Category: The American Spectator
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Why the pro-life movement fails without a Christian worldview
In the United States and other Western nations, pro-life organizations are the primary means through which conservative Christians oppose legalized abortion.
With their cultural engagement and legislative efforts, these pro-life groups and leaders purport to oppose the murder of preborn babies, ultimately desiring the complete end of abortion. But a simple examination of the worldviews held by these groups shows that many are not operating in a distinctly Christian fashion, even when they are led by professing Christians.
We continue to practice child sacrifice today through abortion.
Some pro-life organizations are self-admittedly non-sectarian, seeking to build coalitions of anti-abortion people who may be Christians, other religious conservatives, agnostics and atheists, or feminists.
But even the pro-life groups that are convictionally Christian, or led by convictional Christians, often functionally set aside the Christian worldview.
The church through the ages, bearing the gospel of life, has been the means by which the deathly deeds of child sacrifice have been overturned in countless cultures. The dearth of a Christian worldview in the current anti-abortion movement should, therefore, be gravely concerning to any believer who likewise wants to see modern child sacrifice abolished.
The doctrine of man
Christianity teaches that humans are creatures made in the image of God with rational souls (Ecclesiastes 7:29), but that mankind fell in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:1-7) and became dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1-3). We, therefore, have a thoroughly corrupted nature by which we are innately inclined toward evil (Romans 3:10-18).
The act of child sacrifice is one particularly brazen form of evil toward which man has always been predisposed. The murder of children for reasons of prosperity or convenience has occurred on every continent and was practiced by most major civilizations at some point in their history.
We continue to practice child sacrifice today through abortion.
In almost every abortion decision, the motivation is a rejection of inconvenient responsibility, the desire to prioritize college or career, or some other factor that could never even start to approach a justified reason for murdering an innocent human made in the image of God.
Western nations used to presuppose the Christian worldview. But in recent centuries, Enlightenment ideas have corrupted or entirely usurped the Christian worldview, especially concerning the sinful state of human nature.
Rather than saying that mankind is a valuable yet fallen creature, Enlightenment heretics taught that humans are fundamentally blank slates or even morally good and that with education or infusion of knowledge, mankind can experience true moral progression.
Such a worldview can be seen in pro-life groups claiming that “if wombs had windows, babies would be protected from abortions.” Others say that they are working to “make abortion unthinkable,” as if sin could ever be made completely unthinkable to fallen sinners.
Enlightenment presuppositions about human nature also impact pro-life legislative strategy. Many pro-life groups try to pass laws that seek to mandate informed consent or require viewing ultrasounds before a woman willfully decides to murder her preborn baby.
While some pregnant mothers, especially those who are already soliciting the help of a crisis pregnancy center, may choose life after seeing an ultrasound image of their babies, there are still plenty of others who choose to murder their babies even after seeing the images.
In other words, abortion is not caused by mere ignorance, but by the selfish desires of fallen men and women who value their own prosperity or convenience more than the very lives of their children.
We indisputably live in a culture of death that increasingly accepts abortion. But the development of this culture has occurred alongside the most rapid development of ultrasound technology.
In past generations, mothers and fathers did not see advanced ultrasounds of their preborn babies, yet those generations were considerably more anti-abortion than their children and grandchildren are today. In our current culture, everyone has seen ultrasounds of their own children or the children of others, but abortion is more accepted and even normalized, despite this increased knowledge about life in the womb.
The answer to legalized abortion is not merely an infusion of more education or knowledge for those who would willfully murder their preborn babies.
The answer to legalized abortion is to make abortion illegal. But pro-life organizations are often hesitant to embrace such a position.
The doctrine of government
Christianity teaches that God has established civil authorities to govern human society (Genesis 9:6). These civil authorities are servants of God commanded to bear the sword (Romans 13:1-7) against those who practice evil (1 Peter 2:14). The government exists under the dominion of Jesus Christ (Revelation 19:16) to uphold the public good and to deter evil conduct through the threat of swift punishment (Ecclesiastes 8:11). The act of murdering a preborn baby qualifies for such penalties (Exodus 21:22-25).
Most pro-life organizations would agree with God that abortion is murder. Many would agree that because preborn babies are made in the image of God, there is no inherent moral difference between murdering a person who has been born and a person who has not yet been born.
But when legislating against abortion, they almost never extend that moral equivalence into a legal equivalence, and they functionally address abortion as less than murder.
Many pro-life groups have even actively subverted efforts to establish equal protection of the laws for preborn babies.
Rather than simply treating abortion as murder, they self-admittedly seek to be “innovative” with the laws they write, and they almost never create effective anti-abortion deterrents as a result.
The vast majority of pro-life bills regulate the circumstances of abortion. They allow for abortion once certain conditions are met, such as murdering a baby provided that he or she receives a proper burial, or murdering a baby before he or she reaches a certain stage of development.
Some even adopt the false moral framework of abortion activists by regulating abortion like health care. They allow abortion after the woman who desires to murder her preborn baby first obtains permission from a doctor, essentially legitimizing and sanitizing abortion through the health care system.
There are many proposals specifically targeted at providers of abortion pills, ignoring the reality that even if the flow of abortion pills is truly halted, many methods of abortions exist beyond those substances and have become increasingly popular in recent years.
These laws largely shift behavior rather than save lives, ensuring that abortions continue through legally sanctioned channels instead of deterring the act of abortion entirely.
The emphasis of these pro-life regulations is not criminalizing abortion as murder. If the pro-life groups that write such legislation acted consistently with their professed beliefs about abortion as murder, they would seek to criminalize all abortion accordingly.
But instead of pursuing such an objective, many pro-life groups have even actively subverted efforts to establish equal protection of the laws for preborn babies.
Christian organizations have repeatedly proposed bills that would simply extend the existing homicide, assault, and wrongful death laws that protect born people in order to protect preborn people. Rather than supporting those bills, leading pro-life groups have issued a national open letter to all lawmakers in the U.S., urging them to oppose such proposals because they could lead to penalties for women who willfully have abortions.
Over the past decade, state and national pro-life organizations have been instrumental in subverting dozens of equal protection bills, largely in conservative states that should otherwise have the power to abolish abortion.
The task of civil authorities, as the Christian worldview affirms, is the punishment of wicked conduct, which preserves innocent life by deterring future wicked conduct and provides justice on behalf of the victims. God clearly expects abortion, which is an act of murder, to be punished by civil authorities.
When pro-life groups advocate for regulating abortion rather than punishing those who willfully murder their preborn babies, they protect the legally sanctioned practice of abortion and keep the sword of justice in the sheath.
These pro-life groups not only enable the murder of preborn babies made in the image of God, but protect conduct that damages the bodies and souls of the perpetrators.
The doctrine of repentance
Christianity teaches that repentance occurs when a sinner sees his or her sin as contrary to the nature and law of God (1 John 3:9), despises those sins (2 Corinthians 7:10), and turns from them to Jesus Christ (Acts 17:30-31). In order to properly confess sins, one must specifically name and acknowledge them before God (Psalm 32:5).
Many pro-life organizations not only oppose laws that could impose penalties on women who willfully have abortions, but actively write blanket legal immunity for women who have abortions into their laws. They insist that women who have abortions are categorically second victims, meaning that they cannot be held legally accountable for their actions.
Some pro-life groups claim that most women are coerced into abortions. Others insist that our culture of death removes all accountability from women by indoctrinating them into believing that their preborn babies are mere clumps of cells.
Such arguments are then used to support laws exempting all women — including those who can be shown in a court of law to have willfully murdered their preborn babies — from any criminal penalties.
But the assertions about widespread coercion are simply not true, as even surveys sponsored by pro-life research groups indicate that only a very small minority of women are truly forced into abortions they do not want.
In the same way, merely choosing to convince oneself of falsehood does not excuse evil actions that follow from those lies and almost never qualifies for the mistake of fact necessary to excuse someone of legal culpability.
Beyond the poor arguments required to support the claim that all women are categorical victims of abortion, and the ways in which they undermine the cultural and political credibility of pro-life groups, these arguments also deprive women who have had abortions of true repentance and, therefore, true forgiveness.
Those with a Christian worldview would invite a woman who has murdered her own preborn baby to confess her sin before God and receive abundant forgiveness through the gospel. But pro-life groups and leaders who believe that all women are second victims of abortion have little to offer such women beyond hollow “sympathy” and therapeutic reassurance.
If a woman is a mere victim who has not committed sin, then she has no need of repentance because she has no specific fault to confess before God.
But most women are willful participants in their own abortions. When pro-life groups insist to all women that they are indeed victims, they rob the very women they claim to love of any hope for true peace and pardon.
The pro-life groups functionally seeking to oppose abortion outside the Christian worldview will continue in their failure to end abortion. They will continue to lose, not only to the detriment of their cause but to the detriment of countless millions of preborn babies.
Christianity alone has the potency to end child sacrifice in a depraved civilization like the U.S. and the broader Western world. If we want to abolish abortion, Christians must never set aside the truth of God, but instead rely on the light of those truths to dispel the darkness of child sacrifice once and for all.
Republicans are letting Democrats lie about affordability
Midterm elections go one of two ways. They are either a validation of the sitting president or a repudiation. Historically, they have almost always been a repudiation.
The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be no different — a firm rebuke to Donald Trump. That’s obviously bad for him. Congress will spend two straight years investigating and likely impeaching him.
If President Trump’s supporters don’t show up, Republican defeat is guaranteed.
But the bigger danger is to America. Democrat control of Congress will jeopardize Republicans’ efforts to restore an economy of opportunity for all. Worse, Democrats will lay the groundwork for recapturing the White House in 2028, at which point they will implement the most anti-opportunity agenda in American history. We’re talking welfare for all, funded by crippling tax hikes and a federal takeover of a once-free economy.
Can Donald Trump turn the midterms around? Only if he, his fellow Republicans, and their allies on the right make immediate changes. If they do, they could stem the losses in November — and maybe even defy the odds to expand their majorities in the House and Senate.
First and foremost: They need to realize that midterms hinge on turnout.
The reason midterms are usually a presidential repudiation is that voters from the other party are more motivated. They feel greater anger and intensity, and they show up. The president’s supporters, meanwhile, usually think they did their job when they elected their man. Why bother showing up again?
If President Trump’s supporters don’t show up, Republican defeat is guaranteed. The most urgent need, therefore, is to invest in a massive get-out-the-vote operation. The GOP needs one the likes of which it has never seen.
But such an effort also needs a message — something that resonates with voters and spurs them to action. That’s the second area where change is required. Because right now, Republicans don’t have any meaningful message at all.
The left certainly does. Democrat politicians, their allies in the media, and their associated army of activists and nonprofits have rallied around a single word: affordability. They’re tricking voters into thinking that all the inflation and financial pain that Joe Biden caused is really the fault of Donald Trump. The call to action writes itself: If voters want to make ends meet, their only hope is to vote the GOP out.
This message works, but only because Republicans are letting it work. They are largely silent in the face of Democrat attacks. Worse, in the president’s case, he is calling affordability a “hoax.” For voters who supported him because of Joe Biden’s inflation, nothing could be worse. It’s tantamount to saying their problems don’t matter.
Republicans must reclaim the economic high ground. They need to relentlessly hammer the point that Joe Biden’s enormous failures will take time to fix. They need to point to the relief they’ve given, especially the tax cuts the president signed in July. Most importantly, they need to lay out a unified agenda that speaks to Americans’ deep concerns, convincing voters that the GOP will, in fact, make life more affordable.
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Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Crafting that agenda is as much the work of policy wonks as it is public relations. Republicans and their allies should be relentlessly message-testing and focus-grouping to discover not only what policies Americans want, but how to sell the policies that Americans need — in health care, housing, and beyond. This can be done without compromising conservative principles. In fact, it is essential if those principles are to have a path to becoming policies.
There’s one more message the GOP needs. It’s not enough to make a positive case for Republicans’ own priorities. They need to remind Americans of the danger posed by Democrats relentlessly.
This isn’t hard. The return of crippling inflation. The collapse of our borders once again. Higher taxes on the middle class. Republicans have a simple case to make: If voters want all of America to look more like crime-ridden, welfare-defrauding, utterly unaffordable big blue cities, they should vote for Democrats.
Republicans needed these messages yesterday. They needed a turnout operation that was already delivering these messages to the base and undecided voters alike. If they and their allies don’t get their act together before the start of the year, the midterm elections will indeed be a repudiation of Donald Trump. Worse, they’ll put America’s future at risk. The clock is ticking.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Do not pass the plow: The danger of declaring a golden age without repentance
I live in Montana. Driving in snow is simply part of life here.
When the storm is heavy and the road is bad, you do not pass the snowplow. You go at its speed. You let it clear the way. Trying to rush past does not make the road safer or the journey faster. It only increases the risk.
Does God wink at sin in order to bless a nation — or does Scripture teach the opposite?
I have watched people try anyway. Confidence surges, patience thins, and effort begins to feel like wisdom. Some get away with it. Some do not. Either way, the plow keeps moving — unhurried and unmoved by urgency.
The rush to declare victory
As we approach a new year, I find myself thinking about that lesson while listening to Christians talk about the future of our country.
Some are already calling 2026 a coming “golden age of America.” Others argue that Christian nationalism offers the corrective path forward — that the nation must reclaim explicitly Christian leadership, laws, and identity. Christians, they say, must take the reins.
Christians should care deeply about their culture. Scripture calls us to be salt and light. Many believers already serve faithfully in the highest offices of the state, and we should encourage and equip more to do so. The question is not whether Christians should serve, but what posture we bring with us when we do.
Scripture is remarkably clear about order. In 2 Chronicles, healing and restoration are promised only after God’s people humble themselves, pray, seek His face, and turn from their ways. The sequence is not optional. Humbling comes before healing.
So why does the language of a coming golden age seem so detached from the language of repentance?
There is no denying that our culture has lost moral traction. Christians are not imagining the collapse. And more than 60 million abortions since 1973 are not a statistic a nation simply absorbs and leaves behind. Scripture never treats the shedding of innocent blood lightly.
Outrage is easy. Obedience is harder.
When sin is not merely tolerated but established as policy, what is the response of the people of God?
Outrage may be understandable. Indignation is certainly warranted. Resistance, in some form, may be necessary. But resistance to what — and by what means?
Scripture tells us plainly that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. We say we believe that. The question is whether we act like it. If the battle is spiritual, why do so many of our responses rely almost entirely on human strength, political leverage, and cultural power?
If we are not fighting flesh and blood, why would we expect victory through our own understanding rather than by seeking God’s? And how can we presume upon His wisdom while bypassing the very repentance Scripture says must come first?
Where is the snowplow in this moment?
Prosperity is often treated as evidence of God’s blessing, but Scripture never makes that equation automatic. Drug cartels are prosperous. Entire industries built on sexual exploitation generate staggering wealth. So the question is not whether something flourishes, but why.
Does prosperity always signal God’s approval — or can it also reflect restraint removed, a people being given over to what they insist on pursuing? If abundance alone proves blessing, how do we account for how easily sin thrives?
Invoking God does not obligate Him
We frequently say, “God bless America,” but what do we mean when we invoke God’s name publicly? In 2013, a sitting U.S. president closed a speech to Planned Parenthood by saying, “God bless Planned Parenthood, and God bless America.”
That raises a serious question for Christians. When a national leader invokes God’s blessing in that way, does the language function merely as personal sentiment, or as representative speech? And more importantly, can those appeals be reconciled biblically? Can the same God who condemns the shedding of innocent blood be invoked to bless both its defenders and the nation at large without contradiction?
Does God wink at sin in order to bless a nation — or does Scripture teach the opposite?
This question is not aimed at unbelievers, who feel no obligation to repent. It is aimed squarely at the church.
Throughout Scripture, when God’s people finally grasped the weight of their sin, the response was not triumphal language or claims of destiny. It was confession. Leaders did not announce renewal. They acknowledged guilt. Only then did rebuilding begin.
So why does so much talk of a coming golden age contain so little talk of repentance?
The passages often cited to support Christian political dominance proclaim Christ’s authority. That authority is not in dispute. What is less often examined is how Christ exercises it. Jesus said His kingdom was not of this world. The early church did not secure influence through force or control, but through obedience, suffering, prayer, and faithful witness.
And through that path, it changed the world.
Conservatism is not holiness. Holiness runs deeper than alignment, platforms, or policy wins. Scripture places the deepest problem of any nation not in its laws, but in the human heart. Legislation may restrain behavior, but it cannot regenerate souls. That work belongs to the gospel.
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Photo by: Philippe Lissac/Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
God is not in a hurry
As a caregiver, I have learned the hard way that effort is not the same as health. When the pressure is high and the outcome uncertain, urgency can feel responsible. Control can masquerade as diligence.
But we do not get credit for effort if it lands us in a ditch. Trying to pass the plow does not create progress. It creates wreckage.
God is not rushed. He moves at His pace, not ours.
Repentance is not the abandonment of influence; it is the only ground on which influence survives.
If God is who He says He is, what wisdom is there in rushing ahead of Him?
Which leaves a final question for the people of God: Are we asking the Lord to bless what we refuse to repent of?
Scripture’s order has not changed. Humility precedes healing. Repentance comes before restoration. And when we declare a golden age without repentance, we should not be surprised if what we have built turns out to be a golden calf.
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