This posture on the left makes their position look brittle and indefensible. I don’t see how it wins anyone over to their side—especially since common sense is working against their position. No reasonable person believes that a person’s right to life is based on their location vis a vis the birth canal. Their right to life relies entirely upon whether or not they are a person. But many on the left cannot tolerate a reasonable discussion about that. They want to sneer and emote as a substitute for reasoned arguments in defense of their position.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. The Democratic majority called three pro-abortion witnesses, and the Republican minority called two pro-life witnesses. I watched most of the hearing and listened to sworn testimony from all five witnesses. You would be hard-pressed to find a more stark expression of the division in our nation than what is on display in this testimony.
Three witnesses lamented the overturning of Roe and argued in favor of new federal legislation to ensure abortion rights through all nine months of a woman’s pregnancy. They also argued that restricting abortion rights in any way is an expression of racism and misogyny. An abortionist from Planned Parenthood testified that she is angry and made the incredible claim that the Court’s overturning Roe is “a stain on our history as a country” and that “Abortion is normal. Abortion is an act of love. Abortion is health care.”
The two pro-life witnesses were worlds apart from the abortion activists who testified. They defended pro-life crisis pregnancy centers against the scurrilous claim that they didn’t really offer healthcare. They showed that crisis pregnancy centers offer medical services to women for free, whether or not those women choose to have an abortion. They also showed that crisis pregnancy centers care for these women for years free of charge after their abortion. After the angry abortionist testified that abortion is loving healthcare, the director of a crisis pregnancy center testified that abortion is anything but healthcare and is the taking of a human life. She shares a powerful testimony about a young woman forced into an abortion by her parents. It is worth watching:
At one point during the hearing, Senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the pro-abortion witnesses when a human child’s life begins to have value. He pressed them about why a newborn child outside of the womb has value but 24 hours earlier while in the womb didn’t have value. None of the pro-abortion witnesses would even acknowledge the question. They simply continued with their pro-abortion platitudes about “choice.” Senator Cornyn’s reasonable question was essentially met with the mind-numbing mantra, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians” (Acts 19:28-34). See below:
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If you are a Southern Baptist and you care about the pro-life cause in the SBC, now is the time to make your voice heard. Speak up for the incremental gains we have made over the last several decades, and keep pushing the ball down the field until we get into the endzone.

I am writing this short essay as an appeal to Southern Baptists who care about the pro-life cause. Right now, there is an effort underway by what I believe to be a tiny minority in the SBC to reverse the SBC’s longstanding commitment to the pro-life cause. They call themselves “Abolitionists,” but they are not the only ones who support the abolition of abortion. All sides of this debate want to see abortion abolished. The Abolitionists, however, condemn and repudiate the pro-life movement’s efforts to restrict abortion in whatever measure possible.
After the Roe decision in 1973, the pro-life movement eventually coalesced around an incrementalist strategy to abolish abortion. Pro-lifers realized that because Roe prevented them from passing laws to outright end abortion, they would have to take whatever ground they could to save as many unborn lives as possible. So we have tried to pass parental notification laws. We’ve supported the Hyde Amendment to prevent taxpayer funded abortions. We’ve supported fetal heartbeat laws in an attempt to outlaw abortion. We supported and passed a ban on the reprehensible procedure known as partial birth abortion. Etc.
The so-called Abolitionist movement condemns all of these measures as compromises with evil. The abolitionists even oppose any exception to save the life of a mother. The only laws or public policies they support are ones that completely abolish abortion all at once. Anything short of that fails to honor the humanity of the unborn. Not only do Abolitionists oppose pro-life policies, they also publicly condemn and shame pro-lifers as compromisers with evil.
To use a football analogy, pro-lifers would love to have a 100-yard touchdown run. But if that isn’t possible, then pro-lifers are eager and willing to take 5-10 yard runs in a sustained drive down the field toward the same end. Abolitionists only accept 100-yard touchdown runs. Anything short a 100-yard touchdown run should be condemned and repudiated as a grave compromise with evil. That’s the difference between the pro-life movement and so-called Abolitionism. It’s not about the final goal of abolishing abortion but about how to get there. Pro-lifers will take whatever ground they can get. Abolitionists are all-or-nothing.
If we had followed an Abolitionist strategy, we would not be on the cusp of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. The Mississippi fetal heartbeat law that is the basis for the Supreme Court’s recently-leaked Dobbs decision is a pro-life, incrementalist law. Abolitionists oppose that law and thereby support an all-or-nothing approach that would have undermined the most significant pro-life victory in two generations.
Southern Baptists have expressed themselves clearly decade after decade in resolution after resolution to be on the side of the pro-life movement. Southern Baptist resolutions have long supported incrementalist measures to abolish abortion. We have put ourselves on the side of those moving the ball down the field 5-10 yards at a time. We would welcome a 100-yard dash for the endzone. But short of that, we’ve been more than willing to support measures to take whatever ground we can get. That is why we have supported legislation to outlaw partial birth abortion, to keep the Hyde Amendment in place, to pass parental notification laws, etc. Our record on this goes back at least 41 years.
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The problem here is that this basic structure of reality is at odds with ascendant transgender ideology, which says that being a man or a woman is entirely disconnected from biological realities but rather is rooted in what a person thinks themselves to be at any given moment. If a biological male thinks he’s a woman, then he is a woman. If a biological female thinks she’s a man, then she’s a man. Thinking makes it so!

The video at the bottom of this post is queued up to an extraordinary exchange that occurred at yesterday’s [03/22/22] Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Senator Marsha Blackburn asks Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson if she can define what a woman is. Here’s a transcript of what they said, and you’re not going to believe it.
Blackburn: Do you agree with Justice Ginsburg that there are physical differences between men and women that are enduring?
Jackson: Um, Senator. Respectfully, I’m not familiar with that particular quote or case, so it’s hard for me to comment as to whether…
Blackburn: Okay… Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of “men” and “women” as male and female?
Jackson: Again, because I don’t know the case, I don’t know how I’d interpret it. I need to read the whole…
Blackburn: Okay. Can you provide a definition for the word woman?
Jackson: Can I provide a definition? No.
Blackburn: Yeah.
Jackson: I can’t.
Blackburn: You can’t?
Jackson: Mm. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.
If there is a better exemplar of our times, I don’t know what it is. Here we have a Supreme Court nominee who either can’t or won’t offer a definition of what a woman is. Why? Because she claims that she’s not a biologist. Really? I guess that explains why I couldn’t make a sandwich today. I gave up when I realized that I wasn’t a baker and couldn’t confirm the identity of the bread in my pantry.
Okay, okay. I know I’m descending into the absurd here, but you get my point. Do you have to be a vet to recognize a dog? Do you have to be a butcher to recognize ground beef? This line of reasoning is indeed absurd, but here we are. And it’s probably a good time for us to take the full measure of the moment we are living in.
Have we really come to the point that a sitting judge and nominee for the highest court in the land cannot define what a woman is? Think how fast transgender propaganda has taken root in our culture that this very basic question would produce a blank stare and an “I don’t know” from a sitting judge.
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Would we not be better off to scrap deconstruction and maintain the Christian category of sanctification—which involves putting off old erroneous ways and beliefs and putting on righteousness through the power of the Holy Spirit? It is grounded in faith and hope and love and has glorification as its endpoint. This is the grammar of the Christian faith, and the project of deconstruction really has nothing useful to add to it.

Kirsten Sanders has an interesting definition of deconstruction in an article for Christianity Today. She writes,
Deconstruction, by which I mean the struggle to correct or deepen naive belief, is a significant part of learning theology. Christians should engage in the task to move beyond simplistic conceptions to belief in a God who is vaster than they can comprehend.
As near as I can tell, this definition of deconstruction is what Christians usually refer to as sanctification. It’s that normal experience of growth whereby the Holy Spirit enables believers to forget what lies behind and to strain toward what lies ahead (Phil. 3:13). It involves repentance from error and growth in patterns of righteousness. It involves setting aside defective views of God and His word and embracing the true meaning of God’s revelation of Himself.
But as I read Sanders, she wishes to subsume all of this under the rubric of deconstruction. I think this is a bad move for several reasons.
First, as a category, deconstruction doesn’t sit well as a synonym for spiritual growth. Actual spiritual growth involves a constant “putting off” and “putting on” according to God’s revealed will. Deconstruction, on the contrary, is defined by “putting off” and has no fixed standard.
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Complementarianism neither stands nor falls on EFS. Those who think it does have confused the essence with an accident and raise questions whether they even know what the doctrine is.

As I have observed popular debates about complementarianism over the years, I have noticed how people often confuse what the doctrine is with other associations that have little or nothing to do with the teaching. In short, folks confuse the essence with the accidents.
What do I mean by confusing essence with accidents? An essential property of any object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack (source). You may bite into an apple that happens to have a worm in it, but you would be painfully mistaken if you were to conclude that worms are part of the essence of an apple. The apple may be worse for the wear because of the worm, but an apple is an apple with or without the worm. Likewise, you may bite into an apple dipped in caramel. In that case, you can be sure that the apple has been greatly improved. But still, you know that the improvement is an accidental property of that particular apple. The apple is an apple with or without the caramel.
A similar dynamic is in play when we think about biblical doctrines. For example, I am a pastor in a Baptist church. Many Baptist churches across the country have Sunday School every week. Mine does, in fact. But it would be a mistake to conclude from that fact that Sunday School is a part of the essence of being a Baptist. A church can be Baptist with or without Sunday School. Being a Baptist neither stands nor falls on whether Baptist churches have Sunday School. If you think otherwise, then it’s likely that you don’t know what it means to be a Baptist.
This kind of confusion seems to be at the heart of many of the debates about complementarianism that I have observed over the years. Critics of the doctrine make much of the fact that some complementarians espouse essentially literal Bible translation, conservative politics, the eternal functional subordination of the Son (EFS), etc. Other critics point to abuse or misogyny carried out in the name of complementarianism. It is a profound mistake, however, to conclude that any of those things comprise the essence of complementarian doctrine. None of those things are definitional of the doctrine in any way. Some of those things arguably may seem like improvements to complementarianism. Some of them are obviously no improvement to any doctrine. And some of them are in fact in opposition to the essence of the doctrine (e.g., abuse, misogyny). But no matter how you rate them (improvement or detriment), none of them are complementarianism. The doctrine neither stands nor falls on any of them.
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There is so much more to this conversation than Mason’s article lets on. There are serious, glaring theological problems with “Side B Christianity,” but Mason doesn’t address them. Rather, she caricatures and straw-man’s the sincere biblical and theological issues raised by those to her right. Nevertheless, these problems with the Side B paradigm endure, and Christians must engage them head-on with biblical discernment.

Christianity Today has published an article by a “Side B Christian” named Bekah Mason. For those unfamiliar with this terminology, so-called “Side A Christians” are those who believe that they can follow Christ while affirming homosexual identity and practice. “Side B Christians” are those who believe that following Christ means affirming gay identity while eschewing gay sexual behavior. Mason’s article is about the plight of “Side B Christians” who feel rejected both by LGBT folks on their left and by “orthodox churches” on their right. Mason argues that “Side B Christians are not a threat but an asset to orthodox churches.”
Readers would do well to reckon not only with the article’s argument but also with its problems. For example, Mason treats “Side B Christianity” as if its theological framework were uncontroversial. On her account, Side B Christians are simply people who are trying to be faithful to Christ in the face of “acerbic” conservatives who won’t let them be. But that is a caricature of the debate that has unfolded over the last 8 years or so.
“Side B Christians” treat homosexual orientation not as sin to be lamented but as an identity to be affirmed. Yes, they agree with Christians to their right that homosexual behavior is sinful and fallen, but they nevertheless don’t want to consign homosexual identity to a similar category. From Wes Hill arguing that being gay is “sanctifiable” to Grant Hartley‘s “Redeeming Queer Culture” to Gregory Coles‘ suggestion that gay orientation may be an aspect of God’s original creation design, it is clear that “Side B” folks aim to convince Christians that at least part of homosexuality ought to be redeemed rather than repented of. I don’t believe that Mason’s article is forthrightly dealing with these problems. Rather, she writes as if the debate is mainly due to the irrational rigidity of conservatives.
Mason also caricatures those to her right by claiming, “From conservative commenters, we hear that any acknowledgment of same-sex attraction is sinful.” I am one of the primary drafters of The Nashville Statement, and I know personally all of the other primary drafters. I can’t think of a single one who would agree with that statement. No responsible pastor would ever make such an asinine claim. The truth is that those of us who affirm Nashville believe that Christians should acknowledge and confess their sin no matter what it is. They should be honest about and face their own temptations and find help and strength from Christ to be faithful in the struggle. No one that I know of has argued anywhere that “any acknowledgement of same-sex attraction is sinful.” That claim simply isn’t true of any of the major parties to this conversation.
What we have argued is that same-sex sexual desire is sinful and that faithful Christians should repent of those desires whenever they experience them. They should not found an identity on such desires as though they were to be affirmed or commended. If gay orientation is any part of human identity, it would simply be an expression of the flesh. But the flesh is nothing to affirm or to celebrate. On the contrary, it is something daily to be put to death. The remnants of our sinful nature will be eradicated at the new creation, and that is why we must mortify our flesh even now (Romans 8:13).
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Our hearts are prone to partiality in judgment (James 2:9). We are open to believe the best about certain kinds of people and the worst about other kinds of people. Our prejudices can cloud our judgment and lead us to believing accusations without evidence simply because the accused belongs to a group we don’t like. If you fall into that mindset, you may find yourself self-righteously assisting a mob in condemning an innocent person (Prov. 17:15).

One of the most vicious characters in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is a woman name Madame Defarge. In the beginning, she appears as a diminutive woman who passively spends her time knitting as French nobility commit great injustices against commoners. The reader comes to find out that this woman is storing up bitter resentments and bloody plans for vengeance against her aristocratic persecutors. Through years of oppression, she is quietly knitting a “hit list” of aristocrats whose blood must be spilled in the coming revolution.
Her bloodlust becomes so intense that she begins to sew names on her list that don’t deserve her condemnation. At one crucial turning-point in the story, she adds the name Charles Darnay to the list. She knows of no crimes that Darnay has committed (he’s committed none). She knows nothing of the exculpatory fact that Darnay had renounced his title, his privilege, and the oppressive ways of his uncle. All she knows is that Darnay is the nephew of an evil nobleman. Darnay belongs to the wrong group by birth and therefore must die.
A large part of the drama of A Tale of Two Cities is the depiction of mob justice. What happens when the social order disintegrates, and due process and the rule of law are lost? What happens is that the rights of the accused get trampled under foot. Salacious accusations in service of “the cause” become the pretext for mob actions. The truth of an accusation doesn’t really matter anymore. All that matters is “the cause” and destroying the out-group. The facts be damned.
It is this kind of situation that Proverbs 18:17 speaks to:
“The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.”
The meaning here is pretty clear. It is easy to make accusations, but accusations must be substantiated. That is why the accusations themselves must be probed for consistency and evidence. If there are witnesses, they must be heard and their testimony weighed. All the facts must be brought forth from both accuser and accused. And during the adjudication, the accused must not be presumed guilty based merely on the accusations. It is from this principle that our own norm of due process requires the presumption of innocence on the part of the accused. Without this presumption of innocence, you get mob justice and innocent people’s heads foisted on a pike.
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“I don’t know that evangelicals have been sufficiently self-reflective to admit their basic and personal insecurities. It’s just no fun being an outsider to mainstream culture. We all just want to be loved, and if not loved, at least liked and respected. Elite evangelicals are not just savvy evangelists but also a people striving for acceptance.” ~Mark Galli

Former editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, wrote a jaw-dropping column last week. Galli’s essay discusses where the next generation of evangelical leadership is going to emerge from. Will it be from among “elite evangelicalism” (e.g., Fuller Seminary, CT, Intervarsity Press, World Vision, etc.), or will it be from among the constellation of “reactionary Reformed conservatives” (e.g., Doug Wilson)? Galli then goes on to talk about his tenure at Christianity Today and what it revealed to him about the priorities of “elite evangelicalism.” He writes,
Elite evangelicalism (represented by CT, IVPress, World Vision, Fuller Seminary, and a host of other establishment organizations) is too often “a form of cultural accommodation dressed as convictional religion.” These evangelicals want to appear respectable to the elite of American culture. This has been a temptation since the emergence of contemporary evangelicalism in the late 1940s, the founding of Christianity Today being one example…
I don’t know that evangelicals have been sufficiently self-reflective to admit their basic and personal insecurities. It’s just no fun being an outsider to mainstream culture. We all just want to be loved, and if not loved, at least liked and respected. Elite evangelicals are not just savvy evangelists but also a people striving for acceptance.
I saw this often when I was at CT. For the longest time, a thrill went through the office when Christianity Today or evangelicalism in general was mentioned in a positive vein by The New York Times or The Atlantic or other such leading, mainstream publications. The feeling in the air was, “We made it. We’re respected.” …
This tendency has only gotten worse, as now the mark of a successful evangelical writer is to get published regularly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s interesting about such pieces is that (a) such writers make a point that affirms the view of the secular publication (on topics like environmental care, racial injustice, sexual abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evangelicals should take the same point of view. However, their writing doesn’t reach the masses of evangelicals who take a contrary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writers are really interested in getting those evangelicals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the mainstream press. Better to try to get such a column published in the most popular Pentecostal outlet, Charisma. Ah, but that would do nothing to enhance the prestige of evangelicals among the culture’s elite.
Evangelical columns in large part merely bolster the reputation of secular outlets, as these publications can now pat themselves on the back and say, “See, even religious people agree with us.” Rarely if ever will you see an evangelical by-line in such outlets that argues to protect life in womb or affirms traditional marriage.
We see an ancient dynamic here: When you seek to win the favor of the powerful, you will likely be used by them to enhance their own status. And along the way, many of your convictions will be sidelined. We’ve seen this happen on the religious right in the political nightmare of the last few years. But it happens on the left just as often.
Anyone paying attention to CT over the last decade or so is not surprised by any of this. What’s surprising is that Galli confirms it in so many words. He basically admits that “elite evangelicals” aim to win the respect and praise of Christianity’s cultured despisers and that such is the temptation in the CT newsroom itself.
What he describes is nothing other than the age-old temptation of theological liberalism, which in many ways was simply an attempt to make Christianity acceptable to cultural elites. As we all know now, that project led to the denial of core teachings of the Christian faith. For miracle-denying “Christians,” theological liberalism became the faith of the apostates not the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). It was a failed project in the last century, and it will be a failed project in this one to the degree that “evangelical elites” pursue it.
Pursuing the approval of elites is a fool’s errand. Those undertaking this project never seem to learn that “he’s elites are just not that into you.” They never have been and never will be (John 15:18-19). A part of faithfulness in our generation and in any generation is to have a holy indifference about the approval of those who despise Christ. That is why Paul warns, “For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10).
Galli writes that it’s no accident that CT more or less snubs complementarians and 6-day creationists. It’s a direct consequence of their not wishing to offend elite sensibilities.
I saw this accommodation dynamic as CT managing editor and then editor in chief.  We said, for example, that the magazine did not take a stand in the complementarianism or egalitarianism debate. But we rarely if ever published an article that endorsed complementarianism; we did offer many that assumed egalitarianism in family and church life (not to mention the many women pastors who we published).
Then there was the six-day creation/evolution debate, in which again we said we took no stand.  But try to find an article in the last three decades that argued for or assumed six-day creation. And yet we published several pieces that simply assumed a billion-year time span for the history of the earth.
It’s not a coincidence that complementarianism and six-day creation are anathema to secularists, features of a religion out of touch with reality.
I offer one personal anecdote that confirms this in my own experience. Four years ago, a number of evangelical leaders and scholars gathered in Nashville, Tennessee to complete and endorse what would come to be known as “The Nashville Statement” on biblical sexuality. Over the next four years, an impressive array of evangelical seminaries, colleges, churches, and ministries would adopt the statement as a confessional standard. Two years ago, the PCA adopted it as a faithful tool for discipling their members. The same year, the Southern Baptist Convention also adopted a resolution adopting language taken directly from The Nashville Statement.
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Pro-abortionists want to distract everyone from the central issue. They want to keep everyone in the dark about what the abortionists are doing in their death chambers. They aren’t merely removing a clump of impersonal cells during an abortion. They are killing living human beings. They want to hide this central truth, but we must not let them do that.

The left is apoplectic about the shutdown of death-dealing abortion mills in Texas. Nothing is more catastrophic to them than that babies would no longer be subject to legal execution. And there is hardly anything they won’t say or do to get the abortionists back to the important business of killing the unborn.
For that reason, you can expect to hear some crazy, wild claims in days ahead. You are going to hear downright asinine allegations about pro-lifers and their “sinister” motivations. Here is a case in point. Jeff Greenfield claims in Politico that evangelical opposition to abortion was merely a pretext for racial discrimination:
It turns out that abortion was not really an instant trigger for conservative evangelical political engagement… The evangelical community was by and large supportive of abortion rights for years after Roe v. Wade was decided. It was only when powerful figures on the right saw abortion as a way to build support for their real agenda — private segregated schools — that Jerry Falwell embraced the cause.
So yes, you read that right. Evangelical opposition to abortion was never really about the sanctity of human life. It was about keeping black children out of white schools. I can hardly imagine a more cynical, dismissive allegation about evangelical pro-lifers. But there it is. It just goes to show that when the left can’t engage the substance of the arguments against abortion, they go straight for the specious ad hominem trope: “Hey, can you believe those pro-life rubes over there? They are just a bunch of racists. I’m so glad I’m pro-choice and not racist like them.”
If that seems absurd to you, that’s because it is. Nevertheless, that is the stock-in-trade of pro-choice polemics. Avoid the substance of the issue—the humanity of the unborn—and make unfounded and illogical attacks on the character of pro-lifers. Nevermind the fact that in New York “thousands more black babies are aborted than born alive each year, and the abortion rate among black mothers is more than three times higher than it is for white mothers” (source). Generations of black children have been exterminated in New York, but no biggie. It’s actually pro-lifers who are racist.
And if you think this kind of radical pro-abortion cynicism is a one-off, just watch. It won’t be. The baseless attacks against pro-lifers will continue apace without being fact-checked.
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