Breakpoint

Post-Roe rhetoric continues to reach new levels of rumor, scare tactics, and red herrings. Take a recent headline from Scientific American, “Abortion Restrictions Could Cause an Ob-Gyn Brain Drain.” The implication is most doctors want to offer abortion so badly, they’ll leave medicine if they can’t.   The truth, however, seems to be the opposite.   The LA Times reported, from a 2019 survey of American OB-GYNs, that “while nearly 3 out of 4 had a patient who wanted to end a pregnancy in the past year, fewer than 1 in 4 were willing and able to perform one themselves.”   For some, the reasons were pragmatic. Many others cited pro-life convictions. As Dr. Donna Harrison of the Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists put it, “We have two patients: both the unborn child and the mother. As physicians, we’ve taken the Hippocratic oath… we don’t kill our patients.”  That’s the actual heart of the issue.  Doctors are there to heal, not kill. It’s not hard to tell the difference.  

Today, July 19, marks a dark day in Christian history. On this date in A.D. 64, the Great Fire of Rome left two-thirds of the Eternal City in ashes. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the fire was sparked in a part of town concentrated with flammable goods, quickly spread by high winds, and burned over the course of the next week and a half. This was the stuff of nightmares.   According to Tacitus:  "The blaze in its fury ran first through the level portions of the city, then rising to the hills, while it again devastated every place below them; it outstripped all preventive measures, so rapid was the mischief and so completely at its mercy the city, with those narrow winding passages and irregular streets which characterized old Rome."  He went on to describe screaming women, helpless children, and panicked crowds, trampling everything before them.   The end of the blaze was not the end of the terror. On the throne at the time was Emperor Nero, a man notorious for his immorality and hatred of Christians. Suspicious by the way Nero refashioned the charred city into his own image, as well as by rumors that he “fiddled while Rome burned,” many Romans began to wonder if he had started the fire himself.  To forestall the whispers, Nero blamed the Christians. And why not? Christians were weird. They talked about eating flesh and drinking blood. They called their husbands “brother” and their wives “sister.” They denied the gods, like atheists. They thought a dead man had come back to life and was going to return one day in glory and, most pertinently, in vengeance.  Up to this point, believers had mostly been left alone by Roman authorities, but Nero found they were easy to pick on. In the days that followed, the Apostles Peter and Paul met their fates, along with an unknown but great number of other Christians.  If this was the first time Christians took heat for a public disaster, it certainly would not be the last. Christians have found themselves an unpopular minority in many cultural settings and have been consistently blamed for various disasters in various societies. A century and a half after Nero’s attacks, Tertullian, a North African Christian writer, morbidly quipped, “If the Tiber rises too high, or the Nile too low, the remedy is always feeding Christians to the lions.” In 410, pagan writers suggested that the sacking of Rome by German tribes would not have happened had Rome not abandoned her gods for a supposedly immoral Christianity. That accusation led Augustine of Hippo to respond with his magnum opus, The City of God.   One of the most important works in the history of Western civilization, The City of God is still read, centuries later, by pastors, philosophers, and historians alike. In it, Augustine provided a thoroughgoing defense to a shallow trope leveled against Christians. He offered a litany of natural and military disasters and gross moral failings from Rome’s supposedly purer and pagan past. With these examples, he undid the critique that Christians had somehow made life worse. If anything, in fact, the influence of biblical ideals had made things better.  Christians today face analogous accusations. We aren’t being cast to the lions (at least not here in the West, anyway), but there’s a clear and growing undercurrent of hostility toward Christians that often resembles the tropes used in ancient days. Christians have been blamed for the prevalence of poverty, natural disasters due to climate change, the degradation of science and technology, and all kinds of social and political oppression.   Our reply can be much the same as Augustine’s. Oppression, poverty, military, and natural disasters are the common lot of humanity. They are common in times and places where the Gospel has never gone. However, in those places where Christianity has gone there are hospitals, universities, technological innovation, freedom, and an unusual insistence on human dignity.  Recently, the good that Christianity brought to the world has been described in books like Dominion by the (as yet!) non-Christian historian, Tom Holland, and the newer The Air We Breathe, by Anglican evangelist Glen Scrivener. These works remind us how bad the world was before Christ came, and how much of what we think of as good and valuable has come, not despite Christianity, but because of it. Any Christian who faces an unfair accusation today should read these books and be encouraged. Christianity is just as true and good today, as it was then.  

The day that Roe v. Wade died, reactions were mixed. Those who long supported Roe’s legal death work mourned the victory for life. For many, it provoked fear, sadness, outrage, and hyperbole. “I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale,” Canadian author Margaret Atwood wrote. “The Supreme Court is making it real.”   On the other hand, many pro-lifers celebrated. “For nearly fifty years, America has enforced an unjust law that has permitted some to decide whether others can live or die. We thank God today that the Court has now overturned this decision,” said Archbishop José Gómez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.   The only truly surprising reaction came from a third group. While technically pro-life, this group viewed the overturning of Roe as a sort of problem, a cause for caution and even sorrow. Some even condemned the celebrations they saw from the rest of us.    Apologist Mike Winger referred to this group as “the sideways people,”  ... because it’s like they are taking a sudden turn from the issue at hand and going sideways onto other things they care about more. Or perhaps it’s because they are “looking sideways” at this whole thing in the sense of being bothered by it, even if not repudiating it.   He’s right. After achieving a goal that united Christians for nearly 50 years, it was strange to see a tone of fear and concern from some corners of the Church.   If the caution came from a fear that the Dobbs decision was wrongly understood to have ended abortion or to have settled the issue, that’s valid. Overturning Roe did neither. As many have said, this is not the end of this battle on behalf of pre-born life. It’s not even the beginning of the end. At best, it’s the “end of the beginning.” The pro-life movement must continue, and its future has to be not only pro-child but also pro-mother, treating people, especially women caught in unexpected pregnancies with compassion and support while unraveling the lies our culture tells them about their child’s life. All of this is true. But that’s not really where these critiques were coming from.   These were coming from Christians who declared that real compassion precluded celebration and that we must “lament” with women who no longer have a presumed right to end the life of their child. It was as if the real problem was that this particularly heinous choice was being taken away from them. Abortion is an act of violence to both mothers and children. Only a society that’s been deeply poisoned by a culture of death pretends otherwise. Should celebrations of the Emancipation Proclamation have been muted as well?  The real issue is that too many Christians crumple under the weight of mere public opinion. Whenever empathy becomes the chief virtue of a Christian, their moral waters are muddied. “Winsomeness” somehow looks like “silence.”   Cultural elites, from business to entertainment, have made it perfectly clear: To speak out against abortion carries with it the crushing stigma of somehow hating women, of being merely “pro-birth,” of needlessly offending our neighbors with divisive rhetoric. The tragic irony is anyone who favors the killing of unborn children can publicly say so without a hint of moral disapproval from some of these Christians.   This imbalance is, of course, not new for pro-life advocates. We’ve come to expect it from those who are deceived by the worst ideas of our age. But we don’t expect it from those who claim to be pro-life.   Princeton Professor Robert P. George often tells of a question he asks his students. If you had been born before the Civil War, would you have accepted slavery, or opposed it? Nearly every student quickly answers that they would have opposed slavery and would have worked tirelessly to dismantle it. “Of course, this is nonsense.” George writes: “Only the tiniest fraction of them, or any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves.”  If he’s going to believe those students who claim the moral high ground, George demands that they show evidence of how they have stood, today in some context, for an unpopular victim of injustice, knowing that, as a result of their moral witness, they would lose standing with their peers, be loathed and ridiculed by powerful people and institutions, abandoned by some of their friends, called nasty names, and denied valuable professional opportunities.   Because that is the cost of moral clarity. If we will not even risk being liked, the end of Roe v. Wade feels more like a problem than the win it really is.  Of course, from here, if we’re going to show true love, it’s far more difficult than simply speaking pro-life opinions. It will cost us to support crisis pregnancy centers at the level they need to be supported, to protect at-risk mothers, to show compassion to all children, and to live lives that are in line with God’s plan for human flourishing.  In short, there’s plenty of work to do. But we can do that work and still celebrate the end of a legal obstacle to life that has poisoned so much of our culture for so long. 

A gay couple is suing a fertility business in California because they had a daughter instead of a son. The lawsuit is full of loaded terms we shouldn’t miss. Gay couples “must” pay surrogate mothers if they want to have kids, the suit says. The men paid the clinic to create “their” embryos and to implant only male embryos into “their” gestational carrier.    Must two men, who’ve chosen a biologically sterile union, demand children at will? Who exactly owns a young embryo or a gestational carrier—which is another word for mother?    At the end of the day, this distasteful story isn’t a bug of assisted reproduction: It’s a feature. Treating women and children as objects is the enterprise. If we are uncomfortable when someone is more upfront about that—like a couple who files a lawsuit because they didn’t receive what they had ordered and paid for—maybe we should reconsider turning procreation into a manufacturing business.    

John and Maria comment on how reactions to the images from the James Webb Telescope tell us about God and humans. Moving to the fallout after the Dobbs decision, they discuss Gov. Whitmer's stance in Michigan to restrict extradition due to abortion. They also respond to the accusation of transphobia aimed at Senator Hawley when asking for clarification for women’s rights. Finishing, they touch on two popular stories from this week’s Breakpoint.

The Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men are created equal,” which Chuck Colson called “the American creed,” often elicits a response: since slaves were anything but equal, was this creed a lie?  Many signers of the Declaration were abolitionists who compromised on this issue so that the hope of independence would not end before it started. And without excusing the injustice of slavery, it’s notable that Thomas Jefferson originally included a condemnation of slavery in the Declaration, but was forced to remove it due to opposition from the Southern colonies.   And, it takes time for an idea to take root, to spread, to move from abstract principle to practical implementation. Jefferson was himself a slaveholder, and though in principle he opposed slavery, he failed to make Monticello work without them. The existence of slavery was assumed at the time, and many could not imagine a world without it. They should have but didn’t.  The American creed is an aspiration which neither our founders nor we have perfectly achieved. Rather than dismiss it as hypocrisy, we should commit ourselves again to work toward it.   

The moment Roe v. Wade was overturned last month, desperate activists began to dust off the oldest and oddest arguments for abortion. These “gotcha” scenarios are supposed to prove that pro-lifers don’t really value human life or consider preborn babies from the earliest stages of development to be human. Instead, these pretend scenarios demonstrate that pro-lifers are simply hypocrites.   On closer inspection, however, these scenarios fail to convince. For example, there’s the so-called “burning fertility clinic” scenario. A friend emailed me recently and asked for a response to this one, which as best I can tell, was invented by author Patrick Tomlinson.   It goes like this. You’re in a burning fertility clinic and hear a 5-year-old child crying for help. Across the room is a container marked “1,000 Viable Human Embryos.” The flames are rising, smoke is filling the air, and you can only save one: the child or the container of embryos. According to Tomlinson, if you would choose to save the crying child, you’re betraying the fact that, whatever you may say, you really believe embryos aren’t equivalent to human beings. How, otherwise, could you justify saving one over 1,000?  “Gotcha,” right? Not really. First, this argument has nothing whatsoever to do with abortion. In no instance does a woman or her doctor ever choose between saving the life of one child at an advanced stage of development, or 1,000 at an earlier stage. Abortion involves the intentional killing of one or multiple children who, in most cases, would have lived if left alone. There’s no analogy, here, which means as an argument for abortion, the burning fertility clinic is toast.   But even setting that important point aside, the decision to save the imaginary 5-year-old over the embryos—which for the record, I would make—doesn’t necessarily reflect my view of the embryos’ humanity. It only reflects what I would do with limited time in a no-win situation. Perhaps, I would be acting on an impulse to stop conscious suffering, or to prevent parents from losing a child whose face and voice they know, or from a spur-of-the-moment instinct to answer a cry for help. None of these actions has any equivalence to an intentional killing, and none of them means I consider embryos less than human.   Of course, abortion activists continue to repackage this flawed scenario, again and again, with help from media sources. Last week in The Washington Post, another and even more bizarre form of this argument surfaced. Harvard ethics professor Daniel Wikler and  Northwestern University law professor Andrew Koppelman argued that if state lawmakers who are now outlawing abortion really believe embryos are human beings, they should be panicking over the sudden statistical spike in their states’ infant mortality rates.   As these professors write: “30 percent of human embryos spontaneously self-abort”—or are miscarried. These deaths aren’t normally counted in infant mortality statistics, which only account for deaths after birth. But if embryos are human persons, these profs argue, infant mortality stats should include miscarriages. If we did that, though, we would be looking at mortality rates more than twice those of the most dangerous countries on earth—a true public health crisis! They conclude: “the fact of spontaneous abortion shows that opponents of abortion do not themselves believe what they are saying.”  This “gotcha” scenario has nothing to do with abortion, which is, once again, the intentional killing of unborn babies. Their use of the term “spontaneous abortion” instead of “miscarriage” may be medically acceptable but muddies this crucial distinction.  And consider their logic: Lots of miscarriages, tragically, do happen. If pro-life lawmakers aren’t adequately panicking about this, they must not really think intentionally killing unborn babies is wrong? That is like saying if you aren’t panicked about children dying during a pandemic, you can’t be against a shooter gunning them down in a school. It’s an absurd line of thinking yet, in the frenzy of a post-Roe abortion movement, passes for Ivy-League-level ethical reasoning.  None of these “gotcha” arguments should intimidate pro-lifers, especially Christians. We have the truth on our side, and now, thank God, the law in an increasing number of states. Bizarre hypothetical scenarios cannot change the moral reality that elective abortion is evil. On close inspection, the “gotcha” scenarios, like the imaginary fertility clinic in which they so often take place, just go up in smoke.  

A line typically attributed to George Orwell states that “in times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”    Well, we live in times in which “deceit” has been joined by “confusion.” So, even claiming to know truth can mean being called a “liar,” even when it comes to the observable realities of shared history or biology.  In other words, telling the truth today requires nothing short of revolutionary courage.    That’s why I hope you can join me, Lee Strobel, and Brett Kunkle for Great Lakes Symposium on Christian Worldview this August 4 at the stunning Great Lakes Center for the Arts, located in Bay Harbor, Michigan. Thanks to generous sponsors, the event is completely free for those who can attend locally and will be livestreamed for everyone else.  To attend in person or livestream, register at GreatLakesSymposium.org.    Christians must re-embrace the idea of truth. Please join us August 4 at Great Lakes Symposium on Christian Worldview, where we can spur each other on to do exactly that.     

In response to the recent Dobbs decision and the Supreme Court’s clear, consistent support for religious liberty throughout this term, many progressives are warning of an imminent “Christian theocracy.” Among the loudest voices predicting our collective doom are mainstream media outlets. For example, a recent story in Reuters claimed, “U.S. Supreme Court Takes Aim at Separation of Church and State.”   What’s missing in virtually all of these pieces is a proper understanding of the “establishment clause.” The establishment clause is derived from the opening lines of the First Amendment which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” There are two ways this statement is commonly misunderstood.   First, it is often described as establishing a “wall of separation between church and state.” In fact, those words are found nowhere in the Constitution. The phrase actually was coined later in a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Second, and more importantly, it is assumed that if organized religion cannot be supported by the state, then secularism is somehow “neutral.” Thus, by default, anything goes as long as it’s “secular.”  Understanding the historical context is essential. In the 18th century, an “established” religion referred to an official state church. In the U.S., individual states had already established churches, such as the Anglican Church in Virginia. The First Amendment specifically applied to Congress and prohibited a national church. To prefer the Anglican Church over the Congregationalists or Presbyterians would, at the time, mean alienating certain citizens and entire states. States continued to have established churches well into the 19th century.   In addition, the First Amendment was not intended to prohibit religious activities in governmental institutions. From the very beginning, Congress started each session with prayer. That continues today and is led by an official chaplain.   Our founding fathers, particularly James Madison, believed that religious liberty was an innate right, and inseparable from the freedom of conscience. He also believed that religion would better flourish in a free marketplace of ideas. That thinking was the basis for the free exercise clause.   This understanding of the freedom of conscience is the foundation for the other freedoms protected in the First Amendment. Without conscience rights, we cannot truly speak, write, assemble, or advocate freely from our deepest beliefs. That’s why the freedom of religion is often called “the first freedom.” Its position in the Bill of Rights highlights its importance.  Although the rights of conscience should not be controversial, somehow, that’s what they have become. How this happened is worth considering. By claiming secularism to be neutral, proponents of secularism ,as far back as the 19th century, attempted to broadly apply laws originally intended by Protestants to prevent Catholic schools from accessing state funds. In the 20th-century, secularists embraced the concept of “a living Constitution” in order to transform the meaning of the First Amendment, attempting to keep religious institutions from accessing state funds and allowing only “secular” views in the public arena.  Though many court cases illustrate this, among the more important was Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), which declared unconstitutional Maryland’s requirement that officeholders state belief in God. Rather than ruling on the basis of Article VI, which prohibits religious tests for public office, the Supreme Court ruled on the basis of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from violating the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens. The same line of reasoning has since been used to challenge prayers at public meetings, Bible studies in schools, and nativity scenes on public property. In the process, the First Amendment was turned on its head, taking a clause intended to keep the state from backing any one denomination and construing it to position the state in opposition to all organized religions.  In footnote 11 of the Torcaso v. Watkins decision, Justice Hugo Black listed secular humanism as one of a number of religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.” Calling humanism a religion was not outlandish.  For a century, humanists such as John Dewey and Julian Huxley had defined their beliefs as a religion. After all, secularism involves certain claims about the cosmos, existence, and human nature.   And yet in 1994, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in Peloza v. Capistrano Unified School District that while “religion” should be broadly interpreted for free exercise clause purposes, “anything ‘arguably non-religious’ should not be considered religious in applying the establishment clause.” In other words, secular organizations were able to play both sides, qualifying as a religion for the free exercise clause but free from constraints from the establishment clause.   To further determine whether religious activities could utilize public spaces, the Supreme Court derived the so-called “Lemon Test” in the case Lemon v. Kurzman (1991). According to this rule, a religious activity is only licit on public grounds if it performs a secular purpose, neither advances nor inhibits religion, and does not foster excessive government entanglement in religion. This test maintained an obviously secular bias: Secular organizations were not required to pass any tests to obtain access.  In the recent decision in the Coach Kennedy case, the Supreme Court continued its long-overdue corrections to the anti-religious way the First Amendment had been interpreted. Particularly by unequivocally tossing the “Lemon Test,” the Court has stopped the active suppression of religious beliefs and practice. We ought not fear an impending theocracy, but instead welcome a redress to the unjust and ahistorical understandings of religion. 

Since SCOTUS overturned Roe, sales of the morning-after pill have exploded. Amazon had to restrict purchase numbers as did the pharmacies CVS and Rite Aid. One company saw a 600% increase in purchases within 24 hours of the Dobbs decision, with 72% of those for multiple units.  Morning-after pills, colloquially called by the brand name Plan B, don’t need a prescription. They range from $10 to $50 a pop. Women take it within three days of unprotected sex to deter ovulation and, if not that, to prevent the fertilized egg from implanting in the womb, which as many Christians have pointed out is abortion. It’s not the same as what’s called “medication abortion”—two different pills used up to 10 weeks of pregnancy.  In a recent commercial for a new show, a woman hands a friend a bag with the morning-after pill, so the friend can sleep with a guy spontaneously. In other words, the phrase “emergency contraceptive” is most often a misnomer. Most of the talk of reproductive justice is really about sex without restraint.