Empress Alexandra, wife of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, led a life of humble piety, and yet she and her family were murdered shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Their bodies were dismembered and disfigured, and they were buried in two unmarked graves. Surely the empress was praying, but God wasn’t listening.
This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (part 1 of this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world here):
5. Because nothing distinguishes those who follow God from everyone else
A few years ago, I visited a museum exhibit of the jewelry of Russia’s imperial family. The focus was on the Faberge jewelry, with several of the famous Easter eggs as the centerpiece, but there was more. I was most taken with Empress Alexandra’s Christian icons—paintings and statues of religious figures, crosses, and so on. She was extremely religious, and as Tsarina she performed daily religious rituals, humbled herself by embroidering linen for the church, read almost nothing but religious material, and consulted wandering “men of God” like Rasputin.
Her devotion did nothing to save her family.
We can find many other examples where Christians took to heart Christianity’s promise of answered prayer. Christian faith was strong on both sides of the U.S. Civil War, and yet roughly 700,000 died, about as many as in all other wars involving the U.S.
Francis Galton conducted an innovative prayer experiment in 1872. Since “God save the king” (or something similar) was a frequent public prayer, members of royal families should live longer. Few will be surprised to hear that they did not.
This reminds me of inconsistency from a radio ministry on the question of prayer. The ministry first mocked atheists’ stupidly observing that God didn’t save the lives of Christians in a Texas church shooting in 2017, insisting that Jesus promised tribulation for his followers, not luxury. But six weeks later, the ministry was asking for prayers to speed the recovery of a staff member with a serious injury, insisting now that prayers do benefit believers.
If there’s a God who answers prayers, prayers and devotion from believers should have an effect in our world. Here again, the pro-Christian evidence you’d expect doesn’t exist.
Surely the empress was praying, but God wasn’t listening.
Here’s a bonus reason we don’t live in God World:
6. Because televangelists make clear that prayer doesn’t work
Watch a televangelist show. You will see periodic appeals that first ask the audience for prayers and then for money. Sometimes you’ll see a text crawl across the bottom with the phone number euphemistically labeled “prayer request” (which sounds better than “place to give me money”).
But doesn’t that sound strange? If prayers get God to do something, then the televangelist could just pray himself. Or, if the power of prayer is proportionate to the number of voices, the televangelist could just direct the audience to turn his small voice into a holy airhorn. And God’s actions make any human generosity pointless. What could money do that God couldn’t?
Televangelists are an ongoing experiment, and they make clear the uncomfortable truth: prayer doesn’t work, but money does, as if there were no god at all. A real god who claimed that prayers work would deliver on that promise.
When religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. — Benjamin Franklin
Perhaps you’ve seen the 2018 viral clip of Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks saying this. She makes clear that she doesn’t want to upset Christians’ right to live as they see fit and demands the same consideration for herself.
I don’t care what the Bible says…. All those women who identify with your religion have every right in the world to not get an abortion, to not take birth control, but they do not have the right to dictate my life.
Tim Barnett of the STR ministry pushes back in “Making the Case WITHOUT the Bible” (March 23, 2022). He says the Bible is not necessary to make the pro-life case, just science and philosophy.
First, he says that embryology teaches that “from the earliest stages of development the unborn are distinct, living, whole human beings.”
No, “human beings” is at the core of the debate. We’ll revisit this question of what the zygote (the single fertilized human egg cell) is or isn’t compared to the newborn.
And note the irony of a ministry eagerly following the conclusions of embryology while demanding the right to pick and choose their science. I’ve written much about STR’s shameless rejection of evolution, but embryology is apparently an area of biology they’ll accept. When these non-scientists set themselves up as arbiters of science, we clearly can’t trust any of their science-based arguments.
You didn’t come from an embryo; you once were an embryo, and there’s no ethical difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today.
This is the key pro-life claim: different though they may be, the zygote and the newborn are morally identical where it counts. The one way to state this commonality that we’ll both agree on is that the zygote and the newborn are both living, and both have Homo sapiens DNA.
Big deal. That’s also true for a scratched-off skin cell.
The pro-life response would be that the skin cell won’t develop into a newborn (but the zygote could), at which point the curtain falls away, and we see that their argument is just the Argument from Potential. That zygote isn’t a person now, but it will be! (Or substitute a similar word for “person”: baby, newborn, human being, or whatever.) After it develops into a person, we can’t ethically kill that person, but that’s not true when it’s just a zygote.
A compelling pro-life argument can’t be extracted from the Argument from Potential, and the nine months of gestation can’t be ignored. Barnett is correct that each of us was once an embryo, but there is a huge ethical difference between a one-hundred-cell embryo and a person.
SLED argument: Size
Barnett then ticks off the points in the popular but tired SLED argument.
You see, there are only four differences between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today: Size, Level of development, Environment, and degree of Dependency.
True, unborn humans are smaller than born humans. But since when does physical size give you value?
Someone isn’t paying attention. A newborn might become 12 times heavier by the time they’re a teenager. But that newborn is 12 orders of magnitude bigger than it was as a zygote! That’s right—the single cell zygote becomes trillions of cells. Said another way, the zygote-to-newborn jump is a hundred billion times larger than the newborn-to-teenager jump.
This is no difference in degree where it’s the same thing, just bigger. A one-pound Great Dane puppy becomes the same thing, just bigger, as a full-grown, 150-pound adult. No, we’re talking about a difference in kind, where the embryo eventually becomes something very different.
This will become clearer with point 2.
Point 2: Level of development
Sure, unborn humans are less developed than you or I. But so what? There are plenty of born humans that are less developed than you or I. Are we more valuable? Of course not.
Let’s think of some examples. Someone might be wheelchair-bound. They might have cancer. They might have a traumatic brain injury. Or they might be a single cell.
(One of these things is not like the other. Can you guess which one?)
Barnett’s thinking is far too small. It’s true that the set of “people” is a lot broader than just beautiful movie stars and athletic sports icons. But consider the difference between a newborn and an old person from a distant culture. That is negligible compared to the gulf between that newborn versus the single-cell zygote.
Here’s a chart to illustrate the differences.
Point 3: Environment
What about environment? Where you are has no bearing on your intrinsic worth. So how does the journey of eight inches down the birth canal change your essential value? Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Society needs unambiguous lines to define what is legal and what isn’t. The Roe decision used trimesters. Viability (the fetus being able to survive outside the womb) could be another. Barnett is referring to birth as another line, though few pro-choice advocates would insist on abortion being legal until birth.
This is a tangent.
Note the irony of a ministry eagerly following the conclusions of embryology while demanding the right to pick and choose their science.
Point 4: degree of Dependence
Finally, unborn humans are completely dependent on another for their survival, but so are newborns and the severely handicapped and the comatose and so on. Are they still valuable?
I respond as I did above—the differences between you and me, a newborn, and a disabled or comatose person are trivial when compared against the gulf separating a newborn and the zygote that it was nine months prior.
That’s why I’m pro life. No Bible verses, no religion, just science and careful thinking.
Yes, religion. This is clear when you pick and choose the science you follow based on your religious presuppositions—evolution is bad, but embryology gets a green light.
The religious agenda is also apparent when that’s what guides the argument, not the facts. Compare a zygote and a newborn. Do you see the similarity (they’re the same species) rather than the differences (see the chart above)? If you think the tenuous similarity is the takeaway, you’re enslaved to an agenda.
If Christians really have the 100% direct poop on what’s moral and what isn’t, directly from God’s lips to their ears, how come they can’t agree on what it is? — commenter RichardSRussell
In the wake of the Dobbs ruling against abortion, I wonder if there’s room for compromise on the social issues in the conservative crosshairs in this country.
Let me illustrate the problem with an event I attended a few days ago. Conservative radio host Eric Metaxas is flogging his latest book, Is Atheism Dead?, and I attended his lecture at a local church. The question in the book title seemed odd when the news is actually full of the falling support for Christianity and the rise in the unaffiliated, but we mustn’t underestimate the power of bravado and confidence. Metaxas has plenty of both.
The way he described his research process—that he is often surprised by what he uncovers—made clear that he was a newcomer to apologetics. I’m guessing that, as with fellow bestselling author Lee Strobel, he studied only Christian books and was impressed at how they all supported his Christian presuppositions.
If lite Christian apologetics was the main course, this was its side order of despair.
Metaxas admits that he still has lots of unanswered questions about Christianity and the Bible, but he’s still solidly on Team Jesus. He tells us that while Christians and atheists both have their own embarrassing lists of attacks on their worldviews, there is no symmetry. No, the open questions are much more devastating for atheists. The script has flipped, and science now points to God. It’s game over for atheists. They might as well be arguing for a flat earth.
But when we step back and look at his overall argument, we find reassuring pat-on-the-head claims but little evidence. He might’ve been surprised at the arguments, but experienced atheists would feel at home with the Bible as history, Big Bang, fine tuning, and abiogenesis. In my back catalog I’ve responded to these and many more.
Curiously, he fumbled several dates and historical events. For example, he struggled for a few seconds to give some anecdote about Fred Hoyle and isotopes of copper but gave up. (Something to do with Hoyle’s work in stellar nucleosynthesis, perhaps?)
At another point he marveled at a convent built in Nazareth in the 1880s that may have stumbled on the childhood home of Jesus. He spent a long time discussing different angles to this story, but he misstated the name of the book that documented it.
We’re all forgetful now and then, but for an author on a book tour this surprised me. I had to wonder—did he use a ghost writer?
The Christian apologetic argument was abysmal, but there’s more.
The other part of the lecture
Metaxas wove a second theme through his lecture, and he didn’t fumble this message. If lite Christian apologetics was the main course, this was its side order of despair.
He didn’t take a victory lap to celebrate the recent conservative gifts from the Supreme Court. Rather, he labeled conditions in society today “horrible,” which brought applause. (Yes, they are, but I’m sure I would cite different horrible examples.) And that’s the problem with conservative victories—focus on the celebration and you lose that the-sky-is-falling fear that delivers those conservative votes.
Christian political conservatives in the U.S. have cleverly wrangled an unfair share of the political power. When I look at the gulf that separates the left from the right, my first instinct is to try to find common ground. To reach across the aisle. To see things from their viewpoint. And aren’t my fellow citizens with different viewpoints doing the same thing?
In a word, no, if Metaxas has anything to say about it. He’s striving to maintain that gulf, and compromise isn’t helpful.
He quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and dissident who was killed by the Nazis just before the end of the war, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”* He paralleled Bonhoeffer’s struggle with his own, saying that when he asks about the Big Steal** or covid vaccine, he’s told to shut up. But he won’t. “I have honest questions,” he said.
He said that American Christians are as silent as Germans were in 1933. Bonhoeffer’s friends told him to be quiet, too, but good Christians today must reject that advice. “If you keep your mouth shut now, you are really guilty.”
Is there no room for common ground on the social issues that inflame the country—abortion, same-sex marriage, church-state separation, and more? Metaxas did his best to make sure that this audience of perhaps a thousand said no.
Why think that we live in a world with a god when there are so many reasons to reject that idea? For those who want to convince us that God exists, let’s continue our list of 25 things that they need to show us don’t exist (part 1 here).
The next clue that we live in a godless world:
3. Because God needs praise and worship
Is it obnoxious to have seen Donald Trump as president bask in effusive praise as if he were Kim Il Sung, Stalin, or some other dictator? If so, why expect the all-good Christian God to want that kind of praise?
There’s a progression of wisdom from sociopath, to average person, to wise person, to sage. As we move along this spectrum, base personality traits such as the desire for adulation fall away, but the opposite is true for the Christian god. Not only do we hear this from Christianity itself (“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,” according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism), we read it in the Bible (“At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth”).
What’s the point of praise? Obviously, God already understands his position relative to us. We’re informing him of nothing new when we squeal, “Golly, you’re so fantastic!”
Imagine a human equivalent where you have an ant farm, and the ants are aware that you’re the Creator and Destroyer. It would be petty to revel in the ants’ worshipping you and telling you how great you are. Just how insecure would you need to be?
This sycophantic praise makes sense for a narcissistic and insecure king, but can God really want or need to hear this? We respect no human leader who demands this. Christianity would have us believe that the personality of a perfect being is that of a spoiled child.
Praise makes sense when you’re praising something surprising, but God mindlessly goes from one perfect act to another. Sure, he did a perfect thing, but that can’t be surprising. He’s like water that flows downhill. It could do nothing else!
Another opportunity for praise is when an act came at some expense, like giving food to a needy person or risking your safety to help someone. This too doesn’t apply to God, who is limited by no finite resource and who can’t be injured.
Praise is particularly odd when you consider how unpraiseworthy God is. He’s the guy who demanded genocide and sanctioned slavery in the Old Testament and created hell in the New.
God should be a magnification of good human qualities and an elimination of the bad ones. But the petty, praise-demanding, vindictive, and intolerant God of the Bible is simply a Bronze Age caricature, a magnification of all human inclinations, good and bad.
There is no map of world science, with the geocentrists in the green region and the heliocentrists in the blue, where the Creationists are over here and the evolutionists are over there. There are disagreements over unresolved questions in science, but they’re rarely regionally based. And when those disagreements get resolved, (1) the process will have taken years or (at most) decades, (2) the resolution will have come due to new and better evidence, and (3) the new consensus view will be adopted peacefully and quickly by scientists worldwide.
Contrast that with religion. (1) Disagreements between religions don’t get resolved. Will Muslims ever accept Christianity’s idea of the Trinity? Will Christians ever accept Hinduism’s idea of reincarnation? Will Protestants and Catholics set aside their differences? After many church councils, some Christian questions have been answered (with the losing side declared a heresy), but there is no objective Christianity. Christianity continues to fragment at a rate of two new denominations per day.
(2) Evidence may be the currency of science, but in religion, it’s power. Disputed points of dogma are resolved and became the consensus view, not because a plain reading of the Bible show them there but because those are the views that happen to win. While arguments are made for the various positions, in the end, it’s a popularity contest.
(3) Consensus within Christianity is sometimes imposed. The conclusions of ecumenical Christian councils (there have been 21 since the first one in Nicaea in 325) are imposed on Roman Catholics by the Vatican.
It’s not always peaceful. The Cathars were a Christian Gnostic sect whose members were exterminated in thirteenth-century France for not being Catholic. Catholic vs. Protestant wars have killed millions.
This bloodshed has done nothing to consolidate supernatural belief worldwide. There is not even consensus on the number of god(s), let alone their names or what is required to placate them. When believers get their story straight, they can let us know.
If this were God World, we’d expect to see a single understanding of God worldwide.
(1) If we live in a world with a God, then there wouldn’t be any apologists. (2) There are apologists. (3) Therefore, we live in a world without a God. — commenter Tommy
Catherine Aird observed, “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” Today’s horrible warning is “The Link Between School Shootings And Atheism” by Robert Clifton Robinson. Let’s pick apart this shallow, biased argument to see how strong the connection between school shootings and atheism actually is.
Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to.
Yes, Christians are unfairly biased against atheists, but this says nothing about atheists’ actual goodness. We don’t start with prejudice and then conclude it’s true.
The most charitable interpretation I can put on this is that it’s an “if there’s smoke, there’s fire” argument. That is, Christians wouldn’t distrust atheists so much without a good reason. Which, of course, is nonsense. Prejudice is hardly scientific evidence.
Some Christians wonder, how can atheists be trustworthy if they don’t imagine the Christian god looking over their shoulder? That reminds me of this bit of wisdom from Penn Jillette. The last line brilliantly turns the tables on the sanctimonious Christian.
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
Atheism remains a crime in 25 Muslim countries today, for which about ten assign it the death penalty.
Atheists and school shootings?
Robinson makes his central claim, and it’s startling. Under the heading, “Atheists Are Responsible For A Majority Of School Shootings,” he says,
In the period from 1998-2018, there were 69 school shootings in the United States, all but four were committed by atheists. The four killers not specifically identified as atheists, claimed to be Christians. Upon investigation, these four individuals were Christian in name only, not as genuine Biblical Christians defined by Jesus in John 3:3, as “born again,” and possessing the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Wow. Let’s unpack this neutron star of nonsense.
Robinson’s source is “What Is The Religion Of Mass Public Shooters?” by John Lott (2018). But Lott doesn’t say there were “69 school shootings” but 69 shooters in 66 mass public shootings. Already we see a less-than-fastidious dedication to the facts.
Does 66 mass shootings in 20 years sound right? It’s a radical undercount according to the Boston Globe: “There have been at least 314 mass shootings so far in 2022. There have only been 186 days.” The Globe is careful to define “mass shooting” as any shooting with four or more people shot (excluding the shooter), while Lott doesn’t define the term. So is it 3.3 mass shootings per year (Lott) or 1.7 per day (Boston Globe)? Lott’s statistics are either made-up nonsense, or he has a radically different definition of “mass shooting.” I can only guess that Lott meant school shootings, not mass shootings, but since he doesn’t define the term, we can’t know.
And given all the whining atheists and other liberals make against guns, they’d be the last group you’d expect pulling the trigger. Does it make sense that 65 out of 69 participants (94 percent) in a collection of U.S. mass shootings were atheists when only 3 percent of the overall population are atheists?
Next, let’s consider the source. Lott’s article appears at the Daily Caller web site, about which Wikipedia says, “The Daily Caller is a right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by now-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and political pundit Neil Patel in 2010.” It also notes, “The Daily Caller has published false stories on multiple occasions,” so it’s a questionable source.
Finally, I can’t ignore that last sentence. Robinson won’t stop until his set of Christians has been purged of any immoral actors. Even those last four shooters who claimed to be Christian couldn’t have been, because how could they be since True Christians don’t do that?
Robinson’s poor thinking gets worse when we see what he makes of the Lott article. It cites another article written by Lott that identifies each of his 69 shooters. In this list, two are “anti-Christian,” one says he resented his parents’ strong Christian faith, one is an atheist, and one says he’s no longer Christian. That means that one self-identified as an atheist. About 46 of the shooters, the article says, “No mention of Religion in any news article.”
Now Lott’s sample has one atheist, a few who are some kind of “not Christian,” a few Christians, and a big pile of “Unknown” in the middle. That doesn’t give him what he wanted, so here’s how he spins the data.
The media goes into great depth about all sorts of aspects of these killer’s lives and religious views if they can find any information on them. If interviews with the killer’s family and friends don’t reveal anything about their religious views and the press can’t find the killer’s being affiliated with any religion, at the very least they don’t have significant religious views.
No, it doesn’t follow that if the press said nothing about the killer’s religion then religion couldn’t have been important to that person.
Returning to the Robinson article, this is the flimsy foundation on which he makes his grand conclusion, “In the period from 1998-2018, there were 69 school shootings in the United States, all but four were committed by atheists.” No, there was one atheist, not “all but four.”
More irrelevant papers
Next, we pause again to consider two papers that conclude, according to Robinson, that “a majority of people in human society hold atheists primarily responsible for capital crimes and feel it is likely that most serial killers are atheists.”
Again, these conclusions make Christians look bad, and Robinson shows no motivation to push back against the bias to show the truth.
It’s curious that Robinson is so fixated on atheists’ (supposed) lack of trustworthiness despite his use of a Daily Caller article. About that site, Wikipedia said, “In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations, The Daily Caller was ranked the least-trusted news organization by Americans.”
Robinson’s conclusion to these papers highlights Christian bias:
So much for the claim by atheists that one does not need God in order to be a moral person. Scientific research confirms that a majority of atheists are neither moral, nor held as good people by the majority of people in the world.
He’s done nothing to show that most atheists are immoral or that prejudice is the same as fact.
Atheists and good works
There’s more. Robinson tells us that Stalin murdered millions, and he was an atheist (to which I’ve responded).
Next up is modern healthcare. Robinson says,
In an essay published by the National Library of Medicine, it has been documented that over 70 percent of all healthcare in developing countries, is provided by people who are followers of Jesus.
Faith-based organizations play a substantial role in providing healthcare in developing countries, cited in some publications as up to 70% of all healthcare services.
So (1) not just Christians and (2) “in some publications … up to 70%,” not “over 70 percent.”
The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
Penn Jillette
Robinson next gives an anecdote about his charitable work in the Philippines before and after Typhoon Haiyan, which killed 6,300 people there in 2013.
Every home on the isolated island I lived at that time was devastated. Many Christians began rebuilding homes for the poor over the next year and we successfully completed the rebuilding of over half those destroyed. In all of that time not a single atheist organization came to help us.
Were these “many Christians” local Filipinos? That wouldn’t be surprising because the country is almost 90 percent Christian. Were they working on their home island? That wouldn’t be surprising because they’d be working with their neighbors to rebuild their own neighborhood.
Robinson complained about the lack of atheists helping:
Not a single atheist organization gave money to help provide materials to rebuild homes, provide medicine, or provide food for those decimated.
Is he complaining about U.S. atheists? They help in proportion to their fraction of the U.S. population when the federal government provides aid. The Obama administration gave $37 million in disaster relief after that typhoon, a good example of secular assistance, not explicitly Christian or atheist assistance.
What does Robinson expect? Christianity has had two thousand years to get organized, and atheism was a crime (in the form of blasphemy) in Scotland up until last year. Atheism remains a crime in 25 Muslim countries today, for which about ten assign it the death penalty. Nevertheless, Humanist organizations like GO Humanity (née Foundation Beyond Belief) do exist and are trying to make a difference.
Robinson’s article shows how a combination of wishful thinking and sloppy scholarship can invent a ludicrous conclusion. I hope this can be a good reminder to not give blanket trust to remarkable conclusions and to read the cited works. It should also remind us to maintain high standards for our own work.
Being an atheist means taking personal responsibility for your actions, as opposed to carrying around a “get out of hell free” card that you wave around every single time you give in to temptation. — Barry Goldberg, Common Sense Atheism
Is the pro-life movement so blinders-on focused on the plight of single-celled zygotes that they haven’t noticed where their bus is going? Their destination isn’t a play pen with laughing babies but an illegal abortion clinic with teenage girls afraid of the procedure and terrified that they’ll be reported to police by some Christian busybody.
Personal responsibility
But first, let’s look at one more reaction to the tweet that started this set of articles (part 1).
How about the concept of personal responsibility? I am stunned at how Americans no longer want to be responsible for themselves or their actions. From abortion to free everything, we’ve become a nation of irresponsible freeloaders.
Are you a freeloader if you get food from a church food bank or take other forms of church charity? If church members can give charity to needy people who aren’t freeloaders but need a little temporary help, why can’t taxpayers do the same thing through government programs?
I presume part of this complaint is that a pregnant woman must take responsibility for her actions. Yes, and she might take responsibility by getting an abortion.
Consider a parallel medical need, someone injured in a car accident. The person who drives a car knows there’s some chance of an accident, but the emergency room personnel don’t disqualify them even if they were irresponsible. Similarly, a woman who has sex knows there’s a risk of pregnancy, but the abortion clinic doesn’t disqualify her either.
(While we’re talking about responsibility, note the irresponsibility of U.S. churches who hide behind a loophole that allows them, and only them, to accept nonprofit status but not open their financial records to prove to the American public that they’re using that financial benefit wisely. Only two percent of U.S. churches file the IRS 990 financial disclosure form. Do they have something to hide? That’s what the rest of us are thinking, and Christian churches should push for the removal of this embarrassing loophole. More about churches and hidden finances here.)
Trying to illustrate how taking responsibility works, one Twitter reply showed a meme of a pair of pants with the caption, “Used as directed, prevents 100% of all unwanted pregnancies and STDs, with zero nasty side effects!”
Not really. “Keep your pants on” is an effective contraceptive in the same way “Don’t eat so much” is a practical weight-loss diet and “Just stop smoking” is valuable advice for someone trying to quit.
Christians, don’t focus on making abortion illegal. Focus instead on making it unnecessary.
What is the pro-life goal, really?
The pro-life goal is to replace Planned Parenthood with Kermit Gosnell, the illegal abortion clinic doctor who was convicted in 2013 of the murders of three infants delivered alive plus the manslaughter of one patient. As Chris Charbonneau observed, you can’t eliminate abortion; all you can do is make it more dangerous. With legal avenues gone but the demand still there, abortions will just be illegal. We’re not in the dark about what will happen since we’ve already been here. Before the Roe decision in 1973, the per capita abortion rate was higher than it is today.
Demand is the key to a sensible abortion policy, not prohibition. We must focus on reducing the demand, which means reducing unwanted pregnancies.
I’m about to explain the unsurprising route to reducing unwanted pregnancies but first I want to check in with any pro-life Christians. Do you really think of abortion as murder? Do you think of the 930,000 annual abortions in the U.S. as a holocaust? If so, keep that thought in mind as we continue.
The first step to reduce unwanted pregnancies is comprehensive sex education in schools. Sex can’t be taboo if we expect students to really understand where babies come from, how consent works, how contraceptives work, sexually-transmitted infections, the myths surrounding sex, and so on. Second, contraceptives (especially the most reliable kind, the Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives) should be subsidized and easily available.
At this point in the discussion, many conservative Christians push back. There’ll be no 12-year-olds putting condoms on bananas if they have anything to say about it! But prudery is no excuse when we’re talking about murder—right, my Christian friends? You did say that what we’re trying to avoid is murder, right? Of course sex ed must be age appropriate, but children must learn the facts early enough so they’re comfortable with them before they need them.
Based on what I’ve seen, conservative politicians have no interest in seeing the abortion question resolved. They benefit from an ongoing fight where they can say, “The sky is falling! Vote for me!” This means that they would be the last ones pointing out how the differences could be resolved. Following a conservative politician’s advice on how to respond to abortion is like getting advice from a crisis pregnancy center on how to respond to an unwanted pregnancy.
Christians, don’t focus on making abortion illegal. Focus instead on making it unnecessary. You’ll make a lot more progress working with pro-choice advocates on the common goal of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy contravenes enumerated rights in the Constitution, namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy, as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom. — Prof. Michele Goodwin,New York Times
