The buzzword of Abortion

For the evangelical Christian, history has a different meaning.


It stretches back to the Old Testament where it claims that God blesses Israel or curses Israel based on the obedience of it's people.


It does not match with what we know about history. We know Israel was a small area whose monotheism was born out of prior polytheism. Because of the real major geopolitical players in the area (Egypt, Babylon) it was tossed around over time because it was simply smaller and less important.


It is a false story... that is perpetuated in the minds of Americans in particular.
God's blessing.


The same is said of the Roman Empire. Evangelical Christians have the perfect answer to why this grand Empire fell. And it certainly isn't that Christianity itself weakened the state. It has to do with the Empire becoming decadent and God punished them because of same sex attraction...


"The seesaw of blessing" is always used (after the fact) to explain away complicated events. God turns his back on a Nation and they fall. They obey him and they are boosted up.


Christians are great propagandists. And it follows from a belief (in America) that somehow we are some sort of holy experiment.


Nothing could be further from the truth. That's not how history works. It does not fit together on that seesaw.


I sat in the pew every "Sanctity of Human-life" Sunday with others listening to the declarations of how God was taking away his blessing from the United States. Abortion had angered God so much that he would break up this nation... it was the greatest evil in the history of our nation.


Wait... abortion is not new. Abortion is an old practice.


The historian in me was enraged. Had God taken his blessing away when Native tribes were decimated by disease and swindled out of land? How about when their innocent members were sold into Slavery in the Caribbean after King Philip's War?


From the earliest colonies, African labor built this nation. The horrors of the middle passage, the brutality of the business and the way every person profited from it. Investors, insurance, bankers, anyone who drank rum or wore cotton... all provided by the blood and sweat of slaves. Whipped in the hot sun, raped and torn away from family members. And God stood with an approving smirk?


The oppression of women over centuries in America. Withholding property rights, allowing brutality  because it happened in marriage. No say, no equality. For centuries. And God did not "take his glory away."


The fear of every African-American, although freed from slavery on paper, still subservient and now a part of a tightly controlled Jim Crow south. Can you hear Billie Holiday's cry:


"Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."


My church had no celebration for the end of slavery, or celebrating what pastors and their congregations accomplished in the civil rights era. They never openly decried racism. They never mentioned lynching.
Or the fact that in all these Supreme Court cases and decisions, the evangelical church had written amicus briefs on the side of the White Supremacists and the status quo.


But abortion.


That is the buzzword that keeps things moving. It signifies the sign in society that the church is losing control.


It is all about control. Can you hear it? Mike Pence speaking at Liberty University, talking about being "ridiculed" for their faith. Perhaps for their stand on abortion. their stand on different subjects that put them in conflict.


Does he feel how hard it is to be LGBTQA+ in communities that are predominantly evangelical Christians?


Does he know how hard it is to be in an abusive relationship and find out you are pregnant? Or to be taken advantage of by someone in your life? And carry that baby to term?


Does he know what its like to truly feel different? Real discrimination and ridicule because of the color of his skin or gender?


Abortion is all about controlling that most intimate part of each person. It declares a worldview is present and protection must be given at the expense of everything else because? His God knows better. And he'll punish this nation.


No, that's a rouse. Its a red herring. It is the definition of bullshit.


God is losing. God is fading from the mythologized history of our founding and the lies we have heard of our standards.


More than even that. For the first time, the church is seen in context. Exposed. As what they are.


Psychologically damaging. Morally repugnant. Socially harmful. Invading on every privacy and desperate to grasp at some control. And they are grasping for the uterus. Grabbing at it as a last ditch effort of misinformation. Hoping that they can keep in politics, keep relevant and remain current in a world that has passed them by.


Throwing out lies and fear tactics that I once to feared. Now I stare at them in the face. And cry "bullshit."