Not Ashamed of the Gospel
This is the ninth chapter of a book in progress, with the working title “Be Not Afraid of Their Terror.” The first chapter is here:
While it’s not the Christian’s duty to define his own enemies, they do exist in the form of those who advocate for objectively evil actions. There are many battles being fought in the Western political sphere over issues that intersect with Christian pre-political ethics, which we should, therefore, take a strong public position on. Rather than list all of the issues I believe to be pre-political—something that would require a tangent of explaining what makes them pre-political and to what degree we should oppose them—I’ll focus on one issue that all orthodox Protestants should be able to agree on, that of abortion.
Scripture is clear that a child in the womb is an image bearer (Psalm 139:13-16, Jeremiah 1:5). On top of this, the earliest noncanonical Christian text, the Didache, contains the instruction, “… you shall not murder a child by abortion…”1 affirming that Christians in the Apostolic Age authoritatively barred members of the church from the practice. While there’s room for debate among dedicated Christians over what constitutes a reasonable exception, such as in vitro fertilization and the exceedingly rare instance that the mother’s life is genuinely in danger, overall the practice must not occur among members of orthodox churches, and Christians should publicly advocate against the practice in broader society.
According to a Pew Research poll, 37% of Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, while nearly all of the remainder believe it should be legal in all or most cases.2 Yet, an aggregate of polls by FiveThirtyEight, which includes the Pew poll, shows that the majority of people who claim to be “anti-abortion” are, in reality, members of a majority who hold to a middle-ground approach. Those who genuinely believe that elective abortion should be outlawed in nearly all cases make up less than 20% of the populace.3 After the overturning of Roe, there have been legislative victories for the pre-political position, but there have been just as many victories for the most indefensible position, that of unrestricted abortion up to the point of birth. Still, we should keep this in perspective; a 1979 Gallup poll claimed that 80% of Americans were for legal elective abortion. Even my “denomination,” the Southern Baptist Convention, passed a resolution in 1971, which stated, “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”4 Note that, incredibly, there was an exception for “mental health.”
What this proves is that pro-life advocacy, over the last forty years, has been tremendously effective. As Americans’ perception of sexual morality has become far more liberal, their view of abortion has moved in the opposite direction. Early Christians were known for taking and raising the infants whom pagans literally abandoned to die. Likewise, much of the success of the pro-life movement comes from showing the gruesome truth of the practice, efforts to provide free neonatal care to women with unexpected pregnancies, and Christians adopting children at a higher rate than non-Christians. All of these efforts speak to the Law written on everyone’s heart. This is the core of effective Christian pre-political action, that God’s people are most successful when they not only point out sin, but when they proactively show an objectively better way. Cloistering yourself in a like-minded community may keep the sins of the world at bay—it will also make it more likely that your adult children will reject your fundamentalism—but only going out into the world and proving that the sacrificial love of Christ dwells within you will spread the truth of the gospel.
Conversely, this is why the “abolition” movement has been largely unsuccessful. Most of its members are unwilling to accept “compromise,” including legislation that would see abortions decrease, such as restricting the time frame in which abortion is legal. Instead, they favor an all-or-nothing approach that includes prosecution of women who procure an abortion for murder, chastising any believer who breaks with such hard-line positions as inauthentically Christian. Rather than winning the uncommitted over, this aggressive stance, not coincidentally held by most of the men advocating for defining and punishing enemies, hardens opponents and serves as a bogeyman for pro-abortion activists. It ultimately hurts the pre-political cause, assisting in the passing of ballot measures like Ohio’s constitutional amendment solidifying a “right” to abortion.5 While both the pro-life and abolitionist movements agree that abortion is murder, the former has a proven track record of decreasing the number of murders—the number has consistently dropped since its peak in the 1990s—while the latter has done little more than virtue-signal and alienate people who would otherwise be sympathetic.
Thus, mainstream anti-abortion advocacy serves as a key example of the most effective way for Christians to collectively work for pre-political societal change, namely the exact same thing that individual Christians are called to do: live the gospel that we preach. Regardless of the scale of the mission, whether it be a single person acting of their own volition or a multi-million dollar Christian charity, we should do everything we can to be seen by non-Christians as kind people with strong disagreements. There will always be those who revile anyone who would dare to promote absolute, pre-political Christian ethics in the public square, but how we treat those people is a gospel witness for the larger group who has yet to decide where they stand on these issues. The meek believer on a street corner getting screamed at while he hands out pamphlets on the scientific reality of late-term abortion is the exact opposite of how the average non-Christian activist on a street corner behaves, and that’s the point (1 Peter 3:14-17).
A key reason that conservative Christianity currently has such a poor reputation in America is that Evangelical cultural engagement, in the age of mass media, has had an overwhelmingly different character. Talking heads became multi-millionaires by appointing themselves our cultural representatives, always making sure, after claiming that an earthquake, a hurricane or a terrorist attack was God’s judgment for gay people,6 to direct believers to some business initiative of theirs. Anyone who would dare take to the same channels to rebuke these notions was castigated as a “liberal,” an accusation that many times was true, as that is often the only class of Christian willing to stand up to the conservative Christian media machine. The average Evangelical, who is quick to laugh away these ridiculous notions promulgated by media personalities, still feeds the multi-billion dollar industry, posing as Christian ministry, that allows such ridiculousness to thrive. Just like the average secular American does with politics, media-engaged conservative Christians by and large have a group of “trusted sources” whom they allow to shape their worldview. I used to be this way as well, until witnessing how my favorite Christian media personalities behaved on social media broke me of the spell.7
This modality greatly diminishes our collective, domestic, pre-political gospel witness in multiple ways. A result of outsourcing our engagement to national media “ministries,” and living vicariously through them, is that the average non-Christian has little understanding of our faith beyond the clout-seeking megachurch pastor—or aging actor re-branding himself as Christian—invited onto cable news for the purpose of judging the world for its sin (1 Corinthians 5:9-13). By restricting much of our collective public witness to those who have the means to weather the financial risks, because they either have enough savings or are directly profiting from their engagement, we have normalized the fear of social repercussions for preaching the gospel. When our ancestors confidently went to their deaths for the cause of Christ, that we would be scared of losing a job over it is shameful. The Apostle Paul, after he had already been beaten nearly to death for peacefully evangelizing (Acts 14:19), wrote:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
—Romans 1:16-17
I believe that many conservative Christians, to one degree or another, have become ashamed of the gospel. They’re afraid to witness in the public square, because conservative Christianity in America has largely become more of a conservative political movement than a religious one. Why risk being lumped in with the cultural Christians who use messianic language to describe Donald Trump,8 a group that gets far more airtime than reasonable conservative Christians could ever hope to attain, when you can lay low and proclaim the gospel in the socially risk-free domains of your church and foreign missions? This creates a feedback loop that only ensures Christian media personalities, increasingly promoting extreme political action, will drive the overall public perception of the faith. If we want to reverse our current course of societal marginalization, then we must wrest control of this perception from the self-aggrandizing profiteers of Christian media.
The only way this can be accomplished is if individual Christians, one by one, decide to live the gospel in public, putting trust in God’s providence and in His Spirit to guide them. The faith is far more attractive when it’s proactive instead of reactive. Our churches are full of people waiting for an opportunity to do work in the community that shares the love of Christ, if only someone else would take the initiative to organize it. That is what a Third Great Awakening would look like—the revolution will not be televised. Our nation’s culture is genuinely sick, and our mass media will only highlight the worst actors, but the average non-Christian in your community will be much more likely to recognize that the Christian on TV with a spray tan, pompadour and gleaming white teeth is a fringe character if he’s regularly presented with humble, meek, loving, serving Christians in real life. The conservative church down the road looks a lot less scary when it’s also the local food bank. The individual orthodox Protestant is much more approachable, despite his many cultural differences with the majority of his neighbors, when he goes out of his way to prove that he follows the One who is Love itself.
I wish I had a set of predefined actions that were guaranteed to turn the tide of public perception, but I think that no single person possesses the answer is part of the plan. God works through individuals. Sometimes those individuals gain notoriety by leading large movements that are remembered well after they’re gone, but, more often than not, God’s greatest works are achieved through people whom you’ve never heard of, doing things that most people would consider mundane. A step in the right direction would be for each of us to properly separate the pre-political from the political and ask ourselves how we can lovingly and humbly promote those pre-political imperatives outside of our comfort zone of home and church.
Didache 2
Hannah Hartig, “About Six-in-Ten Americans Say Abortion Should Be Legal in All or Most Cases,” Pew Research Center (blog), June 13, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/13/about-six-in-ten-americans-say-abortion-should-be-legal-in-all-or-most-cases-2/.
Jean Yi, “Where Americans Stand On Abortion, In 5 Charts,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), May 6, 2022, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-americans-stand-on-abortion-in-5-charts/.
“How Southern Baptists Became Pro-Life | Baptist Press,” https://www.baptistpress.com/, January 16, 2015, https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/how-southern-baptists-became-pro-life/.
Manav Tanneeru, “A Constitutional Right to Abortion in Ohio Ballot Measure Election Results | CNN Politics,” CNN, n.d., https://www.cnn.com/election/2023/results/ohio/abortion-ballot-measure.
John Hudson, “Pat Robertson Blames Natural Disaster Victims,” The Atlantic (blog), January 14, 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/01/pat-robertson-blames-natural-disaster-victims/341489/.
Blake Callens, “How Commercial Incentives Break Christian Social Media,” February 1, 2024, https://mereorthodoxy.com/christian-social-media-is-broken.
Caroline Vakil, “Marjorie Taylor Greene Compares Donald Trump to Jesus at Nevada Rally,” Text, The Hill (blog), June 10, 2024, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4713638-greene-trump-jesus-nevada-rally/; Natasha Owens - The Chosen One (Official Music Video), 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9L5K04VgkI .