Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today we are going to wrap up our discussion of abortion by kind of summarizing what we said and kind of giving a big picture of what the modern scenario is like both for the church and for the world. I also want to make this very big picture by pulling in what we've discussed in all three seasons so far because I think it's all very pertinent and if you're if you just kind of jumped in on the the abortion series because that's a hot topic and you wanted to learn more about that, you might be wondering why, you know, I end every episode mentioning that I'm a pacifist or how this relates to to a nonviolent podcast. And I want to kind of pull that in a little bit more than I did in previous episodes too. So this is going to be kind of a big synthesis today, hopefully.

You know interestingly, when I started looking into non violence and I went to the early church, I was extremely impressed to find so much written on the topic of abortion. Now there's not a lot, but considering that we're talking about the first two hundred years of church history when there's not much written at all that has been maintained, you know, because we lost most writings, I was amazed that we really had anything discussing abortion directly. Nevertheless, it was, and abortion was universally condemned by the church. And part of that was, I think that was twofold, the reasons were twofold there. Because the church, first of all, they saw value even in the least.

They saw value in their enemies, they saw value in the pagans, they saw value in women, they saw value in children, and they just recognized the value, the image bearing property of all humans. And so everybody was valuable, even an infant who was just born, who's a girl, nobody wants her, or even the fetus in the womb, there was value. But you know the second reason is because it's undeniable that when you have an abortion you are doing violence to a human being, and so regardless of whether you think some humans are more or less valuable, if you don't think that violence should be done to any human being, that significantly influences your view on abortion. So the early church was just univocally against abortion, they were univocal in their stance and that is again something that you just don't see the church often agreeing on something so thoroughly, but they do on the issue of non violence and that non violence extends to the issue of abortion. And the early church put their money where their mouth was because they would actually adopt and care fetuses or I guess infants who are born and left for the elements.

You know, because especially, like, find sewers filled with the bones of of little baby girls because parents would if they wanted a boy, which was more popular for a variety of reasons, but, you know, if they wanted a boy to carry on a legacy to to whatever, I mean, they would get rid of girls if they had a girl. Girls were worthless and we find sewers filled with with their bones in ancient Rome. But Christians would go and they would find these places where where kids were abandoned and they'd pick them up and they'd care for them and they became known as communities who would do that sort of thing. And I don't know if, I can't think of an example where this happened specifically in terms of taking care of children but I know that the early church was also known to have commonly, if there was somebody in need, they would help them out and if they couldn't help them out they would get to great lengths to make sure that they could help them out. And so if they didn't have enough food, what they would do as community, they would fast for a day or for two days so that they could the food that they would save or the money that they would save, they would be able to take care of somebody in need.

So this wasn't just a community who vocally decried the evils that were going on around them, it was a community that actually did something about it and was willing to sacrifice self in order to right wrongs, to bring justice positive justice, not negative justice. And that brings us to, you know, today. What our Christian community by and large like, at least here in the West? Well, we're not as focused on positive justice. We've got so many Christians, so many Christians in The United States.

I know that in our church there was this one hundred eleven initiative where they talked about, you know, if there was one person in every single church who would just adopt somebody, we'd have no adoption problem. One person from each church. Right? Surely we can find one person from each church and considering that some of our churches here are mega churches like, you know, 20,000 people, those churches could provide way more than one family who could take care of one adopted kid. But we have so many kids in need of adoption today, and that's just that's just insane that, our community can't do more about it.

And that's why, you know, I might have to to, chastise myself in the future one day, but that's why, our family wants to adopt a kid. And, you know, maybe maybe we won't end up doing that, and I'll have to come back and repent, but that's the course that we are set on because we you know, whereas I used to think that this is an option for Christians to pursue, I'm beginning to see that it's it's more of an obligation. How can I go through life and refuse with the vast resources that I have at my disposal? You know, when I consider what the early church did to sacrifice to even fast so that they could provide for needs, you know. I wouldn't even have to fast from food, I could just fast from ordering anything from Amazon for a month and I could give, you know, quite a portion away.

So, yeah, I think that's an obligation and something that we need to do, but our community just doesn't do it. And hopefully I'm held accountable for that, and in five years somebody should ask me, Where am I in that process of adopting? And I'd better be further than I was today. I'd better be putting my money where my mouth is. But you know, it's not just our lack of willingness to sacrifice for positive justice.

My Christian community is also very against many forms of positive justice. Right? Look at how we're treating and talking about immigrants. I just had a conversation the other day with a neighbor and you know, he was telling me how there were some democrats saying they were going to eat babies which was ridiculous. I I fact checked it just in case but yeah, it's ridiculous.

But then all of a sudden we get into the topic of immigration and just saying, well, you know, we can't even support our own people. It's like, are you kidding me we can't support our own people? That is ludicrous. There are social and economic problems in this country, disparities for sure, but we can support other people with jobs and money and other sorts of things. We just don't want to tear down the unjust structures and and right wrongs and self sacrifice.

We're the wealthiest country that's that's ever existed and yes, we can support our own people and surely we can support immigrants coming in, but we don't want to. And when they're kept in cages and mistreated and when we have them dying, instead of seeking to fix that, we make it a partisan issue and talk about how well the last president started it, it's not this president's fault and you know all those things rather than trying to fix it and saying this is horrible, it needs to change, it's a partisan issue and we don't want to fix that. We want to keep the immigrants where they are so we don't have to sacrifice anything for them. Same thing with healthcare, right? We don't care that the poor don't have access to healthcare even though I live in Romania and a lot of Americans talk down about Romania, but I mean even the people that they hate there, the gypsies, even the Roma there have healthcare, right?

Which the Roma are looked down at on way more than we look down on most of our minority groups here in The United States, yet they provide for them there. I know that the issue is is more complicated than than just that, but the fact that so many Christians just are up in arms to provide people with quality care because it might cost them something is crazy. The class disparity that we have in The United States that is worse than many other developed places, we don't want to fix class disparity. We keep giving tax breaks to the wealthy because to tax them would be stealing, yet we don't think that having two coats while my neighbor has none is not stealing. Even though, is it Peter or James, you know, talks about how if we have material resources and others don't, like that is stealing, that is a problem, that isn't Christian, that isn't love.

The justice system, when we have the Black Lives Matter movement, rather than hearing what people say and rather than seeing the injustice that's done, we have to defend authorities, we have to defend systemic injustice, even if all of the cases, even if there is another side to be heard, the fact that we can't listen to a group who has been historically oppressed and to a group who has legitimate claims, you know, at how they're statistically more likely in the same situation to receive different consequences and different actions and retribution. That's a problem, but we don't want to hear it, we want to defend and we want to brush it under the rug, my conservative community. Prison system, right, we're okay with them enslaving prisoners, right, the thirteenth amendment, we're okay with prisoners getting mistreated because hey, they deserve it, they've lost their humanity to my Christian conservative group, you know, they're getting their just desserts. And then war, the fact that we're we're so sad and and disheartened when, you know, an American is killed in embassy bombing or something. Yet, we have so many civilians that we kill in our wars that, man, well, that's just that's collateral.

And it it just blows my mind with the death toll that we're we're willing to justify because we think we're the good guys and we think that when we go into another country, when we invade another country and and overthrow a ruler like Saddam Hussein, who may have been evil, but we allow genocides to go on in other countries because well they don't have the oil, you know we're not gonna protect them. But we'll go throw overthrow Saddam Hussein and and allow groups like ISIS to form and create power vacuums, and hundreds of thousands of civilians die or the atomic bombs in World War II and the way that my group is just perfectly okay with that. We've got some serious, serious justice issues in my community and many of those revolve around violence. Right? Physically detaining immigrants and and doing violence to them.

I guess with health care, it's indirect violence, but allowing somebody to suffer and be harmed. With the justice system and police brutality and locking people up and war, I mean, so much of it revolves around our willingness to do violence and our willingness to define people as enemies who are on a different level of humanity than us and we wouldn't say that, but our actions show that. And that's where we get this this statement that we hear so often against the pro life, against the anti abortion side, which is that we are hypocritical, we are pro life after birth, or I'm sorry, before birth, but after birth we're not, and we prove that. We prove that in our failure to seek justice on all things, and we even prove it with the issue of abortion by justifying ectopic abortions by saying, you know, when when my life isn't in danger and there's no way I could have avoided it even though I've done all the right things, you know, I've I've waited till marriage to have sex and and all this stuff. Right?

Because I would never have an abortion if if it was because I had a kid out of wedlock. You know, I would never have abortion there and and in part because I would never have sex outside of wedlock. Right? We can avoid those things. But when it's this situation that's thrust upon us and we have to prove that we really are pro life, we're not.

We're willing to abort an ectopic pregnancies and that's because we're consequentialists. We believe that the ends justify the means in certain things. We implement a consequentialist ethic when it suits us, when we want to avoid bad outcomes. And that's what we do with Jesus' word so often, we use our consequentialist ethic to get rid of what annoys us. So in that way, when we look at justice and we compare ourselves to the early church, we are just starkly different, so different than the early church the way that they would view justice for all.

We are also very different from the early church in our willingness to be coercive. Now certainly the early church didn't have the tools that we have today because most of them were not in high government offices, although we do see early documents telling Christians who are in higher offices to throw those off because those offices are related to generally two things idolatry and violence. And they say, Hey, don't take those robes, don't take those purple robes because of the compromise you're going to have to make. So even though they didn't often have the tools of coercion, they also threw them off and they refused to use tools of coercion. I can't imagine the early church, the first two hundred years, I can't imagine them forcing other people at sword point to not abort their babies or to not abandon their babies.

That's not what they did. They wouldn't even defend themselves against aggressors, let alone go out and try to enforce morality by the sword. If that's what we do, you know, we get all upset at at Muslims and things trying to to implement Sharia law, right? We think that they're trying to implement Sharia law at places which 99.9% of the time is just propaganda to try to tick off conservatives. But what are Christians doing?

I see Facebook memes all the time like, we need to bring prayer back in school or I can't believe they're trying to take under God off the money or out of the pledge or whatever they're trying to do. Whether they're trying to do it or not. It's just or the 10 Commandments out of courts. It's like, well, why do you think that those things have to be there anyway? Like why are we trying to be coercive and forceful about our our religion?

And and that's something the early church just wouldn't do. It wasn't about the visibility of of this sacral society and and trying to have all of these stamps of of Yahweh all over the place. That's not what a win was. A win was when you had a community who wouldn't let a brother or sister starve or who wouldn't let an infant die from exposure, that was a win. Wins were not brought about by force and coercion.

Yet that's what we see, you know, ironically we've got this 111 initiative that so few people jump on so that we have tons and tons of orphans who are in need of a home, yet everybody jumps on the bandwagon of the Republican Party who is anti abortion and they'll cast their vote so that they can try to force people to do things through law, so that there are even more orphans later that we then won't adopt. And while I would rather have people not commit abortions and I would rather have orphans than dead children. That's a problem for our Christian community that we focus on coercion at all, but the fact that, I mean even if you think that coercion is okay, that you focus on coercion so much more than you focus on positive justice and that's a huge problem. And then of course there the problem that we have where we lack empathy. You know, think back to, I think it was season two, one of the episodes where we looked at Trifo and his discussion with Justin Martyr.

And Trifo was a Jew and he was just astonished at what he saw of Christians, how he said that, You Christians, you think that God is so holy and He's given you these commands that you don't keep, like you can't keep them because they're they're so hard. Yet, in your failure, you worship God for his grace to you because you you think that he has grace for you. And and in these commands, while you don't adhere to the Sabbath and stuff like all of the rest of us, like you don't have these vain traditions and stuff, at the same time you don't disengage from society, you embrace society. And Trifo is just baffled by this, like, how can you how can you recognize the need to be holy, your failure at holiness, and the worldliness of of, those outside of your community, yet at the same time love us so much? And that's not how it works in Christianity today.

It's actually the opposite where the world sees a bunch of Christians who think they're pretty good, they might give lip service to their need for grace, the Christians think they are pretty good and they think that the world is utterly evil and they retreat back to their Christian schools and their home schools which I'm not against either of those things, but in terms of it being a lifestyle, an indication of a particular type of lifestyle rather than homeschooling and Christian schooling being a tool used to engage the world, That's a problem and we just lack empathy for the world. We get ourselves inside of what we think is the arc and we leave the world out there to flood and drown and they deserve it in our minds. We don't really care because that's on them. So, I've just spent twenty minutes basically blasting my Christian community and myself for the way that we have made abortion a problem, a much bigger stumbling block for people to engage Christianity than it should be. It should be a compelling thing to people because it should be something that they see us doing something about more than they hear us saying stuff about.

And that's just not the case and that becomes a stumbling block because of our hypocrisy and because of our judgmentalism, our desire to use force to compel people to do things. Meanwhile, the world does do wrong when it commits abortion and they do this for a number of reasons and it's somewhat commendable in a certain sense because women have been mistreated for millennia and are still mistreated. There are many inequalities that we see in the world towards women And the world rightly and it's good that they seek justice for women, but they do so at the expense and redefining of another group, namely children or fetuses. And while it's commendable that they want to do justice for women, we cannot redefine the value of other human beings. We just can't do that because that perpetuates injustices and creates new injustices.

But that's what the world does. In order to help one group, feel like they can or should redefine the humanity of another group. And many people know that this is what happens, think a lot of people know that, in their heart especially coming out of a Christian background that a lot of people do and you recognize the humanity of people and you've been taught that, you may not have been shown that so that might be what kind of causes you to move away from it, but you've at least been taught it. So in the back of your mind you know that a fetus is a human being, a valuable human being. And if you thought about it for a second you'd realize that taking away their rights is really problematic and leads to a slippery slope of our ability to justify the taking of other people's rights.

Nevertheless, a lot of people suppress that knowledge in my opinion because there's this convenience factor. People want to believe that fetuses are not valuable, that we can dispose of them because it makes the sexual revolution more powerful because now it's my body, it's my choice, I can do what I want, my actions don't have consequences that I really have to deal with, there's no obligation to other, right, it's just me, it's this individualistic mindset and that's where we're at. We redefine the value of a group of humans somewhat for justice for one group of people but also in large part for our convenience, our sexual convenience and our pleasure. Now that right there is a a world view problem and that's not fixable through brute force. That's what Rome tried to do to Christians, tried to persuade them through the sword that they should not follow Christ.

It's what Christians have done from, I don't know, 400 onward to a certain extent getting worse and worse. I saw it in Mexico where you had Catholic churches who who the surrounding communities would put literal idols, not icons, idols of their their local deities in the Catholic church because, you know, they were they were converted two hundred years ago at gunpoint, you know, converted in air quotes, but they didn't really convert. You can't make people do that through force. It just doesn't work. They might change their outward actions but it doesn't change their beliefs.

And that's what we are trying to do with abortion or my Christian community. So as you can see, I hope this relates very significantly to nonviolence because if you are nonviolent, that hugely affects your view of all people. It affects your view of the unborn, it affects your view of yourself and it affects your view of your own community and calling them out on things that need to be called out on. It also affects your view on your enemies and it gives you empathy for people who do evil. This also relates very strongly to consequentialism and our willingness both for Christians and non Christians to justify actions.

For the Christian community, through consequentialism we justify our treatment of immigration, of immigrants, of not giving people healthcare, of pandering to the rich, of a failure to address issues in our justice system, of treating prisoners like slaves and of going to war. We use consequentialism to justify all of those things in various ways. The world uses consequentialism to justify the dehumanizing of a group of people. And so, all of those things lead to this perfect storm of abortion where you've got this great evil that goes on. You've got people who have a world view issue who perpetuate that and feel like they're doing good.

And you've got a group who opposes this but opposes it in a way that is not compelling because it's a way that brandishes the sword rather than a changed life. And as Jesus showed us, that's not how things work in His Kingdom. So hopefully you've enjoyed this series on abortion as much as you can enjoy a series on such a bleak topic. And I guess that's all for now. So peace, because I'm a pacifist.

When I say it, I mean it.