i wish i was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off. - eddie vedder

Friday, August 05, 2005

Bring Back Abortion!

Social justice is a huge issue in today’s church. Maybe it has something to do with Jesus being so into social justice or something like that. If you pick a relevant magazine or go to any cutting edge Christian blog you will see a lot of space devoted to social justice. It is really fantastic to see a renewed charge for this. For too long the church has done nothing for social justice, and I am excited to be part of the resurgence.

But are we really seeing a resurgence? According to most sources the answer appears to be a resounding yes! There is more interest in the church now than ever when it come to issues like poverty, health care and women’s rights. But here is my question…Did we just change out our old issues of social justice with these that seem more hip. If we look back 15 years we see a church that was equally passionate about issues of social justice. This was seen especially in the issue of abortion.

To my knowledge I have yet to see someone who identifies with the emergent conversation stand up on the issue of abortion in the same way that they stand up for the other issues of the day. We cannot argue that within the emergent movement social issues like abortion have taken a back seat to issues like the AIDS crisis in Africa. So what happened? Why do we feel like today we are so much more socially compassionate than ever before?

Another characteristic of the emergent conversation is an understanding that God has no political stance. He is neither conservative nor liberal, neither republican nor democrat. This idea could not be any truer. For years it has been understood that Christians in general are Republicans. Terms like Conservative Christian seem to go hand in hand. To fix this it appears to me that the emergent conversation has indirectly been a driving force behind a shift to the left. I say indirectly because I am not convinced that this was ever the attempt. The emergent conversation finds a lot of its style in the culture of the day. Popular culture is generally leaning politically left, thus these leanings are picked up by the emergent conversation. Popular culture celebrates causes like health care for all, debt relief, and women’s equality and we can see these causes slowly gaining strength in Christian circles…especially in the emergent conversation.

On the other hand, issues like abortion, family values, and public prayer seem to be slowly losing steam in the emergent conversation for the same reasons as stated above. It grieves me to see that in an attempt to rid the church of political leanings, instead we seem to be exchanging one political ideology for another. Many see the church as a pawn for the Republican Party. I am not a fan of this, but the answer is not to become a pawn for the other. The answer, as with many things, lies somewhere in the middle.

I believe that if JC were around today, he would that poverty, and abortion. He would hate that people are dying with treatable sicknesses, and that children were being adopted by homosexual parents. I completely agree that God does not have a political alignment, but we must be careful that we don’t exchange one bad thing for another. We need to live for social justice on both sides of the fence. We must be neither democrat, nor republican, but solely Christians.