5 Reasons to Engage

Abort73 did three LOVE THE LEAST (LTL) events this past weekend in Southern California. Numbers wise, they were the biggest LTL's we've done, and I was extremely encouraged by the feedback we received throughout. At every stop, I prefaced my remarks about Abort73 by outlining why, for many years, I believed that abortion was not something Christians should be particularly concerned about. Through high school and college, my thinking went like this:

• Abortion is a political issue, and political engagement does not move the gospel forward.
• Abortion is a moral issue, and it is not our job to moralize an unbelieving nation.
• Abortion is symptomatic of a much bigger problem. We shouldn't focus on the symptom, we should focus on the problem and let the symptoms take care of themselves. Transform the heart; transform the behavior.

That was my rationale for leaving abortion by the wayside. Obviously, I have since come to a very different opinion, and I articulated my philosophical shift by listing five things I was not taking into account. Because a number of people asked me for that list again afterwards, I figured it would be worth providing online as well. So here they are. Five reasons why the objections I previously held should henceforth be ignored.

• Abortion is not a political issue, primarily. It's a people issue – a love your neighbor issue.
• Combatting abortion does not aim at making abortion-vulnerable women more moral; it aims as saving the life of an innocent child.
• We are not trying to force a foreign morality on an unbelieving world. The morality is already in place. The world knows, intrinsically, that it's wrong to kill a baby. They're just not fully aware that this is exactly what abortion is doing.
• Seventy percent of aborting women in the United States identify themselves as Christians, which means there can be as much confusion inside the church about abortion as there is outside the church. For lack of clear teaching on abortion, heart transformation is not necessarily leading to behavior transformation.
• The apostle Paul commands us to "expose deeds of darkness." Solomon commands us to "rescue those being led away to the slaughter." James commands us to care for the oppressed, and Jesus says whatever we did not do for the least of these among us, we did not do for him. In America today, I can think of no group of human beings more qualified to wear the "least of these" label than abortion-vulnerable children. It is their very "leastness", their helplessness and dependence, which has become the primary rationale for their destruction – and according to the latest data, more than 3,300 of the most innocent and helpless members of the human community are killed every single day in this country, not through a hurricane, not through an earthquake, not through a flood, but through the intentional violence of abortion.

For everyone who joined us this past weekend at LOVE THE LEAST, thank you so much for coming out. For everyone else, we're plotting where the next round of events will take place. Stay tuned...