Vote Your Faith Not Your Fear

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by Dr Lawrence L. White, Pastor, Our Savior Lutheran Church (LCMS), Houston, Texas.

Republished with permission from Christian News October 22, 2012 – www.ChristianNewsMo.com

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It’s that time again. In the midst of a heated Presidential campaign – portrayed, as always, as the most important election in the history of the republic – pro-life voters are confronted with a choice between an ambivalent Republican and a pro-abortion Democrat. I, for one, believe that it is high time we stopped settling for the “lesser of two evils.” I believe the time has come for us to vote our faith and not our fear. My vote for president on this Election Day will be a write in.

As we debate support for the current moderate Republican nominee, abortion is already a well-established part of American culture. We have gradually grown accustomed to the killing of 4,000 babies every day. The 40th birthday (how’s that for irony) of Roe vs Wade is just a few months away. We talk about nearly 60 million murdered children. What we don’t often consider is that there are nearly 60 million women out there who have had abortions and nearly sixty million men who fathered a child in a one night stand without ever knowing it or helped to arrange for the removal of an inconvenient pregnancy. Those awful numbers mean that there are very few families left in America which have not been directly touched by the slaughter. The spiritual degradation and damage which these numbers represent is terrifying. The sad truth is that after forty years we are farther away from stopping abortion today than we have ever been. With every year that passes it become less likely that we will ever be able to end the killing. Most Americans today, especially the younger ones, have come to view sex as just another form of casual recreation. They are convinced that anyone who believes that sex should be the expression of love between a husband and wife without the lifelong commitment of marriage is a judgmental hypocrite who wants to impose his own repressive hangups  on everybody else. As that perspective becomes increasingly dominant, the practical necessity of abortion will become ever more compelling.

I am convinced that Bible Christians – especially those of us who have been actively involved in politics as citizens – have failed to stop abortion because we have failed to consistently put our faith into practice and be true to our convictions. We have known from the beginning what God says about the precious life of the unborn. Our pro-life rhetoric has proclaimed over and over for forty long years that the death of everyone of these defenseless babies breaks God’s heart. And yet we have gone on about our business as usual throughout those forty years as though we were not in the middle of a life and death catastrophe. We have gradually been conditioned to coexist with abortion. “Sure, we are pro-life,” we have assured ourselves, but then we have realistically hastened to add, “but we can’t expect abortion to end anytime soon.” Our patient willingness to allow this abomination to continue year after year is a contradiction and a denial of everything we say we believe about the God of love and life whom we profess to serve.

We got involved in the political process with good intentions for the best reasons – the unborn were being slaughtered, marriage and family were being devastated. But politics changed us more than we changed politics. We rightly rejected the devil’s lie of the absolute separation of church and state and recognized our God given responsibility to fight for Biblical values in the public square. But our persistent Adversary didn’t give up and go away. Instead, as usual, he found a different point of vulnerability. He tempted us to confuse our own political opinions with the absolute truth of God. We failed to maintain a clear consistent distinction between – “This is what I think” and “Thus saith the Lord.” By so doing we have allowed God to be reduced to the status of a mascot for the Republican Party. All too often we have bowed down before the pagan altar of the GOP when we should have been standing steadfastly for GOD. We seem to have forgotten that abortion is like any other issue. This single issue is a direct confrontation between life and death, God and Satan. Any Christian that will not stand boldly for life is guilty of betraying and denying the Lord Jesus Christ. Thousands of babies die with every delay and every concession. Politics is the art of the possible, the world told us. We were endlessly reminded that in order to accomplish anything in politics you have to be practical and realistic. There are no perfect candidates, the experts have advised us. In politics we have to settle for what we can get. Bit by bit our politics have been seduced by worldly games of power and success, politics as usual, and all the while the babies have gone on dying.

We’ve compromised, we’ve adjusted, we’ve settled. We’ve supported candidate after candidate who was – at best – ambivalent about abortion. We’ve settled for the lesser of two evils over and over again, even though deep in our hearts, we’ve always known that these guys didn’t understand the horror of abortion and would never be willing to take any personal or political risk to actually try stopping it. We should learn from our enemies. Can you ever imagine the Democrats nominating a presidential candidate who was not passionately committed to a woman’s right to choose? Can you imagine Obama, or any other Democrat president, ever nominating a Supreme Court justice who was not unequivocally, absolutely pro-abortion? It could never happen. Unfortunately those who are pro-death understand the crucial importance of this singular issue to their world-view much more clearly that those who are pro-life. The Republican Party establishment views pro-life voters with scornful contempt. Based on our past cowardice, they confidently assume that we “have nowhere else to go” and will continue to vote Republican because the Democrat will always be worse. They deride us as useful fools who will settle for vague promises and an occasional scrap tossed their way. As long as we continue to submit to their cynical manipulation, and to allow fear, not faith, to determine our vote, the killing of the unborn will continue.

We have got to finally deal with reality. The sad fact is that anyone who is only nominally pro-life, uncommitted or indifferent on this issue is, in effect, pro-abortion. This is true because the challenge that confronts pro-lifers is infinitely greater that which confronts abortion supporters. Pro-aborts don’t have to change anything. All they have to do is leave things the way they are, maintaining a well-established status quo. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, have to bring about a cultural revolution. They have to challenge what has come to be defined by all of our cultural elites – media, entertainment and academia – as “reproductive freedom” and then overturn forty years of history. Pro-lifers have to transform a culture of death back into a culture of life. The Republican establishment and their moderate stalking horses are determined to avoid this issue, whenever possible. Their strategy has been the same for decades and it works! They say as much as they have to during the primaries in order to placate Christian voters while they eliminate real pro-life candidates. Once the primaries are over, they immediately run for the center, studiously avoiding the dreaded social issues. When they do manage to win an election that same craven pattern continues – minimal talk and no action. The consequence of these sad facts is that the same number of babies will die during the administration of a nominally pro-life Republican coward, as during the administration of a radical, pro-abortion Democrat.

We’ve made these expedient choices over forty years because we wanted to win elections. We’ve made these choices because we were afraid of what would happen to the country if our personal conservative views on Government, taxes, the economy, foreign policy, etc., etc. did not prevail. We have soothed our consciences with the thought that at least with a Republican president we have the possibility of moderate/conservative Supreme Court appointments. The record of Republican court appointments contradicts that hope. But more basically, we have allowed so much ground to be lost in the battle for the soul of America, that we are well beyond the point where the Supreme Court can solve this problem for us.

We need a president who is passionately committed to life; a president who hates abortion and recognizes the dire threat that it poses to the survival of America. We need a president who will fearlessly articulate his own firm convictions on the issue again and again, to rally the nation, and recall America to its most basic belief – “that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their Creator: with an unalienable right to life. As long as we are content to settle for the docile servants of the party establishment as the lesser of two evils that will never happen. As long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated by cynical party bosses we will never succeed in rousing the people of God who sense the lack of spiritual integrity in our efforts. We’ve been practical and realistic for forty years and every single day of these forty years 4,000 more babies have died. It ought to be plain to anyone by now that our lesser of two evils strategy has failed. We must finally stop being practical and realistic. The time is long past due for us to be faithful, to stand for truth and life without compromise or concession, come what may, and entrust the outcome to God.

I will never entrust the lives of unborn children into the hands of another milk-toast weathervane Republican again. On this election day I am going to vote my faith not my fear.

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Dr. White is the author of The Book of Revelation: Scripture’s Crescendo and Culmination, Life with God: A Survey of Biblical Doctrine as Confessed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and Breaking the Da Vinci Code: A Review of the Conspiracy Proposed by Dan Brown’s Bestseller “The Da Vinci Code”, available from Christian News at www.ChristianNewsMo.com.