interconnected in terms of the historic root of our departure from sense when it comes to that discussion. But what I mean is Christians. I mean it feels like we're in full retreat.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think there was a time we could count on one party to be more or less pro-life and I don't think that's the case anymore. I mean, I think there was a time we could count on one party to be more or less pro-life and I don't think that's the case anymore. And again, I really appreciated that actually this William McGurn was pondering this question about what is a Christian to do and what is a pro-lifer to do. But you could sense he had a feeling of beleaguerment in here. You're just beleaguered and because it almost seems like If you want to assert a pro-life agenda then you've lost your mind Right Now in the current culture.
Speaker 2:You've lost your mind. You're against women, you're against health care, you're against freedom, you know. It's interesting, though, that you mentioned the connection between abortion culture and gay and lesbian culture, things like that, and gay and lesbian culture, things like that. Once you start to breach that barrier, there was a professor at Princeton a number of years ago who argued that sex should not even be a problem across the species barrier. So he's arguing for sex with animals, and he's not just talking about this in the classroom. He actually owned a farm and practiced what he taught.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is the natural outworking of again, I think of the 1960s and the sexual revolution, with freedom for everybody, oh, peace and love. You know, no boundaries, which is, to some degree, also part of a platform we see from everybody's favorite demon, george Soros and his open society network, arguing that there should be no borders or boundaries, not just nationally or ethnically, but there should be no borders or boundaries on anybody. It's interesting when and this gets a little bit into politics, but it's just history when Clarence Thomas was going through hearings to be appointed to the US Supreme Court, then Senator Joe Biden asked him what is good law? And Thomas gave an answer, and Biden said. Let me just tell you what I think and know. Good law is Good. Law does not stop us from doing anything we want to do. So when we ascribe moral value to law and call it good, and that it's only good if, and only if, it doesn't stop us from doing whatever we want, we no longer live in a society of laws. We live in an open, free society where people can just do whatever they want. That's genuinely frightening.
Speaker 2:It really is, and for a Christian to look at again assuming you're just going to go with a two-major party decision, to look at both of these parties that we have now that are both on their platforms pro-choice. In fact, a few days ago, one of the two major candidates expressed that he would not sign any type of national ban if it were to come across his desk. Even if Congress passed it overwhelmingly, he would veto it so the states could decide. That's not a party that I grew up in and around and seeing and hearing from. I don't think either party would have said that 40 or 50 years ago from. I don't think either party would have said that 40 or 50 years ago Because, as you mentioned, it was the Bill Clinton type Democrats who argued for safe, legal and rare, and that's not what we see anymore.
Speaker 1:No, I mean again. It almost seems like it's celebrated as a moral good and that's brand new.
Speaker 1:It seems to me it's expressive individualism run amok and the only sin is restraint and calling for any kind of restraint or any kind of restrictions and there's part of me that says, when I read the Bible, we shouldn't be surprised. I mean Genesis 3, it's just taken a long time to get here. And of course we know from Greco-Roman society, medieval, various cultures within medieval times. This isn't the first time we've seen this kind of debauchery and of course things got this way in the days of Noah. So I don't think we should be surprised that humanity wants to throw off all the restraints.
Speaker 1:But, as Christians, do we retreat? Do we say, well, we're going to settle for something less than a call for banning abortion? I mean, I'm for banning abortion. Right, I'll hear them talk about it. See, I'd love to have a national ban on abortion. I would support that in a heartbeat. Yeah, 100% yeah. And so I mean, what do we do? Do we stay the course? Do we go to these abortion clinics and stand outside and try to talk to women who are going inside? Do we stop doing that? What is it? Has anything changed in terms of our view and how we live that out within the church?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this is—now for some. There are some who disagree with me on this, and that's totally fine. I think for the vast majority of Christians, this is an issue of individual liberty of conscience. How far do you go with this? I think the biblical teaching is pretty plain we do everything we can do to stop the taking of innocent life, whether it be in the womb or outside the womb period. We stop and do everything we possibly can to stop the taking of innocent life period. So that means the abolition of abortion, that would mean the abolition of murder, of anything. That's the taking of innocent human life, because humans are the only ones created in God's image in Genesis 1 and 2.
Speaker 2:Do we shrink back from saying anything at all just because two major political parties have decided that either they're going to fully embrace it full-throated or they're going to run away from it and say let somebody else decide? No, we have to keep talking about this. If Christians shrink away, nobody else in society, in American society, is going to bring this up. Nobody is. Secularists aren't going to bring it up. You know Christians are going to bring this up. Historic Orthodox Christians, members of the Roman Catholic Church probably, are going to bring this up and talk about this because they're staunchly pro-life Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, are going to bring this up. They're staunchly pro-life. This is not to say they're Christian. This is simply to say that socially, they're very conservative, and we would agree with them on these particular social issues.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we cannot shrink away. We have to continue talking about this. We have to continue pressing elected officials on this. Agree with them or don't? We have to press them. If they don't hear from us, they're going to hear from the other side. We know that beyond a shadow of any doubt. If they don't hear from us, they're going to think that either we don't care or there's not anybody supporting either the complete abolition of abortion or, at the very least, slowing down of abortion in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 2:We have to keep talking about this. We have to talk about it with elected officials verbally. We have to talk about it with our vote. We have to talk about it with our vote. We have to talk about it with our wallet, because there are plenty of companies we support, either willingly or unwillingly, that are very pro-choice. This is how we do things. We have to do this, and the way to change somebody's mind is not just to scream. The way to change somebody's mind is through the active proclamation, verbal proclamation, of the gospel message of Jesus. The Bible does not support abortion. The Christian church, historically, has never supported abortion. Baptists have never supported abortion historically. We have to proclaim the gospel and hope and pray that the Spirit moves and changes hearts.
Speaker 1:That's right, absolutely Amen to every bit of that. And I think again, we shouldn't be surprised when we're in the minority. Jesus has never been in the majority. Jesus is not going to win the election. No one's going to vote for Jesus and him win the day.
Speaker 1:Sadly, we want to see that happen through changed hearts, so through the new birth. But know that Jesus said we may be persecuted. If they hated me, they're going to hate you, and we stand for truth in an age that doesn't believe that even truth is even possible. Me, they're going to hate you, and we stand for truth in an age that doesn't believe that even truth is even possible. You have your truth, I have my truth. It works for you, this kind of pragmatism. So we should not be surprised. And so I agree, we don't retreat, we continue to hold the line lovingly and we don't get too caught up in whether or not a party we have supported in the past is retreating, because, frankly, I think give it back to the states, give it over to the states, is a cop-out. Yep, I think that's plain and simple, because once you've said that, you really don't have to say anything more about it right Right.
Speaker 1:And they know that's not a winner, not a winning proposition right now, given the polls.
Speaker 2:if you believe the polls and here's the best part about this is, regardless of who wins the election in November, regardless of who controls the country, the kingdom of Christ is not dependent on the United States of America. The kingdom of Christ is dependent on the church. The church is God's plan for the world, not the US, not any other national or ethnic boundary. It's the church. The church will always move forward. Matthew 16, 18 promises that Gatesville will not prevail against the church. The church will always move forward. Matthew 16, 18 promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. Gates of hell might prevail against the US, but that's not going to stop the kingdom of Christ from moving forward.
Speaker 1:No, we will not be the first, or Jesus carries the last kingdom nation to be relegated to the testament of history, and I think that's important for us to remember. As Americans, we're thankful to be Americans, sure, but we're not the new Israel, as some seem to think that's right, or as we can almost give that impression, can't?
Speaker 2:we Right.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 1:I'm very thankful for the freedom we have to worship according to the dictates of our conscience and, of course, we continue to defend those kinds of things as well. Well, the discussion won't end here. Of course, we didn't pretend to solve anything, but we do want to weigh in a bit on this issue. We appreciate your listening to us and we hope that you find our new method of bringing this truth to you pleasing. Just remember to promote us on social media. Give us a five-star review if you're listening to us, If you're listening to us.
Speaker 1:On the Buzzsprout app, you can leave a message. If you have a question, leave that there and we'll do our best in an upcoming episode to answer that. We will drop every month on the last day of the month, and so we're trying to wait for the news cycle as long as we can to get if we're going to weigh in on that. And obviously we're going to wait for the news cycle as long as we can to get, if we're going to weigh in on that. And obviously we're going to do a lot of other things. We'll have authors and we'll be looking at books and things like that, but right now the news cycle is busy and we want to weigh in when it's appropriate in that. Well, Travis, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thanks for listening and we look forward to seeing you next month. We're glad you joined us for Courier Conversations, where we are informing and inspiring South Carolina Baptists and beyond. For more information about these topics and more, subscribe to our e-edition or go to our website at baptistcouriercom. The Courier is located in Greenville, South Carolina. As a multimedia ministry partner of the South Carolina Baptist Convention To comment about today's podcast, email us at conversations at baptistcouriercom. This podcast, produced by Bob Sloan Audio Productions.
