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Talk Transcript | Brephos Conference 2019: For such a time as this Rape, incest and backstreet abortion: Handling the hard questions | Nov 2019 Backstreet Abortion ​ [Excerpt from 31:55] Firstly, when it comes to backstreet abortions, the question of the morality of abortion is still central. Some people try and use backstreet abortion as a way of saying it doesn't matter what you think about the morality of abortion. I actually might think abortion is wrong, I am pro-life and I oppose abortion, but I think that all banning it will do is lead to dangerous backstreet abortions, which don't stop abortions, but which lead to women dying. So they try to say that actually the morality of abortion is irrelevant. Well, actually my first point is that the morality of abortion, the ethics of it, is absolutely central. Firstly, because the law plays a powerful expressive role. It expresses what we believe about humans and about human dignity, even if no-one obeys it. A good example is the transatlantic slave trade. Many people initially who were opposed to the abolition of the slave trade said that it didn’t matter whether slavery or the slave trade was wrong. It will still happen, so we need to make sure it happens in the safest way possible. That's completely wrong. We know that whether people do it illegally or not, we need to say in the law that the people who are being trafficked in the slave trade are equal human beings worthy of dignity and respect, and that goes, no matter what the consequences of that law will be. Wilberforce says essentially the same thing. He's responding to the backstreet slave trade argument. And what people said at that time was that abolishing the slave trade led to revolutions in the Caribbean that killed many people. In one case they say the slave trade went on illegally, so 60,000 slaves were being shipped across the Atlantic each year, many of them illegally shipped, even once abolition had been put into law. Illegal traders often used ships which had not being designed for holding slaves at all, cramming them into the hulls of converted warships, and other vessels, which gave the victims even less space than in the days when the British trade was legal and regulated. We can see the parallel very clearly here. In both cases, yes, there will be some illegal activity that goes on, even if it is made illegal, and perhaps you could make the argument that a legal, regulated system is ultimately better, but I think in hindsight we know that that perspective does not work. Actually, banning the slave trade did lead to its abolition eventually, at least in that form at the time, and lead to much better prospects for everyone involved. The other reason the morality is central and why you can't use this backstreet abortion argument is that we know that pro-life laws do work, but we know that when we put in pro-life laws, whether banning abortion or putting limits on it, or putting financial restrictions on it, or putting informed consent laws in, all of these reduce the numbers of abortions. And just as an example of that, the British Medical Journal just a few years ago estimated that just before the 1967 Act there were 10,000 abortions in the UK every year. And, of course, with much more widespread contraception and legal abortion, that figure has multiplied by 20 over the last 50 years. What about the question of mortality from illegal abortions? What about women who will die as a result of illegal abortions? Well essentially one of the short answers to this is that most of these figures were completely invented by admission of pro-choicers. There were very few deaths from illegal abortions in the developed world, even 50 years ago and now there will be almost none or probably even none. Bernard Nathanson was one of the foremost pro-choice doctors in the movement in America in the 1970s and he says, “How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In our organisation we usually emphasised the drama of the individual case, but we spoke about 5,000-10,000 a year. I confess that I knew the figures were totally false. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?” Likewise, Mary Calderone, who was the medical director of Planned Parenthood, which is the main abortion provider in the US, said, “When abortion was still illegal in the US abortion illegally is no longer a dangerous procedure. It is carried out in sanitary conditions, and there are not many deaths from it at all. Abortion, at the end, whether therapeutic or illegal, is in the main no longer dangerous because it's been done well by physicians.” Just to give some statistics on that - in 1973 when abortion was legalised in the UK there were only 19 deaths recorded from illegal abortion and 50 years later we would expect there to be far fewer and I would hope none at all. By contrast, if we look at mortality from legal abortions, I think we can expect significantly more. Even now with legal abortion, some women die directly from legal abortions from complications such as bleeding. But actually, abortion seems according to the studies to contribute to one of the biggest killers of women of childbearing age, which is suicide. I already gave some evidence on this and I'm not going to go through it in detail, but studies suggests that potentially between 1% and 5% of all suicides among women can be attributed to abortion. And actually if you look at the statistics, and work out how many women would be affected therefore, you could make the argument that at least 15 women die from suicide as a result of abortion in the UK every year. And that along probably exceeds the likely mortality rate from illegal abortion if abortion were to be made illegal. So finally, in responding to this, we have to think about the human cost. No option is without cost in human lives. Someone who asks the question about backstreet abortions is trying to come up with a eutopia where they say, “Look, these women are dying if abortions are made illegal. How can you allow that to happen?” Now of course these are tragic cases and we don't want that to happen. But the point is that neither option is completely without cost in human lives. So yes, it is true that some women may die in illegal abortions in the UK, if it were to be made illegal. I think the number would be very few, probably less than five. That is obviously a tragedy, but we have to weigh that against the other tragedy of legal abortion, and the human cost of legal abortion is exponentially higher. Plausibly you would have even more women dying because of the suicide rates associated with abortion, you would have a culture and a law that says at its root, not all humans are equal. And of course, the ultimate thing which all of this comes down to, whichever hard case you're talking about, the human cost from allowing abortion, even if you consider the hard cases, is at least 200,000 dead unborn children in the UK every year. That is something that I don’t think can be outweighed very easily if at all, and that is something that's the pro-choicer has to reckon with when they're thinking about these cases. Podcast available to subscribe on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/aboutabortion Available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7uASkOzgro&t=3s

Talk Transcript | Brephos Conference 2019: For such a time as this Rape, incest and backstreet abortion: Handling the hard questions | Nov 2019 Rape [Excerpt from 23:36] Penultimately we'll come to the most difficult question to speak about, particularly as a man: the question of sexual assault and about abortion in the case of rape. The whole point of communicating on these hard cases is that we have patience and that we have time to speak about them with people in a pastoral context. So please don't take this as a model for your pastoral engagement on this. Firstly, I think we need to say something just about the incidence. How common are these? Different studies suggest different things but I've never seen a study showing more than about 2% of abortions being for the case of rape. In a 2005 study they suggested 1%, but even in that study, sexual assault or rape was the main reason for the abortion in less than 0.5% of the cases. They didn't say exactly what percent of cases, but it was essentially four or fewer women out of nearly 1000 women, so extraordinarily rare that this is the main reason for having an abortion. The more recent data from Florida last year suggests that it’s much less than that, 0.1% to 0.2% of abortions, so an extremely rare case. But I would always counsel, whenever I speak about this, initially start by saying that these are an extraordinarily rare minority of cases, but not leaving it at that. I would always say these cases still matter because these women matter and these children matter. So certainly I would not recommend in any way using the rarity of them to undermine the importance of them because it can make people feel unrecognised. But a way to approach this that I usually start with is, ultimately the fundamental question, “Will abortion help heal a woman who has been through sexual trauma?” Now there are only two options here, and neither of those options eliminates the trauma, neither of them gets rid of the trauma, neither of them wipes away the suffering in an easy way, or a simplistic way. There is no easy or simple way to deal with this kind of trauma, but of those two options, one of them really at best patches over the trauma and pretends it never happened, and often fails in that pretension, whereas the other – I’ll give some evidence to show – can lead to deep healing and victory in surprising ways. There are two ways to answer this question ultimately of whether abortion will help heal. Those are by listening to women, and by looking at the evidence of what women say on a larger scale. So when we listen to women, what do they say about these situations? Firstly, they say it is deeply personal, and actually that we need to listen to women, rather than just making assumptions on their behalf. We need to give these women a voice, and yet these women are usually silenced. So in the Ireland campaign against abortion some survivors of rape were invited to give a pro-life talk all over Ireland, and many people just cancelled their talks and refused to host them, even after initially agreeing, because they were pro-life. So these women's voices are actually often silenced, which is one of the worst things that I think we can do. It goes without saying that many victims of sexual assault don't want to be exploited for the pro-choice cause and certainly not for abortion on demand. Women actually say that possibly even the majority of times they keep the baby in these cases. We would never expect this because most medical counsel in these cases, most family counsel and counsel from friends, is to obviously have an abortion in these cases. But actually repeated studies seem to show that most women continue the pregnancy in such cases, even despite this pressure to abort. And actually studies seem to suggest that abortion is often regretted in these cases, whereas having the baby in these cases, is almost never regretted. There's a book by David Reardon, called ‘Victims and Victors’ which is essentially a group of testimonies of 200 women who were the victims of rape, and who became pregnant, some of whom had abortions, some of whom gave their child up for adoption, some of whom raised the child themselves. Not a single one who continued the pregnancy regretted doing so. But actually I think most women who had abortions in their circumstances regretted it, and this is something that we don't hear. But that book does a great job of actually listening to those women. One of these women is Helene Evans, who says, “Abortion does not help or solve a problem. It only compounds and adds trauma to the already grieving victim. It only takes away the one thing, her child, that can bring joy.” So let's think a little bit about the psychology of these cases. Well, one of the most important things for trauma victims in general is for them to make sense and derive meaning from their traumatic experience, so that they have some story in which to place their experience, to make some sense of why it happened. Now abortion, it seems, can never do this. Abortion can never make sense of what is going on. It can never provide meaning for a woman who has lost her sense of hope and meaning because of the trauma that she’s been through. But actually what these women who have been through this have said themselves, is that having a child can be a profoundly healing and victorious way to find meaning in that deeply painful experience. We know this is extremely important for people’s psychological wellbeing. There’s a psychologist who I don’t think is religious at all – I’ve never seen him write about the pro-life debate - he says actually the main results from the study he looked at, was that for both adults and students, the more redemptive the life story, the more pain was overcome in someone's life through healing and victory, the better a person's overall psychological wellbeing. They had better psychological wellbeing in people who had never really experienced much pain. And of course as Christians we know this in the most profound way of all, because we know that victory through suffering actually came in the deepest way and that it is profound, because that is exactly what Jesus accomplished with us and for us. One final thing I'll say is that mental health evidence in general shows pretty unanimously there is no evidence that abortion helps a woman's mental health. But actually there's significant evidence that abortion is bad for women's mental health. So the most recent major review conducted by a pro-choice psychologist David Ferguson, in 2013, in the top psychiatry journal showed that even when you controlled for all the other factors like prior mental health, or whether the pregnancy was wanted, or socioeconomic status, even when you kept all of these constant, women who had abortions had more anxiety, more drug abuse, more alcohol abuse, and more suicidal thoughts and behaviours than women who continue the pregnancy in those circumstances. And this is borne out by other studies which show higher suicide rates, much higher suicide rates after abortion than after continuing pregnancy and much higher mortality rates. And so actually, to sum all of that up, when people invoke the case of sexual assault to talk about abortion, they're often making huge assumptions on behalf of these women and saying things that these women do not say. So, again, to sum up the case of sexual assault, the question is not, “Will the victim suffer?” because we know that whatever happens, a victim of such a horrendous crime will suffer.. The question is ultimately, “Will abortion help them heal? And what is the unborn?” Those are the two ultimate questions. And, as I suggested, there are two options there, both of which involve an enormous amount of hurt, sacrifice, and difficulty. But one of which seems to try and wipe away the crime and adds to the trauma, and one of which can be a very profound way of healing. So you can sum up by saying that abortion only adds a second trauma to the victim and a second victim to the crime. Podcast available to subscribe on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/aboutabortion Available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7uASkOzgro

Talk Transcript | Brephos Conference 2019: For such a time as this Rape, incest and backstreet abortion: Handling the hard questions | Nov 2019 Life-saving Abortions ​ [Excerpt from 21:52] Life-saving abortions are very rare in the UK. So in emergency situations there's only about one abortion a year to save the life of a woman in emergency circumstances. If you include non-emergency circumstances, it goes up a fair bit, but still to about at most 100. In most of these cases the baby will die if the mother dies, and so the options really are to save one person or not to save any one at all. And for that reason most pro-lifers say that abortion is permitted in these circumstances, because you are saving one life, as opposed to not saving either life. But when you have an abortion in those circumstances, there is no intent to end the life of the child. Rather the ending of the life of the child is an inevitable consequence and it’s a foreseen consequence, but it's not an intended consequence. And so many people will say that this strictly does not count as an abortion, thinking that abortion is only intentional ending of life. And of course, most countries in the world allow abortions in these circumstances. Certainly Ireland did, and despite the hype around Ireland’s law, Northern Ireland, until the recent change also allowed abortion in these circumstances. And again some data that we got from the Department of Health on which kind of life-threatening conditions were involved in these cases - you'll see that some of them are for mental health - only five in 2017. It's unclear exactly how serious this threat to someone's mental health was, but you can see that there is some room for malleable interpretation of the life-saving abortion clause. Podcast available to subscribe on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/aboutabortion Available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7uASkOzgro

Talk Transcript | Brephos Conference 2019: For such a time as this Rape, incest and backstreet abortion: Handling the hard questions | Nov 2019 Disability & Life-limiting Diagnoses [Excerpt from 11.46] Disability So let's look at the cases first, in terms of disability. Abortion, as I said for disability, is legal up til birth, possibly even during birth. There was a bid to outlaw it, I think, back in the 90s in the UK and it didn't go through. And no one denied that it was legal. So as far as we understand this is legal, to abort for disability during birth. There are over 3000 in the UK and rapidly increasing each year. This ends up essentially having the consequence that 80 to 90% of children diagnosed with Downs Syndrome in the womb will be aborted, and that equates to about 700-800 in the UK every year. And actually many other conditions are grounds for abortion up to birth, including things which are surgically correctable, such as cleft palate, including twins. For example, you can choose one of the twins to have their life ended, and so on. And the disability doesn't actually need to be proven. So, there are probably also some children, with no disability or no condition at all, who are aborted under these grounds, up to birth as I said. This kind of discrimination in the law which allows abortion up to birth for children with disabilities but only up to 24 weeks for other children, has been condemned pretty widely by everyone, including some very pro-abortion authorities. So the Disability Rights Commission was set up in the Blair government, and it’s talking about this section of the Abortion Act. This section is offensive to many people. It reinforces negative stereotypes of disability, and there is substantial support for the view that to permit terminations at any point during the pregnancy, on the grounds of risk of disability, while time limits apply to other grounds set out in the Abortion Act, is incompatible with valuing disability and non-disability equally. Likewise, the UN, which is an extremely pro-abortion organisation that tries to push it on the rest of the world which doesn't want abortion, says that at least in one of their communities, one of their subgroups, on the rights of people with disabilities, they say the committee is concerned about perceptions in society that stigmatise persons with disabilities as living a life of less value, and about the termination of pregnancy at any stage on the basis of fetal impairment. The Committee recommends that the state party amends its abortion law accordingly. It says that this law is ultimately discriminatory. And this helps to bear in mind when we're talking about and thinking about abortion in that hard case of disability, or particularly life-limiting disability, that actually it is pretty widely agreed even by various pro-choice authorities, that this sort of distinction in the law is actually very clearly discriminatory and is incompatible with human inequality. So I've just included some statistics here about the numbers of children who are aborted for different reasons, different medical conditions found. Some of these are very severe complex conditions, anencephaly, where the child is born without most of their brain or with their brain extraordinarily changed in a way that usually doesn't allow them to live for a very long time, is an extremely difficult condition to manage, and it does have a very bad prognosis. Most of these children do not live very long. On the other hand, there are many children aborted, as I say, for cleft lip and cleft palate. You can see in the government statistics, about nine children were aborted for those reasons in 2017. Other reasons: Down’s Syndrome, about 700. You can see multiple gestation at some point, which is essentially twinning, and other reasons. So there's a huge variety of reasons given for abortion for disability. And there are statistics which I could send round on the method of abortion for those abortions. Life-limiting Diagnoses Now of course there's a hard question about life-limiting diagnoses. So we could all agree that people who have a genetic condition, perhaps, but who have a reasonably ordinary lifespan to be expected, most of us would say actually we think those people are really valuable and they should be allowed to live. At least everyone in this room I imagine would say that. Many people find it much more difficult to explain and understand these ideas when we're talking about babies who really do not have a long time to live at all, who are either expected to pass away in the womb or shortly after exiting the womb. But one of the first things I think he should say here is that often suggestions that abortion should be allowed in these circumstances are based on profound prejudice about the value and the quality of life of disabled people. So, there have actually been studies on this, perhaps stating the obvious, but Scott Co and a number of his fellow researchers show that 99% of people with Down’s Syndrome are happy with their lives, and they’re glad that they were born. Now, as I say, probably to everyone here this is blindingly obvious. But actually, the way that abortion is talked about leads people to think that people with disabilities really do not enjoy their lives, and would rather not have been born at all. Perhaps more surprisingly there's a condition called ‘locked in syndrome’, with which some of you may be familiar, in which usually due to a stroke, there are people who are unable to move really at all, except their eyes and blink. This is a profoundly disabling condition, and is one when I have tried to imagine having it, I cannot even imagine tolerating a life like that. It’s extraordinarily difficult to understand living in that condition and actually being glad that you're alive. I certainly find it difficult to sympathise with that. And yet when we actually asked people with that condition, there was a study which showed that they rated their quality of life on average, as about a 7, which is the same as an average student. So really, we make deep and huge assumptions about the quality of life that people with disabilities have, and of course about the value of life that people with disabilities have, and the value of that life is obviously always infinite. What is also interesting is if we look at the mental health evidence of the mothers in these circumstances, so often these kinds of cases are framed in the media as extraordinarily distressing cases, and of course they are. Any women who has had a diagnosis of their child in this way where they're told that their child is unlikely to survive for very long at all is going to find it extraordinarily difficult, and rightly so. It's an extremely difficult situation to go through. But what we're usually told in the media is that the obvious thing to do in that case is essentially to cut things short, to not force her to go through extra torment, and simply to end the pregnancy in a way that doesn't prolong that suffering that she is experiencing. But again, if we look at the evidence on this which is never told to women in this harrowing situation, the evidence points to quite a different story. Yes, in all of these cases, it is tragic and it's extraordinarily difficult for the parents. But out of those two extraordinarily difficult alternatives of ending the pregnancy or continuing the pregnancy, it seems that women who continue the pregnancy seem to have much better psychological outcomes. So a study from last year by Wool et al. found that 97.5% of parents in this situation who continued the pregnancy, had no regrets whatsoever, and Wool describes those feelings that they described about the opportunity to love, hold and meet their child, even for a very short time. And there are other studies which show similar things. And this is true for parents, whether they're religious or not. Other studies have shown the importance in cases like this of parents spending time with their child, either alive for a short time, or even with their child who has passed away. They’ve shown the importance of parents spending time with that child for getting long-term psychological outcomes. In terms of other mental health considerations, these are typically wanted pregnancies in the first place, and it was a reluctant, painful decision to end them, which is a risk factor for having psychological poor outcomes after a termination. In 2017 a paper in a top midwifery journal described women's experiences of delivery after abortion in these cases, and described these experiences as overwhelmingly negative. And they also documented the importance of spending time with the baby afterwards. And they quote a number of women saying things like, “No one can understand the torture of having an abortion [in that case]. It was one of the worst things in my life. There was no hope. I thought I would die.” Likewise, NICE, just this year published an evidence review of abortion cases and the impact on the mother, and they said very similar things, that it's almost an entirely overwhelmingly negative response to abortion that women have. Most of the women were not able to work or do anything. “I had a hard time to focus the first three months after termination. Everything felt quite meaningless.” Most women find grief intensifying for the first 3 to 6 weeks and lasting until the due date and so on. And there’s lots of talk of torture, and it being the worst experience that anyone could possibly go through. Now if we look by contrast at women who have the baby in those conditions, yes, it’s obviously an immensely difficult thing to go through for the woman and for the man, and for anyone else in the family. But if we compare the two options, both of which are extremely bad options which no one would want to go through, it seems that the better psychological outcomes are there for people who continue the pregnancy, and have some time to spend with their child and who really cherish that time. And there's actually a direct study by Cope et al. showing a direct comparison between these two groups of people, showing that those who continue the pregnancy have better psychological outcomes. Podcast available to subscribe on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/aboutabortion Available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7uASkOzgro

Talk Transcript | Brephos Conference 2019: For such a time as this Rape, incest and backstreet abortion: Handling the hard questions | Nov 2019 Unwanted Children [Excerpt from 6:29] What if the woman really doesn't want a child? Won’t it be better for the child if they don't have to go through a painful life? ​ Well, the most basic response here is to say, “Who says they have bad lives?” So, the classic scenario is, someone says, “Well, this person is unwanted. How can you justify bringing a child into the world? They’ll have such a horrible life, and they really would prefer that they never had existed.” Well, realistically, there's simply no evidence to support the idea that children born into difficult circumstances, on the whole, resent their lives or regret being born. On the contrary, most children seem to be very glad that they're alive, even when they were born in very difficult circumstances. And that is why of course we don't make the same argument for unwanted born children. We don't say if someone has already been born into poverty and into a difficult family situation, it's better for them not to have lived at all, and so end up taking their lives. We would never use that sort of reasoning for a born child, so human equality suggests that we should not use it for a pre-born child. But actually there's this other argument that comes up, which accuses pro-lifers of being hypocrites saying, “Well, who is going to look after these children then, if the mother can’t? I don’t see Christians or pro-lifers stepping up to look after all these unwanted children. Where are they? They just care about the baby being born and then completely neglecting it.” Again, there's really very little evidence for any of this. The most interesting evidence I think is, if you look at adoption studies and adoption statements, and the information on it, it's actually pretty much impossible or very, very difficult to adopt a newborn baby in the UK, because there are so few of them. There is a long list of people waiting to adopt a newborn baby in the UK, and they're simply not able. So it's not the case that there are many newborns who have no one to look after them. In The Independent they reported it this way; they said, “Demand for babies is so high that this adoption agency doesn't list its name in the yellow pages. Their fear is being swamped with calls. They just can’t handle it. There aren't any more babies available,” said the spokeswoman. And in The Spectator a few years ago it talks a little bit about the waiting times to adopt other sorts of children in different circumstances, and it says, “up to nine years typically to wait to adopt a newborn.” So it simply isn't the case that there are all these newborns waiting to be adopted, and that Christians and pro-lifers are not stepping up to do this. Nor is it true that the pro-life movement doesn't support women in difficult situations, pre-birth or after birth. In fact, the opposite is true, that there's an immense amount offered by pro-lifers, much of which you've already seen today. We have better data from the US, but in the US in 2017 for example, pro-life pregnancy centres of which there are nearly 3000 served almost 2,000,000 people in a year, saving about $160,000,000 at least. There were 400,000 free hours offered by sonographers, there were 70,000 volunteers including nearly 8000 medical professionals. And all of this is pretty much done voluntarily through funding, through giving of people's own time, people's own expertise. Whereas if by contrast you look at abortion providers themselves, and the support that they give to women, ostensibly enabling those women to make a choice, if you look at those abortion providers they get millions and millions of pounds and dollars in funding from governments, from extremely rich billionaires around the world. So for example, Marie Stopes International got £70,000,000 from governments in the UN in 2018. If you ask them what do they do for women who want to keep the baby, and how they support women who have already had a baby, there's very little answer. And if you compare the funding between the pro-life and the abortion providers, and if you compare what they actually do for women after birth, I think it's clear which one really supports women, both before and after birth. Podcast available to subscribe on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/aboutabortion Available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7uASkOzgro

EXPANDED PODCAST VERSION HERE. I was heartened to see that Affinity is taking the initiative to bring people together to "explore what the Covid-19 pandemic taught us about the health of the UK church", because there has been precious little serious reflection on all that has gone down over the last few years. As some friends recently wrote to me (emphasis added): "We are firm in our belief that the recent pandemic was (amongst other things) a compassionate attempt by a merciful God to wake up His church, both by closing our church doors to get our attention, and by highlighting our sinful attitudes (such as our fear, our love of this world, and our lack of discernment). We don’t believe the church was ready before the pandemic, responded rightly when going through it, or has learned its lessons from it since. The church had an opportunity to recognise the pandemic as a message from the Lord and to repent, but instead was determined to carry on and 'build back better'; the Lord may therefore have to bring a mightier shaking upon us, and we are concerned that the church isn’t prepared for this." So I am grateful that Affinity is trying to tackle at least one of these problems and in a sense the primary one, in seeking to reflect and listen and learn. Sadly I am unable to tune in tomorrow as I have an all-day meeting, but I wanted to take this opportunity to collate some of the concerns that I have had and still have about the health of the UK Church as revealed through the Covid-19 years, and to add in one or two new ones. My hope is that these might provoke questions and discussion-points for those who are able to participate tomorrow. Rather than develop any of these into substantial arguments here, in no particular order I will simply flag some of the issues and questions that I believe deserve deeper consideration. In a word I think our problem could be summed like this: We are worldly. The world is in the Church. IDOLATRY We share the same idols as our wider culture: we idolise the State, looking to them to provide at some level our “salvation” and trusting in their inherent goodness (though we say we believe in original sin and total depravity); we idolise the “experts”, particularly scientists, as the high priests of secular humanism; we idolise the NHS and healthcare professionals; we idolise health and safety; we idolise what people think of us and take that as the guide for how we are to “love our neighbour”. We certainly idolised the vaccine. I explore these issues in more detail here, here, and here. I don’t wish to be pedantic or ungenerous, but I do see a glimmer of our being overawed by the “experts” in part of the introduction to Affinity’s event (emphasis added): “Hosted from the offices of the Christian Medical Fellowship in London, leveraging their medical expertise…” There is an assumption within the Church that when it comes to issues like “abortion” or Covid-19, it is the doctors and scientists who are the experts. Of course, they will know more than the rest of us about their specific field and these technical subjects, but that is not to say that they will necessarily have more moral, theological, or ecclesiological clarity. Indeed, I have found anecdotally when speaking in churches that doctors in particular can be the most resistant to a clear pro-life message. Perhaps that is a discussion for another time. FALSEHOOD We allowed these counterfeit authorities to tell us what is good, what is right, what love is, and how we should worship God, over and against what Scripture says. (I explore this here.) We largely believed and followed the mainstream narrative somewhat uncritically. One example: The media, together with the Government, strongly asserted (without any evidence) that the jabs would prevent or significantly reduce transmission, and on the back of that made out that the spread of the virus was thanks to the “unvaccinated”. “Anti-vaxxers” were demonised or at the very least treated with suspicion. We were called selfish. Too many church leaders jumped on board with this: they parroted the mainstream message and slapped a Bible verse on top ("love your neighbour"). It is clear that this directive originated with the world and then was pushed through the Church. This simply is not good enough. We now know for sure that the jabs do not prevent transmission, so the entire premise is found to be false. (The premise that forced care workers out of their jobs, incidentally. Why didn’t we speak up for them? What about love for those neighbours?) But we also knew this at the time, if only we cared to look and think for ourselves – even the manufacturers of the jabs said that they did not know whether it would prevent transmission. So why did we all act as though they did? Instead of making up our own minds based on the facts, we were swept along by the currents of the mainstream narrative. COMPLICITY WITH CHILD SACRIFICE This is all the more concerning when we consider the fact that the jabs used a fetal cell line from a healthy baby girl deliberately killed through “abortion”, and the fact that such organ harvesting continues to this day. What about applying “love your neighbour” to these helpless babies? I suppose, given the Church’s apathy in the face of child sacrifice generally, it is hardly surprising that this wasn’t a question even worth discussing for many. We were also so blinded by fear and propaganda that questioning the goodness of the vaccine had become almost a blasphemy, so for many this had become an unaskable question. SILENCING AND CENSORSHIP Following on from this there was very little room for open discussion – those deemed with dissenting opinions were frequently silenced in their own congregations, seen as trouble-makers. This shut down opportunities for reflection and discernment. It was not uncommon to be smeared as selfish (in line with the mainstream narrative) and for our motives to be called into question. In one post John Stevens labelled those who decided to follow the Bible’s directions for public worship rather than the Government’s guidelines as “petulant teenagers, using our freedom for libertarian self-indulgence rather than exercising wise voluntary self-restraint for the common good”. Nice. INSANITY We showed ourselves to be willing to entertain total insanity. This is not in keeping with the “sound mind” we have been given in Christ. MORE HARM THAN GOOD It is hard to even mention this without immediately getting drawn into a web of detail, but at the very least we need to ask whether the Government’s measures (chiefly jabs and lockdowns) and our almost wholesale encouragement of and cooperation with them did more harm than good. When we look at financial catastrophe, continuing excess (non-Covid) deaths, mental health problems, educational and social retardation amongst young people in particular, widespread isolation, suicides, the huge backlog on the NHS, problems for cancer patients being seen to, one has to admit that whether it was jabs or lockdowns or paying people to do nothing or whatever it was: it has deeply damaged the nation. When you consider this alongside the already-very-low IFR of Covid-19, to me it is clear that overall it has done more harm than good. That has been the net effect. And that is without even going into the question of vaccine harms, or at the very least the relative ineffectiveness of the jabs, and of the lockdowns. Everyone still got the virus, and the jabbed still got ill and passed it on. This isn’t so much to point the finger at the Government but at ourselves: Why did we play along with all this? When so much of this was entirely predictable? We should have been a prophetic voice against the madness. Or, if all that is too much for you - if you believe that the jabs and lockdowns did save considerable numbers of lives and that this could reasonably be weighed up against the monumental costs (including on people's health and physical lives) - what about this more conservative question: If we were willing to go to such great lengths for such a modest benefit margin, why are we so unwilling to do anything against the genocide of a quarter of a million babies every year in the UK? What's really driving us? My points, no doubt, raise more questions than they answer. Good! That is what tomorrow is for. I encourage anyone who can to sign up and participate in the event. I pray that the Lord guides the discussions and brings clarity and, where necessary, repentance. May all hearts and minds be open to what the Spirit is saying.

Podcast Transcript | About Abortion with Dave Brennan Pro-life apologetics in a post-truth world | 25 July 2023 | Episode 57 Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of About Abortion. There are within the pro-life world at least two major camps. We could call them the secular camp and the sacred camp. I don't want to stereotype these, or portray them unfairly, but I think it's fair to say we have at least these two major camps. The one that we might call the secular camp are in fact broadly, mostly Christian by conviction. They are privately and perhaps in other contexts quite publically and unashamedly Christian, but their philosophy is that when it comes to pro-life activism, we keep God out of the picture. We don't mention God, our faith, but we have to argue in a neutral way. We use secular arguments, and that's the way that they proceed. The organisations will try to hide their Christianity, or suggest they are not Christians, and they're purely secular human rights organisations, and that's how they proceed. On the other hand you have two further camps. You've got those who say they're pro-life, but have quite a defeatist approach, who say, "Until the nation becomes Christian again, until everyone's converted, we can't see any social change, because the foundation for pro-life conviction is the Christian faith. So there's nothing we can do except preach the gospel." And sometimes these folks would have quite a narrow conception of what it means to "just preach the gospel", and although they might say they support pro-life work in principle, in reality, there's no hope there for the time being. So all efforts are diverted towards straight evangelism, and it's thought that the nation will become quite naturally pro-life once it becomes Christian again. And I have some sympathy with that view, and I certainly agree with the primacy of evangelism. But that's one of these sub-camps. The other sub-camp would be those who do engage the culture very directly on the issue of abortion and other moral issues. But they argue much more from authority and they certainly don't want to keep God out of the picture. And I want to really begin a conversation now about where we should place ourselves. Is it with one, or the other, somewhere in the middle or somewhere totally different? Because without doubt, wherever we land on this, we have to agree that it's such an important question. Something most of us would agree on is that we are in a culture that's moving further and further away at the moment from the gospel. We are seeking to engage a culture that's post-Christian. Indeed, we could say increasingly anti-Christian. How do we engage in moral debate with a culture that largely does not share the foundational convictions that we do about God and the law of God? How do we do that? So I'm going to play for you a recording of a talk I gave at the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK Teams Conference a few weeks ago. We've got teams all over the United Kingdom out on the streets, engaging members of the public, using big pictures showing the reality of life in the womb, and exposing the inhumanity of what we call "abortion" - the violence done to human beings in the womb. Our teams go out there and use a Socratic questioning method, helping people review their beliefs and assumptions about abortion, and by God's grace we see many minds changed, and we see lives saved. And I think it's fair to say that whilst we wouldn't fall neatly into any of these camps, historically we've had more of a secular approach on the streets with our pictures, science, human rights arguments, and that logical Socratic questioning method. We've sought the common ground and our basic argument has been, "Look, if you believe in human rights, and the unborn child is a human being, which science shows us beyond any doubt, then shouldn't the unborn child also get human rights?" That's been the essence of what we at least lead with, not to the exclusion of evangelism and looking at the foundations, but that's been our predominant approach over the years. At our recent Teams Conference I sought to introduce to people a way in which I believe we now need to go much further and much deeper in our apologetics essentially. Please understand, I'm not seeing this as a closed book. This is very much the beginning of us grappling with How do we engage the culture at this particular moment in time? I want us to begin thinking these things through, and I would welcome feedback and engagement: "Finally, one of the hardest things, and a number of us have found this increasingly... It seems that over the last five years especially, we've seen a bit of a shift. With some people, whereas it was enough to show the reality of the baby and make the case, it was scientific ignorance - "I didn't realise it was that developed!" and so on, for many people that was enough for them to make the jump to being somewhat pro-life. But something we've seen increasingly over the last five years, (definitely in Norwich,) is people able to look at the pictures, able to contemplate full-term abortion and even infanticide, and say, "I'm comfortable with that, because at the end of the day it's just her choice. It's up to me. It's about my rights, my truth, my reality." So how do we engage a culture that's increasingly going that way? Not a truth-centred culture, a self-centred culture, where even the notion of objective truth is being left behind. How do we engage a post-truth culture? Before we dive into that, I want to say by way of caveat, I still really believe that with huge swathes of people, the pictures and the human rights argument are very effective. I think there are at least two reasons why they still work with many. Firstly, although we live in a culture that's increasingly God-less, it does still have this post-Christian, residual law and structures that may not be fully understood or consistently held to, but things like equality and care for the weak etc. This post-Christian hangover is real and it still has an impact at various levels. So although we could say it's fading, it's not gone and can still be used. The other more universal and timeless reason is that every human being does have a conscience. God has given us a conscience. His law is written on our hearts, we're made in the image of God and instincts such as the maternal instinct are very strong. In fact, in Scripture, they're taken as a given even amongst those who are evil. Jesus said, "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children"... (Matt. 7:11) and in Isaiah 49:15 it says, "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast?" Of course it's not universally adhered to, but it's one of the most basic inbuilt instincts in human nature to care for one's own children. It's not flawless. The conscience is not enough to save people or really transform them, but it is enough for people to know deep down what's wrong a lot of the time. So for those two reasons I think the pictures and the human rights arguments continue to work. We shouldn't give up on them. But increasingly we're running into trouble because our assumptions about our own culture are becoming outdated. In particular, our assumption that people will take science and reality seriously. Two examples of this: the whole trans debate. We're seeing people quite happy to ignore biologial reality. People are quite happy to detach themselves from reality and just go with their feelings and desires and make their own reality. And a step futher than that, they will then often perceive truth claims contrary to what they want not as information, but as a personal attack. They will see that as violence, an assault on them, rather than information. That becomes an attack which they will try and repel. I think a great example of this was when we were doing a display in Norwich a few months ago, and we had in this instance just two living pictures and a sign saying, "Follow the science," and it had some information on the moment of fertilisation - that's all. There was no moral language, no imperatives, just some scientific facts. And this woman came along and instantly burst into a rage, and said, "So what you're doing is, you're calling me a murderer." She had several embryos through IVF in a freezer and she was about to discard them. But she made the connection. The facts convicted her, but she perceived that presentation of the facts as a personal attack, so she rejects them. She's come back again and again trying to fight against what we're doing, but all she's really fighting against are the facts, because we haven't said anything. So we're in a culture that's not only ambivalent towards objective truth, but actually often hostile to science and reality. We'll follow the science if it suits, but not if it doesn't. So that's one assumption that's becoming more and more outdated. The other assumption is that people care about human rights. Most people will say they care about human rights, but do they actually? If it were true that people took science and human rights seriously, it really would be as simple as: show the pictures, make the human rights argument, and they're with you. The fact that it doesn't go as easily as that shows that there's much more at play beneath the surface that we need to be thinking about. People seem very comfortable with shifting the goalposts within a conversation. So you show the pictures, make the case, answer their questions, and they shift the goalpost to still defend their position, even though all the reasons they've just given for it have been defeated. Something else is at play that I want to try and explore. I want to give you a quote from Scott Klusendorf's book The Case for Life. Whereas we're talking about the centre of gravity culturally, legislatively, I want to think about what it is idealogically. This is what Scott says quoting J. Gresham Machen: "False ideas are the greatest obstacle to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer, but succeed only in winning a straggler here and there if we permit the collective thought of a nation to be controlled by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion." (Although we could say now, maybe harmful delusion in our culture.) "Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. What is today a matter of speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage it has gone too far to be combatted. The time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mould the thoughts of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity more than a logical absurdity." He says it's true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. He's not saying that it's our clever arguments that have the power to change things. What he is saying is that ideas and ideologies, worldviews, whole networks of thinking, dictate people's particular thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, don't they? So as long as we leave those worldviews untouched, they will continue to dictate what they think about abortion for example. It's not to say that we can't see gains without going there, but unless we hit the ideologies and indeed the idols of our culture, those things will continue to move people to just shift the goalposts, justify what it is they want to have, even when it doesn't make sense. So we need to try and get to the source, the heart of our culture. What's driving this abortion culture? Romans 1:18-32 reads, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is for ever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practise them. 2 Timothy 3:1-5 reads, But mark this: there will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. So, do you see here that there are two things in particular that flow out from a suppression of the truth of God and the worship of the Living God, and the adoption of idols - worshipping created things. One is insanity - foolish thinking and foolish acting. That's where it comes from. Some people take this to the conclusion, which I would call a blinkered or even a defeatist evangelical view, that there's no point doing social reform until the whole country becomes converted and is Christian already. Some people say, "There's no point, we're not going to see any change, we have to make everyone Christian first and then they'll become pro-life." I think that expression is false for at least two reasons. One is, we know non-Christians can become pro-life, because of the conscience, the way God's made them, because of the post-Christian hangover in our culture. We know that non-Christians can be persuaded of the human rights case. We also know that Christians need to be persuaded. It's not as if when you become a Christian, you automatically become pro-life. How many Christians need to see the pictures and hear the case made? So I don't think the answer is to drop social reform, activism, apologetics etc, and simply preach the gospel and hope that abortion will be ended automatically at the end. But the second, more important reason is that I reject the idea that one should avoid issues of morality in evangelism. I don't think it's true that we should tiptoe around the moral issues in order to just do evangelism. I don't think that's how Jesus did evangelism. Jesus often made a beeline for the moral issue, the heart issue, the thorny issue, the one that everyone else might have been tempted to avoid. He spoke to the rich man about money, he spoke to the woman at the well about her sex life, he spoke to the men squabbling over inheritance about greed. Jesus didn't avoid the moral issues. In fact, the moral issues, rightly handled, are the perfect gateway and opportunity for evangelism and sharing the gospel. So, I don't think the answer is to drop the issue of abortion and just preach the gospel. However, if we're going to reach our culture most effectively, and as Scott put it in his quote, "reach more than just the stragglers," I think we do need to hit the root more than what we're currently doing. Alastair Campbell said, "We don't do God." Well, I'm saying, "We need to do God." We need to be prepared to root our idols. We need to proclaim the gospel and engage at a religious and ideological level. Not all the time. It takes wisdom. Even Jesus didn't give it all at once. There's wisdom on when we start and how quickly we proceed. But we need to be prepared at a religious and ideological level because what precipitated 1967 is not a dip in science, a dip in knowledge. That's not what caused 1967. But broadly looking at culture from a height, it was a culture moving away from God, it was the sexual revolution, and child sacrifice is what the gods of our age have demanded. The sexual revolution demanded as its price child sacrifice. That's where it's come from. It's the God of self, expressed especially through sexual 'liberty' as it's called. (It's actually captivity, but thought of as liberty.) That's the source of this, where it's really come from, and I think we need to be prepared to go there. So, this is why on the streets, where you've shown the facts, presented the evidence, made the case, answered all their questions, and they can't disagree with anything you say. And at the end they say, "But I do still think it's her choice." What's going on there? They still recoil, rebound into the default position. I think it's because what you're up against is not intellectual, it's spiritual. These are not intellectually honest or intellectually free people making honest mistakes. These are ideologically committed people, ideologically captive people, who will remain ideologically committed in the face of truth and sound arguments and evidence etc. In the face of what is clearly humane and right, they will cling on. They will re-write reality itself in an instant. They'll move the goalposts at the drop of a hat to maintain their position. Why? Because it's not a position they got to because of intellectual persuasion or the scientific evidence. What does Romans 1 tell us? They've suppressed the truth of God, in particular creation. They've denied that He is Creator. They've worshipped idols and the fruit of worshipping idols results in two things: insanity and depravity. That's where this has come from. They're killing babies because their idols tell them to. Idolatry dictates our thoughts, beliefs and behaviours. It's our sinful desires that fasten us to our idols, and that generate our idols. We make idols in order to justify what we want to do. This is why the evidence and logic alone is not enough. Jesus talked about how you have to bind the strong man up before you can take his stuff. As long as the strong man's not bound up, the strong man will continue to dicate what happens next. If someone's a middle-man in a Maffia gang and the big boss has told them to go and do something, and you bump into them along the way, and you prove logically that it wouldn't be kind, and you even say, "and it wouldn't be good for you either," are they going to listen if they've got Don Corleone back at HQ waiting to see the job done, and if it's not done, they're sleeping with the fishes that night. For as long as they are living in the fear of the big boss, they're just not listening, and it doesn't really matter what you present to them, they're not going to hear. So, until their allegience with that idol is broken, as long as they're in the grip of that idol, it will continue to dictate their thoughts and decisions. And that's why we get that rebound: "Well, I still just think it's her choice." Even though you've disproven every single point they've must made. The idol is dictating. So, when we find that the normal approach doesn't work, what we've uncovered there is a spiritual problem. Even when it's not making sense in the Church, when it should be obvious, being pretty clear in Scripture when life begins, so what's blocking this? It's idolatry in the Church. It's a spiritual issue we're up against. When things aren't making sense, often it's because of idolatry, because what does idolatry breed? Insanity and depravity. One of the greatest lies of our age is the claim of secular humanism to be neutral. It's as if we're the religious ones, the ones bringing our outdated morality, we're the ones who are ideological. Recently I saw a doctor saying, "There'll be those who want to stop this for ideological reasons, but it's important that we progress with our science." Well, science is an ideology, especially if it's killing people to do it. So, it's this great lie that we're the ideological ones, the ones who are morally charged, and secular society at large is netural, doesn't have a morality, and it's gone beyond religion. It's a total lie and it needs to be exposed. There is no neutral when it comes to the killing of babies. The view that it's wrong to kill a baby is no more religious than the view that it's okay to kill a baby. They're both moral, religious, ideological statements. We need to stop allowing secular humanism to get away with being seen as neutral as if it's not an ideology. Biblically we know that we're all worshippers. We're created to worship. If we don't worship the Living God we'll worship something else. We're religious. Secular humanists are religious. A fish cannot describe water because it's just in the water, and it's like that with secular humanism. People don't realise they're caught up in the religion of our day, the worship of self, individualism. This is every bit as religious as anything else. In America all these Americans said of me, "Oh, he's got an accent," and I'm thinking, I think you'll find you're the ones with the accent actually. It's like that with secular humanism. They don't think they're the ones with the religion. Secular humanism is a religion. In part it's a cult of death, a religion that demands child sacrifice. So, we're all worshippers. We all operate with an ultimate love, an ultimate authority which dictates everything else. I think we need to be prepared to expose that for what it is, what it's doing, the effects on people, on babies, on society. We need to show what it promises. The thing about idols is that they never deliver what they promise, and they can't carry out what they threaten. If you don't obey them, they threaten that your life's going to be ruined. They're gods that are no-gods at all. So I think we need to expose these foundations root and branch. We need to expose that this idol demands the blood of innocent babies. This idol flies in the face of reality. This idol pretends to reject truth and yet it becomes its own totally arbitrary truth. So I think we need to be prepared to expose the futility and wickedness of this idol for what it is. I think we need to expose that what our culture really cares about is not following the science, and it's not equality and human rights, though it might claim to. It's really the idolatry of self. What we really care about are our passions. That's what scripture says - lovers of self, of pleasure. That's what's really going on here. I'm not saying we bring that in a condemnatory way, but we help people to see what they're being swept up in and how it's not going to deliever what they think it will. Idolatry always disappoints." 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Podcast Transcript | About Abortion with Dave Brennan The sycamore gap in our thinking | 3 Oct 2023 | Episode 67 Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of About Abortion. As you no doubt have heard, the sycamore tree at Hadrian's Wall was felled overnight recently by no-one-quite-knows-who, but someone has been arrested. And I number myself amongst those who are genuinely sad about this. I'm not just saying that to gain some sort of common ground with my listeners. Genuinely I'm sad. I've been to that spot a couple of times with my family. It's a beautiful scene, or it was a beautiful scene, and now, much less so. But there's something about this whole affair that makes me much sadder than the demise of this tree, and that's what I want to talk with you about today. Now it's important when we have these knee-jerk reactions and these sentimental responses, especially as God's people, Christians, that we bring those reactions and seek to submit them to the Word of God. We want to be looking at everything in the light of Scripture, and just because something makes us sad doesn't mean that it necessarily is sad, or that it's right that we are sad. We mustn't be emotionally driven. So, what I want to do first off, is I want to explore some scriptures with you, and move towards something of a theology of trees. We're going to see what the Bible has to say about plants, where they belong in God's design, in His order. And then out of that, think about how we should be responding, as Christians, to what's just happened. So, let's begin at the beginning: Genesis 1 and 2. We see that the Lord created all things. In the beginning there was nothing, and then God created out of nothing by the power of His word. And we read here, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants, and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good." [Genesis 1:1-12] So, here what we see is, as with all of creation to begin with, God says it is good. That's His judgement on what He has made. So, straightaway, we can say that trees are good, part of God's good creation. But already we're seeing hints here of the way in which trees are good. One of their primary functions is to provide food for animals and for humans. So, right off, we can see that plants, yes, are important, but in a derivative way or incidental way. The good that they provide is chiefly for other living things. Of course, plants are living, but according to Scripture, they're not living in the way that animals are, and certainly not in the same way that humans are. And we see this really reiterated again and again. Later in the chapter God says, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth, and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for good." [Genesis 1:29] And then in chapter 2 we read that the garden was full of trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. So, here's another function, another way in which trees and plants and much of creation are good: they're pleasing to the eye. So, it's right and natural that we should rejoice in the beauty of a sycamore tree, and be sad when that beauty is taken away. So, we can see trees, plants, vegetation, they're good for food and they're good for the beauty that they provide. If you flick ahead now to Psalm 104. As it happens, before I decided to speak on this this morning, this was my reading today. And we see here again, the Lord very actively involved in the growth of plants. It's not as though God just set up creation and then had no further involvement. Yes, He did create things able to reproduce according to their kinds, human beings included. But we also read, when it comes to human beings, (Psalm 139, fantastic example,) how God is intimately involved every time a new humam being is created. He's hands-on involved in that creation. And we see something comparable here from Psalm 104: 14 He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate— bringing forth food from the earth: 15 wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart. 16 The trees of the Lord are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted. 17 There the birds make their nests; the stork has its home in the pine trees. So, again, we see plants being provided as food for the animals and for humans, and also as a place for birds to live. So, vegetation, plants, they're there primarily to serve other living things. So, there's a functionality to the way that plants are good. But the passage I want to focus on most today is in Jonah 4. I hope that you will see how this relates to recent events for us. For those who know the story of Jonah, incredible story. Well worth a read if you've never read it before, only 4 chapters. You can read it in one sitting. In a nutshell, the story is, Jonah is commanded to go to Ninevah, but first off, he refuses. He doesn't want to go there. Why? Because the people of Ninevah were notoriously wicked. They were so evil. They're similar to what we're like today in the way that they treated human beings. The methods they used for torturing and skinning their enemies, and pinning their enemies up in public places as an example to others - it was a society that almost seemed to relish torturing human beings. And when you compare their torture and execution methods with what we're doing to babies in the womb today, especially late-term abortion, well, we use potassium chloride, saline poisoning... The torturous methods are really comparable. And it's because Ninevah was so wicked that Jonah didn't want to go there in the first place. And of course there's the famous account of how he runs off, ends up in a storm, ends up sinking into the sea, but he's rescued by a fish. He prays to the Lord for deliverance, he's spat out onto dry land, and the word comes to him a second time to go to Ninevah. This time he goes, and he marches through the city declaring the Word of the Lord, and from king to beggar the whole nation/city of Ninevah repents. And the king actually issued an edict saying that everyone was to give up their evil ways and their violence. And there was just that hope that God might have compassion and relent, and indeed He did. And that's where we join the story in chapter 4. Jonah is really in a huff because they've been let off, because they've been shown mercy. 5 Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. 6 Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head and to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. 7 But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” 9 But God said to Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” “I do,” he said. "I’m angry enough to die.” 10 But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 But Ninevah has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and many cattle aswell. Should I not be concerned about that great city?" You can see there that the plant has a use. It's good in a certain way. Again, it's primarily good in the way that it serves a purpose for Jonah. It gave him shade. It was a good thing. But there's a bigger point being made here. Jonah has it entirely wrong. Why? He cares more about a plant than he does human beings. If we were to go back to Genesis, whilst we would see that plants are good and have their function, when God made men and women in His own image, that was a special act that distinguished them from all of creation. No longer did He say, "it was good." He said, "it was very good." And throughout Scripture we see a very high premium being placed on human life. In Genesis 9 we read that it's because we're made in God's image that the shedding of innocent blood is forbidden, and God will demand an accounting for every human life that's taken. It doesn't say that about trees anywhere. It doesn't say an account's going to be demanded for every tree felled. But every human life taken: absolutely. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, it talks about how there is no remission for the curse on the land, there's no way to cancel out that, except by the shedding of the guilty's blood - capital punishment in that legal code. Now, of course, we could in another discussion talk about how that relates to what Jesus did on the cross and how that price has been paid. But the point is, that's how seriously the Lord takes the shedding of innocent blood, and that's why it attracts capital punishment in the Old Testament law. So, Jonah's got it all wrong here. He cares more about a plant than he does about human beings, and these are human beings whose eternal souls are at stake, and if he had had his way, and had witheld the gospel as-it-were from them, the message of repentance, their souls would have been at stake. But also all the violence being done, and the innocent blood being shed, that also in a sense would have rested on Jonah's head had he not delivered God's message of judgement and the offer of repentance. We could also look at when Jesus curses the fig-tree in the New Testament. There's no indication that the tree itself had some kind of value whereby that was punishing it as if it was a person, but rather it was a prophetic sign showing what was going to happen in particular to Jerusalem and the Jewish people at that moment who were rejecting the Messiah, not bearing fruit in time. So, I hope we can see here that we can categorise God's creation of living things into three - plants, animals and humans. We can talk about angels in another setting, but in terms of here on earth we've got plants, animals, humans. And humans are effortlessly superior under God's authority in value, because we're made in the image of God. Now, what we're seeing, if we compare this biblical account of this to what's happening right now in response to this sycamore tree in Northumberland, is we see that we've got it entirely the wrong way round. We're a bit like Jonah. We're weeping over the felling of a sycamore tree and yet we remain callous-hearted and insensitive to what's being done to human beings made in God's image. We are humanising non-human things more and more, but we're acknowledging the humanity and value of human beings less and less. And there's this gap that is widening. Let me give you some examples. In the newspapers, on social media, celebrity responses to the sycamore tree, I noticed words such as this: Apparently someone "murdered the tree". People are saying, "rest in peace," to this tree. They're talking about how the tree's irreplaceable, you can't put the tree back up, about how it was a star in a film, as if it was one of the actors, as if it had a personality. Others talked about how the tree kept them company. At one level one can understand these sentiments and the metaphors that may be being employed here, but the reality is, there is an outpouring of grief over one tree being felled in a way that we're not seeing over the hundreds of babies that are being killed every single day. The humanity of human beings is being suppressed, and the non-human objects such as trees are being humanised, and that gap is widening. I even saw a quote from W. H. Auden that said, "A culture is no better than its woods." And a modern-day poet was latching onto that, and saying, "Yes, this is the heart of the nation. How we treat our trees is the measure of our nation." How have we got to this point? Because this is a problem, but it's not the heart of the problem. It's symptomatic. If we turn to Romans 1 we begin to see more of what's going on here. (We could have looked at Matthew 6. You can look at that in your own time. Jesus talks about how God does clothe the flowers of the field and He talks about the sparrows being provided for, but, "How much more will your Heavenly Father feed you, of you of little faith?") The clear point being made there is that human beings are far more precious and meaningful to God than animals or plants. But if we look at Romans 1 we can see what's going on here. We can begin to understand the spiritual backdrop to the insanity that's at play in our society that there's an outpouring of grief over a tree, but not a tear shed for human beings. 18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. 28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips,30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;31 they are senseless, faithless, heartless, truthless.32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. What this passage reveals to us from God's word is that where all of this starts is with the suppressing of the knowledge of God and the worship of created things. That is at the heart of the malaise in our nation today. We have suppressed the knowledge of God, we know that God is there, He's made it clear. We have that sensus divinitatis, that sense of the divine in our hearts, we have a conscience, we're made in God's image, His glory is clear to see in creation. But we suppress the knowledge of God and we worship created things instead. And what pours out of that is insanity and depravity - insanity in our thinking, depravity in our behaviour. And so we can see there's a futile mind that we have all around us, that cannot judge rightly between the value of trees, the value of human beings, that cannot see biological reality (a boy can be a girl, a girl can be a girl). And there's also the depravity, the wicked behaviours. And it's no accident that this passage starts by talking about sexual behaviours. This is so key. So often where a nation begins to go wrong is in sexual activity. Very important. It talks about the exchanging of natural relations for unnatural ones - homosexual activities. And then what happens after that, (and if you tune in next week you'll hear about this) there is this unavoidable connection between sexual sin and violence. As night follows day, the shedding of innocent blood follows sexual sin. And sometimes that follows very closely as in the sacrifice of babies, whether that's Old Testament Molech worship or modern-day worship of the self and sexual licence and what we call abortion being the sacrifice of babies. Very closely related to the sexual revolution, but what we can see here is that it all starts with suppressing God and worshipping created things. It often moves them to sexual sin and onto all sorts of other kinds of wickedness including murder and violence. What is the religion of our day? Well it's becoming increasingly clear that here in the West, one of the great religions of our day is the cult of the climate. It's earth worship, it's worshipping nature. And the other chief idol is the worship of self, the idol of me. I do it my way. It's choice, autonomy. And what's interesting about this is, in a way we're going back to basics. Idolatry today is literally worshipping created things, as in creation, the planet. We're not even making statues of created things or putting different bits of animals together in a statue as various idols have been, including today in Hinduism for example. And likewise, we're not making idols of made-up beings and worshipping them, but we're worshipping ourselves. Not just any particular sin, but sin as a concept, because we're saying, "Whatever I choose it's right, as long as I'm choosing." So we're in a moment in our culture of worshipping creation, the earth, trees, the sky, the sun, and ourselves. And that's what we're seeing at the moment with this sycamore tree. This tree stands for something. And alarm bells should be going off that this has happened and that this is how we're responding to what's happened. People are exalting created things to the level of human beings and then God. And at the same time we're demoting humans made in God's image to be as disposable as a fingernails, or no different from having your appendix out. That's how we're treating unborn children, as if they are just things, inconveniences to be got rid of. We need to pay attention to moments like this. This gap in our thinking, the gap between how we care about a tree and how we care about human beings, it's not just a gap in our thinking. It's a gap in our feeling, in our loving, in our esteeming. It's what we esteem, what we value, what we worship. In a culture that has done away with the knowledge of God we will find that human beings are next on the list of being done away with. And inanimate objects like trees get exalted to the highest place. So let's return to this question of, Are we sad about this and is it right to be sad? Of course, at one level it is right to be sad about the destruction of something beautiful. It's important when we are sad, when we are angry, when we're offended, to ask, "Why is that? What's going on in there?" Often that's a window into what's going on in our hearts. Often it can uncover some idolatry. So, there are good reasons to be sad, even angry, that this has happened. It can make us look forward to the new creation where there aren't going to be vandalism, and where beautiful things will remain in their place. But I think there are also some other reasons why we might be sad and angry. And they're tied up in the issue of idolatry. Very often when we get sad or angry especially, it's because an idol has been touched. So, what's been touched here in our nation? Perhaps in your heart, listening in, when this tree was felled overnight it reminded me of some other things that have been felled overnight. We don't know who felled this tree. There was one report that it was a teenage boy of 16 years and another claim that a man of 60 years old has been arrested. But assuming it was some teenage boy, what if this young man was a prophet? And I only mean that half-jokingly. Judges 6: 25 That same night the Lord said to him, “Take the second bull from your father’s herd, the one seven years old. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. 26 Then build a proper kind of altar to the Lord your God on the top of this height. Using the wood of the Asherah pole that you cut down, offer the second bull as a burnt offering.” 27 So Gideon took ten of his servants and did as the Lord told him. But because he was afraid of his family and the townspeople, he did it at night rather than in the daytime. 28 In the morning when the people of the town got up, there was Baal’s altar, demolished, with the Asherah pole beside it cut down and the second bull sacrificed on the newly built altar! 29 They asked each other, “Who did this?” When they carefully investigated, they were told, “Gideon son of Joash did it.” 30 The people of the town demanded of Joash, “Bring out your son. He must die, because he has broken down Baal’s altar and cut down the Asherah pole beside it.” Gideon tore down an idol overnight and the people went ballistic. He touched a nerve and though what he pulled down was just made of stone, wood, inanimate, useless, the people couldn't handle it and they wanted to kill him. What we've seen in our nation may not be expressed in quite the same way, but there's a lot of anger, and it seems to be that this has really touched a nerve in our nation's heart. And I want to ask, What if this episode is something of a prophetic sign? What is the significance of what's just happened here? Just as Jonah's vine withered, (and the Lord did that), so in our time the Lord has allowed this tree to be felled. Who knows what their motives were? But at a deeper level, what if this is a prophetically significant moment? This tree has been felled, and this tree stands as a symbol for our climate cult, for our worship of nature itself. The tree has been felled, and the question is, Now what? What are we going to do with that? Are we going to be like the men who surrounded Gideon demanding his blood? Or are we going to see that what's been felled here cannot help us, cannot give us salvation any more than a block of stone or a piece of silver? Will we turn our hearts to God in repentance, and will we value people, their physical lives, their eternal souls? Will we care for them more than we care for things like the air, plants, animals? Or will we, like Jonah, sulk? Will we shed tears over this plant, but continue to be calloused with regard to the unborn child in our day? The issue of created things being exalted and human beings made in the image of God being demoted, this is a problem in the Church. Something that struck me on Twitter was the response of various bishops to the sycamore tree, expressing horror at what's happened. And these same bishops have never said a word about the genocide of babies in their nation on their watch. They will be held to account on this by the Living God. They're going to have to give an account for this as we all will. What did we do in the time of the baby genocide? Some of these men and women have seats in the houses of parliament, and they heave an opportunity to speak. To my knowledge, not a single one of them has spoken at all against the genocide in recent history. One example is the Bishop of Norwich, my local bishop. He blocked me on Twitter after I made the point that babies matter more than trees biblically. He's an interesting case in point of how this climate cult really is a cult. It's an idolatry that's taken hold within the established Church. His profile picture has Gaia, this massive globe named after a pagan goddess in the background, which was hosted in a large church building in Norwich. On his profile he describes his birth date in terms of some sort of carbon dating system. So he identifies himself and he traces his moment of birth not according to the Christian calendar or Anno Domini, the year of our Lord, but rather according to some carbon calendar. He also is down as saying recently that net zero targets and climate culture ought to permeate every part of our lives. So he's talking about whole-life discipleship, not to Christ, but to net zero. This is the Bishop of Norwich, and he doesn't stand alone. Even some who call themselves evangelicals are far more concerned about the climate and the environment than they are about living human beings. And this is because of an idolatry that is taking hold and gaining ground by the moment. And there are even others who may not be card-carrying eco-warriors, but we are naïve and we are complacent as to how this is taking hold in the Church. And we don't perceive where this is coming from spiritually, and where it's taking us to spiritually. And we see some superficial similarities between climate concern and what we read in scripture, and we think, That's good enough for me. It's a biblical thing to care about. Let's adopt it wholesale. But it's not like that. Satan is using this ideology amongst many others to draw us away from the word of God and to take us away from the gospel, and to get us to serve other gods. And the mixing of idolatry and the worship of the Living God has never been good enough. There's no way anyone can claim that within the established Church, within the Church at large, there is anything like the amount of concern for the unborn, for the babies being killed daily; nothing like the same level that there is for things like trees and the atmosphere. There's a moment here for us to pay attention. An idol in our nation has been felled and the question is, What are we going to do next? Great Britain, we need to snap out of his idolatry of non-human things, of created things. We need to snap out of the idolatry of the climate. And that goes for people in the Church aswell, and for Church leaders. We need to snap out of it and we need to see how lethal, how toxic this ideology is. As I was looking into people's responses to the sycamore tree felling I came across something quite striking. I was already beginnning to be concerned that this was something of an idolatry that was at play here, and I came across this headline: "A deliberately felled tree and an idol." I thought, Goodness, this is interesting. And it was actually the top eighteen best photos from around the world last Thursday. It contains a picture of the sycamore tree felled, a drone shot from above. But then very interestingly the same day, one of the top photos globally was of a huge clay idol from Hyderabad in India, of the Hindu God Ganesha, the hideous elephant-god that's worshipped in Hinduism. And this Hindu god is worshipped for several days in a row and then apparently this huge 63 foot-tall idol is hoisted by crane and dipped into a lake. This is part of this idol-worship in India. Can this be brushed off as coincidence, or are we prepared to see that there's something here, there's a connection that we're meant to make? Just as in India still to this day in Hinduism, statues of elephant-headed gods are worshipped and there's all this ritual and expense and devotion poured out for a statue - that's one of the many idols within Hinduism. Are we prepared to see that what's going on today in our nation is idolatry - no less than that? Different in form, but it's no less an act of idolatry. And are we willing to be as repulsed by the idolatry of the climate as we are, or should be, by the idolatry of statues made to look like human-elephant hybrids? Again, you're free to dismiss this as coincidence if you like, but it just so happened that I met someone yesterday who was from Hyderabad, and got chatting to him in the park. And then this article pops up this morning - idolatry from Hyderabad in connection with the sycamore tree. I think that the Lord is trying to get my attention on this and perhaps all of us need to pay attention to the idolatry that's gripping our nation. An idol has been felled. Are we willing to turn from our idolatry and come back to the Living God and honour what He honours, love what He loves, hate what He hates, which includes the shedding of innocent blood? Or are we going to go with the tide of popular culture and get no further than outrage that a beautiful tree has been felled and an ever-increasing clamour for devotion to the cult of the climate? Subscribe to podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aboutabortion Watch episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1lOEGjQ7I4 Login and subscribe to be notified of the latest post

Podcast Transcript | About Abortion with Dave Brennan A curse upon the land: how child sacrifice affects us all | Ft. Lynda Rose | 22 Nov 2022 | Episode 24 Dave Brennan: Let me just introduce you for any of our listeners who don't know you already. Lynda heads up Voice for Justice UK, V.F.J.UK, and I highly recommend their newsletters. I don’t know if it's a particular frequency, but I get these newsletters into my inbox. And as someone who doesn't generally like email, I can say I really do appreciate them. They're full of helpful insights into what's going on in the nation, analysis of the spiritual status quo really, of our church and our country. And I really appreciate the sort of historical perspective that's often brought to bear, and really just looking at culture through a biblical lens. I highly recommend that to anyone who doesn't already get those mailings. But Lynda, you've been speaking into the Church and nation on a range of issues for a number of years now. And abortion isn't the only one. But it does seem one of the key issues that you and Voice for Justice focus on. Tell us, why does this feature highly on your agenda of all the things we could be talking about? Lynda Rose: Life: it's fundamental to how we approach everything. Voice for Justice is a Christian organisation, so we're speaking out to protect human rights and protect people from abuse, and protect the Christian faith. And the normalisation and acceptance of abortion goes to the heart of what our faith is, and it has a profound impact on everyone, irrespective of whether they have faith or not. The way that we view life, and view its importance influences how we behave at every level. So it's foundational to the changes that we've seen in society over the last fifty years, and it's also foundational to how we defend Christian faith, how we see Christian faith. Dave Brennan: Thank you. And thanks for mentioning that issue of the impact this has on other issues. I think that's something that is so important for people to see. In and of itself, abortion is an incredibly significant issue, but the ripple effect of abortion in a sense is even more significant - what it does to a culture, what it does to a society, what it does to families, and so on. And that's really what I'd love to speak with you about today. And funnily enough I noticed an article that you just wrote for Christian Today, about the spiritual consequences of abortion. That's very much what I was hoping to speak with you about today, and in particular, the spiritual impact that takes place when a nation embraces abortion as we have done. So let's just do a quick recap for people. We've just passed a very significant threshold in our nation, and a significant anniversary. Could you just update us on what that is, why it's significant? Lynda Rose: It was the 55th anniversary of the passing of the Abortion Act, and it is hugely significant. At the time, when David Steel introduced it, he said he thought at most there'd be maybe three hundred abortions a year, and this would be just for women in extremis, to just stamp out this terrible backstreet abortion. And don't get me wrong, backstreet abortions are bad. But he massively underestimated the effect. And since that time, we've had ten million abortions. And it is the availability, the ease withs which people can get abortion, that has driven and underpinned the whole sexual revolution. Because in the sixties, the big thing was about free love, and this was the important thing. Women, and men too, had never been able to indulge that up to then, because there was always the fear of the consequences. And women would not have sex before marriage because they didn't want to have a baby. Shame, horror! And then suddenly, with the Abortion Act in 1967, there was a way of dealing with this if they had some unintended consequences. They had a right to have sex, just as men had a right to have sex. And this fueled the whole drive towards the loosening of moral values in society. It underpinned the sexual revolution, and that figure of ten million aborted children (and let's not call them foetuses, embryos, or anything else. Let's call them what they are, babies or children) that just shows the fundamental shift in society and how suddenly sex has become a human right for everybody, because they can get rid of unintended consequences. Dave Brennan: And just to back up what you're saying statistically, and this is even acknowledged openly by the abortion providers, by the likes of Ann Furedi, who recently retired as head of BPAS, the main abortion provider, some 98% of abortions are what we might call for social reasons. Abortion is a sort of retroactive contraception. There's no medical indication whatsoever. We're not talking about rape, we're not talking about incest, not talking about life of the mother or foetal abnormality. 98% are quite simply, for one reason or another, the baby who was conceived through consensual sex, was not wanted. And that's what the official statistics bear out for us. So it's no exaggeration to say 98% of these are quite simply unwanted babies. Lynda Rose: They are, and of course we dress it up because we say, “It's the wrong time to have a child.” When is a time the wrong time to have a child? I'm not trying to say that it's easy to make a decision to have an abortion, because it's not. And it scars so many women who have abortions and they know what they're doing, and it's painful. But they've bought into this delusion that there has to be an optimum time to have a baby. With consensual sex, a baby is just showing that the machinery is working the way it ought to be working, and a baby is a gift from God. “It's a reward”, scripture says. And yet suddenly we're saying that's only right if it's the right time to have a baby. And people dress it up and they're hurting themselves because you can say, “We haven't got enough money to have a baby, we’re doing exams at the moment, it’s going to inhibit career prospects,” and all the rest of it, but the knowledge that you’ve actually ended the life of your unborn child is actually horrendous. We're not giving a service to women in perpetuating this myth. And you're right, 98% for social reasons, that is horrendous. Dave Brennan: And we'll go on to talk about some of those ramifications on women, on families, marriages and so on. But before we get there, let's just talk a little bit about this idea of abortion as child sacrifice, and that's the term that you've applied to it. It's a term I've applied to it, but I know there are going to be some people who will say, “Hang on, that's a bit rich, child sacrifice. Isn't this kind of just religious hyperbole, aren't you just trying to slap some biblical jargon on something to make it sound like a bigger deal than it really is?” Because of course, in our culture, we just speak of abortion like it's healthcare. It's just a choice. It's just a private decision between a woman and her doctor. Child sacrifice? Wow, that's a bridge too far. So can you make the case for us. Is abortion child sacrifice, and in particular, in a culture that wouldn't see itself as religious? We’d say we're secular, we're post religion, we're postmodern people. Lynda Rose: Let's explode one of those myths straight off, Dave. We are secular, we don't hold religion? No. Secularism is a belief system. And it's actually an alternative religion because it is hostile to the idea of faith being in any way influential in society, and what we've seen over the last century is an increasing rejection of God. And if you look at the whole evolution of humanism and secularism, there's a real antagonism towards God. God is this judgemental fairy in the sky who's irrelevant. They don't want that because we've come of age, we can control it all. If we only have knowledge, we have the power. So there's this real clash of belief systems. Christianity says we are servants of the living God. And God has given us the rules by which to live, and those rules give us freedom. So obedience gives us freedom and brings us to fulfillment. So there's a real clash of belief systems there. So it's just not true to say secularism is just this nice objective little way of approaching things, it’s just trying to keep a bit of balance here. No, it's not. It's a belief system. But coming back to your point of how we can possibly call abortion child sacrifice. Men and women actually are profoundly religious. Most people will say to you, “I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual and I believe in all sorts of things.” There is a strong impulse for religion and for spirit, and for faith in all of us. And as we have rejected God, and specifically rejected Christ, we've replaced that with another worship. And in society today, the big God is actually self. It's my rights, I can do what I want. Whatever's good, consumerism, I can have what I want. We have made a God of self, and the way that we can continue that worship is actually by getting rid of all the things that get in the way, that hinder it. Children that are not wanted are a part of that. They can be sacrificed in order to allow the continuation of this new worship. So it is not fanciful at all to say that children, the unborn, are being sacrificed on the altar of self. Because that is exactly what's going on. Now the whole idea of sacrifice and why I do tend to call it sacrifice, is when you look back to paganism and what's going on in sacrifice. It's very interesting because sacrifice is very transactional. And from men and women's side, humanities side, it's because they're trying to get some kind of control, some handle on the divine and the divine is often very capricious and behaves quite badly. So offering a sacrifice is a way to appease the divine and to get favour. But it also feeds that divine spirit to which it's being made, so as a sacrifice is made, men and women are trying to get favour, but on the other side of the equation, the demonic spirit that's being sacrificed to is being fed and it's growing. And the ultimate thing, if you go back to pagan understanding, blood sacrifice was incredibly powerful because blood was the life force. So what the men and women are doing in sacrificing blood sacrifice, was giving this life force to the demonic spirit, which was growing more and more powerful. And that is actually a transactional thing that's happening in abortion. We are sacrificing the unborn on the altar of self and it's feeding into this demonic spirit, that's growing stronger and stronger. And that is why we are seeing the growth of evil in our society today. And it goes at every level. It's not just related to sexual relations, but the chaos that we're seeing in society, the breakdown in family, the fragmenting of relationships. So there's so much loneliness in our society today because people can't form relations with each other anymore because there's no idea of commitment. We have these serialised relationships and everything is breaking down. Domestic abuse, violence, the figures are astronomical. And again, it's all coming down to the fact that we don't have that stability anymore. Stability which actually comes from faith. The chaos is a product of this replacement faith that we've put there. Dave Brennan: When you put it like that it's obvious, isn't it? When we worship self, is it any surprise that we end up with an epidemic of loneliness, of marital breakdown? I've even read that amongst students, and you think of students as having a great time, the time of their lives in the prime of their youth and so on. But I can't remember the source of this, but the number one problem mentioned by students was loneliness. You might think they're feeling a bit financially hard up or they got their exams, but it was loneliness. And is that any surprise when we've fed this demonic spirit, this worship of self, that we end up alienating ourselves and breaking down relationships? I think it's really interesting this term you're using: ‘transactional’. There's a spiritual transaction taking place in this act of child sacrifice, and maybe that will help us to begin to grasp something of the spiritual power of what's going on in abortion. A critical line has been crossed, and I think you could say, once you've sacrificed your own children to the God of self, what greater sacrifice is there to make? It doesn't get much more precious than your own child. And that's something that pagan religions seemed to acknowledge, and that was the ultimate sacrifice. Human sacrifice, especially child sacrifice was the pinnacle, because in transactions, the more money you put down, the more you get out of it. But tell us, what do you think it means for that spirit to have been strengthened? And I've heard people speak in terms of this act of child sacrifice welcoming or strengthening a spirit of death or a spirit of murder. What's your understanding of these things? What's going on spiritually in heavenly realms, what's going on spiritually in our nation and in our church, when we not only tolerate this stuff, but we actually feed it and we protect it? Lynda Rose: In giving so much worship to something that is actually hostile to God, and we've put sex in the place of where there ought to be relationship. And that too has skewed everything. But while we keep giving this worship to the demonic, God, I believe, has withdrawn his protection. Again, you see this in scripture. Time and again, God says to the nations, to individuals that sin, that reject him, rebel against him. He says, “I'm going to stand back. I'm going to give you up to the consequences.” And spiritually that is what's happening to us here because as a society, by rejecting God, and God's actually very polite, He doesn't force himself onto people, so He's just standing back. And what we're seeing in society today, I really believe, is just the fruits of our choices, the chaos is coming because we are worshipping the demonic, and we are getting the demonic. And God is just letting that happen because we've chosen it. So in a sense we've written our own judgement by this and that is the spiritual impact of what's happening. But, and there is a big ‘but’ here, because God is sovereign, He is Creator, and this world is His world, and Hem will only allow this to go on so long. I don't believe it's right to say that we are under judgement here, but I think we have written our own judgement, and that unless we do majorly repent now, judgement is really coming in this life and eternally. This is serious stuff. I really believe it is. Dave Brennan: If I'm understanding correctly, your understanding is Romans chapter one, this is what you want, I'll hand you over to it. You want to worship created things? Okay, we'll see how that goes. And we are handed over, which is a terrifying thing. It’s a fearful thing. Lynda Rose: And don't forget, in Romans two, the understanding gets darkened as they're handed over, so men and women can't see the truth from there. And that again is something that's really evident in society today from our wrong choices. People are just more and more blinded to what's actually going to make them happy and healthy and fulfilled. Dave Brennan: So biblically we see, of course, that even the more straightforward, (if I can use that word,) the more straightforward shedding of innocent blood, Cain kills Abel, even that brings a curse, doesn't it? Lynda Rose: Dave, that very explicitly brings a curse. That too is something that throughout the Bible, taking of innocent life is murder and it brings penalties. It brings the death penalty and it always places the perpetrator under a curse. So think about it. We are without cause killing all these unborn children and they are children, and everyone is special to God. Everyone is loved by God. Everyone is known by God. And they're cavalierly just ending their lives. We are putting ourselves under a curse. Now, it doesn't mean to say this is the ultimate sin that cannot be forgiven, because sin can always be forgiven. When we repent and come back to God, there is always healing, because God's love never ends and God does not desire the death of a sinner. He wants to reach out and to forgive people. That is what he wants, people to turn back to him. But without turning back, we are placing ourselves under a curse. Those who have an abortion are putting themselves under a shadow that they cannot get rid of by themselves. The men involved are also coming under that curse. The medical practitioners who do it are placing themselves under that curse. Our government in sanctioning it, is putting itself under a curse. Because it is all rebellion against God. And it's the ultimate rebellion because it's the destruction of a life that He has made, and it is so infinitely precious to him. Because God knows us from even before conception the Bible says. Jeremiah 1: 5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” And over again in the Bible, we find the same idea. Babies aren't just special. God knows us before that moment of conception. He has plans for us from before that conception. Dave Brennan: I want to just consider the impact that this has on various different sorts of groups of people. We've touched on it already, but I'd love to just dig a bit deeper on these things. We are looking here at the curse that the shedding of innocent blood brings, and as you said, it darkens our thinking. It means we lose God's protection. If we don't repent we face serious judgement. But can you just help us think through, what does this do? For example, obviously abortion itself is an attack on children, that's straightforward. It takes the life of an innocent child. But beyond that what do you think that's doing to our perception of children more broadly, and our concept of the family, and how we treat children generally? How has it changed our attitude towards children and indeed to other vulnerable people groups? Lynda Rose: I think that's a really good question, Dave, because it's actually saying that children are only special when they're wanted. So it's actually drawing this distinction between the wanted and the unwanted and that actually makes us view people as objects who are only really of value when they're being useful, because it's when they're useful that I want them. So it's actually bringing a terrible attitude into society, it's this utilitarian attitude, that people are only of value while they're actually contributing something and everything else, well, what's it matter? We can get rid of them. It doesn't just affect how we look at children, but at end-of-life too, because, suddenly people are good and great while they're contributing to society. But if they're not contributing to society, they're a bit of a drain. Do we really want them? Couldn't we use our resources somewhere else? It weakens how we look at others, and actually the Bible says that we should actually respect every other human being, and more than that, we should love them. We should always treat them with honour and with compassion because they are made in the image of God, and God loves them. That applies to us too. We are made in the image of God and God loves us. We are special. So it's breeding this terrible utilitarian approach that is actually so destructive of humanity. Dave Brennan: It's interesting that in scripture, and in Jesus’ own life and ministry, there's such an emphasis on those at the margins, be it the young, the old, the disabled, the foreigner, the widow. It’s so interesting, such a disproportionate emphasis on those on the fringes, because it's there that our true colours are shown. A society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. That's the measure of it. It's easy to love those who serve your purposes. But what about those who are costly? What are those who aren't like you? It's a real litmus test, isn't it? Lynda Rose: It is a litmus test, but it's also, spiritually, God is engaging with us from the word go.He knows our destiny and God has plans for all of our lives. And the meanest beggar on the street, God is working with them and doing something in their lives. We don't know what that is this side of eternity, but it's something precious. And that goes on for all of our lives, in every situation of life, God is at work, doing something. And we should allow him to get on with it because he know’s it a bit better than we do. Dave Brennan: Yes. It's not our authority, is it? It's not our place to say who gets to live and who has to die. At so many levels, it's just not our call. We don't have the right, we don't have the wisdom. And another people group, what does this do to women? Now, of course, the great promise is that this is empowering. You mentioned earlier that you can now behave as the men have always been able to behave. This is freedom for you. You don't have to suffer the cruel oppression of biological cause and effect. But what has this actually done to women, and to how our society perceives women, and femininity, and perhaps motherhood? Lynda Rose: I think it's had an effect at so many different levels, Dave. It's hard to know where to begin. I think this is a very basic thing because sexual relations have become the norm. It's almost that having sex is like having a cup of coffee was years ago at the end of an evening. And that actually has placed women, I think, under an enormous burden because they don't always want sex. What women want, and I venture to say, I think what men want actually, is relationship. All of us actually want meaning and we want love. We want commitment. We want to commit to somebody, we want somebody else to commit to us. But this current approach is forget that, it's just sex. And I think there are so many, especially some young girls, and my heart goes out to so many teenagers these days, where the expectation is because they've had all the RSC lessons, sex is for when you feel ready for it. And they might be thinking, I don’t know when I feel ready for it, but everyone around them is saying, “You're ready for it.” And they're being forced into having sex and that is terrible. It's terrible for their self-esteem. It's terrible for how they relate to others and it massively impacts how they are going to form relationships, and are they ever going to find love? And a lot of people, both men and women now, do not find love because it is being replaced by this casual sex all the time. So it's massively impacting women. And I think more and more too that women are behaving as men, and I guess some men are behaving as women. But it's destroying that unique bit of our nature, our God-given nature, which is beautiful. And women should not be forced into trying to become men in society, whether it’s in attitudes to sex, in jobs, in relationships, whatever. Women should be allowed to be women, and to flourish and flower as God has made them. Just as men need to be allowed to be men, to flourish and flower as God has made them. But we've got this real unhealthy mishmash at the moment. So it's having a profound effect, and this comes back again to the worship. Because we're worshipping something that is at heart destroying us. Dave Brennan: I was reminded as you were speaking there, people might have heard this in the States, soon after Roe v Wade was overturned, companies like Amazon coming out saying, “We'll pay for you to have your abortion if you work for us”. So employees get their abortion sponsored by Amazon. Now the interesting thing is, their actual maternity provision is still appalling. If you want maternity leave to actually have a baby, Amazon's not interested. But they'll happily spare a few hundred dollars and miss you for a day to get your abortion sorted out. Now, which of those two options is really more honouring of women and which do women deep down really want? Or certainly, which is more beneficial for them? It's actually appalling that a company's message to its female employees is, if you get pregnant, we'll pay for you to have the abortion, but we're not interested in giving you proper maternity leave. And I was also reminded of a friend of mine who began work, I think it was a legal firm, after university. But early on the boss made it very clear to the female employees who are just coming in, these graduates, you're not going to get pregnant, not at this stage in your career, not interested in having any any pregnant graduate employees. So again, the message is, if you do get pregnant, your options are lose your job or have an abortion. Is that really the best we can offer to women? Is it really benefitting women? Lynda Rose: I don't think it's benefitting women or men, actually Dave, and I think what I'd really like to see in society is a sea change in how we approach the whole issue of abortion. We ought to be strengthening and building up the family within society. We ought to be strengthening men and women to enter into their roles as men and women, father, mother. We ought to be helping them. I think we just need a real sea change there. Dave Brennan: And it has been a real attack on the family, of course, hasn't it? It's divorced sex from marriage. It's divorced babies from sex. It's really fragmented what God designed to be one thing for good reason. It's not to be a killjoy, but because He knows best. The maker knows how what He's made functions best. But we've isolated those different things. You can have the sex over here. Don't worry about the babies. Don't worry about marriage. We think we can access them all as and when. But it's surely contributed to this colossal breakdown in the family that we've seen over the last few decades. It's happened hand in hand. Over the last 60 years, we've seen divorce rates go up. We've seen number of children growing up in single parent families go up. And is it a coincidence that it's been over the same time period when it's been legal to kill your own children? Lynda Rose: I think it's very much tied, Dave. I think you're absolutely spot on there. But I think it's interesting too that we talk about religion and the family being foundational, but actually quite apart from religion, the family has been the main building block of society going back to the dawn of history. You look at the tribes, you look at the family units within that, it was those units that have always given stability and strength. It was a place of protection for those in the family, and it made them strong. It gave order to the little social group that they were in, and that's what's been so attacked. With abortion, we destroyed any idea of you needing to be committed to a family, and that smashed in one fell swoop this basic foundation to our society. And I'm not just talking religion here, I'm talking of our society. It has done irreparable damage. Dave Brennan: And the final group I wanted to ask you to comment on, is men. What's this done to men? We're conditioned to believe this is just a women's issue. It's got nothing to do with men. But actually even that's an interesting little phrase. What has this done to men, the way men perceive themselves, what we think of masculinity, what it means to be a man? And what sort of behaviors has it encouraged? Lynda Rose: That's such an interesting one because at one level you can say men must think it's their birthday because they can have now sex without consequence whenever they want. Wonderful. But of course, it's like eating several bars of chocolate in one go, I imagine. You end up feeling very sick and you don't want to see chocolate again. And it is destroying for them the pattern of their lives. And a lot of men have just lost their role because they're supposed to be the breadwinners, the strength within a family unit, the father figure being looked up to. And suddenly that's all gone. And I think they really are at a loss. And women have taken on a lot of that role themselves. They've become the breadwinners and the head of the family. So again, men suddenly, what's my role, what's my importance here? And no wonder we're just seeing so much confusion. All this gender questioning, I'm not surprised, because certainly people just don't know who they're supposed to be anymore. They've had too much of what they thought they wanted, and actually it's turned out to be extremely bad, and they can't get back to what's right. And it has led to so much confusion and so much alienation, and just loss. So it's really bad news. At the very least, we should be urgently, as a society, looking at what we have allowed and saying, “This is too much, it's too far.” We should urgently be trying to limit abortion, because it is damaging. Dave Brennan: We've looked there at something of the problem. We've seen abortion itself in isolation is a terrible problem, grievous, and just in terms of scale, it's astronomical. Ten million. That's more than the holocaust. Generally, we think of the Holocaust as six million, that's the traditional figure. There will be debates over that, but ten million is such a number. That's more than the current population of London, isn't it? It's a huge, huge number. But then there's also all the ramifications, the impact on the way we see ourselves, the way we relate. The whole of our society has been deeply wounded by this, spiritually, morally. What's the remedy? What hope can you see for addressing a colossal issue such as this child sacrifice in our nation? Lynda Rose: I think that's a very interesting question, Dave. I think left to ourselves, most men and women, even though it is such a mess, they still just continue. You see it already with arguments in the media and everywhere else. They just want more. But it's very interesting with world events over the last few years, and we are facing a situation of crisis. We've got Covid, it's still there. We've got financial collapse coming on as a result of Covid and the war in Ukraine. We've got the possibility of war because, heaven help us, this might spread very easily from Ukraine at any minute. We've got at every level family breaking down more and more, more and more violence on our streets. It’s getting bad, and I strongly suspect it's going to get a lot worse unless and until people come back to God. And I’m firmly of the belief that God could settle all this in a heartbeat. This is not beyond Him. He could very easily come and sort all this chaos. But He won't while we are still hellbent, literally, on going our own way. We need to come back to Him and need to say, “Sorry and help us please!” And that honestly is the only answer to where we are now. We need urgently, as a society and as individuals, to say, “Abortion has gone too far.We must stop it now. We are killing off the human race and we are harming ourselves in the process.”But we need, at a more fundamental level, to come back into relationship with God and to say, “God, I'm just sorry that I have got it so badly wrong and gone after what I wanted all the time. We have rebelled. Lord, just come in, forgive us and sort us.” And if we do that, He will help. So there is no easy answer here Dave, and I know a lot of people who are not Christian will say,“I'm not going to do that, thank you very much.” I think they are going to face a situation where more and more people are going to be confronted with some spiritual realities, and I hope their eyes will be open to God, and they’ll come back to Him. Dave Brennan: It's my firm belief that the Lord, in His mercy, is allowing these things to happen at the moment in order to wake us up. These should be wake-up calls, and yet so many of us are still sleeping, still deluding ourselves, oh, we can manage this, we just need whatever it might be. We just need to change our economic approach or we'll sort out our education or whatever it might be. We continue to believe the myth that we can sort it, but if we would have the sense and the humility to admit what's obvious. This isn't working. We've gone our own way. It's not working. I was reminded of some scripture as you were speaking. This is in Isaiah chapter 30: 15 “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. 16 You said, ‘No, we will flee on horses.’ Therefore you will flee! You said, ‘We will ride off on swift horses.’ Therefore your pursuers will be swift! Then it goes on to say: 18 Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him! And it's easy to be overwhelmed, isn't it? We look at this great problem and how deep we are into this. And yet there's a sense in which the way back to God is simple and it is quick because of the cross. Because Jesus actually has made a way for us to come back to God, which doesn't involve us having to rebuild everything we destroy, because we can't. We can't make everything right. We can't turn back the clock. And yet in Jesus, the way back to God is made clear and indeed can happen in an instant. Lynda, thank you so much for spending time with us today and sharing your insights. Is there anything you'd like to share by way of parting comment, or can you tell us how people can find you guys and follow up in the fantastic work you are doing? Lynda Rose: The only thing to add to what you've just said, Dave, about the Isaiah passage that God promises us that when we turn to him, He will never leave us nor forsake us. And He says, “Be strong and very courageous. Do not be terrified, do not be dismayed for I am with you. I will never leave you nor forsake you.” (Deuteronomy 31:6) And that is something that I think we all need to cling on to because I think we are living in frightening times, and nobody knows what's going to happen. But our God is a God who we can trust 100%. So I would just want to say to everybody, be strong and be hopeful, and trust Him. And be faithful. And we will come through, but we do need to turn back to him most definitely. And people can find us just by going on the website to www.vfjuk.org and they will find our website and various things there, and how to contact us if they would like to. Dave Brennan: Thank you Lynda. Would you be happy just to close off in prayer for us? Could you just lift this all in prayer and we'll finish there? Thank you. Lynda Rose: Thank you, Dave. Father, we just thank you that you are a God who loves us. You are a God who sees, and thank you that you love us so much that you will not just abandon us to evil and to the consequences of the choices that we have made Lord, that destroy, that brings so much harm. Lord, we want to say that we are sorry for the ways that we rebel, the ways we've knowingly rebelled, and for the ways that Lord, we've just unknowingly and heedlessly so often gone against you and gone against your Word for us. Lord, we pray now that you will help us. We pray that you will open the eyes, ears, and minds and hearts of men and women, that they may see the evil that we have embraced, and celebrated, and promoted in this society. And that Lord we will have the grace to turn back to you and to seek your forgiveness and your protection. So, Lord, please do be with us. And I ask your blessing, Lord, for Dave and for Brephos and CBRUK and all the work that they are doing. Lord just empower them. And may your voice be heard in this society. In Jesus' name, amen. Subscribe to podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aboutabortion Watch episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6WgOC91Ww Login and subscribe to be notified of the latest post

Podcast counterpart | About Abortion with Dave Brennan No, John Stevens: we actually have too many | 24 Oct 2023 | Episode 70 A military friend recently told me that morale is the critical element in the success of an army. (Tolstoy makes the same point repeatedly in War and Peace.) Sooner have your comrades tie your shoelaces together, burn your toast, or even make a material error on the battlefield, than sap you of that all-important resource, morale. Biblically, we see this principle addressed in Judges 7. From one perspective, Gideon had "too many men" because it was important that Israel not be tempted to boast that it was "her own strength" that saved her, the glory had to go to God - so they had to be small in number. (Note: victory is a not a numbers game in the way that we are naturally inclined to think that it is.) But from another perspective, he had too many men because more than half of them were afraid. You can do without comrades who are going to spread fear and sap morale just before a battle. So he sent home twenty-two thousand of them. We shouldn't miss the fact that the fearful are sent home before the inept are (those who drank with their faces in the water). Morale is paramount. But we also see this addressed in Numbers 13/14 and it is here that I want to focus most of all. In this famous account of the twelve men who went to spy on Canaan, ten returned with a "bad report" and only two with a "good" - though they had all seen the same things (the fruit and the opposition). Two things are noteworthy for our purposes here. First, the "we can't" attitude had an immediate and observable impact on "all the people of the community". They started grumbling and complaining and wished they had died in Egypt or in the desert. Faithlessness is contagious. In the retelling of the story in Deuteronomy 1 we read that these men "made [their brothers] lose heart". So pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Second, the "we can't" attitude is judged by God in moral terms. It is "rebellion"; they treated the LORD "with contempt". It dishonours God, since the "we can't" is perhaps more accurately rendered "God can't". It is theologically and spiritually a weighty thing to declare a "bad report". Morale is a moral issue. I have said elsewhere that cowardice has become one of those "acceptable sins" in 21C British evangelicalism. It is said with almost a laugh sometimes, "Oh I don't have the courage to do what you do!" And yet we read in Revelation 21:8 that along with "the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars", it is "the cowardly" who will find their home "in the fiery lake of burning sulphur". Indeed, the cowardly top the list. Cowardice, also, is a moral issue. Do we believe that? It would probably be inaccurate (even, unfair) to equate a loss of belief/morale with cowardice, but there is a connection. Perhaps we could say that a lack of morale gives birth to cowardice in the same way that faith and hope give birth to courage. This is an example of why Paul in particular repeatedly comes back to faith, hope, and love as root virtues or super-virtues: from them spring other virtues. So what we say can or can't happen is an extremely consequential thing. My reason for taking to the keyboard this morning is that I caught sight of some comments from an influential evangelical leader that are, unless I am much mistaken, precisely the opposite of what is true and precisely the opposite of what is needed with regard to the spiritual, moral, cultural war in which we find ourselves - in a sense made all the more dangerous by the fact that they are under the (no doubt sincerely) promising heading, "Contemporary Culture: To Navigate The Present We Need To Understand Why Evangelicals Failed To Transform The Nation In The Recent Past". For those who don't know, John Stevens is the national director of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, a grouping of over 600 congregations in the UK. As you will see if you read it, Stevens' central explanation as to why we failed in the '60s, as "liberal" and "progressive" legislation began to take hold, is this: "Christians didn’t have the numbers." Of course, if we didn't have the numbers in the '60s and '70s, we definitely don't have them now. The logic isn't lost on Stevens: "we are even less likely to succeed today," he says. "We can make progress on issues where the liberal progressive consensus is already in line with Christian values (eg human trafficking) but not where it is opposed to Christian convictions (eg human sexuality)." In a nutshell, we can't really do anything to the culture that wouldn't happen anyway without us, because we are just too small to have any transformative impact - so we may as well give up. Stevens sees this as the only way forward: "Transformation will only come when there is significant church growth." So, nothing any time soon; but he's "optimistic for the future" because he thinks the evangelical church is growing and will continue to grow, whilst liberals die off. "The refining of the church to become more evangelical will also have the consequence that in coming years church leaders will be unequivocal in supporting Christian values." But here is the fallacy. How will the proliferation of churches or evangelicals who don't care or speak about, for example, the baby genocide in our land, ever eventually lead to the overturning of the baby genocide? The problem is not our quantity, it's our quality. Stevens appears to assume that those increased numbers who identify as "evangelical" will be "unequivocal in supporting Christian values". But right now, this clearly is not the case. As Stevens himself has conceded, some evangelicals will think it's ok to kill a baby if he or she is believed to be terminally ill, or "so severely disabled as not to be able to be able to enjoy a meaningful and conscious life". Sounds a lot like the Nazi "mercy killing" T4 Programme to me. Others will entertain killing a baby for the (sexual) crime of his/her father. Is this Christian thinking? Instead of seeing these as representing a crisis of moral and theological confusion, even heresy, within the wing of the Church that considers itself the most biblically faithful, Stevens refers to these merely as "nuances" to be wrestled with. Would we call it "nuance" if evangelicals were broadly against racism, but just not in the case of racism against Chinese or Japanese people? More than 130 attendees of the Keswick Convention 2023 (about as evangelical as it gets) were asked, "Aside from situations where the life of the mother is at risk, do you think abortion is ever justified?" Three in every ten said, "Yes." The change that is needed is first and foremost in the mind and the heart of the evangelical Church. Our number is not the problem. Indeed, one could make the Gideonite assessment and say that we are still too many!! Thinking back to the '60s, we can say that then, too, the problem was not the numbers. The problem was that, as Harry Blamires wrote in 1963, there was "no Christian mind", by which he meant that there was no substantial, sustained, shared stream of thought and discussion whereby Christians brought a biblical worldview to bear on the issues of the day, even internally, and much less out in the public square. The diabolical 1965 Abortion Act, composed by the Church of England, is the perfect example of this. Claiming to bring a Christian/Church response to the question of "abortion", it hardly consulted the Bible at all but instead approached it in an entirely secular way, with a sprinkling of Christian jargon, and came out actively promoting child sacrifice. Can you believe it? Lest we see this as a Church of England problem only, the "evangelicals" were hardly any better. The first "evangelical" book on "abortion" to come out in the '60s/'70s also promoted child sacrifice. You see, the numbers were not the problem. In fact, we can thank God that we weren't any more numerous! Our net effect was most certainly negative; we can only assume that if there were more of us, it would have come out even worse! Stevens' piece does make a nod to the problem of churchmen in high places lacking moral clarity in the '60s, but this is not given nearly enough attention. It is the very heart of the problem, that Christians arrived in the '60s not knowing how to think Christianly about almost anything. We still have the same problem today and it grieves me to say that we are not facing up to it. I have begged the FIEC repeatedly to adopt something like the Life Affirmation to address the moral and theological chaos (not "nuance") of many evangelicals believing that child sacrifice is sometimes ok, but they have refused, remarking that as a "unity" movement it is not their business to draw more dividing lines. The numerical growth of such evangelicalism will never lead to cultural transformation. What is needed is repentance and reformation, not multiplication. We already have enough evangelicals; the problem is that we're not evangelical enough. What we need is not more evangelicals, but to become more evangelical. We desperately need to get our own house in order - in our thinking, in our affections - and then, as salt and light, we will start to see the transformation of society as we preach the gospel and live out truly Christian public lives. We don't need to wait until we're more numerous to make this necessary change; we can do it now. (Six in ten of the Keswick interviewees hadn't heard "abortion" even mentioned in church over the last five years. Is it any surprise that our public witness is so feeble?) From the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. If we, the people of God, allow our hearts to be conformed to God's on this all-important issue of child sacrifice, we can expect the overflow to follow and bring truth, righteousness, justice, and grace to Church and nation. If Stevens' view, that this is fundamentally a numbers game, were correct, pessimism about what could be achieved anytime soon would be well-founded. But if, as we learn from Numbers 13/14 and Judges 7, God is looking for faithfulness rather than great size or physical strength, we can realise that we don't need to become more numerous before we can repent and recapture that clarity, conviction, and courage that can and will make all the difference. For something of why I'm optimistic about the change we can see in our culture soon, if only we'll do the necessary things (which we're currently not), read this. In the past Stevens has said that I see a sharper antithesis between our views than he does. I am not claiming that he is not "pro-life". Nor is he entirely "quietist". He is quite public, even forthright, with his personal convictions on this and other matters from time to time, for which I thank God. But if you are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a fellow soldier on the battlefield, and he turns to you and says, "I don't think we can win this," but you think you can and you must, in a sense the antithesis couldn't be sharper. Remember: morale is everything. Subscribe to podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aboutabortion Watch episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlLze4bVyWo Login and subscribe to be notified of the latest post

Top Ten Pro-life Passages #10 // Luke 18 People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called the children to him and said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ [Luke 18:15–17 NIV] The Gospels tell us a great deal about Jesus’ attitude to infants, which diverged sharply from Greco-Roman culture. As a young child Jesus himself was nearly killed. Luke does not relate this episode, but in Matthew’s Gospel the child Jesus is soon threatened as the puppet king Herod seeks to destroy him, slaughtering all of Bethlehem’s male children up to the age of two (Matthew 2:13–23). This horrific event has strong foreshadowing in Pharaoh’s attack on male infants in Exodus 1 and Matthew also connects it via Jeremiah 31:15 to the exile, when Israel’s children were taken away from their homeland. It is striking how Jesus even at this stage of life enters into solidarity with the vulnerable and persecuted. His family’s subsequent refugee status confirms this. The Gospels give us a snapshot of the turbulent and harsh realities of first century Roman-occupied Palestine and a reminder that in the New Testament the Greco-Roman world impacts life for God’s people, along with the beliefs and customs of Judaism. The Greeks and Romans did not share the Jewish reverence for life, including life in the womb, which we have seen is so characteristic of the Old Testament.[1] Both Plato and Aristotle permitted abortion, arguing for its use in terms of limiting family size and thus population growth – the individual, and certainly the unborn child, being of lesser value compared to the requirements of the state. It is likely that exposing infants once born was the more usual means of their destruction. Disabled infants were almost always exposed at birth. Roman attitudes and practice were very similar, illustrated by the Emperor Domitian (AD 51–96), who ordered his niece, whom he had made pregnant, to have an abortion, from which she died. Later Roman writers and ethicists such as Cicero, Ovid, Seneca and Musonius were more critical of abortion, but their concerns suggest the scale of the issue. In Roman law, the father possessed the patria potestas (Latin: “power of a father”) over his offspring. If he decided the new-born baby should die on the grounds of disability, appearance or gender, the child was killed. We might regard this as the ultimate example of a toxic patriarchy. Yet has our apparently “progressive” society really advanced beyond such attitudes to the child in the womb, clamouring for abortion on demand up to birth? Such attacks on the most vulnerable – regardless of ideological basis – are always toxic and indicate a regression to pagan barbarity. Jewish authors like Philo and Josephus who lived in the Greco-Roman world stress the fact that Jews love children and neither seek to kill their offspring in the womb, nor expose them after birth. Josephus argues that abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide in his work Against Apion (2.202). The Jewish position emphasises the goodness of procreation and God’s sovereignty in forming the unborn child. For Christians this value is elevated still further through the incarnation and early Christian works such as the Didache are uncompromising on the immorality of abortion. It is possible that references to pharmakeia in the New Testament (e.g., Galatians 5:20) includes a prohibition of abortion. This is the word from which we derive “pharmacy,” but also had connotations of illicit practices and abortifacient drugs, and is often joined with adultery and murder (see Revelation 9:21; 21:8; 22:15, cf. Didache 2:2). Having traced some relevant aspects of the contemporary milieu it is possible to return to Jesus’ teaching and practice in the Gospels. If pagan society and tyrants like Herod regarded children as expendable, Jesus stands firmly in the counter-cultural Jewish mould of valuing and loving children, including the unborn. It is worth realising just how many of Jesus’ healing miracles involved children. Jesus frequently includes children in his teaching – “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Jesus even uses labour pains to teach about his imminent crucifixion, with the joy of childbirth akin to the resurrection (John 16:21–22).[2] The Gospels show Jesus receiving help from children in his ministry (John 6:8–11) and it is children who realise his true identity, even when the religious leaders remain blind (Matthew 21:15–16). Jesus’ action in laying hands on children to bless them occurs in each of the Synoptic Gospels – Matthew 19:13–15; Mark 10:13–16 and Luke 18:15–17: 15 Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16 But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 17 Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” Imitation of Jesus means welcoming children and making their welfare a priority. The privileged status of children vis-à-vis the Kingdom is again expressed – childhood is not a prelude to becoming a proper disciple, but actually images the kind of dependent faith God desires and delights in. We can say more: Luke calls these little ones, infants, brephe – the same word that he used for the baby Jesus (Luke 2:12, 16) and also the unborn John (Luke 1:41, 44). In other words, in a way analogous to Matthew 25:31–46, our attitude to children, including those in the womb, reflects our attitude to Christ – whether one of welcome or rejection. What we do for or to these little ones we do in a sense for or to him. A similar pattern emerges when we observe that Mark in his version of this event uses almost identical language (Mark 10:16) as that which describes Simeon taking the infant Jesus in his arms in Luke 2:28. Whenever we embrace a child, it is as if we are embracing the Christ child. The historical record is clear that as Christianity spread across the Mediterranean it consistently challenged the attitudes and practices of the prevailing culture in terms of children, not least regarding exposure and abortion. Christians became known for their humane and compassionate treatment of children; eschewing abortion and bringing up unwanted infants left to die. The consensus on abortion as utterly contradictory to Christian faith continued well into the 20th Century. The current liberalism and timidity to speak out on this issue is an anomaly we can be sure Christ would correct, as he did his first disciples. Jesus summons us to love all children. Will we obey his teaching and example? [1] The following summary is drawn largely from Michael J. Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982). [2] At various places in the Gospels a parallel is created between the virgin womb from which Jesus is born and the tomb (“where no one had ever yet been laid”: Luke 23:53) from which Jesus emerges at the resurrection. Jesus talks about the “sign of Jonah” to signify his resurrection. In Matthew 12:40 the word for the whale’s belly (koilia) can also mean “womb.”

Top Ten Pro-life Passages // Luke 1 But the angel said to him: ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. [Luke 1:13-15 NIV] When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. [Luke 1:41-44 NIV] Luke’s Gospel begins with a long infancy narrative, which takes up two chapters or roughly ten percent of the overall book. Echoes of Old Testament episodes, characters and promises are everywhere, with the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Hannah looming large. Women – Elizabeth, Mary and Anna – are prominent, with a large part of chapter 1 revolving around a conversation between two pregnant women. In fact Luke “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14) uses nearly as wide a range of vocabulary for pregnancy as Hippocrates[1] and Luke 1–2 displays a “high interest in infant and fetal life.”[2] Before Jesus is conceived, Gabriel appears to the aged priest Zechariah: 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. 14 And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, 15 for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb. As with Isaac’s conception and birth, the announcement is made to the father on this occasion, and as with Abraham and Sarah, the good news is met with a degree of scepticism, as a result of which Zechariah is rendered mute until John’s birth! John is named before he is even conceived, putting him in some pretty august company (e.g., Ishmael: Gen 16:11; Isaac: Gen 17:15–19; Solomon: 2 Chr 22:9 and Josiah: 1 Kgs 13:2). John’s vocation as forerunner is reiterated once he is born (Luke 1:76) – whether before or after his birth John’s calling does not change. The alcoholic prohibition has precedent in Samson’s conception (Judges 13:4, 7) and suggests that John is akin to a Nazirite (compare 1 Samuel 1:11). What elevates John above Samson and even Samuel is that John will be filled with the Holy Spirit even while inside Elizabeth’s womb. The prophet Jeremiah was consecrated by God in utero (Jeremiah 1:5), but John is unique in that his prophetic ministry actually begins as an unborn child. As the first person to be filled with the Holy Spirit in Luke’s Gospel (see Luke 1:41, 67; 4:1), the humanity of the unborn child is also underlined. In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy – time now being reckoned according to gestational development – Gabriel is sent to Mary who conceives Jesus by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:26–38). There is mystery here and Luke does not attempt to explain how this happens. Rather his language suggests something like the “surprise of creation”[3] with the Spirit’s involvement recalling Genesis 1:2. The other main allusion is to God’s Spirit filling the tabernacle (Exodus 40:35). And it is possible to interpret the pregnant Mary’s journey into the hill country of Judea as paralleling the journey of the ark of God in 2 Samuel 6:1–16, except that now God’s presence is manifested in the embryonic Jesus. Once Mary reaches her destination Luke zooms in on this happy domestic scene, where the two women and their unborn children meet. It is important to note that John is twice described as a brephos here (Luke 1:41, 44), a word that can equally be used of new-born infants, in fact it next refers to Jesus in the manger (Luke 2:12, 16). This suggests a strong sense of continuity between the child in the womb and the infant once born, as well as connecting John and Jesus within Luke’s narrative purpose. 41 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, 42 and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! 43 And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? 44 For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Finding himself in the presence of Jesus, who is possibly just days old at this point, John, already filled with God’s Spirit, responds exuberantly. This is more than a baby kicking in the womb, John’s movements primarily serve a theological purpose: the incarnation has occurred and the Lord Jesus is already bringing gladness to his people. Luke employs a verb, meaning to leap or skip, which is used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament for Jacob and Esau’s uterine jostling (Genesis 25:22). This demonstrates that John’s character as witness begins within the womb, just as Jacob’s personality first emerged there, but it also indicates that a new age has dawned: conflict and strife have been replaced by adoration and joy. Elizabeth’s loud exclamation here is matched by the Jesus’ utterance at the end of his life (Luke 23:46).[4] Elizabeth’s shout heralding the incarnation and Jesus’ cry at the culmination of his ministry bookend Jesus’ life, quite literally from the womb to his tomb. Elizabeth describes Jesus both as the “fruit of the womb” and as “Lord,” kurios. Kurios has previously been used 10x by Luke in chapter 1 to refer to God, here it indicates the unborn Jesus, as it will the new-born Christ in Luke 2:11. What becomes Luke’s favourite title for describing Jesus – “Lord” – is thus first utilised when he introduces Jesus as unborn child. In short, there was never a moment of his earthly existence when Jesus was not the incarnate Saviour, the very embodiment of Israel’s God. But in the same way, there was no moment of his earthly existence when Jesus was not a fully human person. His life, like ours, began at conception, being like us in every way save sin (Hebrews 2:14, 17). In the Old Testament God creates and loves the unborn child; in the New Testament God becomes an unborn child. This, more than any other factor, should settle the question of abortion for Christians. How can one who claims to believe in and follow the Lord Jesus, end a life in the womb, a stage of our existence which has been made holy by the Lord himself? [1] William K. Hobart, The Medical Language of St. Luke (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1954, repr. ed.), 91. [2] John T. Noonan Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in History” in The Morality of Abortion, ed. John T. Noonan, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 8. [3] Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (rev. ed., New York: Doubleday, 1993), 314. [4] Barbara E. Reid, Choosing the Better Part? Women in the Gospel of Luke (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996), 72. NEXT WEEK IN THIS SERIES: When Jesus blesses the babies Login and subscribe to be notified of the next new post.