The Evangelical Logic Fail on Abortion
Is being born worth an eternity in hell?
There’s a meme circulating around social media that pictures a bunch of aborted babies in heaven looking down at the Earth and bemoaning “If only we could have lived!”
The picture is worth a thousand words. First of all, all the babies are white. There is nothing surprising here, being that “only white people matter” is a foundational tenet of this sect’s belief system.
More interesting, though, is their location in heaven. For this is where all logic gets lost in the Evangelical brain. First of all, if I were in the Christian Heaven, Earth would be among the last places I would wish to leave it for. Because the odds would be stacked against me.
White first-world Christians have a sheltered view of the realities of life for the vast majority of people on Earth. According to the U.N., 25,000 people die per day from hunger alone. A casual glance at this planet would be enough to put anyone off of voluntarily coming here. The odds of falling victim to starvation, sex trafficking, drug addiction, disease, torture, mental illness, war, natural disaster, and a hundred other nightmares are much greater than those of escaping them.
And even those of us white people in the first world are far from immune from fates that may make us wish we had never been born.
But that’s not even the worst of it. According to Evangelicalism, everyone who does not follow certain tenets of their theology is destined for an eternity of torment in hell. And given the minuscule proportion of Evangelicals among Earth’s population, the odds are even worse for escaping this calamity, which, unlike the others, does not end upon death.
So then, let’s revisit the meme from a more realistic perspective. I don’t remember how many white babies were in it, but six is probably a close guess. Given that the world’s population was estimated at 7.9 billion in 2022, the odds are that most of these aborted babies would not be white. Maybe one or two of them would be born in the first world. Maybe a few them would be born into some type of Christianity, and only one of those may beat the odds and get into an Evangelical family.
Basically, these six aborted babies are sitting up there in Christian heaven wishing they could trade this fate for different ones that may well go something like this:
- Born in Sudan, Muslim, starves to death as a child in a war, spends eternity in hell, or
- Born in India, Hindu, lured into sex slavery by human traffickers promising employment, dies of AIDS, spends eternity in hell, or
- Born in Mexico, Catholic, becomes a cop, tortured to death by a drug cartel after watching his wife and kids suffer the same “punishment,” spends eternity in hell, or
- Born in the U.S , Mormon, lives a full, happy life, dies of old age, spends eternity in hell, or
- Born in Thailand, Buddhist, gets addicted to pain killers and heroin, becomes homeless, dies of hepatitis, spends eternity in hell, or
- Born in Canada, Evangelical, groomed and raped by a youth pastor, blamed for “seducing” him and forced to apologize to the church, leaves the faith, dies of chronic alcoholism, spends eternity in hell.
Even if you believe that life is worth living no matter what happens to you, the hell part destroys any argument for wanting to be born. Evangelicalism teaches that we should focus on our eternal life, not our immediate, secular experience. And yet, in their opposition to abortion, evangelicals claim that 80 years on this planet are worth a near certain eternity of torment in hell.
If I were still an Evangelical, I would support abortion rights as a way to keep more people out of hell. For even if you luck up into a wonderful life, it’s not worth that eternal torment just because you were born into a family and a religion that was not Evangelical.
And I would take it a step further. If I believed that everyone outside of my religion was destined to the Christian hell, I would not even have children. “Raising them up in the Word” is far from a guarantee they will not stray from the faith. Indeed, the fastest outflow from Evangelicalism today seems to consist of the kids who were raised in it.
It makes no sense at all. No degree of mysteriousness in God’s ways can rescue this argument from the jaws of absurdity.
