W. S. Browning

Evangelicals are the only religious group where a majority do not agree with these 3 statements: Abortion should be legal Gay and lesbian people should be allowed to marry Homosexuality should be accepted by society

Everyone should read the book, “When Children Became People” by historian OM Bakke. In it, he explains how the ancient pagan world justified the slaughter and mistreatment of children. Scholars believed at the time that a person’s worth was determined primarily by their possession of the “logos” or their ability to reason. Only the adult free male were thought to have the fullness of rational capacity, so women, slaves, and children were seen as inherently less-than. Children got the worst of it, as they were considered in the same category as animals and barbarians. Thus, children were, without qualm, aborted, murdered, trafficked and objectified. Unwanted newborns were left to die on what were called “exposure hills.” Babies would be left there —alive and screaming— to be exposed to the elements until they died. But about 2,000 years ago, the perspective on children started to change. Eventually, the practice of infanticide was stigmatized, then criminalized, then replaced— with orphanages, hospitals, and other means by which desperate parents could ensure their babies were cared for. Children became people. Slowly but surely, they went from a class of sub-humans to be discarded and oppressed to a special category of vulnerability deserving of love. Those of us in the West consider this sentiment the norm. Even with our raging debates on abortion and other child-centered issues, the Western instinct is still to show compassion for the child above and beyond the compassion we show for adults. But it was not always so, and it is not so in most of the world today. The game changer for children— and the impoverished, the sick, the elderly, slaves, and women— two millennia ago was Christianity. Christians changed how the world saw children. This strange and persistent group worshiped a man named Jesus, whom they claimed to be God. Yet unlike the pagan gods of the day, their God came to earth in weakness and meekness. In fact, He arrived first as an embryo. He was heralded by the kicks of a newborn John the Baptist. He was worshiped by angels and wise men as an infant. And, against the protestations of His disciples, insisted: “Let the children come to me, for such as these belong the Kingdom of Heaven.” This Jesus had another name— one with which the pagan scholars at the time would have been familiar: Logos. The Word. Pagan scholars said “logos” determines a person’s worth. But the Logos said, “Your worth is defined by me.” Christians popularized the concept of the Imago Dei — that all people are equally valuable just because they are people. And they preached this radically equalizing gospel that said that all people are dead in sin apart from Christ but all can be made alive in Him. Christians, through this message, because of Jesus, completely changed how the world saw people. You cannot have all the things we cherish in the West: compassion, dignity, human rights, and forgo the foundation upon which these things are built. Look to the non-Western world today and see the unbroken chain of oppressing women and children. Perhaps so-called “Christian nationalism” isn’t the bogeyman you should be most afraid of. Something to consider.