One of the most frequent objections to abolitionism I hear from fellow Christian leaders is that it puts abolishing abortion ahead of gospel witness, making it a form of idolatry.
Pardon my Greek, but this is just nonsense. While one can make anything into an idol, no abolitionist I've ever associated with is doing that. All they are doing is giving proportionate treatment to the evil of our age by bringing the gospel into direct conflict with that evil.
Just as it is not idolatry to temporarily suspend Sunday School in order to help put out a fire in the church nursery, neither is it idolatry to give due prominence, until it it is outlawed, to a barbaric practice that claims over 20,000 innocent lives per week. A gospel witness, a “faith”, that does not have works conformable to its confession that Christ is Lord of all, is “dead” – so says James by the mouth of the Holy Spirit. To refuse to give priority to abolishing abortion is every bit as much a denial of the faith as refusing to fight a nursery fire during Sunday School.
In the midst of an abortion holocaust, to have any kind of gospel witness that does not feature abolition (which is simply the outworking of Christ's commandment that “thou shalt not murder”) is to have a spurious witness; one that may be right in the bare technical details of confessional Christianity (i.e., the letter of the law), but that is wrong in the spirit – i.e., the application – of it. It may say many of the right things, doctrinally, but if it does not live out the implications of that right doctrine it is nothing other than “faith without [commensurate] works”.
Yet sadly that is where an astonishing number of Christians are today. They operate as if having sound doctrine is all that matters, and that all the monstrous evils of the world will magically (I choose the word deliberately) vanish (“if God so wills”) if all we do is just keep preaching sound doctrine.
It is one thing to preach sound doctrine. It is quite another to both preach it and live it out. In fact, truth preached but not lived is hardly truth at all. It is truth obscured and misrepresented. To borrow the apostle Paul's metaphor, it is “as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal”.
To preach truth but not live it is faith-without-works deadness. “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of God”, according to James, is in evidence only where sound doctrine is lived as well as proclaimed. That is the whole point of his discourse on “faith without works”. It is supremely ironic that accusations of idolatry should be leveled at the very ones who are meaningfully seeking to live out what James says characterizes “pure and undefiled religion”: namely, “visiting orphans in their affliction.”
In an abortion holocaust the very works that faith is designed to produce are exactly the works that abolitionists are doing. To call those works “idolatry” is itself a perverse form of idolatry – the exaltation of a faith that doesn't work over a faith that does.
--Rolley Haggard
