Some people, in what is called the “Pro-Life Movement”, like to say today that their movement and the Civil Rights movement of the middle of the last century are similar causes. I dare say that most people who believe that don’t know what they are talking about.
I agree with them, but not for the reasons they think. Many people who are crusading for the unborn say that they are the new civil rights movement, that they have taken on the mantle carried by the likes of Martin Luther King. They mean that they are as justified in their social activism as were those of the earlier movement. They covet the blanket of acceptability.
What we don’t understand is that many of today’s Pro-Lifers are closer to the truth than they realize. And in fact until they acknowledge that truth, their cause is doomed to fail.
What am I talking about? Back in the 1950s and 1960s a lot of good, religious people in America – white folks, that is – were very critical of the civil rights movement or were at least fearmongering about it. They saw King and his minions as a threat to God-fearing people and civil society in this country.
Evangelicals for the most part sat out the Civil Rights movement either because they didn’t think it had anything to do with spirituality and faith or because they were too busy reaching the lost. Maybe not reaching the lost Americans of Color, but reaching their lost white neighbors or the real heathen somewhere else.
Now consider the Pro-Life movement since Roe v. Wade. That landmark decision which catapulted the anti-abortion cause to the forefront of Evangelical thought happened in the waning days of the Civil Rights movement which had consumed and convulsed the country for the two decades prior. Evangelicals who had slept through the 1950s and 1960s or at least cowered behind their curtains and their moving vans as blacks took control of their neighborhoods were suddenly galvanized to do something about the poor innocents being slaughtered – as well they should have been. They even shed tears for poor innocent black babies, not that they wanted more, they just didn’t want to see them die in the womb.
Why did a life so unworthy of Christian compassion before 1973 become so worthy of Christian action after 1973? This troubling question is a very personal one for me.
I came of voting age in 1973. I was the youngest person ever to vote in my county because the constitutional amendment lowering the voting age took effect on my 18th birthday. Several things were culminating in my spirit – my right to a voice in American society, my coming into legal manhood, the birth of the Pro-Life movement, the end of the most active phase of the Civil Rights Movement, the winding down of the Vietnam Era, and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It was, to say the least, a very momentous year.
But it was a troubling age for me. It brought me to a deep and long crisis of faith because I could not understand how selective American Evangelicals had been in their acts of righteousness. And that troubled feeling was to grow over the next decade or so as I unearthed much of the corporate sin of my fellow believers throughout the decades prior in shutting blacks out of our churches and in opposing a movement that spoke out against this great sin of our nation.
In silencing our prophetic voice prior to 1973, we found ourselves spiritually hoarse in the years that followed. We lost our ability to be prophetic – and instead became pathetic when it came to preaching justice.
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