This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.

Hello friends. Christmas season is here and guess what? You’re about to be bombarded by fundraising letters from pro-life groups, Christian conservative groups telling you that things are going great, that we’re winning. Don’t believe them, and I’ll explain why on this edition of The Case for Life program. Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. And before we launch into some bad news, let me give you some good news. Our primary sponsor, Life Training Institute, can help you frame pro-life arguments with friends, Christian and non, who don’t understand the issue the way you do.

It will give you a biblical grounding for making your pro-life case. I encourage you to visit prolifetraining.com to see our offerings, what we can give you in terms of speakers, in terms of content that will be helpful for you. Now, I mentioned there was some bad news. Well, I’m holding it in my hand. And here’s what’s going to happen. If you’re not already getting them, you will soon be receiving emails, maybe text messages, and hard copy fundraising letters from a lot of pro-life groups that are doing some good work.

I’m not meaning to attack them in the hole here, but I do want to say I think we need to be honest. And there’s a sense around the endear appeal where we tell everybody how great everything is and we give them all kinds of false hope that we are actually winning this fight. You’ll hear things like, “Well, look, we have a pro-life president now. We have a pro-life Congress, a pro-life Supreme Court. Voila, we’re winning.” well, we’re certainly better off than we were in the last administration.

I agree. And improvement should be applauded, but we are not winning. And I want to give you some data to prove this. It’s not me just being a Scrooge here, okay? There are some very concerning things to look at. Now, I think all of you know that since let’s see, going back about four years now, ever since the DOS decision that overturned Roie Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey, that states have individually been voting on abortion. Because what do is it said, “We’re going to take the abortion issue and we’re not going to rule that the fetus is a person with a right to life.” That didn’t happen.

What did happen is the Supreme Court said, “Look, there is nothing in the Constitution that says women have a fundamental right to an abortion. There is no constitutional right to an abortion. Therefore, the federal government at the court level should not be mandating policy.” Okay, I agree with that as far as it goes. But we shouldn’t conclude that that means culturally we’ve won this debate. And you have seen this ever since DOS. Even red states like Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Arizona, and the list goes on and on have passed referendum issues that support abortion and write abortion rights into the state constitutions of those individual states.

Why is that happening even in red states? Well, the answer is obvious or should be obvious to all pro-life groups and all of us. We aren’t winning culturally. You know, this idea that used to be out there before we hit our current time went something like this. Well, the pro-lifer’s real problem is not that the public disagrees with us. The public largely supports us. The problem is we have an activist court that won’t let us pass pro-life legislation, or at least meaningful pro-life legislation, and we have a hostile press.

If we could just, you know, mitigate those two problems, we’d be all right. Well, guess what? We found out that the public isn’t with us because the public is not voting pro-life when given the choice. They are voting pro-abortion and they’re doing so in overwhelming numbers. So, I got this earlier this week. It’s a new study by the Bara Institute, Arizona Christian University, and the Family Research Council. And so these are conservatives surveying the landscape on where we are culturally. And I want you to hear what they say about attitudes on abortion and the family and morality in the church.

So set aside for the moment the public at large. Let’s talk inhouse about believers here. Here are some of the key findings from their research. Only 43% of churchgoers now identify as pro-life. That’s down si that’s down from 63% three years ago. That’s very bad news. Just 46% of churchgoers embrace a biblical definition of family, namely that marriage is one man and one woman in a permanent co covenant where they aim toward producing children. Now, among Gen Z churchgoers, the numbers get even worse.

Only 34% hold to that view of a biblical view of family. And then you couple that with the fact that confidence in scripture is slipping as well. Only 51% now believe the Bible is unambiguous in its teaching on abortion. That’s down from 65% a couple of years ago. Now, what we’re seeing here is a really troubling trend, and that is people are not only losing their faith in the pro-life position, they’re losing their faith in scripture being authoritative. They think that somehow scripture is ambiguous on issues like abortion, on issues like marriage and family and they are not trusting scripture alone as their source of authority when they try to adjudicate between competing moral viewpoints.

That is very troubling. And the study goes on to conclude something that I think we all need to pay attention to and this needs to be heard loud and clear. The study concludes this is not a political problem. This is a moral and disciplehip problem within the church. The study concludes with this quote. When the people of God lose moral clarity on an issue such as abortion, it signals a serious disciplehip crisis. The research indicates that many Christians are being shaped more by culture than by scripture.

Now again, this shouldn’t surprise us. Think about it. The average churchgoer generally does not spend a lot of time in Bible study. They spend a ton of time online scrolling mindlessly through video clips, reading Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever they’re into. And they’re not spending any time systematically thinking through how the Bible informs their day-to-day decisionmaking and their day-to-day thinking on moral issues like abortion, like marriage, like the family. So, we shouldn’t be surprised. Now, here’s the question I have for pastors.

The culture is getting, I’m going to guess, roughly 30 to 40 hours of input into your people every week. If you take the time they’re online and you count the weekends and the week days, I’m going to guess that’s probably where it is. You’ve got one hour a week to make a difference against all that tide of opposing views coming in to your people through social media through news sources that are overwhelmingly against the biblical view of morality. What are you going to do about that?

And of course, the answer we get is that well, we don’t want to take on any issues that might be controversial because we don’t want to drive away seekers. Well, the problem is at that point your church becomes overwhelmingly seeker friendly but believer worthless because you’re not equipping your own people to think biblically. And then we get results like this and we’re surprised. We shouldn’t be. One hour a week of teaching that is largely wasted on topics not related to where the culture is at.

And instead, what we do is we talk about, hey, here are 10 suggestions for having significance in your life. Here are worship songs that we’re going to present you with smoke machines, strobe lights, lyrics that are just pathetic. We’re not going to teach doctrine. We’re going to try to make ourselves feel relevant to people who are seekers. This is a disastrous equation. And it points out why we are losing in the public arena. Why in the public square, not only do we see people opposing the pro-life view, they’re doing so in overwhelming numbers.

And then in the church, we now see the same thing happening. People drifting from the biblical moorings that they may have been raised with to other worldviews that are hostile to the biblical worldview. So, what are some of those hostile worldviews that we see in play right now in the church? Well, the first has to do with morality. And the worldview we see competing with biblical morality is that of relativism. Now, biblical morality is objective, meaning morals are not plucked out of thin air.

We don’t invent them ourselves. We don’t construct them from our own experience. Rather, right and wrong are grounded objectively in the character of a holy God. That’s the biblical view of morality. It’s what we call objective morality. Objective moral rules require an objective moral lawgiver. And we see that lawgiver in God’s character. Okay? So when we approach an issue like abortion, our first question as biblically grounded qu Christians is not going to be how do I feel? How does this impact my friends that I know?

The first question we’re going to ask is, does this line up with the teaching in scripture that reflects God’s character? So, if somebody comes to you and says, you know, pro-choice is the more compassionate way to go. Because after all, think about this, and I’ve actually heard Christians say this. Think about this. Rich women can still get abortions if laws are passed against abortion in a particular state. They can either travel to a foreign country and get an abortion or they can maybe travel to another state, New York, California, Illinois, other states that are setting themselves up as abortion tourism states.

They will actually help you get there to have an abortion. Poor women don’t have access to this. Therefore, to make the situation equitable, what we need to do is we need to make sure that poor women have the same access to abortion services as rich women. And I’ve actually had a Christian woman say to me not long ago, Christ would oppose this unfair treatment of poor women. Now, you might hear that and think, wow, how could a Christian land there? Is it any surprise when we are looking at data like what we see here?

I mean think about how silly her argument was. Look, rich people can afford to hire hitmen to kill their enemies or people they don’t like. Poor people cannot. Does that mean we ought to legalize the hiring of hitmen so that poor people can have equal access to a gunman to do their dirty work? I mean, as Francis Beckwith points out, the vices of the wealthy do not become virtues simply because the poor are denied them. This is unbelievably vacuous moral thinking.

But when you have Christians not exposed to clear biblical teaching from the pulpit and instead they’re getting their moral compass grounded in social media, we shouldn’t be wondering why we’re facing such a der of persuasive thinking on moral issues. Now relativism, we’ve talked about this on this program before. It’s the basic belief that right and wrong are not real. They’re not objective. Rather, right and wrong are determined by you, the individual, or by your culture. And you shouldn’t say that there’s any overriding moral principles we need to line up with.

And this claim of relativism is used to force a concept of tolerance on the public. And that concept goes like this. Well, since there’s no real right and wrong, we each have differing opinions on what right and wrong is. We shouldn’t force one view on people who disagree. Now, of course, there’s all kinds of problems with this. When you pass laws, for example, censoring people who call people male and female, when somebody else thinks, “Hey, you better honor my pronouns. You better not refer to me as a man or a woman.

You better honor me according to the pronoun I identify with.” And then we pass laws punishing people who won’t comply with that. That is not tolerance. That’s forcing a world view on those who hold the traditional view of genders. Right? But there are other problems. I mean, how does it follow that because people disagree, nobody’s right? I mean, how many times have I had a Christian student or a Christian adult at a conference during the Q&A say to me, “Listen, I personally oppose abortion, but I know people who think differently than I do.

It’s not right for me to take my personal views and force them on others who disagree. Okay, that line of thinking is not biblical. And I think you can see why. First of all, morality in scripture is not about our personal opinions, our feelings, our subjective sentiments. It’s about what lines up with God’s word. And I mean, let’s be honest, scripture is pretty clear. You look at passages like Romans 1 Corinthians 6 and a host of other passages we could cite here.

It is very clear that some people are not going to go to heaven because they engage in activities that God clearly condemns. He calls them an abomination. These activities are not matters of personal preferences. They are absolute assaults on the holy character of God. Okay. All right. Relativism says, “Well, people disagree, so who are we to impose our views?” Well, let me ask this question. How does it follow that because people disagree that nobody is right? People once disagreed on whether slavery should be allowed.

Did that mean there was no right position? They once disagreed on whether women should have the right to vote. Did it follow that we had to be unclear on that? You know, people disagree on all kinds of things. All that means is, get ready. They disagree. By the way, if disagreement means that nobody’s right, the relativist’s own position is falsified because I and many others disagree with it. So, the whole thing is self-refuting. But a lot of a lot of American Christians, let’s just say Christians in the Western world, so we’ll include our good friends in the United Kingdom and Canada and Western Europe, have bought into this notion that somehow because there’s people out there that don’t see it the way they do that we really can’t take a strong stand.

I remember a church on the day after the Dobs decision. I remember a church that I used to go to, a large church, influential church at the time in Southern California that rightly committed itself to pray for over three decades that Roe vade would be overturned. Okay, they did that. And by the way, I applaud them for that. And at the time, the pastoral leadership would mention abortion. And when they preached on it, their teaching was in the main, thoroughly biblical.

Okay? So, I’m glad for that. But here’s what happened. They now have new leadership. And the day after Roie Wade, here’s the gist of what they put on their Facebook page. We understand that there are many people today troubled by the court’s DOS decision, and we think it important that we be sensitive to their fears and concerns. That’s all they said. Never mind, hey, we prayed for 30 years that this child sacrifice would be abated somehow. Now, we just got a significant victory at the Supreme Court that says there is no constitutional right to child sacrifice in the Constitution.

Therefore, let’s rejoice at this. No, what they were concerned about was that there were people who disagreed with what the court did. And our primary focus as Christians ought to be on making sure we don’t further trouble those people by being excited that this Supreme Court decision went in a pro-life direction. Well, that’s just awful. But should we be surprised at it when Christian leaders by and large I’m not sure many of them even know what a consistent biblical worldview looks like on cultural issues.

I don’t think they’ve thought about it. But that that kind of thing is just that that grinds me like nothing else when Christian leaders are that confused. Okay. The other thing we find is that there’s a world view of the human person that is now troubling. What happens is when you’ve come to the conclusion that there are no objective truths, all we have is what we construct subjectively is reality. Once you’ve bought into the idea that reality is constructed subjectively, well then your view of the human person is going to be constructed subjectively.

And what you end up with is a view of the human person known as body selfduelism. Now, in the past, here’s how we did it. If you had a human body, you were a human person and rights flowed to you, not from the government, but from your status as being a human being. So, we had this idea of natural rights in our culture that say things like the right to life, the pursuit of happiness, things that you see in the Declaration of Independence.

These are rights that the government doesn’t grant. These are rights that you have in virtue of being human. No government grants those rights. Rather, you get them because you’re a human being. All right? So, for example, if I go to Mexico or Germany or the United Kingdom, anywhere on the planet, and I try to vote in their next election cycles, I’m not going to be allowed to vote there. Why? Because I’m not citizens of those countries. But I certainly have a right not to be gunned down in the middle of Mexico City or in the middle of Munich when I visit those countries.

Why? Because I’m a human being and I have my right to life is not grounded in a government granting it or someone else constructing it and subjectively saying well I feel that you should have that right. No, I have that right objectively in virtue of being a human being. But when the definition of human being is changed from once you have a physical body you are a human being to hey it’s subjective traits that may come and go things like consciousness cognitive awareness the ability to feel pain being a sentient being whatever they pick out as being arbitrarily decisive here.

Once you ground human quality in those things, then the rights that spring from your human nature also come in degrees. So we end up saying things like, well, we can kill an embryo because it’s not yet self-aware. Well, we can kill a person with Alzheimer’s disease because they no longer have community through memory. They’re no longer connected biographically to their former selves. All they have is biological life, not biographical life. You know, any of those arguments, they’re all the same. We end up picking out a trait arbitrarily or if you will, subjectively that we say is decisive and then from there we can rule out the people we don’t want to include.

And this is not just in abortion. We see this body self-dualism present. And I probably ought to define it before I go any further. Body self-dualism is simply the belief that the real you has nothing and I do mean absolutely nothing to do with your identity as having a body. The real you has nothing to do with your body. The real you is rather grounded in your identity at the cognitive level. What are your desires? What are your thoughts? What are your feelings?

What are your aims? And as a result, we can change a person’s gender, if we’re talking about transgenderism, for example, by pointing out that what they have bodily does not match what they have at the desire level. Cognitively, they may be a female even though they have a male body. That’s the ideology behind transgenderism. Well, that plays out in the abortion debate like this. Well, until that embryo has a cognitive self, there is no self there. That would be the argument of Peter Singer, Michael Tulie, Jubilini, Manurva and others who hold to this idea that not only do you not have rights until you have cognitive ability, there’s no you there until you have mental continuity.

So with that worldview in mind, it’s not hard to see why people no longer have an objective definition of what it means to be human. Rather, we are now grounding human value in traits that none of us share equally that may come and go in the course of our lifetimes. And we end up having no way to define what a human being actually is. It’s all subjective. Not only are morals subjective, so is our anthropology. We don’t even know what a human is anymore.

This is very troubling and ought to trouble pastors at a very deep level. Then there’s a third world view in play here that actually conflicts a little bit with the one I just told you, but secularists often don’t see it. And we’re going to pick that worldview up after the break. I’ll come right back after the break and tell you what that third world view is that is prominent in our culture today and why we as Christians need to be biblically prepared to answer it.

I’ll see you at the other side of the break.

Welcome back everybody. I was talking about a third worldview before the break that we need to examine and that is the worldview of philosophical naturalism. Philosophical naturalism goes like this. The universe came from nothing and was caused by nothing. Everything we see in the universe including human beings are the product of blind random chance. And there’s no design inference that we can draw. There’s no creator. There’s no originator. Rather, the universe just happened. It was random through natural selection. And the best we can do in pointing to human anthropology is point to a common ancestor.

That’s generally Darwin’s theory of evolution. Okay? This worldview is 180 degrees at odds with the biblical worldview. The biblical worldview says human beings have intrinsic value in virtue of the kind of thing they are. They are beings with a rational nature that bear the image of their creator. Well, philosophical naturalism denies all that and says that we’re all the product of blind random chance. Now, in that kind of world, how do you get human dignity for any living thing regardless of their stage of development if we are all the product of blind random chance?

Well, I don’t see how anything has value in a right to life other than people arbitrarily saying so and so or this group or that group has a right to life. There’s no intrinsic value we can point to that would make us equal in our fundamental dignity. Very problematic for Christians to embrace worldviews like this and drift away from biblical teaching on the value of human life, the value of marriage and the identity of male and female. All right. So, does that mean I’m hopeless?

Now, before you burn all those fundraising letters you’re about to get, let me tell you something this study said that gives me a little bit of hope. It also noted that despite all this erosion in a biblical worldview that most Christians still agree that human beings bear the image of God. Okay, that part’s good. I’m glad to hear it. In fact, they say 80% believe that every person is made in the image of God. Okay, that’s a little troubling because people love to divide human being from human person.

As if there’s a class of human beings over here we can’t kill because they’re human persons, but there’s another class over here of human beings we can kill because they’re humans but not persons. And again, personhood is usually defined by cognitive ability. But at least we have something to build here that they do agree that humans have value because they’re made in the image of God. Now, they don’t apply that consistently when it comes to issues like abortion, transgenderism, and the definition of marriage, but at least we have that to work from.

So, more than ever, you as a Christian must be equipped to defend a biblical view of anthropology, of human life in particular. This is a source that I hope you will look at. It’s the case for life, second edition. It will equip you with a biblical worldview, give you the tools of thought you need to not only be confident in your own view, but persuade others as well. We also have a course that you can look at. You can see our sites for information on it.

A one-week course where in 7 days you will master the logic of the pro-life position. It’s called Prolife 101. I commend it to you. But might be an excellent stocking stuffer. Folks, we need to be clear on what the Bible teaches and how to communicate it truthfully. Let’s not slack off on that responsibility.