Evangelicals Without Faith

Hunter Backer discusses his experiences at an Evangelical Convention and the topic of abortion came up as it inevitably does. So I wrote him a letter:

As long as abortion is an individual decision the only way to reduce it is to change minds.

The alternative is laws. So where does that lead?

1. Women as wards of the state during child bearing years. Not. Going. To. Happen.
2. Black markets.

Re: #2. Evangelicals seem really enamored of black markets as solutions to social problems. Not in theory of course. But in practice. Because of their biblical upbringing evangelicals are prone to think of prohibitions as the answer to more than a few questions. Prohibitions empower criminals. Prohibitions are a criminal’s best friend. Alcohol Prohibition is a case almost everyone agrees on. The Baptist/bootlegger coalition is notorious. And yet evangelicals refuse to learn its lessons.

Evangelical thinking as it currently exists is dying. Because reality does not match its prescriptions. And in that respect it is no different than the left. And the evangelicals and the left do agree on one thing (mostly) – government and its enforcers are the answer. You can smell the fear of liberty.

The fear is “if you let people be free they will make mistakes” leading to the corrective “laws and enforcers are the answer”. In other words a police state.

And the fatal religious conceit is “God does not have an individual plan for every soul so we will supply a collective plan.” Lack of faith. Pure and simple.


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6 responses to “Evangelicals Without Faith”

  1. Frank Avatar
    Frank

    That is an excellent argument. The problem here dates to the founding of New Salem. It’s like they’re stuck in a time warp.

  2. Hunter Baker Avatar
    Hunter Baker

    You have ignored the impact of legality. Abortion became radically more common upon legalization. So there will be black markets if we prohibit. Fine. But if I have 200k aborted instead of 1.5 mil, I have achieved something highly significant. I prefer libertarian arrangements, too, but this is life and death.

  3. Simon Avatar

    Hunter,

    Thanks for dropping by.

    And as far as life and death goes – the reality is that the mainstream of the anti-abortion movement thinks that abortion is misdemeanor manslaughter. And the instigator of the death – the woman – goes free. That hardly sounds convincing.

    If it really was life and death pre-meditated murder is life in prison for the woman and the doctor.

    And then there are the pills. Which would require something like mandatory weekly pregnancy testing to detect. Good luck with that. Given the current political landscape I think convincing women to carry the babies to term is your best bet.

    Have you considered setting up a fund for women in financial stress? But that has the same problem welfare does. Women getting pregnant for the money.

    It has been a while since I looked but when I did something like 60% or 80% of Americans were against abortion. But only about 30% (maybe less) want government in charge of American wombs.

    What happens when another Obama gets in and declares abortion mandatory? Putting government in charge of wombs is a very bad idea.

    And of course to enforce your vision every miscarriage would have to be a murder investigation. A disincentive to pregnancy right there.

    ==========

    The anti-abortion crowd is like Democrats on this subject. They don’t look at second and third order effects of what they propose. Having your heart in the right place is all that counts.

    ==========

    And then there is the who. It is mainly Democrats killing their future. I favor that. Innocents getting killed? What about their policies? At least it is their innocents.

    ==========

    Women who are not determined to breed are being selected out of the gene pool. In time Darwin will fix the problem.

    Or if you prefer – God works in mysterious ways.

    BTW I did some bits on the thermodynamics of all this that you might like.

    Behavioral Sink Behavior And Thermodynamics

    A thermodynamic explanation of politics

  4. Randy Avatar
    Randy

    If pro-lifers had their way, it would be the abortion providers that would face the brunt of the punishments meted out under their brand of abortion laws. Pregnant women who violate the restrictive laws would face punishments much less severe as compared to the punishments awaiting the abortion providers. And the reason this out-of-balance situation would exist is purely due to political concerns. The pro-life zealots understand that widespread political support would be needed to implement and maintain their restrictive abortion law regime. They also understand that they would lose widespread support for their positions if the abortion laws punished the women who obtained illegal abortions to the same extent that abortion providers are punished. In short, political concerns would force pro-lifers to implement abortion laws that would necessarily mete out more severe punishments to abortion providers. Pro-lifers will be implementing patently unjust laws in order to maintain political support for those laws.

    Pro-lifers talk a lot of self-righteous smack, but when it gets down to business, pro-lifers are more interested in moral preening than they are in crafting just abortion laws. If they were interested in proposing just abortion laws, both abortion providers and women obtaining illegal abortions would face the same punishments. Pro-lifers know that equal punishment is a political non-starter, which just goes to show how truly morally vacant their positions really are.

  5. Simon Avatar

    Randy,

    I have had pro-lifers tell me explicitly (in e-mails) that the reason that they did not propose more just laws is that such laws were not politically viable.

  6. TallDave Avatar

    The new evangelical movement has become “everyone can be as socially conservative as they want to be.”

    Ironically, they’re coming to this position because they’re finding out the same government that used to do things like enforce monogamy and heterosexuality can now being used against them, preventing things like school prayer and defunding traditional-values organizations like the Boy Scouts.