Would we become single issue voters for infanticide?
Last year alone, 12,857 human beings were deliberately killed in NZ before they had the chance to be born.
That’s an average of 35 human beings killed every single day of the year last year in our country.
Yet, according to the outcome of this year’s election, it seems that many of us - including many Christians - aren’t even willing to let the severity of the abortion crisis guide our voting decisions.
To be fair on the average church attendee though, if the Christian Church isn’t offering a strong and consistent voice of charitable opposition to this grave evil, then it’s easy to understand why most of us in the pews wouldn’t see any need to take this crisis seriously either.
Is it any wonder that this election turned out the way that it did when, for most of us, our usual experience is three years of silence, and then a few vague and confusing equivocations about abortion, plus a stern warning not to be ‘single issue voters’, in the last few weeks before an election?
What would it take for us to wake up and realise that our moral laryngitis (to borrow a phrase from the late Billy Graham) about abortion actually points to a much deeper and more serious crisis in its own right within Christianity?
To quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’ — who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?”
I can’t help but wonder whether the Christian Church would maintain this same silence if the issue in contention was infanticide rather than abortion.
I am skeptical that we would remain so quietly glued to our pews if an average of 35 Kiwi children were being killed by infanticide every day in New Zealand.
And I doubt we’d be hearing so many condemnations of single issue voting, or equivocations attempting to conflate quality-of-life issues with right-to-life issues, if the Labour Government had passed the ‘Infanticide Legislation Act’ in 2020.
(On a side note: I also have a sneaking suspicion that warnings about single issue voting would suddenly cease if either of the two major parties ever made removing charitable status from all NZ churches a key party policy.)
I think the difference here is that infanticide is currently a socially unacceptable practice in the West. It is rightly seen as morally repugnant by the overwhelming majority, whereas abortion is not.
This means that there is zero risk for the Christian Church in speaking up loudly against infanticide in 2020 in New Zealand. It is a very safe, comfortable and popular position to adopt.
Charitably speaking truth about the grave injustice of abortion, however, is not.
In fact, it is becoming more and more socially unacceptable to deviate from the new pro-abortion orthodoxy that now dominates the Western political classes.
To speak up requires us to be willing to swim against a vociferous and increasingly hostile cultural tide.
To do that we would first need to relinquish our love of safe, comfortable and socially acceptable religion.
We would need to rediscover authentic Christianity - the kind that is more committed to goodness and truth than to comfort and social acceptance.
The kind that is not willing to trade being authentically prophetic and pastoral for merely being popular.
The kind that is willing to imitate a Messiah who goes to His cross alone, abandoned and abused by society after warning his disciples that whatever they do to the most vulnerable in society they are doing to Him.
(And that’s to say nothing of the prophetic warning about the weaknesses of democracy and referendums which saw the criminal Barabbas released and an innocent man condemned to death because of a popular vote.)
Here’s the thing, while almost everyone in the West now considers infanticide to be so morally repugnant that it should be outlawed, things were the exact opposite 2000 years ago.
Back then infanticide was socially acceptable and widely practiced, and if it hadn’t been for the willingness of the Christian Church to call it evil and boldly stand against it, infanticide would still be legal and widespread in the West today.
Imagine a Christian Church with that same fire in its belly about the issue of injustice of abortion - things would be very different than they are right now in New Zealand.
