The Change of Protestant Stance on Abortion II. | George Grant
from the book: Third Time Around by George Grant
(Presbyterian minister)
Chapter 7:
ABOMINATIONS
AND ADMONITIONS:
THE MAKING OF MODERNISM
extinctus amabitur idem
As always happens to miraculous things, the virtue has all gone out
with the lapse of time.
Hilaire Belloc
If the world grows too worldly, it· can be rebuked by the church; but if
the church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for
worldliness by the world.
G. K. Chesterton
When Marx and Engles began their Communist Manifesto with the eloquent sentence, „A spector is haunting Europe,” they were at least partly right. A spector was indeed haunting Europe; in fact, it was haunting the whole earth. But, it was not the spector that they had imagined. Instead, it was the primal spector of resurgent abortion. It was the aboriginal spector of child-killing.
Some battles just don’t stay won. Especially when they are rooted in the very character of fallen man.
Theodore Roosevelt, writing on the eve of America’s entry into the First World War in 1917, exhorted his fellow citizens to be on guard against that ancient spector:
The world is at this moment passing through one of those terrible periods of convulsion when the souls of men and of nations are tried as by fire. Woe to the man or to the nation that at such a time stands as once Laodicea stood; as the people of ancient Meroz stood, when they dared not come to the help of the Lord against the mighty. In such a crisis the moral weakling is the enemy of the right, the enemy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That was a remarkable warning from a remarkable man-a man of unbounded energies and many careers. Before his fiftieth birthday, Roosevelt had served as a New York state legislator, the undersecretary ofthe Navy, police commissioner for the city of New York, U.S. civil service Commissioner, the governor of New York, vice-president under William McKinley, a colonel in the U.S. Army, and two terms as the president of the United States. In addition, he had written nearly thirty books, run a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territories, and conducted scientific expeditions on four continents. He was a brilliant man who read at least five books every week of his life. He was a physical man who enjoyed hunting, boxing, and wrestling. He was a spiritual man who took his faith very seriously and for years taught Sunday school in his Dutch Reformed Church. And he was a family man who lovingly raised five children and enjoyed a lifelong romance with his wife.
He was, indeed, a remarkable man.
And he lived in a remarkable time-at the sunset of one century and the dawning of another. The United States had grown from sixteen states in 1800 to forty-five in 1900, from nine hundred thousand square miles to almost four million, and from a population of five million to seventy-six million. That century had produced steamships, railroads, streetcars, bicycles, rollerskates, the air brake, the torpedo, telephones, telegraphs, transatlantic cables, harvesting machines, threshers, cotton gins, cooking ranges, sewing machines, phonographs, typewriters, electric lights, illuminating gas, photographs, x-rays, motion pictures, and cottonseed oil. According to journalist Edward Byrn, the comparison of the start of the century with the end of the century was „like the juxtaposition of a distant star with the noonday sun.” And popular historian M. J. de Forest Shelton exclaimed in all truthfulness that there was „more difference between Napoleon’s day and ours than between Napoleon’s and Julius Caesar’s. One century against eighteen.” Agreeing, the English intellectual Frederic Harrison, said:
Take it all in all, the merely material, physical, mechanical change in human life in the hundred years, from the days of Watt and Arkwright to our own, is greater than occurred in the thousand years that preceded, perhaps even the two thousand or twenty thousand years.
Despite bitter labor agitation, anarchist strikes, communist insurgencies, and the emergence of terrorism as a political weapon; despite attempts on the lives of the Prince of Wales, the German Emperor, and the Shah of Persia; despite successful assassinations of King Umberto of Italy and President McKinley; despite the uproar of the Dreyfus affair in France and the Robida scandal in Austria; despite the imminent passing of the old world order-and its accompanying spector-despite everything, a robust optimism pervaded the thinking of most Westerners. Their advances, after all, had been stunning. So, for the most part, they shared the opinion of the New York World in its prediction· that the new century would „meet and overcome all perils and prove to be the best that this steadily improving planet has ever seen.”
Theodore Roosevelt had a saner view, a more realistic view of his time. It was a view balanced by a Christian understanding of mankind-made in the very image of God but, at the same time, fallen. With penetrating perception and prophetic precision, he said:
Progress has brought us both unbounded opportunities and unbridled difficulties. Thus, the measure of our civilization will not be that we have done much, but what we have done with that much. I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism. The thought of modern industry in the hands of Christian charity is a dream worth dreaming. The thought of industry in the hands of paganism is a nightmare beyond imagining. The choice between the two is upon us.
He sawall too clearly the dangers that faced the Western world as it marched so boldly, so confidently into the twentieth century. That is why he devoted himself to remedying as many of those dangers as he possibly could throughout his life. His reforms focused on the needs of the poor working man, on the struggling immigrant, on the miserable tenement dweller, on the helpless widow and orphan, and on the pioneering homesteader. But above all else, his reforms focused on the needs of the ordinary family-which was facing extraordinary new pressures and changes. In his State of the Union message in 1905, he underscored this priority saying:
The transformation of the family is one of the greatest sociological phenomena of our time; it is a social question of the first importance, of far greater importance than any merely political or economic question can be.
He went on to describe his simple agenda for protecting the family against the encroachment of those men and women he called „the foes of our own household.” He said:
There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality. All else is immorality. There is only true Christian ethics over against which stands the whole of paganism. If we are to fulfill our great destiny as a people, then we must return to the old morality, the sole morality.
His analysis was sterling;
All these blatant sham reformers, in the name of a new morality, preach the old, old vice of self-indulgence which rotted out first the moral fiber and then even the external greatness of Greece and Rome.
It is not surprising then, that when a new wave of abortion advocates mlade their way onto the American scene and into the public arena, Roosevelt was one of their chief opponents; in fact, apart from the hierarchy of the Catholic church, he was one of their only opponents. He railed against their „frightful and fundamental immorality,” calling their cause a submission „to coldness, to selfishness, to love of ease, to shrinking from risk, and to an utter and pitiful failure in sense of perspective. „But he did not simply hurl invectives their way-he acted. As he said:
The foes of our own household are our worst enemies; and we can oppose them, not only by exposing them and denouncing them, but by constructive work in planning and building reforms which shall take into account both the economic and the moral factors in human advance. We in America can attain our great destiny only by service; not by rhetoric, and above all not by insincere rhetoric, and that dreadful mental double-dealing and verbal juggling which makes promises and repudiates them, and says one thing at one time, and the directly opposite thing at another time. Our service must be the service of deeds.
He went on to assert:
The most dangerous form of sentimental debauch is to give expression to good wishes on behalf of virtue while you do nothing about it. Justice is not merely words. It is to be translated into living acts.
The infamous Margaret Sanger – who founded the vast Planned Parenthood network on such shocking pronouncements as, „The most merciful thing that a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it” and „The marriage bed is the most degenerating influence in the social order”-rightly saw Roosevelt as „a holdover from the old Christian religion,” and thus a serious obstacle to her revolutionary program which called for „no Gods and no masters. „
Theodore Roosevelt stood foursquare on the legacy of Biblical orthodoxy and pro-life advocacy. He often asserted that he was „proud of his Holland, Huguenot, and Covenanting ancestors, and proud that the blood of that stark Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards flows in the veins” of his children. For a time, he was able to sway public opinion. But as great a man as he was, he simply could not hold back the tide on his own. The dam had broken.
Progressivism
At the turn of the century, the urgent problems brought on by dramatic changes in the cultural and industrial landscape demanded immediate and innovative solutions. Progressivism offered such solutions.. Under the dynamic leadership of Roosevelt in the U.S. and Hilaire Belloc in Europe, the movement produced a powerful groundswell of united support for sweeping social, political, and economic reforms. Rights were secured for organized labor; political machines were called into account; and massive commercial trusts were reined in.
Despite those remarkable successes, however, Progressivism was a short-lived movement. It quickly splintered into wildly divergent special interest factions. In America, once Roosevelt left his „bully pulpit” in the White House, Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles Lindbergh, Sr. Valiantly tried to carry on Progressivism’s tradition- s informed by Christian conviction, patriotism, and family values. In Europe, once Belloc left his seat in the House of Commons, Cecil Chesterton and Maurice Baring likewise attempted to uphold Progressivism’s legacy. In both cases, however, the bulk of the once mighty movement simply dissipated.
The fact is, among the movement’s disparate factions and interests, there were a large number of irreverent and impatient young radicals who were informed by a very different ideological standard: the revolutionary philosophies and ideals of the humanistic enlightenment. They pushed the bulk of Progressivism into the fringes of Western politics and culture, establishing dozens of groups intent on the utter decimation of the Christian vision of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: the Mugwumps, the Anarchists, the Knights of Labor, the Grangers, the Single-Taxers, the Suffragettes, the International Workers of the World, the Populists, and the Communists. But perhaps the most dangerous and influential off-shoots of Progressivism’s new humanistic fragmentation was Malthusianism.
Thomas Malthus was a late eighteenth century professor of political economy whose mathematical theories convinced an entire generation of scientists, intellectuals, and social reformers that the world was facing an imminent economic crisis caused by unchecked human fertility. According to his scheme, population grows exponentially over time, while food production only grows arithmetically. Thus, poverty, deprivation, and hunger are simply evidences of a population problem. A responsible social policy will, therefore, address population growth as its most pressing priority. In fact, Malthus argued, to attempt to deal with endemic needs in any other way simply aggravates things all the further.
Malthus made the dystopic implications of his thinking crystal clear. In his definitive work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, first released in 1798, he wrote:
All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room is made for them by the deaths of grown persons. Therefore we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns, we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly·encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.
The followers of Malthus believed that if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be eliminated. The question was how? A few believed the solution to that dilemma was political- estrict immigration, centralize planning, reform social welfare, and tighten citizenship requirements. Some others thought the solution was technological-control agricultural production, regulate medical proficiency, and nationalize industrial efficiency.· But the vast majority of Malthusians felt that the solution was genetic-restrict or remove „bad racial stocks,” discourage charity and benevolence, and „aid the evolutionary ascent of man.” Through selective breeding, eugenic repatterning, and craniometric specificity, they hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the stock of the „highest” and „most fit” – or Aryan – race. Through segregation, sterilization, birth control, and abortion, they hoped to winnow the „lower” and „inferior” races out of the population-like chaff is from wheat.
These ideas found their way into some of the most significant political and social programs of the twentieth century.
Adolf Hitler adopted the ideas of Malthus in a wholesale fashion in his administration of the Third Reich-his exterminative „final solution,” his coercive abortion program in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, and his elitist national socialism. He echoed the Malthusian call to „rid the earth of dysgenic peoples by whatever means available so that we may enjoy the prosperity of the Fatherland. ” And he reiterated the Malthusian ideal of eliminating any Christian mercy ministries or social service programs. „Let us spend our efforts and our resources,” he cried in a frenetic speech in 1939, „on the productive, not on the wastrel. „
Josef Stalin also wove the Malthusian ideal into his brutal interpretation of Marxism – his Ukrainian triage, his collectivization of the Kulaks, and his Siberian genocide. He argued that, „The greatest obstacle to the successful completion of the people’s revolution is the swarming of inferior races from the south and east. „And the only thing that kept him from eliminating that obstacle was „the foolhardy interference of church charity. „That is why he made all Christian philanthropies illegal in 1929.
Similarly, in America, Margaret Sanger made Malthusian thinking the cornerstone of her endeavors – her attempts to smuggle contraband contraceptives into the country, her foiled campaign to send obscene materials through the mail, and her advocacy of promiscuous sex and abortion. She was thoroughly convinced that the „inferior races” were in fact „human weeds” and a „menace to civilization.” She believed that „social regeneration” would only be possible as the „sinister forces of the hoards of irresponsibility and imbecility” were repulsed. She accepted the Malthusian notion that organized Christian charity to ethnic minorities and the poor was a „symptom of a malignant social disease” because it encouraged the prolificacy of „defectives, delinquents, and dependents. ”
Clearly, the practical import of Malthusianism – whether grafted into Nazism, Stalinism, or Planned Parenthood Eugenicism – was that abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and euthanasia were advocated as social virtues and that traditional Christian values were derided as vices. It was that killing was offered as a beneficent solution to a plethora of planetary crises of monumental proportions. For the first time since the time of Plato and Aristotle, a consistent pagan philosophy had been formulated to ethically defend genocide-and, for the first time it was systematically implemented. The Scripturally-rooted Progressivism of Roosevelt had been turned completely on its head.
Turning a Deaf Ear
When Balak, regent of the ancient kingdom of Moab, was confronted by the advancing armies of Israel immediately following the Exodus sojourn, he began to cast about for a strategy to defeat them (see Numbers 22:2-3). Military confrontation seemed hopeless. Diplomatic appeasement seemed suicidal. And defensive alliances seemed delinquent (see Numbers 22:4). So in desperation, he sent for Balaam, a conjurer and diviner, who was thought to have the power to bless and bind through spells and incantations (see Numbers 22:5-6).
Balak wanted to hire Balaam to curse Israel.
At first the magician was reluctant to take part in Balak’s ploy, despite his generous offer (see Numbers 22:15-35). But eventually he gave in and delivered four oracles (see Numbers 22:36- 4:25). Much to Balak’s chagrin, however, each of the oracles predicted that Israel wasinvincible from without. No army, no king, no nation, and no empire would be able to stand against it. The only way God’s chosen people could be defeated was if they defeated themselves from within – through disobedience and moral defilement.
That was all Balak needed to know. He didn’t need an army. He didn’t need diplomats. He didn’t need allies. And now, he didn’t even need diviners. All he needed was something to tempt Israel away from its fidelity.
He chose sex. He sent the most beautiful women in all of Moab down into Israel’s camp at Peor (see Numbers 25:1-3, 6). Enticing the people to play the harlot, those women were able to do what no warrior or general ever could: tempt and trap Israel. And not a sword was drawn. Not an arrow was unsheathed. Not a javelin was hurled.
The people were dragged off into captivity by their own lust. They were defeated by the compromise of their Biblical standards.
The disintegration of Progressivism and the emergence of Malthusianism was more the sad consequence of the church’s rueful recalcitrance than humanism’s proud proficiency.
Under the influence of romantic and existential sentiment, believers absolutized the intuitions of individual conscience rather than the certainties of revealed external standards. Under the barrage of Darwinian and Malthusian prevarication, the bulk of the church began to confuse the moral faculty-the ability to make choices-with the moral good. Subjective whims and fashions were given the weight of objective authority and truth. The Balak temptation once again did its work.
In 1930, after an all-out lobbying effort by Margaret Sanger’s staff, the Committee on Marriage and the Home of the Federal Council of Churches – a precursor to the National Council – became the first major organization in the history of Christendom to affirm the language and philosophy of „choice.”28 Soon after, the Quakers, the Northern Presbyterians, the Congregational church, the Methodist-Episcopal church, and several Baptist denominations followed suit. In Germany, the cooperating church gave tacit approval of Hitler’s harsh Erbgedsundheitsgetz laws, which prescribed compulsory abortions, sterilizations, and eugenic controls for „dysgenic” peoples throughout occupied Eastern Europe-including the „final solution” that had been devised for the Jews. Finally, even the Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops capitulated to the Malthusian presuppositions.
When the Catholic church bemoaned this gross abdication of historic orthodoxy, several leading Protestants from around the world offered a defense arguing that God „is revealed· in the endless sweep of evolution and His message is being slowly translated by science into the accents of the human tongue.” Instead of relying on the Bible or Christian tradition, they said, the church should be guided by „the light of the evidence, the knowledge, and the experience of our time.”
It was not long before an avalanche of compromise occurred. One denomination after another turned a deaf ear on the unborn innocents and capitulated to the Balak temptation.
The United Church of Christ-which had led the prolife charge just two generations earlier-affirmed „the sacredness of all life, and the need to protect human life· in particular,” but then went on to uphold „the right of men and women to have access to adequately funded family planning services, and to safe and legal abortions as one option among others. „
The United Methodist church declared:
Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of life and well-being of the mother for whom devastating damage may result from an unacceptable pregnancy. In continuity with past Christian teaching, we recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures.
The Friends church asserted:
On religious, moral, and humanitarian grounds, we arrived at the view that it is far better to end an unwanted pregnancy than to encourage the evils resulting from forced pregnancy and childbirth. We therefore urge the repeal of all laws limiting either the circumstances under which a woman may have an abortion or the physician’s freedom to use his or her best professional judgment in performing it.
The American Baptist churches baptized the Malthusian rhetoric saying:
We grieve with all who struggle with the difficult circum stances that lead them to consider abortion. Recognizing that each person is ultimately responsible to God, we encourage women and men in these circumstances to seek spiritual counsel as they prayerfully and conscientiously consider abortion.
The largest Lutheran communions worldwide reaffirmed the principles of their Nazi collaboration by stating:
In the consideration of induced abortion, the key issue is the status of the unborn fetus. Since the fetus is the organic beginning of human life, the termination of its development is always a serious matter. Nevertheless, a qualitative distinction must be made between its claims and the rights of a responsible person made in God’s image who is living in relationships with God and other human beings. This understanding of responsible personhood is congruent with the historical Lutheran teaching and practice whereby only living persons are baptized. On the basis of the evangelical ethic, a woman or couple may decide responsibly to seek an abortion.
Even a large number of prominent evangelical leaders yielded to the Balak temptation. Meeting under the auspices of Christianity Today magazine and the Christian Medical Society, and led by the highly esteemed Carl F. H. Henry, the evangelicals engaged in debate and exchanged papers for several days before they drafted a consensus report. Published later in the magazine, the report said in part:
Changes in the state laws on therapeutic abortion should be encouraged.
Suitable cases for abortion would fall within the scope of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Statement on Abortion.
As to whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is always sinful we are not agreed, but about the permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.
The Christian physician will advise induced abortion only to safeguard greater values sanctioned by Scripture. These values should include individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility.
Much human suffering can be alleviated by preventing the birth of children where there is a predictable high risk of genetic disease or abnormality. This appears to be a reasonable Christian objective.
With the massive defection of so much of the church from its historic role as the defender of the innocents, the pro-abortion forces were able to easily roll back legal impediments to child- illing:
• In 1925, abortion is legalized in the Soviet Union.
• In 1931, Hitler also legalizes abortion and launches his eugenics plan for Germany and Eastern Europe.
• In 1938, Sweden becomes the first free nation in Christendom to revert to pre-Christian abortion legislation.
• Between 1949 and 1956, abortion is legalized in eleven other European nations (including Hungary – the editor).
• In 1954, Planned Parenthood holds an international conference on abortion and calls for „reform” of restrictive legislation.
• In 1962, the American Law Institute proposes that abortion laws be decriminalized.
• In 1966, the National Organization of Women is established with the liberalization of abortion laws as a major goal.
• In 1967, the American Medical Association reverses its century old commitment to the lives of the unborn and also begins calling for decriminalization of abortion.
• During that same year, three states-Colorado, California, and North Carolina-loosen restrictions on certain child-killing procedures.
• In 1968, the United Kingdom legalizes abortion.
• In 1970, four more states-Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, and New York-enact abortion-on- demand legislation.
• By the end of 1971, nearly half a million legal abortions are being performed in the U.S. each year.
• Then in 1973, the Supreme Court issues its momentous Roe v. Wade decree that changes the abortion laws in all fifty states by sheer judicial fiat.
It seemed that the lone Christian voice of dissent during this tidal wave of neo-pagan revivalism was the Catholic church. On July 29, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his Humanae Vitae encyclical which, among other things, reaffirmed the church’s commitment to the sanctity of life. Thus, it appeared that only the Catholic church remained uncompromisingly pro-life–and as a result, the abortion issue came to be viewed in the public arena as „a Catholic issue.”
Resource
from George Grant Third Time Around c. könyvéből : https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/210e_47e.htm
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