Most abortions are committed by women destined to remain childless. A vast majority of normal American women intend never to commit an abortion, never do, and instead want to start a family. Rejecting abortions is normal. Having abortions is not.

Recently in Ohio, a constitutional amendment to allow some abortion-on-demand narrowly passed a popular referendum. The amendment would have failed had only about seven percent of voters switched from “yes” to “no.” This contrasts with recent pro-life wins in states that are in some cases arguably less red than Ohio such as the traditional swing state of Florida, Texas, and the blue-leaning state of Georgia. There, Republicans who passed laws that protect unborn babies with heartbeats have lately won statewide and even won big.
The Ohio setback is what results when the political right argues law instead of culture. The right outsourced its arguments on abortion mostly to its kindly Christian women, who have so far avoided using one of the most powerful tools they have: Shame. But shame is the way to train abortion proponents to care about the unborn, and shame comes from culture.
The political left knows this well. The left for a century has changed culture before law, turning the unimaginable into the standard, through relentless campaigns of public shaming. That’s how it trained a generation to avoid fanciful horrors of the so-called “politically incorrect,” even though no one ever believed it. The political right, if only it is willing, can far more quickly teach a generation to avoid real horrors everyone already knows are wrong.
The Median Abortion Seeker Is Far from the Median Woman
Trained to avoid the politically incorrect, much of the right assumes that condemning women who get abortions is like staring at a solar eclipse: something you just can’t do. But the left’s cultural wins are reversing. As more and more reject the bizarre racial and sexual pities of the aughts and the vapid norms of the nineties from which they sprang, now is the time to question whether it really is bad to shame women when they kill their children. Now is the time to break free from the Millian paradigm that negates historically normal enforcement of social norms and morality: shame and stigma. These things are always operative anyway. It is just a question of which morality governs and what “lifestyles” are elevated. 
There aren’t many women to shame anyway. The typical woman is far from the typical woman who commits abortion. Roughly half of all abortions are committed by women who have already had at least one. About a fifth of women who get abortions have several. Overall, only about one in ten who get pregnant ever go on to commit even one abortion.
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Christian princes are not church officers, insisted Calvin, but they have “obtained” by God’s sovereign decree. Like David, they should be versed in God’s law in order to apply it justly throughout the nation, leaving the administration of the sacraments and preaching to those with ministerial callings. Calvin’s view resonated with many in Britain where history had prepared the soil for it to take root. Under Elizabeth I’s rule, a diverse array of church leaders echoed Calvin’s political theology including Puritans like Thomas Cartwright and Anglicans like John Jewel and Richard Hooker. 

Recently, a provocative quote from Michael Bird made the rounds through Christian Twitter. “The Bible has a technical term for someone who tries to combine religious and political power,” says Bird, “It’s called antichrist.”
It’s a punchy line, but interrogating it for a moment reveals new vistas of incoherence. It’s obviously appealing to evangelicals who want to countersignal their embarrassment of fellow believers seduced by the lure of Christian Nationalism. But as many pointed out in the replies, does the satisfaction of castigating your socio-political rivals require censuring the lot of Calvin, Luther, the Westminster Divines, Constantine, most English monarchs, and King David as antichrist?
Any sane person will say Bird’s opinion lacks nuance. But how many will admit it represents an ideological bias embedded in American Protestantism whose reckoning is long overdue?
Radical Secularism and American Protestantism
It’s ironic that mainstream evangelicals have come to equate piety with a notion of radical secularism championed by an atheist turned Unitarian. Most are aware that the primary source of modern commitments to secularism comes from Thomas Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association” of 1802. There, Jefferson explains that his intentions behind the Constitution’s First Amendment were to build “a wall of separation between Church and State.” More important for today, however, was the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Building on Jefferson’s wall imagery, they urged it to be “high and impregnable.”
There has since been a post-war consensus about the absolute separation between church and state whose proponents have grown among believers and unbelievers alike. Most concerningly, the former sound just as dogmatic as the latter. 
Examples include David French’s infamous defense of drag queen story hours as a “blessing of liberty” which civil authorities must allow by demand of the First Amendment’s commitment to moral neutrality and  Russell Moore’s criticism of Uganda’s new anti-homosexuality laws which, to him, represent a trading of gospel witness for political power.
Both cases argue for limiting the magistrate’s power to enforce Christian virtues although on slightly different terms. French, for example, mostly appeals to Jeffersonian principles and the inalienable right to religious liberty. He doesn’t need to cite specific Scripture since it’s clear he thinks his views are the right application of the Bible’s teaching. And he’s not alone. A.A. Hodge, the famous nineteenth-century American Presbyterian theologian and churchman, made a similar appeal to religious freedom in his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. 
Self-conscious of their desire to faithfully articulate the whole testimony of Scripture, the original authors of the Westminster Confession punctuated each doctrine with biblical citations. In James 4:12 and Romans 14:4, Hodge sees a right to conscience (WCF XX) which, when applied in the civil sphere (WCF XXIII), becomes an “inalienable prerogative of mankind…to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.” For Hodge, the magistrate’s duty to preserve religious freedom supersedes that of advancing Christian virtues. Add a bit of Frenchian proceduralism and it’s ready for the Sunday column, though Hodge would no doubt be horrified by some of the ways French applies this way of thinking today. 
If French takes a slightly indirect way of arriving at the absolute separation of church and state, Moore is more explicitly biblicist, rooting his case in hermeneutics which reveal important distinctions between Old and New Testament political realities. Conveniently for him, evangelical hermeneutics mandate a church-state arrangement amenable to everyone but conservative Christians while also making it easier to dismiss his opponents to the right as theocrats who simply misread their Bible.
Chad Van Dixhoorn represents the best version of his argument, addressing what he calls the “problematic” parallels between the duties of Israelite kings and today’s civil magistrates codified in the original Westminster Confession of Faith:
The problem with these parallels is that what is good for the old covenant people of God is not always good for the new. In the Old Testament, Israel was the assembly or church of God and God’s chosen nation. And so rulers in the nation also carried some responsibility for the church. In the New Testament the assembly or church of God is Israel, but there is no chosen political nation. The church is scattered among the nations. Neither is any ruler in any nation responsible for the church (Confessing the Faith, 314).
But as I have argued before, the implications of Christ’s new covenant were not lost on most early American Protestants. Most wanted a harmonious relationship between the civil and ecclesial spheres no less rooted in Scripture but arranged by robust systematic categories. 
A Mixed Metaphor
One historically popular image for conveying the entire biblical witness to the magistrate’s relationship with the church was that of a nursing father. The admittedly mixed metaphor comes from Isaiah 49:23, and it was Calvin’s penetrating commentary on that verse that established the religious duties of Protestant magistrates in their realm. Beyond an “ordinary profession of faith,” magistrates are to defend the church, promote the glory of God, maintain the purity of doctrine, curb idolatry, and, generally, “supply everything that is necessary for nourishing the offspring of the Church.”
Impossible to ignore in Calvin’s interpretation is a convenient polemic against papal supremacy, which he blames for improperly subordinating civil authority to the greed of the Roman Catholic Church.
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“The purpose of this book is to help the reader understand how the broken brain does not work, (analogy to a broken arm) to set the broken brain in the context of the gospel, and to discover how the church can bring comfort to the mentally ill and their families by watching for a Galatians 5:22-24 moment.”

A Christian Guide to Mental Illness by David Murray and Tom Karel Jr. sits on my list of the top five books about the topic of mental iIlness. Written in 2023 and 244 pages long, this book is divided into 30 short chapters which can easily be read in minutes/small chunks of time.
What makes this book especially unique and helpful is the very candid personal stories on the topic. At the risk of being pegged a gadfly, I will not repeat any of the personal stories. Suffice it to say that these stories add a definite tone of humility and utter dependence on the Lord, not to mention “personal touch” which draws the reader in and makes the book a “page turner”.
If my new method of marking especially helpful pages is any indication of the helpfulness of a book, about a dozen pages are marked with a folded corner to revisit, repeat and dig into again, indicating a very helpful book indeed. Also, the chapter titled “The Story Behind This Book” is very personal and adds a wonderful dimension to the contents. “Due to their painful experience of trying to care for Gary through these traumatic years, Norman and his wife, Vicki, felt called of God to donate this money ($70,000, which had been realized from Gary’s estate – Gary had been Norman’s brother and  had schizophrenia) to a research project (this very book!  Thank you!) that would ultimately help Christians care for other Christians with mental illness.” The very last line of the book (before the index) reads: “The purpose of this book is to help the reader understand how the broken brain does not work, (analogy to a broken arm) to set the broken brain in the context of the gospel, and to discover how the church can bring comfort to the mentally ill and their families by watching for a Galatians 5:22-24 moment.”
The first 11 chapters or almost 100 pages focus on mental illness: what it is, how it affects the sufferer and spiritual life and those around the sufferer. Moreover, addressed are how people react to having it, hurdles to recovery and causes.
The next chapters (12-18, about 50 pages) focus on roles such as the roles pastors play in helping sufferers, role of church community, role of family and friends. Furthermore, the part that professionals play, medications and biblical counselors are touched on.
The last 11 chapters (19-30) answer primarily “How can we…” questions. How can we help a sufferer grow spiritually, how can we help someone who is suicidal, and how can care be given for the caregivers. The last question deserves a full book – there’s so much more that can be said about caring for caregivers.
Some favorite parts – the authors give very helpful explanations of the two main types of mental illness, although there is overlap and both may be present in one person. The two categories are primarily affective (mood) disorders and mind disorders. The mood disorders mainly affect the mood or emotions and include anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, …” page 24 The second main category is primarily thought (mind) disorders. “While the affective disorders are often disabling and devastating, perhaps more confusing and perplexing are the diagnoses classified under ‘thought disorders.’ These diagnoses would include: schizophrenia … psychosis.” There’s an ongoing struggle to “make sense out of reality.” This involves very disordered thoughts and often an inability to communicate effectively.  These two authors also face the fact and effectively communicate the reality of voices, a topic often glossed over, and at times, disregarded or not thought to be true. Well, voices  are for real, both auditory and visual hallucinations are for real, speaking of those that are  not drug induced.
Another very helpful page was page 61 where the authors discuss submission and service. In the context of the chapter on “How does mental illness affect those around the sufferer,” we read that part of a healthy response to mental illness is “accepting God’s will in the matter.” “We stop fighting and denying. We bow down and say ‘Not my will, but your will be done.’ Going further, those around the sufferer must recognize and accept the sufferer’s limitations and “adjust accordingly.” Accept it, don’t think or try to change it. Why? :This is the only way to silence torturous questions like, “Why me?” or “Why them?”
The comments about service were very much appreciated as a clear recognition of the long term problem mental illness often is and repercussions. “…therefore it’s best if we frame it as one of the primary areas in which we serve God, rather than as an inconvenience that may hinder our service to God.” How freeing and affirming to read that on page 61.
In the section pertaining to the role the church community has, the reader is reminded that although mental illness isolates people and “makes them feel unloved and unwanted, deepening the illness,” we should never “underestimate the power of including them and welcoming them in the church family.” In other words, “Mental illness cuts off, but the church family connects.” page 109 (Reviewer’s note: another book could be written on this and the great need of the church to do more.)
There are so many more gems and highlights of wisdom in this book. It’s really like a treasure trove, and very readable. In fact, the use of white space, bold headings, parenthetical quotes and chapter summaries including problem, insights and action, plus stories, make the book very readable, not daunting which one might think, given the subject matter.
A shortcoming of the book is the too short chapter on caring for caregivers. This is such a neglected topic in the whole discussion. (After all, there are still people who think the parent caused the issue or that the sufferer can merely snap out of it…even some who think it’s contagious and they might catch it if they get too close.) So much more could and should someday be written about the caregivers who often rarely get out because they cannot leave their loved one alone. There are many reasons for this, which may warrant yet another book! There are concerns that a voice could tell someone to leave the house and go away, a voice that could say hurt yourself or someone else. And what of the little man in the tree looking back? Or the face in the radio, looking back to torment. Who can write that book?
Jane Vos is a graduate of Reformed Bible College (now Kuyper College). She is married to Douglas Vos, publisher of The Aquila Report. She is a mother to five, grandmother to 14 plus two foster grandbaby boys. Jane was born into a family with a history of mental illness. She’s read dozens of books on the topic both from a Christian perspective and secular perspective. Jane recognizes that mental illness is something that must be accepted and stewarded for the glory of God.
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