Rest in peace justice Ginsburg.

So many of us are thankful for your life, for your service to our country, and for the way that you’ve inspired us all.

While America really needs to take some time to celebrate the life of RBG and mourn her loss, we’re all on pins and needles wondering what’s going to happen to her spot. Will it be filled by a like-minded lawmaker, or will a more “pro-life” republican take her seat?

Understandably, many conservatives in the US believe that the latter will result in a big victory in the fight against abortion.

For many Christians, that’s the only issue.

If we can’t take care of the “least of these,” as Jesus put it, how can we care about anything else? And if a human fetus is a human, if it bears the human genome, or is at the least the beginning of the spatio-temporal chain that will become human, how can we call abortion a logical choice?

Unfortunately, this plays well into the hands of humanity’s urge to tribalism; a phenomenon that compels us to organize into groups based on a particular set of beliefs, suspicious of outsiders who don’t think like we do. As such, casting a vote for non-republican politics is a deeply immoral deed, resulting in little more than the continued slaughter of unborn innocents.

For a God-fearing Christian, the only way to vote is Republican.

Fiction

Since the 70’s, liberal administrations have done a far better job at stemming the tide of abortion in the US. Every administration has seen a drop, but the drop for liberals is significantly steeper (below: liberal administrations depicted in blue, conservative in red.)

You’ll find it interesting that this chart was compiled from CDC data by snopes.com in an article that suggested no correlation between abortion numbers and political parties.

“It is plain to see that abortion rates have risen (prior to their peaking in the mid-1980s) and fallen under both Democratic and Republican administrations, suggesting little to no correlation with whichever political party controls the White House. The overall trend since the 1980s has been a fairly consistent decline across through administrations of both parties.”

It’s also plain to see a sharper decrease in Democratic years, while the Republican numbers appear to be almost flat.

This data tells an interesting story, suggesting, among other things, that liberal politics are more effective in protecting the unborn than conservative politics. I’m left baffled at how the anti-abortion voter, someone who has put so much stock in the power of politics to protect human life, can support a system that has, historically speaking, done such an awful job.

Based on everything we know about abortion in the US, filling RBG’s seat with a pro-lifer probably won’t be a victory in this arena.

Who’s Side is God On?

I’d like to invite you to consider a sermon from Dr. Tony Evans on the importance of avoiding our temptation to go tribal when we approach politics, tying our hearts and minds to one party or the other.

Christians Shouldn’t Be Fully Committed to Either Party, Evans Says

I’m in firm agreement that a human fetus is a human life, I see no reason to believe otherwise. But placing political emphasis on one issue above all the other brokenness that’s in our laps has left us in a deep state of hypocrisy. We take a stance against injustice in the womb while simultaneously villifying those who claim injustice anywhere else because they don’t embrace our anti-abortion cause.

All the while, conservative politics, ironically, haven’t done much in support of our belief that “all lives matter.”

But, alas, single-issue tribalism is a powerful thing, especially because it’s been declared holy. It’s left us racially and politically segregrated from the conversations that we desperately need to engage, and kept us at arm’s length from the people and problems that God has called us to affect.