Abortion Is the Democrats’ Chief Sacrament
While evangelicals on the Right always seem to be getting flak from evangelical elites, those on the Left are routinely celebrated in our culture as open-minded, true followers of Christ. Evangelicals for Harris-Walz (now that the radical Minnesota governor has joined the presidential ticket) is one such group that purports to be making political decisions informed by scriptural injunctions and godly wisdom. Many in these circles are not liberal icons like Jim Wallis but have been passed off as orthodox by conservatives and supposedly practice a politics deeply influenced by the love Jesus said we must have for our neighbors.
Though supporters of Evangelicals for Harris-Walz claim to be “[f]aithful, compassionate evangelicals exercising our God-given citizenship by voting for someone who better reflects Christian values,” this doesn’t pass even the slightest scrutiny. In truth, they are apologists for LGBTQ radicalism, genital mutilation, shouting your abortion, white people (especially men) getting punished and shut out from colleges and upper-tier jobs, functionally nonexistent borders, and foolish economic policies that will crash the U.S economy. Armed with a few favorite—but badly misunderstood—verses from Scripture ripped from their context, Evangelicals for Harris-Walz are prepared to overlook a whole host of evils to check off a few of their trendy concerns. Their real power is being able to pass this off as “moderation,” which is as sinister as it is pervasive among the upper ranks in the evangelical world.
Evangelicals for Harris-Walz is composed of a who’s who of evangelical heavy hitters who, unlike many in the Trump camp, have notable influence in the trajectory of evangelicalism writ large.
Perhaps their most significant supporter is Bishop Claude Alexander, who believes in the 1990s Democratic Party era line that “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare in the cases of rape, incest, and threat to the life of the mother.” Alexander currently serves as chairman of the board of Christianity Today and is also on the boards of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, among other influential Christian institutions.
To no one’s surprise, Jemar Tisby is also in this camp. Tisby was educated at the well-known Reformed Theological Seminary and was once regularly featured on panels with Ligon Duncan. Often thought by many evangelicals to be the Christian equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi according to John Fea, Tisby even worked for five months at Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (a grift of epic proportions) back in 2021.
Amy Peeler, another signer, is a Wheaton professor and an associate rector at an Episcopal church in Illinois. She’s also a contributor to On Classical Trinitarianism, a forthcoming volume edited by the most popular classical theist in Reformed Baptist circles today, Matthew Barrett.
Finally, there is Dwight McKissic, the senior pastor of an Arlington, Texas, church that is somehow still part of the SBC. He’s voting for Harris-Walz because “racism and police brutality are as evil as abortion.” Contra McKissic, the latter is an industry that has killed at least 63 million babies, and approximately 20 million black babies, in the womb since 1973. By comparison, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald found that in 2019, nine unarmed blacks were shot by police (a number that includes “suspects who have grabbed an officer’s gun” or who fled “from a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their vehicle”), which destroys the narrative that police departments across the country are riven with anti-black racism.
The Idol of Abortion
We shouldn’t let Evangelicals for Harris-Walz off the hook: whether they intend to or not, they are supporting the Democrats’ deep love of abortion. In what could easily be mistaken for a Babylon Bee headline, DNC attendees can get free abortions and vasectomies. As of this writing, 25 abortions have been performed in Planned Parenthood’s RV of death, which is parked minutes from where the DNC is being held at the United Center. But as Auron MacIntyre quipped, “Mobile altars to Moloch still can’t stop the regime evangelical”—that is, the group of evangelicals who are not only voting for Harris but are enthusiastically campaigning for her. The mobile abortion news surely won’t stop them from continuing to shill for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
This completely belies the absurd notion from Evangelicals for Harris-Walz that they, supposedly just like Harris and Walz, “believe in common sense pro-life policies that protect life at ALL stages.” The briefest look at Harris’s and Walz’s record on that question indicates the exact opposite of that stance.
In what is perhaps the definitive take on Harris’s abortion radicalism, Ryan Anderson noted at First Things that she became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion mill during her national “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” campaign after the Dobbs decision.
As senator she voted against legislation that would have given “protections for unborn children at 20 weeks” and “required medical professionals to provide care to children who survive abortion procedures.” She was an original cosponsor of the “Women’s Health Protection Act of 2019,” which Anderson says would have overridden “state pro-life laws, including such modest measures as informed-consent requirements, parental notification, and waiting periods.” She supported taxpayer support of abortion and gutted “religious-liberty protections against abortion mandates.”
As California’s attorney general, she supported legislation that compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion. Even worse, she sicked her team on David Daleiden—not Planned Parenthood—for exposing how the abortion giant sold the body parts of aborted babies for lucre.
Anderson rightly calls Harris “a hard-core ideologue” and “an abortion extremist.” “Short of coming out for killing toddlers,” he concludes, “there simply is no way to be more extreme than Kamala Harris and her party now are.”
And then there’s Tim Walz, whose goal is to make Minnesota the most extreme state when it comes to abortion. As governor, Walz seemingly dedicated every waking minute to making abortion a “fundamental right.” He signed legislation that legalized abortion “through all nine months of pregnancy.” Anderson writes that Walz also “removed virtually all health and safety protections for women, removed a 24-hour waiting period, permitted taxpayer funding of abortion, and repealed the state’s protection of children born alive after failed abortions.” This is the man Evangelicals for Harris-Walz calls “a man of excellent moral character” who possesses “deep Christian faith.”
Even if you think the GOP capitulated in principle in its 2024 platform, what Harris, Walz, and the Democrats represent is abortion on demand insanity—exhibiting a clear lust for killing babies a la the infamous Aztec sacrifices.
In light of the above, Evangelicals for Harris-Walz has the audacity to make the case that “we don’t agree with her on everything. But to be thoughtful voters we have to take into account the totality of someone’s character and positions.” The moral vacuousness, blindness, and lack of any iota of judgment couldn’t be more striking.
As Jake Meador writes at Mere Orthodoxy, Evangelicals for Harris-Walz freely gives “away their votes and endorsements while demanding nothing from the campaign they are supporting and utterly ignoring that campaign’s serious failures and shortcomings as judged by Christianity.” (And Meador makes the same critique of evangelicals who have supported the Republican Party for decades, a criticism Aaron Renn has made in more helpful ways.)
Critiquing Evangelicals for Harris-Walz, however, is in some measure an easy target. There is a far, far bigger voting block that will undoubtedly vote for Harris-Walz at a 90 percent clip: black Protestants. In the 2020 election, 91 percent of black Protestants voted for Joe Biden, and in 2016, an astonishing 96 percent voted for Hillary Clinton. In this light, to save babies, kids, and families from ruin, evangelical institutions, public theologians, and pastors should devote time and resources helping their black counterparts to stop making the same deep errors in moral judgment exhibited by Evangelicals for Harris-Walz. As I wrote in my column last week, Christians don’t have to vote for Republicans—but they simply do not have the option to vote for Democrats, the party of dismemberment, disintegration, and death.
Image Credit: Unsplash
This article makes clear that Christians (especially those seeing themselves as spokesperson’s to believers) need a new definition of “evangelical.”
If abortion was the only factor or activity in our society that threatens to unnecessarily end life prematurely, then the above reduction of pro-life to anti-abortion would suffice. But there are other factors and practices in our society that threatens to unnecessarily end life prematurely such as ignoring or denying climate change, not protecting the environment, participating in the nuclear arms race, discrimination and ethnic hatred, poverty and economic systems that continue to increase wealth and income disparities between the classes as well as between the races, unjust law enforcement and justice systems just to name a few. So how acceptable before God is it for either religiously conservative Christian Republicans and Evangelicals for Harris to point fingers of judgment at each other? Are we assuming that God shares every single one of our political beliefs so that there are no surprises in store for us when all that we have done is judged by God?
In James 2, James warns us against judging other Christians because their sins are different from our own. The problem James saw is that we are all law-breakers and so to call for judgment on, or speak down to, other Christians because we believe that their sins are worse than ours can infringe on us receiving mercy.
And so we need to learn how to criticize faults in each other without looking down on each other. We need to think of ourselves as peers or colleagues in sin even though our sins are different. And that is a major flaw we all struggle with and that the two sides here, religiously conservative Christian Republicans and Evangelicals for Harris, are failing. I have misgivings about a lot of what is posted here, but I view those I disagree with as equals and I have occasionally defended them from unjust criticism. But I also have my failures in this area too. So I will close with a quote from James 2:
‘8 If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. 9 But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all. 11 For He who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not commit murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. 12 So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. 13 For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.‘
As an evangelical Christian voting for Harris and walz, let me tell you WHY. bc the democrats feed the children. Don’t pretend you care about the unborn when you’re not even willing to take care of the ones we have here. Trump’s fits of rage are of the flesh. He is divisive and a small, weak man.
“As an evangelical Christian voting for Harris and walz, let me tell you WHY. bc the democrats feed the children. Don’t pretend you care about the unborn when you’re not even willing to take care of the ones we have here.”
I find this claim disingenuous or, at best, profoundly ignorant of the work that pro-lifers do to support mothers and children in need.
Gordon,
It matters not whether you find her claims to be disingenuous. What matters are the policies that have been and will be pursued by the Harris and the dems vs Trump and the Repubs. According to the policies that have been pursue by both candidates and political parties, what have the dems done and are planning to do in contrast to what Trump and the Repubs have done and are planning to do?
Curt,
I feel no need to accept your claims about what matters or not. The claim she made that pro-lifers do nothing to “take care of the ones we have here” is simply false. It’s also absurd to suggest that voting for the party that will allow for unlimited abortion is justified because “the democrats feed the children.” It’s saying that it’s fine to allow killing some of the children as long as you feed some of them.
Gordon,
You say that you don’t care about the claims that only one candidate says and yet you comment on that person’s claims. And I agree with your analysis that her claim that pro-lifers don’t care about those who are here is false. But it is false because of its absoluteness. And so do you also believe the claim that pro-choice people don’t care about children is also false for the same reason?
It is the absoluteness of both claims that make them false. But it would not be wrong to say that, generally speaking, pro-life advocates–and, btw, I am pro-life because I oppose elective abortions being legal–care less about the children who are born than pro-choice advocates do according to the policies both pursue. While pro-choice advocates care less about those who are unborn than pro-life candidates according to the policies that they both pursue. And so here, we should also recognize that neither pro-life advocates nor pro-choice advocates are monolithic in the stances on abortion. Also, neither side is consistently pro-life.
BTW, the only claims that you need to accept by anyone are those that are true. And so if you reject the claims of anyone without examining them, that means that the truthfulness of a claim means less to you than other reasons.
Megan, for one, it is simply disingenuous to suggest that the pro-life Right does not care about feeding children. What evidence do you have for this?
But here’s where your argument breaks down. You are making a category error. The Democratic Party actively affirms the concept of abortion. The Republican party DOES NOT actively affirm the concept of withholding food from children. There is no “starvation RV” stationed outside of the RNC conference where you can enter to starve a child. These are not parallel ideas.
Now, you could argue that the Republican party could do more, that it could live into its principles better, that it could utilize the government more in feeding children, fair enough, but notice you could not do the same to the Democrats when it comes to abortion. They ARE living into their principles, they are doing exactly what their underlying ideology leads them to do..
As with ancient Israel, modern Christianity shows there really is “nothing new under the sun”. God never wanted Israel to become a nation-state, but they insisted on their first king, Saul, and it was downhill from there. They looked to the state instead of the LORD, just like many modern Christians. These lost Christians believe it is the state that is supposed to feed the poor, house the poor, educate the poor. Where is the Church? There used to be great Christian charities that did all these actions as Christ led us. The state can only offer corruption. Is the US’s education system really the best in the world? Is government funded gender reassignment in the best interest of the people?
And again, as with ancient Israel as the model, child sacrifice was the straw that broke the camel’s back with the LORD. It is the one thing that made Him withdraw…see Ezekial 16. We are at a shameful stage in this nation where child sacrifice is called a “reproductive right” and is glorified. May His wrath and chastisement come quickly and with force if this is truly our path as a nation.
Wow! Mike Sabo takes on “Evangelicals for Harris-Walz [who] are prepared to overlook a whole host of evils to check off a few of their trendy concerns,” while he himself chooses to ignore an even larger host of evils to support his narrow issue. I’m ardently opposed to abortion except for in very narrow circumstances. But I’m opposed to adultery, and then committing felonies to hide it from the public. I’m opposed to constant lies. (It is true that Trump was a liar from the beginning, but as I’ve watched our nation descend into a cynicism where God’s basic laws are trampled on by political leaders, it is clear that Trump continues to lead the charge in support of his own personal god.) I’m opposed to a presidential candidate who dismisses Jesus Christ and his own need for repentance. It looks like Sabo does not care about Truth either–but then again who does these days? The whole religious establishment built their agenda on a foundation of sand. Now the storms have come.
Mark, Does the Republican Party affirm adultery? Do they blast it in every political ad as a selling point as to why you should vote for Trump? Are they backed by an ideology that encourages you to “shout your adultery”? Do they have brothels stationed outside of their convention where married men can enter in and break their vows? These are not equivalent evils. Abortion is the logical outcome of the Democratic agenda. Adultery is NOT the logical outcome of the Republican agenda. Every democratic candidate for office affirms abortion. Did every Republican candidate for office affirm adultery?
I despise Trump and think he is destined for hell, and shame on the Evangelicals who don’t have the guts to say so. But we are not electing one person for one job. We are electing 5000+ people and an underlying ideology that will affect this country for years to come in innumerable permanent ways. We have to look at the parties as a whole. And for all of the Republican party’s clear issues, they at least acknowledge the most basic fundamental Christian truth: that there is a Creator and that His creation is distinct from Him. Therein lies our foundation for truth, for justice, for beauty, for goodness. The Democrats do not affirm this truth and thus run into a myriad of evils.
If we are genuinely seeking the welfare of our country and our neighbors, we will run as far away from an ideology that has made man his own creator and purveyor of justice. The Republicans may flirt with this from time to time, but the Democrats are married to this idea. Therein lies the difference.
Some of the folks who post sound a lot more like political activists than devoted followers of God, through His Son.
The author has laid out a series of facts, in the case of this article on a particular candidate’s stance on abortion.
No one has posted any effective dispute of those facts, they’ve simply deflected and posted weak false equivalencies in response (I suspect because they know deep down there is no reconciling the murder of unborn babies with the teachings of the Bible).
And if you use Scripture to call out the author for wagging his finger at other Christians, then at least recognize that in the same breath you’re doing the same thing to the author you say is so wrong to do. After all, these Christians he is calling out have taken a very vocal and public stance for how to vote in the fall. By putting it in the public realm and citing their faith as the reason for their stance, they readily invite criticism from other Christian (especially if their stance on a given issue is more based on political activism and party talking points than the teachings of Scripture).
DRW1,
But as I wrote in my first comment, abortion is not the only pro-life issue that the candidates are addressing. And that is because there is life after birth.
in other words, you haven’t effectively refuted any of the facts the author points out. You’ve simply deflected and posted false equivalencies (none of which are tantamount to murder).
DRW1,
That is an interesting take on the fact that abortion is not the only pro-life issue. In fact, by trying to focus on what you allege my attempt was, you’re distracting from the statement.
But it logically follows that if abortion is not the only pro-life issue, then those who are pro-life should also compare the candidates on all pro-life issues. And since neither major political party nor Presidential candidates are consistently pro-life, other issues come into play as well. Such as should we elect a candidate who tried to overthrow a legitimate election.
Your continued refusal to address the subject of the article, and subsequent comment thread, is most telling, and is entirely consistent with your MO.
We should skip the pretense. Your comments indicate you are a political activist first, and at best view the teachings of the Bible and of Christ as a distant second to those things. Which is fine. We all have to set priorities in our lives, whether about who/what we choose to give fealty or what considerations we prioritize when choosing a presidential candidate. You clearly set your priorities by the DNC latest talking points.
Your last comment has nothing to do with the article. You are apparently making the claim that questioning the legitimacy of an election is an automatic disqualifier. Very well then, let us agree to disqualify both candidates. In 2019, then sitting senator Harris stated on meet the press: “Russia interfered in the election of the president of the United States…” She produced as much evidence to back up that statement about the 2016 election as Trump produced to back up his claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate.
DRW1,
I did address the subject of the article. But what the name ‘pro-life’ itself implies is to reject being reduced to one issue.
If I ignored the abortion issue, which is what the article is mostly about, I wouldn’t have said that the Dems are not consistently pro-life. But instead, the problem with the reductionism of the article is that it enables the kind of Phariseeism that we read in the parable of The Two Men Praying.
Finally, it is those who opportunistically make personal judgments about others who might be the real political activists here. They are the ones who want us to selectively focus on fewer issues chosen by them to paint a misleading narrative. And so they use those judgments to discourage people from reading views that they disagree with.
And, btw, while Harris produced no evidence to back her claims, the intelligence agencies did not and Trump decided to trust Putin. But I am only going to mention that, not discuss it, because it has nothing to do with being pro-life but you brought it up anyway