Someday, Hollywood (or whatever it’s called 150 years from now) will start making films about abortion. Long after the institution of abortion has been eradicated in America and thrown in the furnace next to slavery, our secular culture-makers will start to look at it with clarity. After all, it’s much easier to look at your grandparents’ sin honestly than it is your own.
In true Hollywood tradition, they will cast themselves as the heroes of this story. It worked great for them with the #metoo movement. Christians will be cast as the villains. Classic. The tragedy is that it won’t be a total fabrication.
Self-proclaimed Christians like Willie Parker, who has performed thousands of abortions and is now being accused of sexual assault by former patients, considers abortion his ministry for Jesus. Pro-Choice ministers like Nadia Bolz-Weber, and religious politicians like Pete Buttigieg misquote scripture to assert that babies aren’t alive until they draw their first breath. Just a few weeks ago, a dozen clergy gathered in a Texas abortion clinic. They held hands right between the high-powered suction machine and stainless-steel cutting tools to sing a rousing verse of “Hallelujah, Bless This Room.”
Hollywood will smugly look at these death-dealing zealots with all the scorn and disgust they deserve. The world will finally know about the religious extremists who used the Bible to justify the wholesale slaughter of millions of infant children. Their names will forever be disgraced in history books and unflattering dramatic portrayals, to be despised and held up as cautionary tales to our great great grandchildren.
The Christian-led pro-life movement, however, just like the Christian-led abolitionist movement, will be erased from the history books. Invoking God brings light and clarity to the past, sure. But it also brings light and conviction to the present. That’s why God’s role in the pro-life movement will be erased by our secular culture. Because in the future, long after abortion is gone, mankind will have another grotesque pet sin they will wish to remain blind to. Once again, true Christians will be called on to fight and defeat it, before once again fading into obscurity. That has always been our role. We are, as C.S. Lewis called us, the “good infection,“ quietly spreading the grace and truth of Jesus, and living for a kingdom the world cannot see.
It’s a wonder that God chooses to use us Christians for this work with all our brokenness and hypocrisy and failure. What grace and mercy! Let us revel in the opportunity to reveal brief glimpses of His kingdom through these broken vessels of ours- there is no greater assignment. Someday, glimpses will no longer be necessary. The kingdom will be here in all its glory, and Christ will sit on the throne.
And the stories told in eternity will not come from Hollywood.
