Fight the good fight—for our children

In recent years, much ink has been spilled urging Christians to abandon the “culture wars.” Some of this has been a necessary rebuke against a totalizing politics that goes looking to inject conflict into every area of life. There are many political skirmishes unworthy of our time and energy.

Yet, there are some fights worth having, even against the protestations of our cultural elites, who are quick to cast evangelical Christians in the role of culture war aggressor. In California and Maryland, state legislatures have pushed to expand abortion far beyond the “safe, legal, rare” formulation Bill Clinton and other liberals used to employ when defending the taking of innocent lives of unborn children. The laws will allow abortion not only right up until the moment of birth, but the California legislation includes language that allows for termination in “postpartum care.” You read that right. Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is no other way to describe this horror other than infanticide.

Wesley Smith from the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism explains it this way: “Nothing in this bill would limit the license granted to the context of a baby surviving an abortion, which would be horrible enough. Rather, the freedom granted from civil and criminal liability would seem to apply generally. One blue-state bill that would allow a born baby to be neglected to death might be an anomaly. A second that does that—and perhaps could be interpreted to allow infanticide, also—is a pattern. The cultural Left is blazing new grounds of depravity.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration recently put out a statement of support for what it refers to as “quality and visibility for transgender Americans.” This was released in conjunction with the Justice Department’s letter threatening states that don’t fully empower the gender transitioning of children, including puberty blockers and reassignment surgery. This is rather opaque language for state-sanctioned mutilation of young children’s bodies, sometimes without parental permission. This, after a decade of such policies, is causing some European countries to reverse course and has led to a growing number of medical professionals warning about the long-term dangers of medical transitions. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California–San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic told The Week last fall, “We’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Are you paying attention yet?

The radically permissive abortion legislation in Maryland and California and the new transgender push by the Biden White House are nothing but an assault on the sanctity and dignity of human life. The radical left, not content to extinguish the lives of children in the womb, now sanctions their disfigurement post-birth. But remember, dear evangelical, you are the real problem. You are pursuing, after all, a Christian theocracy. It’s not that you care about truth, justice, and the common good. No, what you’re really after, the narrative goes, is power, privilege, dominance, and self-protection.

All such musings are attempts to keep you silent. But we cannot stay silent. God has spoken. Too much is at stake.

Christians should respond to gender confusion with compassion and should continue to invest in compassionate ways to care for pregnant women and their children. God offers something better than the false promises made by false ideologies. But fighting abortion and fighting a transgender revolution that targets vulnerable children is a worthy fight. We should engage this conflict in obedience to the command of Jesus to “love our neighbor as ourselves,” using our voice and our vote in our representative democracy to oppose policies that destroy human flourishing while making arguments on every front. Such a fight may be unpopular. We may get tagged by some as “culture warriors,” but protecting vulnerable children and furthering a humane society is worth the scorn.

And we can engage these issues with courage and civility, resisting the urge to dehumanize those with whom we disagree. We can press God’s timeless and flourishing plan for gender and sexuality into a culture confused by untruth and share the good news of God’s redemptive grace for those who seek a better way. We can live boldly and without fear, speaking truth with humility, knowing that one day, God will renew and restore a broken world. Until then, we should not shy away from shining light into darkness.