If you’ve been in the church for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly heard some variant of the following sentiment:
Christians should be known for what they’re for, not for what they’re against.
If you’re like me, you’ve heard this maxim more times than you can count, and while it holds some helpful truth, I wonder if it doesn’t also set up a false dichotomy—giving aid and comfort to some thoroughly un-Christlike behavior.
In theory, this simple pronouncement encourages Christians to extend grace and humility, instead of anger and condemnation. It urges us to be more concerned with proclaiming the name of Jesus than with hammering away at society’s ills. But in practice, I fear it may cause some of us to hold our tongues when we should be shouting something from the rooftop.
Not Wary of Against
The problem is this: You can’t be for one thing without being against another. Even a cursory glance at Jesus’ life makes this abundantly clear. Clearing the temple, hurling insults at the religious elite, driving away “seekers” by pointing to the law—these are not the actions of someone who is wary of taking a public stand against something.
Jesus’ behavior was sometimes gentle and sometimes harsh. It rarely accommodates our pithy conventions. Why? Because Jesus wasn’t sometimes loving people and other times hating sin. He was always doing both. It is only the expression of this ongoing duality that changes from context to context.
In the vocational context in which I operate, millions of children have been torn to pieces for our failure to faithfully, courageously and creatively express the fact we are against abortion. Few pastors will publicly say with R.C. Sproul, “If I know anything at all about God, I know that God hates abortion.”
Rather, too many Christians have largely embraced a “no offense” approach to abortion. Not wanting to sully our hands by entering the fray directly, we take what is perceived to be the moral high ground. If there is any engagement on the abortion front, it tends to be indirect—by promoting adoption and/or supporting a crisis pregnancy center.
These are both good things, but they do too little to curb abortion in the mainstream.
Driven by Ignorance and Evil
Abortion is not driven by a lack of adoptive parents or a lack of low-cost, prenatal services. Abortion is driven by ignorance and evil. And so long as Christians are unwilling to call a spade a spade, this will continue. In the realm of abstract morality, it may seem noble to keep your opinion to yourself, but what about those more concrete realms where unchecked immorality is literally killing thousands of innocent human beings every day?
The difficulty is this: We all want to be liked, and the “be known for what you’re for” mantra offers a convenient rationale for not speaking out against something that is likely to ruffle some feathers—and few things ruffle more feathers today than the open, unapologetic condemnation of abortion.
