On Abortion and Reputation

Exposing the Mission of Self-Protection

Last year I read through a children’s book about William Carey with my then-8 year old son. As we reflected on Carey’s extraordinary missionary life, we found numerous connections with things we avoid saying or doing today in order to protect our “missional” reputations. (That’s evangelical short-hand for caring too much about what the world thinks of you).

Carey was the father of the modern missionary movement which inspired thousands of missionaries to go to the ends of the earth with the Gospel. His dedication to reaching India and surrounding nations was incredible. He learned several languages, and often knew those languages better than the governing imperial officers of the time.

Carey longed to reach the lost with the Gospel. He laboured to plant the seeds of the Gospel wherever he was. He knew that to bring Christianity to India meant the whole package, to advance the kingdom of God by being “salt and light” (Matt. 5:13-16) to the culture.

This often meant confronting the culture head-on, especially where idolatrous ideas brazenly contravened the ways of God’s kingdom. As Paul says:

“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2Cor. 10:5).

These are not passive words. They are not the kind of words to pass over lightly. They are words William Carey certainly took to heart in India.

Against the World

Most famously, Carey opposed the practice of sati, whereby Indian widows were burned alive once their husbands had died. Carey knew this was simply wrong. He did not worry about offending the existing traditions by saying so. He did not need to worry about being called a “white supremacist” for telling Indian people they shouldn’t be burning widows alive. He cared more about the burning widows than about the burning tongues of those who would speak ill of him for saying so.

In challenging sati Carey was also remembering James’ exhortation “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (James 1:27). It’s easy to say we care for the downtrodden when there are no big toes to tread on in order to say it. It’s easy to parrot trendy hashtags about who we’re willing to support when it’s the flavour of the week on social media.

Too many Christians of late have been happy to support whatever or whomever they’re told to, provided they don’t get called names for doing so. This is a problem, and it’s one of the ways we fail to follow James’ caution to keep ourselves “unstained from the world”.

Even when we’re trying to care for people in the world, the world may still drag us into self-serving habits in surprising ways.

Caring Is Costly

Caring for the oppressed is not about virtue-signalling or reputation-building. Truly caring for those most oppressed by the sins and lies of our time will usually be costly. It will usually involve confronting and/or challenging an oppressor.

Not all oppressors look like oppressors, remember - not even to those they are oppressing. Sometimes the oppressed may even have been led to believe (by the oppressor, of course) that it is the liberator who is the true oppressor!

Generally speaking, oppressors tend to prefer remaining unconfronted and/or unchallenged. Be warned, but do not fear. God is on your side. Despite the ways narratives of “oppression” have been grossly over-emphasised and distorted in our time, God’s care for the actually-oppressed remains one of the most prominent themes in Scripture.

This is especially true for the most socially vulnerable, thus why orphans and widows are mentioned frequently:

“You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry” (Exodus 22:22-23)

One of the burdens of missionaries like Carey was to respond to God’s call to liberate the mistreated and oppressed. This wasn’t just about talking about God’s love, but also his judgement on oppressors.

This judgement may also extend to enablers and cowards; those who see what is wrong and yet still do nothing about it for fear of the consequences. Carey’s fear of God was greater than his fear of people.

Questioning the Unimaginable

This dual care for God’s holiness and God’s care for people drove Carey to confront another abominable practice he encountered in India: child sacrifice…

“Why should babies be cast into the river year after year?” It’s a really excellent question. So excellent that it’s almost stupid. How could such a question be necessary? The answer seems so obvious that it renders the question pointless.

Evidently, it was not so obvious for Carey’s hearers or he wouldn’t have had to think it, let alone say it. But he did say it, loud and clear: “Why should babies be cast into the river year after year?”

You don’t need to look too far today to see that this question remains an excellent and/or obvious question for us too. We call it abortion. Or: the legal and morally acceptable murder of unborn children by the millions. Or: the casting of babies into the river year after year.

Abortion’s Magic Words

Naturally, the modern pro-choice advocate has ways of dealing with such crude and simplistic descriptions as I’ve just made. They would prefer me to say that Carey was opposing “primitive barbaric practices”, “coercive superstitions”, and “abuses of religious power”. This, of course, is totally different to abortion.

Naturally, the modern west is far too “civilised” to be throwing babies into rivers at the behest of fabled river goddesses. No, what we do is remove “placental parasites” from female human “hosts”. By renaming what we oppress, we believe we have excused ourselves from the oppression. We all know the sound a baby makes when it cries. But helpfully (for the oppressors) we cannot imagine the cries of a parasite.

In these advanced modern times of ours we profess not to believe in magic spells anymore. Yet oddly enough we find that such words can accomplish quite magical things when we ask them to. Words like “parasite”, “foetus”, and “medical procedure” are magic words because they accomplish remarkable feats. They help to form opinions in the minds of mothers which would have been thought unthinkable by most mothers ever.

Like all magic tricks, it works best if you close your eyes. On abortion, we’ve been closing our eyes (and our mouths) for decades. Why should babies be cast into the river, year after year? Because we’ve told ourselves it might not be all that evil after all.

Justifying the Unjustifiable

But am I oversimplifying? Surely abortion is nothing like all that superstitious nonsense Carey was opposing? Surely we all know it’s crazy to abandon sickly babies in forests to be devoured by wild animals simply because “their parents thought they were bewitched and would bring disaster to the village”?

We would never dream of giving such a reason today, would we? Well, let’s ask ourselves why well over 90% of down’s syndrome detection scans during pregnancy result in abortion? Why was one recent mother strongly pressured by medical staff to abort her daughter due to detected spinal abnormalities? Her reflection on the medical spiel she was given about the potential risk to the baby’s physical health was this:

“The brutal truth of that argument broken down is: ‘Would you like to erase this baby and try again?’”

What do such examples tell us? Perhaps they tell us that despite all the virtue signalling about inclusivity of the disabled and vulnerable today, deep down many in our consumeristic society see disabilities or defects in their children as a kind of “bewitchment”.

Why go to all the inconvenience of struggling to raise this cursed parasite? Why not simply erase this “curse” from history and get yourself a better one? Indeed, we wouldn’t want to bring too many of these bewitched children into the world lest they “bring disaster to the village”?

After all, in these apparently apocalyptic days of environmental crisis, haven’t we heard the sobering news that “having a child is the grandest act of climate destruction”? Think of all the resources that would be wasted on such children when those resources could instead be spent on saving the planet?

In other words, if we really care about the future of the human race, we must kill more of our babies. A curious conclusion indeed for any “advanced” civilisation.

The “Mission” of Self-Protection

Perhaps Christians should stay silent about such things, though? After all, “complex” side-topics might harm our “missional witness”.

What missional witness, we might ask? That missional witness which sees thousands of new converts flocking to western churches week by week? Is there an evangelical revival sweeping the West that I’ve missed? What is it, exactly, that we’re protecting? Our “witness”, or ourselves? Aren’t we meant to be the witnesses?

William Carey chose to protect babies rather than his missional reputation. It didn’t seem to harm his missional fruit, either. He’s arguably the most fruitful missionary in Protestant history. As for today’s evangelical inheritors of Carey’s missionary vision, we seem to be playing “the long game”. Indeed, we’ve allowed that curious modern evangelical mantra, “keep out of culture wars!”, to blunten the sharpness of evangelical truth.

We have taken the path of the quietist and trouble avoidant witness - the kind of witness that would not wish to speak against abortion too loudly lest anyone actually hear! This has been the go-to strategy during the greatest decline of the Church in western history. We seem to think that protecting this witness will help reverse the decline, rather than asking ourselves whether this was, in fact, a key ingredient in the decline.

Prudence or Cowardice?

Put simply: we have stopped witnessing to the truthfulness of the truth. We have deceived ourselves into thinking that to proclaim the truthfulness of the truth would somehow be harmful to the truth.

In reality, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that the reason we stopped proclaiming truth like it matters and when it matters, has nothing to do with self-protection. It has everything to do with it. And we know it.

Many still believe the call of the hour is to remain “prudent” by not exposing the evils of the age too abrasively. However, as Ben Zeisloft has noted, within the pro-life movement such strategic calculations easily become self-defeating. The path of prudence is not always the path of safety and protection. To be faithful is to be wise: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10).

In seeking above all to protect ourselves (personally or institutionally) from slander or harm, we remain complicit in the ongoing harm to the most vulnerable. These vulnerable are so vulnerable that you cannot even hear them protest against their oppression. This is because you cannot even hear them cry. They’re murdered before they even had a chance. Millions and millions of them. Year after year. Chucked into the river.

“Why should babies be cast into the river year after year?” It’s still an excellent question. It ought to be an unthinkable one.