War and Peace
by R.C. Sproul, Jr., January 21, 2003
As I write, these United States are on the brink of war. That, of course, is not all that unusual in our day. In the last thirty-some years, we have waged war in Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Gulf, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. (And these are only the ones we know of.) All of these wars have at least one thing in common: never did Congress declare war. All but the last have this in common: they were over almost as fast as they began. The Vietnam War was different. First, it snuck up on us. Virtually no one paid attention when the first “advisors” were sent to shore up the South Vietnamese. When the pretense of advising was lifted, still precious few soldiers were over there. Eventually, however, Vietnam became the red elephant in the corner that no one wanted to talk about, but no one could ignore. Soon, the masters of the empire learned that, even when the war was being waged half a world away, there was still a war to fight at home.
America’s involvement in the Vietnam War ended thirty years ago, the same year a new war began, on the home front. This war, however, was not declared by Congress. Neither was it undeclared and waged by the commander-in-chief. Rather, this war was declared by the judiciary, by the Supreme Court of these United States. On January 22, 1973, the Warren Court declared war on unborn children.
As with Vietnam, this war’s beginning managed to fly below the radar for several years. The evangelical church, unaccustomed to dealing with the dirty realm of politics, continued in its ignorant bliss as laws protecting the unborn in most states were napalmed out of existence by the decision. Eventually, however - in large part thanks to the heroic efforts of Francis Schaeffer - word got out about the destruction going on in the wombs of mothers across the land. By then, however, the death toll had reached 1.5 million per year - four thousand babies murdered every day by medical assassins in the employ of mommies.
Like the anti-war activists of the previous decade, the political awakening of the evangelical church created a tidal wave. TIME magazine dubbed 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.” Jimmy Carter, though a Democrat, was our man in Washington. We marched and filled the mall in Washington with not an undifferentiated mass of tissue, but a mass of humanity, demanding that the humanity of the unborn be recognized by the state. It looked, for a moment, as if the war would be a blitzkrieg, as if we would wipe Roe v. Wade off the map with the speed with which we toppled the Noriega machine.
Instead, we found ourselves in another Vietnam-like quagmire. Our enemies were entrenched, slippery, and were known to fight dirty. Our conventional political weaponry wasn’t up to the task. And so the war has dragged on.
With Vietnam, as victory became more and more elusive and as death tolls rose, the clamor to end the war reached a crescendo. With abortion, however, we have made peace with the war. The pro-life movement is a shadow if its former self. We are so politically insignificant that, with one national party, Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania can be silenced because he dares to support the unborn, and with the other national party, the pro-life plank is seen merely as a hindrance to making the tent still bigger.
Of course, we ought to expect such things from politicians. What is far more disheartening is the response of the movement itself. After thirty years of this war, after over forty million dead babies, we are weary of the fight. Evangelicals across the board stand and cheer a president who, while running for office, not only proclaimed clearly that he would not use Roe v. Wade as a litmus test for bench nominees, but has likewise affirmed that those unborn babies conceived as a result of rape or incest (the hard case that made Roe law in the first place) would be fair game for medical mercenaries if he could help it. This same president enjoys the endorsement of the National Right to Life Committee.
In my own lifetime then, I have seen a ragtag group of stoned children bring one war to an end. At the same time, I have seen the church of Jesus Christ make peace with the last enemy, death. We, in the whole, won’t learn war anymore. And so the babies continue to die.
The great tragedy of the last thirty years is not ultimately that the heathen, those who the Bible tells us “love death,” are killing their children. Rather, the great tragedy is that those who have been bought by the blood of the Lamb just don’t care. Of course the heathen kill their children. They, after all, are the heathen. But we who were dead in our trespasses and sins, but who have been made alive, who have been set free by the death of the One Innocent, ought not to give up.
The Christian Right stands now at a crossroads. Our choices are these: Either we can play the game and enjoy the honor that comes from being players in the political arena, or we can become fools for Christ. Either we will ignore the silent screams of the unborn so that we might be heard, or we will identify with the suffering and speak for those who are silenced. In short, either we will speak for the least of these, or we will continue to sell our souls for a mess of political pottage.
For all the phony wars politicians foist on us, this is the issue of our day: What will we do for our neighbors - for the inconvenient, politically-insignificant unborn bearers of the image of God? Jesus has told us this: Only those who profess Him before men will He profess before the Father. If we will not speak for our silent neighbors, no matter the cost, must we not question whether we belong to Him?