OPINION:
The Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, D.C. is now on record saying that, for a modest fee, it will perform a late-term abortion on a healthy, viable baby boy or girl.
An employee at the clinic confirms a mother can abort her baby at 26 weeks for $6,200 or a child who is approaching 27 weeks for $7,200. Footage of an undercover call made to the clinic also shows one of its abortionists agreeing to deny medical care if an infant happens to survive a failed late-term abortion.
Add to this the fact that a quick search online shows several women who have used the Washington Surgi-Clinic are clearly less than satisfied with their experiences. “Worst place ever. This is an overcrowded meat market,” one woman wrote in 2011. “I almost died in here and they were about to let me,” wrote another.
Yet, in spite of the mounting and gruesome evidence of such abuse of women and the outright murder of our youngest and most vulnerable children, we still have leaders in our evangelical churches — and in many of our Christian colleges — who say when it comes to abortion and the other critical moral debates of our time, that we shouldn’t try to “play the role of the Holy Spirit” and that we can’t “reasonably expect” non-Christians to embrace our Christian values.
“It’s not our job to judge,” they say. “That’s the Holy Spirit’s job.”
“Everyone has to live to their own convictions. Our job is to simply love like Jesus loved.”
Women are abused by the thousands and children continue to die by the millions while the church parrots this illogical nonsense and theological pablum.
Would these same leaders have told Dietrich Bonhoeffer that he was wrong to assume the role of “playing the Holy Spirit” in confronting the Holocaust? Would they have said that he shouldn’t “reasonably expect” Nazis to stop killing Jews? Would they have suggested that it “wasn’t Bonhoeffer’s job to judge” Hitler and that, everyone — even the Third Reich — “has to live to their own convictions”?
Would they have told the great abolitionists, like Orange Scott and Luther Lee (the founders of my church, the Wesleyan Church), that they shouldn’t have “reasonably expected” our constitutional republic to respect and protect the dignity of the rural poor, of blacks and of women?
Would they have told Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, “It’s not your job to judge; you shouldn’t presume to play the role of the Holy Spirit”?
Would they have told William Wilberforce that he shouldn’t have “reasonably expected” the British Parliament to abolish the slave trade?
Would they have scolded Frederick Douglass and said that “it wasn’t his job to judge” southern plantation owners by telling them that they should free their slaves? How about Martin Luther King Jr? Would they have told him to stop “playing the Holy Spirit” and that “it wasn’t his job to judge”? Would they have told him that he couldn’t “reasonably expect” Bull Connor and the KKK to honor the civil rights and human worth of every African-American boy and girl, man and woman?
I have to wonder what these progressive pastors and scholars would have said to Jesus. Would they have told him that he was wrong when he charged all of us to be salt and light to a rotting culture and an increasingly darkened world?
When he said, “Go and sin no more,” would they have said “stop judging”? Would our current Christian leaders have told the Child of Bethlehem — you know, the one the angels told us would be called “Emmanuel: God with us” — that he should stop “playing the Holy Spirit”? Would they have pulled him aside and said, “This isn’t your job, just try to be a bit more loving”?
When the salt loses its savor, it is thrown out and trampled underfoot.
This default disengagement, this insipid and morally vacuous “tolerance,” that is being popularly promoted by the leaders of the contemporary church is the exact opposite of the Great Commission of Jesus. Those who follow Christ engage culture and “salt” it for the good. They shine a light in the darkness of our brokenness and they try preserve human dignity and rescue us from our depravity and sin.
They speak boldly, confront courageously and judge righteously.
They are the body of Christ. They are his hands, they are his feet, and they are his mouth. They refuse to disengage precisely because they love people too much to do so.
Heaven help us, if the church — His church — resigns itself to the defeatism of saying, “We can’t reasonably expect …” or “It’s not our job .” It is exactly our job, and if we don’t do it, we can reasonably expect that thousands of women will continue to be abused and millions of little boys and girls will continue to die as our culture careens toward hell.
• Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is the author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery, 2017).
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