This is a profound time of thankfulness as we express gratitude to God for the recent United States Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This is a moment for which we have prayed a long time, and I wanted to take a few minutes and record several thoughts that have been on my mind over the past few days as I’ve reflected on this historic decision.
To quote Richard Weaver, ideas have consequences. The idea that every human life has value and the idea that every human life has essential rights the Constitution guarantees, such as life, liberty, property, habeas corpus, and the due process of law, have consequences. The idea that those who are pre-born or elderly or ill or disabled, as human persons and thus divine image-bearers, have the same rights and liberties as those already born or young or healthy has consequences.
The Conservative Legal Movement
However, if ideas remain theoretical and never grow into plans, then policies that lead to human flourishing will never be developed. The maturation of the conservative legal movement is one of the best examples we have of ideas, over time, turning into plans and eventually effecting policies. A coherent, intelligent, well-conceived conservative legal movement developed after the U.S. Senate defeated President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court Robert Bork in 1987. Had that not occurred, we would not have had conservative scholars and practitioners with the legal and jurisprudential expertise to be nominated and confirmed for the Court now.
This is an example of the maxim that “politics is downstream from culture.” As conservative religious people, we have put too many of our eggs in the basket of the “horse race,” of trying to get people elected to office. But once they’re elected, too often we just fixate on the next election. But politics is indeed downstream from culture, and the conservative legal movement is a prime example of how an intellectual and cultural shift, together with philanthropic resources and single-minded determination, has resulted in a policy shift of momentous proportions.
We must remember, though, that such a shift took thirty-five years to take effect. And the pro-life movement worked for nearly fifty years for this moment. The conservative legal movement and the pro-life movement played the long game. They persisted and did not give up. They focused on ideas and on changing the way people think. This long-game mentality is perhaps the greatest takeaway from these movements.
But thinking of the conservative legal movement brings to mind how out of sync much of the American public is with the clear, constitutional language used in the majority opinion that overturned Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That is because the jurists that formed the Court’s majority in this case affirm the traditional notion of originalism.
Originalism holds that justices need to go back to the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and its amendments to determine the meaning of those documents. It holds that the job of the federal courts is not to introduce new ideas. It is not to legislate from the bench. Jurists are not to act as ethicists or sociologists or legislators to figure out what new laws they need to enact and enforce those laws on the states.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s role is simply to determine if laws or legal actions are constitutional. The Court’s majority opinion in this case rightly held that Roe and Casey were unconstitutional and thus the question whether a woman has the right to end the life of her preborn child must be decided by each state.
The only constitutional way to guarantee, in every state, the right to receive or perform an abortion is to pass an amendment to the Constitution. Everyone on all points of the political spectrum knows that could not have happened in 1973 and could not happen now. Likewise, to make abortion-on-demand illegal in all fifty states will require an amendment to the Constitution, which is just as unlikely at this juncture as a pro-choice amendment. Sadly, however, many individuals fail to understand how the American constitutional system works.
Christian Worldview Education
This leads me to the next thing that has been on my mind the last few days: we conservative evangelicals need to place more emphasis on Christian worldview education. That emphasis will lead to greater ethical literacy, including knowing how to explain how biblical ethics lead to human flourishing while providing for religious liberty for everyone. It will also lead to greater literacy regarding our role as Christians who are also citizens.
The recent Gallup poll that shows there are fewer people who believe in God should come as no surprise to us. At the very same time that we have allowed K-12 schools to become dominated by precise progressive-secularist ideology, we have dumbed down our churches almost in inverse proportion. The past few decades are when we should have become more intent on training our children in serious theology and Christian truth and how it relates to the culture around them. Instead, we have dumbed down our religion and, to quote Neil Postman, become intent on “amusing ourselves to death.”
It should not be surprising to us that our retreat from serious thinking and preaching and teaching about God’s truth—our substituting of entertainment for worship, motivational speaking for preaching, CEO leadership for shepherding, and marketing for evangelism—has been unsustainable. It has produced fewer serious Christian believers. And studies have shown that serious Christian believers are also the ones who invite people to church or share their faith. Further, the vast majority of new believers join churches because of the influence of a friend or family member.
George Barna has shown over and over again that many evangelical churches’ recent numerical success has increased at the same time that the spiritual health of their members has plummeted. Fewer and fewer of the members of seemingly successful churches can pass a basic Christian worldview quiz, give more than a few percent of their income, attend church or pray or read Scripture more than a handful of times a month, and invite people to church and share their faith.
The upshot of all this is that we cannot expect there to be more Christians when secular progressives pour more and more money into education and training that comports with their worldview while conservative Christians put paltry resources of time, priority, and funds into education and training that comports with their worldview. Yet a strong emphasis on education and training is what we see at the heart of the long game that the conservative legal and pro-life movements have played.
Committing Ourselves to Action
Now that the Court has overturned Roe, we as Christians will need to put our money where our mouth is. We’ll need to be intentional about supporting unwed mothers, who are divine image-bearers like the children they carry in their wombs. This will require our unflagging support of crisis pregnancy centers, adoption, and foster care.
This is what Jim McComas so eloquently reminded me of the day Roe was overturned. He is leader of our own Free Will Baptist Family Ministries, which sponsors ministries such as these, including a crisis pregnancy center known as The Hope Center, which is worthy of your financial support. We will need to pour more resources into these efforts than ever before.
We must also be intentional about continuing to speak the truth in love, standing strong on Christian teaching while tangibly demonstrating the love of Christ to people with whom we differ. Jesus was a perfect example of what it means to combine clear truth-telling and sharp rational thinking with compassion, meekness, patience, and humility. We must strive to be like Him as we combine truth and grace. We must model civility and understanding while being uncompromising on truth and virtue.
We must realize that ideas have consequences, that elections have consequences, that now is not the time to withdraw from the public square. At the same time, we must stop neglecting public life at the local and state levels, focusing only on the federal level. We must reinvest ourselves in helping our children to be Christian citizens who understand how their government works and are patriotic, without making politics and our country into an idol.
Finally, it is vital that we commit ourselves to sound Christian worldview teaching in the church, the home, and Christian educational institutions. And it is crucial that we provide financial resources for this task and for the educational institutions that provide leadership for it.
Thanks be to God for this historic ruling. May we prayerfully and faithfully move forward in our individual and corporate calling to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and do everything we do to the glory of God.