Is pro-life more than pro-birth?
Why isn’t the pro-life movement committed to the whole person?
These are common questions aimed at the pro-life movement. In fact, one of the most frequent criticisms of the pro-life movement is that those who hold such views only care about ending abortion.
In this episode of Signposts, I address these questions and offer my perspective on the pro-life movement by thinking about what it means to fight for justice and human dignity.
Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.
Transcript
Hello, this Russell Moore and you’re listening to Signposts: questions and conversations about faith, life, and culture. If you have listened to me for very long, you’ve probably heard me tell the story of one of my earliest memories because in some ways I think it shaped the way that I view almost everything else in my life. And it was a time when I was, I don’t know, five or six years old. I was in Sunday school. We had a guest teacher that day, and in our little Southern Baptist Sunday School class, as in almost all of them, the way that it it worked was you had a little envelope and you would put your name on it and you would mark whether you’re present, whether or not you were going to attend the worship service, whether or not you’d read your Bible daily, whether or not you shared the gospel with somebody, and your offering.
And so my parents would often give me a quarter or a nickel or something to put in the offering envelope, and I had a quarter in there. And you know, as kids of that age will do, I was sort of playing with the quarter because for whatever reason they didn’t take up the envelopes until the end of that day. And so I was playing with the quarter, and I put the quarter in my mouth. And the lady who was teaching that day was rightly upset about that. She didn’t want me to choke on the quarter. But what she did was to come up and say, “Now you don’t want to put that coin in your mouth, because you don’t know where that coin has been. And for all you know a colored man may have held that coin.”
Now, this was long past the days of Jim Crow Mississippi. This was not during the times when people would have been seeing images on their screen of people being beaten in the streets. But what was underlying that comment was a much, much larger worldview of white supremacy, and as I’ll often say when I talk about that story, I don’t know if it’s my memory playing tricks on me but it seems to me as though right after that comment, she gathered us up together to say “Let’s sing ‘Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.'” Whether whether I’m conflating some other memories or not, we did sing that all the time, and I was starting to conclude that those two things did not go together.
You cannot be pro-missions and racially bigoted. Those two things can’t go together. You can’t be pro-missions and white supremacist. If in fact God has created a church made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language, then to prize my ethnicity as somehow being better than yours – much less to oppress with evil those of other ethnicities is the contradiction of the Gospel. So what many people in the civil rights movement and elsewhere were doing with churches that were trapped in that culture was to come in and say, “Wait a minute. If you believe in missions, then you have to believe in racial justice and racial reconciliation. Because the very impetus behind missions also ought to teach you about the impartiality of God and about the universal human imaging of God. If the Gospel is offered to everyone, if the church is made up of people from everywhere, then that means that you cannot be a white supremacist without exchanging the spirit for the flesh and exchanging the gospel for an anti-gospel.”
Now, the reason I bring that up is because