Tomorrow’s Middle Passage

If you are a Christian of influence who is nervous about supporting a local ordinance like this one, I submit to you that you would not have had the courage or moral clarity to stand as a Christian against the Third Reich or American chattel slavery.

It is always easier to stand against yesterday’s evils. You will have no shortage of support in our twenty-first-century America for the making of a movie like Valkyrie or Twelve Years a Slave. We have astute moral judgment about yesterday’s evils. We are thoroughly willing to say what was wicked about 1940 or 1860.

But when the moment is hot, when insults are being slung and influential people are ready to disbar your from the elite circles of your day, when it will actually cost you something with those who hold the levers of power and significance in your society, that is where moral fortitude actually counts. Are you prepared to be written off by the sexiest and most admired people of your day as an ignorant bumpkin, a relic, a seed picker? Can you say, “Poisoning babies and dismembering them is appallingly wicked, and I don’t care what your judgment of me is; I will pray and work to stop your slaughter of children”? Or do you find yourself much more willing to speak with moral rage about Hitler’s Holocaust and the wickedness of the slave trade than the better part of a hundred million babies of whom our nation has legally protected the murder?

Will you wait until abortion is tomorrow’s Middle Passage before standing with those who say it must end, period?

Someday, I hope and believe, American infanticide will be a dead atrocity whose memory makes our grandchildren shudder. God accomplishes such victories through the faithfulness and foresight of men and women whose allegiance to what is good outweighs their lust for a seat at the cool kids’ table.

Today’s evils are our appointed foes, and our confrontation with them is where what we truly believe and truly value is revealed.