Pro-Life

It is an accepted generality that Christians are "pro-life" on the question of abortion. American Christians lead the political fight against abortion rights for women to save the millions of unborn children killed in the womb every year in the nation. It is typically argued that human life is sacred, whether born or not. And yet these Christians do not apply the same reasoning once the child is out of the womb. Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, recently said

I'm very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion. If I'm a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war.

To be pro-life is a comprehensive outlook, touching on every element of our lives. To be pro-life, one must consider not only the unborn child, but what happens to that child after he or she is born. It means being concerned about poverty. It means being concerned about victims of war.

I still remember the 104th Congress (the one elected in the 1994 elections). One of the measures the Republicans wanted to push through was a change in welfare that would prohibit additional benefits to women who get pregnant while on welfare. Now, think about this. You have a woman struggling to provide for, say, two children who then gets pregnant. Without additional benefits, how will she provide for a third child? Were these supposedly pro-life not driving poor women to consider abortion? How is that being pro-life?

How many Christians rejoiced and praised God in 1991 after the first Gulf War that the death toll was so low, even though perhaps 100,000 Iraqis were killed by our bombs? Why were only American dead counted? To be pro-life is consider the innocent Iraqi victims of that war, and the sequel, as just as important as the American soldiers who died.

Now, is God pro-life? I do not mean in the political sense regarding abortion. I mean in the sense of, does God view life as sacred as so many Christians do? I think the answer, quite frankly, is no. To make such an argument, one has to forget all the instances in the Old Testament where God ordered mass killing, and to be blunt, genocide. What was the last straw between God and King Saul? It was Saul refusing to carry out God's order for genocide against the Amalekites.

² "Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt.
³ 'Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"
...
⁸ He captured Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.
⁹ But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and were not willing to destroy them utterly; but everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed.
¹⁰ Then the word of the LORD came to Samuel, saying,
¹¹ "I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following Me and has not carried out My commands."

If God not only orders genocide but rejects kings who do not carry it out, how can one argue that God views human life as sacred? It doesn't follow. This is a hard truth, but it is the truth of Scripture.

I am not saying God is indifferent to this life. Indeed God cares very much for our life on this earth. He demonstrates this in Jesus' healing of the sick, and His continuing healing today. But God is concerned primarily with our spiritual lives, not our physical lives. We are all too easily consumed by this life. One of the great questions non-believers constantly ask is, "how can a loving God allow such and such to happen?" I think the answer is that God, while concerned and pained by the sufferings of this world, is more focused on the eternal.