A friend sent me a draft e-mail, that he wrote to a family member, who has rejected historic Christianity for progressive Christianity. He was asked to give the basics of salvation, and his attempt to explain the gospel to her is below. My advice included taking out the Christianese terms. Do you think he did a good job? I think his emphasis on what is not the gospel (what needs to be rejected) makes this a first-class explanation of the gospel.

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So, you’ve asked the 10,000 talent question (alluding to Matthew 18:23-35).  You are basically asking me what I think the Gospel is.  I’ll try to answer that in a minimalistic way, using my own characterization of it rather than just making doctrinal statements.

One must accept that there is a God, who is a higher authority than themselves.  How much one must first believe about that God is debatable, but candidate beliefs would be that He is personal (having a mind like, but greater than, ours), powerful, and the creator of this cosmos and everything in it — He owns it all.  Our natural intuition is to see beauty, order, complexity, and “design” in nature.  There is a difference in belief vs unbelief in that some think it is just the appearance of design and some acknowledge their intuition that it actually is designed.

One must acknowledge their moral intuitions, and recognize that there are actually right and wrong things in this world.  It’s not just whatever you want to do, or whatever society decides in a given time or culture.

Given that morality is then understood to be a transcendent thing (universal and independent of time and culture), the connection is made to God as the author of this moral law.

One must then recognize that he/she regularly fails to live up to this law, even according to just their meager understanding of it, and even by the standards of morality that they make up for other people.

One must not try to suppress this, or therapize it away.  One must recognize there is a problem and real moral culpability.  One must recognize that they feel guilty and have self-esteem issues because they actually do have guilt and issues.

One must make the connection between guilt and their standing before God.  Being good sometimes and in some ways does not erase the bad you do, past, present, or future.  One must be willing to bend the knee to God’s will regarding morality.

One must also come to see the moral failure (sin) in their lives as a bad thing that they’d like to be rid of, rather than excusing it as the fault of others, or revelling in it as part of the pleasure of life, or shrugging it off as just “who I am.”

One must appeal to God in these matters for both forgiveness and help in living as they should.

Given that God has provided a champion for the problem that humanity faces (the backstory of which not all will fully know), one whose heart is truly yielded to all these things will naturally and eagerly receive Word of this as Good News.  God has solved the seemingly irreconcilable demands of both justice and forgiveness in that champion.

Those with ears to hear will receive this solution — Jesus — and believe what He has done in life and on the cross for their sake — the resurrection being both confirmation of His divine authority and also the sign of the defeat of death which awaits us all, and is the only barrier between us and facing this God whom we fail at every turn.  They will believe on (or upon) Jesus as Lord and their means of salvation, surrendering dependence upon their own ideas of self-righteousness and earning the favor of God.

The outward expression that we have understood and accepted these things is that we have made Jesus Lord and committed ourselves to following Him, conform our character to His, resist our sinful inclinations, and are interested in learning all about Who God is and what has been done for us in Christ.

This commitment to the Lordship of Christ naturally leads to the acceptance of subsequent beliefs.  If Jesus is indeed Lord, then He holds all authority, and what He said and taught to His followers is our guide — the New Testament.  And if this is the divine story, as intended by God for men, then we have reason to believe that it is comprehensible to us, and He will insure (in spite of the fallibility of men and demonic plots) that its essential message will not be lost or corrupted until all things are competed.  Given that Jesus affirmed every categorical section of the Old Testament, and claimed to be its promised Messiah, then that, too, is a source of truth and understanding.

Those doctrines that are sometimes characterized as “essential” for salvation, are merely the highlights of this redemption narrative, which are those things being clear and consistent, and which indicate that someone has yielded themselves to the authority of Christ and the scriptures, and understands these things.  It is not that believing them is what saves, but they are what the saved naturally come to believe.  Confessing them is the tangible, verbal act of affirming the Gospel, but is not necessarily identical to a life committed to putting it into practice, which is saving faith.

This post was authored by my mysterious pro-life friend. He is responding to religious leaders who don’t think clearly about the right to life issue. Please share it on social media if you like it.

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Suppose you are walking down the street one day, minding your own business, when you hear screams coming from a nearby house. You run over to investigate, and a woman runs out to tell you her child isn’t breathing. You follow her into the backyard where you find a small child who was just pulled unconscious from a nearby pool. You call 9-11 and start performing CPR on the child, praying you will be able to save her. Paramedics arrive and take her to the hospital, and you find out that thankfully, she will live and make a full recovery. The local news happens to pick up the story, and you are hailed as a hero.

Then things take a strange twist. The neighbors who watched the whole incident take place but didn’t intervene inform you that the child is being raised by a single mom, and that if the child had a father around, she wouldn’t have stumbled into the pool in the first place, so why aren’t you doing anything to fix the problem of single parent homes?

The situation gets even more bizarre. A local advocacy group asks why you aren’t engaging in education efforts about pool safety. Other advocacy groups begin asking why you only focused on saving the lives of children who fall into pools and not children who die of gun violence, abusive homes, or from poverty. Then, when you attend church on Sunday, the pastor preaches a sermon about how Christ-followers must focus on the sanctity of all human life, not merely the lives of those drowning in pools. Finally, to top it all off, a few days later the child’s estranged father, who has been skipping out on child support payments all year long, gets interviewed on the evening news, where he accuses you of all manner of character failings, saying that if you had truly been concerned about the life of his child, you would also pay for her schooling, her basic needs, and would ensure all of her needs throughout life are met.

If this whole scenario seems absurd, that’s because it is. And yet, it matches real world events currently playing out for pro-life advocates.

Right now the moral legitimacy of the pro-life movement is being attacked from all angles. Consider the following comments from Progressive pastor John Pavlovitz. Writing in an article that went viral shortly before the 2016 Presidential Election, Pavlovitz had this to say to pro-life advocates:

“I actually don’t believe you’re pro-life, I believe you practice a far more selective and convenient defense of Humanity. From where I’m standing it seems as though ‘Life’ for you, comprises a very narrow demographic—one that bears a striking resemblance to you. The unborn are easy to advocate for because you can idealize them into something palatable to you, something benign and comfortable, something in your own image. You see, it’s not that you’re really pro-life, you’re pro-straight, white, Christian fetuses.”

He then goes on a diatribe about how a real “pro-lifer” would act: They would oppose police brutality, they would be inclusive to LGBTQ communities, they would care for the poor, they would fight racism, so on and so forth. Pavlovitz isn’t alone in laying out this laundry list of “pro-life” activities that have nothing to do with abortion; in fact, this has become a favorite tactic of abortion choice advocates when faced with pro-life arguments: Turn around and attack the moral character of the pro-lifer in particular or the movement itself as inherently hypocritical. After all, who is going to listen to what a hypocrite has to say about right and wrong?(1)

As I’ve written about before, there are two types of people who raise the issue of consistency: Crusaders and Inquirers.

An Inquirer is someone who has genuine questions about what it means to be truly “pro-life”. She gets why abortion is wrong, but she is curious how her views about the value of human life in the womb should inform her when it comes to issues outside the womb. She also wonders why pro-life advocates focus more on abortion than other topics. Her questioning is honest, but often misinformed.  Pro-life advocates will focus on abortion more than “outside the womb issues” because it is the only time in an innocent human being’s life we may enjoy the full protection of the law while we deliberately kill them. While an Inquirer may not still fully understand, she is on the right track.

The Crusader wants none of it. He’s just looking for a quick way to end the argument in his favor, and he will usually do it by making the pro-life advocate look stupid or wicked. He isn’t searching for an honest dialogue, he’s looking to win fights. John Pavlovitz is an example of a Crusader.

Here’s a simple way to defeat a Crusader: Call their bluff. When I’ve encountered Crusaders who charge me with being inconsistent in how I approach being “pro-life”, I usually ask a simple question:

“Tell me, if I became active on all the issues you brought up and agreed to support all your positions, will you join me in opposing abortion?”

They will almost always say no, to which I usually reply along the lines of “So why did you even bring up those other issues in the first place? If you think there is nothing wrong with abortion, then you need to defend that idea, instead of just attacking me personally.”(2)

Pro-life advocates don’t need to just sit by and take attacks on their character. They can and should when feasible point out the bad faith reasoning inherent in such attacks and address it, firmly but respectfully. Sometimes the best way to correct bad behavior and bad thinking is to call it for what it is.

Oddly, some pro-life advocates in recent years have begun adopting the very same sort of argument being advanced by John Pavlovitz, although instead of attacking the pro-life position, they are trying to change it into something else entirely. This new “pro-life” movement goes by a variety of names, such as the “Pro-Abundant Life” position, Whole Life position, and the Consistent Life position. While the names can vary, at its core the ideas at play remain the same.

Consider the following remarks from Herbie Newell in the introduction to his book Image Bearers: Shifting From Pro-Birth to Pro-life, one of the best book-length articulations of the Whole Life viewpoint:

“Being pro-life means that not only do we see abortion as murder, but we also see our apathy against injustice toward life outside of the womb as a co-conspirator in the fight for life. It means we fight for racial Equality. It means we love the woman walking into the abortion clinic passionately with the love of Christ, and it means we embrace life no matter what syndrome may be attached to a person’s identity.

There are many books written about being pro-life and combating abortion, but my hope is this small volume will bring awareness that the pro-life ethic is so much bigger than just being pro-birth.” (emphasis in original)

Newell goes on to list issues that the pro-life ethic encompasses: Racism, family breakdown, sex trafficking, fatherlessness, elder abuse, and assisted suicide, among other things. His book is very well-written and very eloquent, and as a call for the Christian church as a whole to show concern for justice, I think it succeeds.

That’s not where the issue lies. Instead of simply acknowledging that Christ-followers must promote justice in our society(something I agree with), he goes on to assert that all major justice issues of the day have to be taken on by the anti-abortion movement in order for said movement to truly be “pro-life”. There are a multitude of problems with this idea.

For starters, it’s quite arrogant to suggest that people who have spent much of if not their entire adult lives fighting against abortion at every level imaginable and often experiencing a great deal of hardship along the way are somehow not deserving of the title “pro-life” because they didn’t spend enough time focused on other “outside the womb” issues. While I doubt Herbie Newell or other Whole Life advocates intend to come off this way, the suggestion smacks of self-righteous chest thumping.

Second, it’s simply false to claim pro-life advocates are merely “pro-birth”. Pro-life advocates do focus on forms of unjust killing outside the womb, and very often are the only ones concerned about it in the first place. It is pro-life advocates who have been advocating for the past two decades for legislation protecting babies born alive following botched abortions, sounding the alarm about the rising endorsement of infanticide in academia, and opposing the legalization of assisted suicide. It is also pro-life advocates who have brought attention to the deaths of women from botched abortions performed by doctors such as George Tiller and Kermit Gosnell.

Furthermore, the accusation anti-abortion activists are somehow guilty of wrongdoing for being “pro-birth” is itself absurd, when the alternative to birth in question is being killed outright. Of course pro-lifers want babies born; we want them to leave the womb alive and in one piece instead of as a pile of body parts in a surgical tray. For a self-declared pro-life advocate to suggest his colleagues are somehow apathetic or immoral because they focus primarily on opposing the butchery of fellow human beings before birth is really quite scandalous.

Third, the Whole Life position assumes moral equivocation between issues that are inherently different in scope, form, and whom they affect.

Abortion is different from nearly every other issue that is currently being labeled “pro-life” by Whole Life advocates for the simple fact that few other issues concern the direct, intentional killing of innocent human beings, and the protection of said killing by law.

Outside a psych ward or a college philosophy department there are few people who will seriously suggest you can deliberately kill innocent human beings outside the womb. However, much ink has been spilled in defense of the idea that human beings may be killed before birth and need not be valued as human beings. Added to the abovementioned support for abortion is endorsement from nearly half the culture, an entertainment industry that regularly promotes abortion and the foolish sexual lifestyles that contribute to it, roughly half of congregants in American churches identifying as pro-choice on abortion, an entire political party that has declared it’s support(and sometimes celebration) for abortion, and lastly close to one million abortions happening per year. Given the odds pro-life advocates are up against in trying to stop the killing of human beings before birth, it’s nonsense to suggest we broaden our approach to other issues.

Pro-lifers have a narrow focus towards abortion because abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. Few, if any other “outside the womb” issues routinely raised involve direct killing of innocent human beings, and are therefore different in scope and in form. To put it somewhat differently, outside the womb innocent human beings have the protection of law(even if imperfectly) from being intentionally destroyed; inside the womb they do not. It doesn’t take a genius to see why pro-lifers are going to spend more effort on behalf of the unborn who aren’t protected in law than those who already are.(3)

Why does any “outside the womb” issue raised deserve the label “pro-life” in the same way abortion does? Anyone who suggests a different social justice issue deserves addressing by anti-abortion advocates has some explaining to do, and needs to argue for their claim, not merely assert it. Those advocating a new definition of “pro-life” bear the burden of proof for their claims.(4)

This brings us to a fourth point; the Whole Life position being proposed often doesn’t meet its own standards.

It’s worth noting that people and groups focused on other “outside the womb” issues are never held to the same standards of being “pro-life” that anti-abortion activists are, even those these other issues are asserted to be just as pro-life as abortion. Groups dedicated to addressing other social justice issues are never called less than “pro-life” for failing to focus on abortion.

When was the last time a proponent of a Whole Life perspective told a ministry fighting sex trafficking that they weren’t spending enough time on abortion? Or a ministry dedicated to helping strengthen marriages that they needed to be more active in opposing abortion? The list can go on, but in practice the redefinition of “pro-life” seems to only be getting selectively applied to those focused on opposing abortion. The simple reason why other ministries and groups are usually not held to this standard is because deep down, proponents of the Whole Life view know better. They know it’s unreasonable(not to mention obscene) to tell a group dedicated to rescuing victims of sex trafficking that they are not moral enough to warrant support because they don’t spend an equal time fighting abortion, or racism, or marriage breakdown.

This raises a question: Is the Whole Life position being more influenced by genuine moral reasoning, or by current political and cultural trends? The Whole Life position being offered seems to more match the moral feelings of the current culture(and curiously, those of the Democratic Party platform) than a genuine moral concern for fellow human beings. If one looks close enough this becomes obvious. While proposing a broader perspective on what it means to be “pro-life”, proponents of the Whole Life position tend to ignore(and quite often attack) the moral concerns raised by political conservatives and libertarians in favor of the concerns of political liberals, and most often those who endorse abortion. Free-market capitalism, school choice, limited government, support for law enforcement, effective national defense, and entrepreneurship are all causes championed by conservative and libertarian thinkers as beneficial to fellow human beings; and yet rarely, if ever, are these causes considered as warranting the label “pro-life” by Whole Life advocates. The broadly defined “pro-life” perspective only seems to encompass the objectives of political liberals, making effort to exclude conservative and libertarian thought from the conversation.(5)

Ironically, as we saw from John Pavlovitz’s article above, the broadening of “pro-life” also ends up more matching the laundry list of “pro-life” causes being used by abortion supporters to attack pro-life advocates than the moral objectives of the pro-life movement itself.

That brings up a final point: Why should those who support abortion get to dictate the moral objectives of those who oppose it? No effective social reform movement in history has ever succeeded by having it’s goals redefined and reshaped by the opposition. Instead, effective social reform movements have succeeded where they stayed laser-focused on their goals and didn’t get sidetracked by silly red herring arguments.

Conclusion

Whole Life advocates are not the mortal enemies of the pro-life movement or of unborn human beings. Most Whole Life Advocates are genuinely concerned about the lives of unborn children, and about the lives of other people. Many are doing phenomenal work on behalf of children and their parents. Their intentions are noble and they do want to see good done in the world.

That being said, having the best intentions is not a guarantee one will always exercise wisdom or prudence. Many of the most well-intentioned ideas of the past have turned out disastrous when implemented, and often hurt more people than they helped.

The core flaw of the Whole Life position is that it trades the emotional draw of being seen as morally awake to other issues of concern in the culture for the wise application of moral principles. It’s important to be aware of the existence of wrongdoing in society; that also means we need to be wise in what we spend our time addressing. All people are created equal; all issues are not. We must act accordingly.

This doesn’t mean pro-life advocates can’t be concerned with other “outside the womb” issues; they can. This does mean the wisdom of saying pro-life advocates must be concerned with other issues in order to be seen as truly “pro-life” needs to be called into serious question. Broadening our focus to issues outside the womb doesn’t do much to help those being deliberately killed inside the womb. Instead it seeks to make pro-life advocates more liked by those who are already fighting tooth and nail to ensure we don’t succeed in our endeavors to protect unborn children.

Gregg Cunningham has said it best: Effective social reformers are seldom liked, and liked social reformers are seldom effective. Focusing all our efforts on being liked by our critics will not save the unborn; it will ensure the killing of the unborn goes unnoticed and unquestioned. And that is as far as one can get from truly being “pro-life”.

 

Endnotes

(1). Pavlovitz, who himself is an abortion advocate, never explains in his diatribe why pro-lifers are wrong about abortion. He ignores the issue and instead resorts to personal attacks and name-calling. Now, it’s possible every pro-lifer in the world today is an ignorant, hypocritical, fetus-obsessed jerk. That proves nothing. Pro-life advocates argue abortion is wrong because it unjustly kills an innocent human being. Pavlovitz must answer our argument, not resort to personal insults. Ironically, by ignoring the nature of abortion, Pavlovitz himself is guilty of the same sort of hypocrisy he accuses his opponents of: Advocating only for human beings who bear a striking resemblance to himself, those who are already born

(2). There are a few who will bite the bullet and say yes. So follow up: “What difference is there between the unborn and the born that makes it acceptable to allow abortion until we have solved every other societal issues first? Why wait to take on abortion if it is the intentional killing of an innocent human being?” Now we’re back to the central question in the abortion debate that matters: What are the unborn?

(3). As a small caveat, it is often asserted that police shootings and police brutality are just as much pro-life issues as abortion. While every police shooting is a tragedy, that does not mean police shootings are inherently unjust or the majority of police are morally out of control. There are many factors(legal, tactical, physiological, informational etc.) at play in every use of force by police that must be considered; factors which are routinely ignored by activists attacking what they see as pro-lifer’s inconsistency. However, it would take a book-length response to examine all of these factors. See In Defense of Self and Others… Issues, Facts, and Fallacies- The Realities of Law Enforcement’s Use of Deadly Force (3rd Ed.) by Urey W. Patrick and John C. Hall for a thorough examination of the topic.

(4.) A common trope is that “Abortion is not the only pro-life issue.” This is usually said in regards to voting, and very often is used to justify voting for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life one. Even if abortion is not the only “pro-life” issue, that doesn’t mean it’s not the most important one. Given nearly one million abortions per year in the United States alone, abortion is obviously going to rank at the top of any list of “pro-life” issues

(5). More ironically, the deliberate killings of “Precious Image Bearers”(to use Herbie Newell’s term) who aren’t currently the subject of cultural focus tend to be ignored in Whole Life writings. The killings of police officers by armed criminals, victims killed or hurt in everyday violent crime, and veteran suicide tend to get
ignored in favor of issues which currently tug the cultural heartstrings, even though no one can seriously deny the abovementioned involve acts of gross injustice against valuable human beings. It’s ludicrous to demand anti-abortion activists meet a standard many Whole Life advocates often don’t adhere to.

I know that I am not alone in experiencing a MASSIVE drop in page views from the Google search engine since Trump won the election in 2016. My traffic from the search engine went down 95% almost overnight. Others have reported similar drops. In this post, I wanted to review the evidence that has convinced me that Google’s products are designed to favor the Democrat party.

Here’s the latest on a Google whistleblower, reported by Breitbart:

Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, co-author with Kent Heckenlively of the new book Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship, explained how Google “re-wrote their news algorithms to specifically go after Trump” in an interview with the Epoch Times.

Vorhies passed hundreds of internal documents to Project Veritas in 2019, including items from the company’s YouTube search blacklist showing direct interference in democratic votes.

In his interview with the Epoch Times, Vorhies displayed internal files showing how Google ranks news stories. “This is called realtime, hive-mind scoring,” said Vorhies.  “They literally built it, they re-wrote it according to the fight that Trump was having with [James] Comey.”

Leaked videos of internal presentations by Google executives confirm pro-Democrat bias.

Breitbart reports:

A few days after the 2016 election, at an internal meeting later leaked to Breitbart News, top Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Kent Walker, lamented President Trump’s victory, comparing Trump voters to “extremists” and discussing their desire to make Trump’s election and the populist movement a “blip” in history.

The Google search engine was investigated for blacklisting conservative web sites.

The Federalist reports:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai brushed off questions Wednesday before the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust related to the tech giant’s apparent blacklisting of conservative groups last week when about a dozen major websites were temporarily de-platformed.

[…]The websites targeted in last week’s blacklisting, according to NewsBusters which itself was temporarily de-platformed last week, included the Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent, Breitbart, the Media Research Center, and CNSNews among others.

Google is reported to be hostile to employees who dissent from the Democrat party.

The Daily Caller reports:

A Republican Google software engineer has written an open letter describing a culture of left-wing “outrage mobs” that make use of the company’s anonymous bias reporting channels to shut down dissent.

The article quotes him saying that he was forced out of Google.

The far-left Washington Post also reported:

James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired after distributing a memo questioning the company’s diversity policies, filed a class-action lawsuit Monday claiming that the technology giant discriminates against white men and conservatives.

According to the Washington Examiner, Google, YouTube and other Google-linked companies gave 90% of their political donations to Democrats:

A study released Thursday found that 90 percent of political donations by Google, YouTube, and other subsidiaries of Alphabet have gone to Democrats.

In 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Alphabet employees donated more than $5.8 million to Democratic candidates and causes, while only $403,042 was contributed to Republicans. Ninety-four percent of Alphabet contributions in that year went to Democrats.

Breitbart News reported in March 2019 on how Google used their products to influence elections:

New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country.

The study, from Epstein and a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), analyzed Google searches related to three highly competitive congressional races in Southern California. In all three races, the Democrat won — and Epstein’s research suggests that Google search bias may have tipped them over the edge.

This confirms a previous study from 2016:

The research follows a previous study conducted in 2016 which showed that biased Google results pushed votes to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.

Here’s another study reported in May 2019 by the UK Daily Mail:

Google’s bias towards left-wing media outlets has been laid bare by an algorithm which detected that it favors sites including CNN and The New York Times over others.

According to data compiled by researchers from Northwestern University, the search engine promoted those sites over others repeatedly in November 2017.

Of the 6,302 articles that appeared in Google’s ‘top stories’ page that month after a term was searched, more than 10 percent were by CNN.

The New York Times was the second most favored and accounted for 6.5 percent of articles. The Washington Post was third with 5.6 percent.

By contrast, Fox News, the most right-wing outlet in mainstream media, was the source of just three percent of the stories which appeared.

See for yourself the difference it makes:

Leaked internal Google documents label Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro as “Nazis”.

The Daily Wire reports:

A newly-published leaked document contains what appears to be an email exchange among Google employees participating in a “transparency-and-ethics” discussion that includes a reference to PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro as “nazis using the dog whistles.”

Youtube, which is owned by Google, has censored conservatives who disagree with the Democrat party.

The Washington Examiner reports:

In the latest example of bias against conservatives, YouTube is censoring videos from conservative group PragerU by placing them on “restricted mode.”

The category, which is applied to videos that may contain “potentially objectionable content,” was applied to 21 PragerU videos, the group announced on its Facebook page on Tuesday.

It may be too late to do anything about Google now. We had the chance to do something when we had majorities in the House and Senate, and the White House. That was the time to investigate Big Tech, break up the monopolies, press charges against the executives and pass laws to allow victims of censorship to sue. It’s probably too late to do something now.

My advice now is to stop using Google Chrome, Google’s search engine, and any other Google products. I use the Brave web browser, the DuckDuckGo search engine, and I don’t buy Google phones, tablets or laptops. I think Google is anti-American.