A Pro-life Manifesto: Part VI
I argued in Part V that the Catholic Church compromised its credibility by its toleration of scandal and allowed its irrational fear of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to deprive it of the courage of its convictions. What of our fellow Christians, especially our Evangelical brethren?
They suffer the ailment of all those separated from Rome: disunity. There are perhaps 50,000 Protestant sects. Without the centripetal force of the papacy, maligned for five centuries as the “whore of Babylon,” Protestants, protected, quoth Luther, from error by the Holy Spirit in their solitary meditations upon Scripture, have spun into a theological universe with no cosmological constant. The “liberalism” that so alarmed John Henry Newman almost two centuries ago has now led inexorably from a unified catechism to a cataclysm of explosively divergent doctrines.
The result? So-called “mainstream” denominations are quickly evolving into staunch defenders of “reproductive freedom” for women. Even Evangelicals taking pride in their fundamentalism have been peeling off into the eddies of theological commerce. Evangelicals like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis labor to ingratiate themselves with the liberal media, help in the election of liberals, beat the drums for wealth redistribution, wring their hands over discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — and endlessly seek “common ground” on the issue of whether it is okay to murder babies in the womb.
Harold
