Today’s moral climate is dominated by the notion of total self-determination. This is not a Christian concept. It may be Walt Whitman’s or Henry David Thoreau’s, but it is certainly not the “road less traveled” and that makes “all the difference.” In this façade of reality, each person becomes their own god, their own standard for what passes for good or evil. From that fecund moral swamp hatches all manner of sickness, disease, and pathology, including abortion. But these social diseases like abortion, while a travesty that needs instant treatment and cure, can only be corrected if the swamp is drained.
What happens when a person or society ignores their created purpose of living for God? The ethic to treat every human with dignity and respect dies with it. We see in 2 Kings chapter 21-23 the story of King Manasseh of Israel. He and all Israel forgot God, and the result was that he fills Jerusalem with blood from top to bottom, sacrificing even his own son on the altar of his personal desires. Reforms only happened after his grandson King Josiah submitted his heart to God in submission to the revelation of His word in Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (See also 2 Kings 23:3).
The western world is gasping under a smog similar to the one that Jerusalem did during the acid reign of Manasseh…we’ve forgotten God. Therefore we increasingly dehumanize each other, filling our nation with blood from one end to the other. The Solution to the resulting systematic injustice is not reason, or law, or even a new President, but submitting to the revelation of every man’s purpose: Love God and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22: 37-39).
American society has taken the notion of absolute personal liberty to the moral cliffs and may be stepping back to ponder the gravity of an abrupt demise. Time will tell. But the insatiably ravenous appetites of man look to devour CompassCare and all Christian organizations of good will. On June 26, 2016, the Supreme Court signaled a reversal of their position allowing for state restrictions of abortion (Whole Women’s Health v Hellerstedt 2016). Lest you think replacing Scalia would have altered the outcome, note that the decision was split 5-3.
I’m not asking you to help CompassCare merely provide life-saving Christian care to women and their babies. I am asking that you deepen your commitment to rebuilding the dilapidated, ramshackle house we call Western Civilization, one family at a time, by living out more consistently what it means to love God and love our neighbor without partiality or favoritism. Continuing on as before only leads to the same radically anti-Christian, anti-human horrors.
Certainly, we must never rest in our efforts to help women have their babies. But neither must we rest from reforming culture. The best way to do that is to take serious care to walk out our personal lives each day more oriented to God than the previous one. For the way we live our lives sets the expectations for a more humane humanity.
As my friend likes to say, “God became man so that man could become man again.” If society continues promoting absolute personal autonomy as its core value, shuttering thought by switching on the television; if society continues committing logicide by indoctrinating our children into this secular materialism; if the church insists on giving up its unique voice to find ‘common ground’ with the world’s views instead of teaching God’s, then we can be assured that next week, next month, or next year, the demon named Distraction will return with his friend named Legion finding a house swept clean whose foundation nevertheless remains cracked and compromised.
Christians show themselves to be Christians, not only because of what they do inside the church walls but because of what they do outside. Every human is called to orient our hearts more toward a love for God day by day and one way we do that is by helping others to do the same. And because of that, true Christians have always been the Samaritans standing as sentinels between the oppressed (Luke 10:25-37) and any king, country, or culture that would systematically or categorically dehumanize by position, policy, or philosophy.
The only answer to abortion and all other institutionalized injustice is submitting ourselves to God in Christ and loving people as Christ loved us, at all costs, one person at a time. And when it becomes unjustly illegal for the Samaritan to love his neighbor on that dangerous Jericho Road, we simply look up from our healing work with that stubborn love and let them smite the other cheek, soldiering on with Christ down the new way called the Calvary Road.