The Church in Post-Roe America

Finished Writing This Book!

Thanks for your patience as I was away finishing the writing of my next book, followed by a family vacation back in our hometown. As I may have mentioned, this is the hardest book I’ve written yet because so much of it is so personal. I found myself halting repeatedly and thinking, Do I really want to say that?

But, at the end of it, I find myself more sobered than ever about the realities facing American Christianity and more hopeful than ever about what I think God is doing under the surface of all the wreckage.

The manuscript is done and delivered to the publishers. More on that later.

The Church in Post-Roe America

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade, some people are wondering who’s up and who’s down in terms of getting or claiming power. And while those kinds of people are usually the loudest, they don’t represent most people who are asking the question “What do we do to carry a pro-life vision into caring for women and children in crisis in our communities?”

For others, the question itself is the problem.

Critics will point out that many of the states most likely to restrict abortion (such as the plaintiff in this case, my home state of Mississippi) also have high rates of infant mortality, higher likelihood of women dying in childbirth, and higher rates of hunger and poverty. They will also emphasize that these states often have the thinnest social safety nets for people in poverty or without health insurance.

Like many others, churches are asking, “How do we care for these women and children?” Yet those with a cynical view of pro-life Christians see this as a deflection from the issue of government policies that might actually benefit poor and struggling women and their children—those most likely to be vulnerable to the abortion industry.

For some, the cynicism comes from seeing the abortion debate as only a strategy to motivate voters. But the typical pro-life Christian asking about the next steps of ministry is quite likely already working to serve such women and children—whether by giving financial assistance, helping to get children out of the foster care system, or repairing families torn apart by substance abuse.

Typical pro-life Christians are seldom the people “owning” their political or cultural opponents on social media. After all, they’re usually engaged in persuading others to see the value of vulnerable human life and to not give in to the “solutions” offered by the abortion industry or the pressure of a boyfriend or husband or parents who want the “problem” just to go away.

Pro-life believers involved in this work don’t demonize the women they are trying to persuade; they serve them.

In any given community, I rarely, if ever, have to look in different places to find the people who lead the day-by-day work of on-the-ground pro-life ministry, who help orphaned or hungry children, who tangibly care for refugees and immigrants, and who help women escape abusive situations. Those calling attention to the vulnerable are almost always the very ones who are serving them and equipping others to do the same—and they usually transcend the expected tribal boundary markers to do so.

The cynics might say, “Yes, but that’s not nearly enough,” and that would be fair.

Some people who oppose social safety nets for the poor of various kinds will say, “If the churches were doing their job, we wouldn’t need the government or society to get involved.” In response, the cynics will point to the data—that even if every church were doing everything possible, we would not eradicate poverty—to suggest that such talk is about charity, not policy.

Even aside from such skepticism, the church wanting to care for the poor might look at the same charts and wonder, What can we really do to change any of this? This sense of despair can then lead to inaction and inward focus.

Neither despair nor cynicism is seeing the issue rightly, though.

Indeed, we need policy changes to better care for vulnerable women and children. Policies like this—radically different in approach—are coming from such divergent sources as democratic socialist Elizabeth Bruenig and Republican U.S. senator Mitt Romney. The merits of these and many other policy reforms will be debated along prudential lines, determining whether they can deliver on the help they promise.

Yet the longer term will require more than even the best solutions policy can bring. It will require convicted consciences that actually care for the vulnerable people in need—both born and unborn.

Church ministries that help women find alternatives to abortion, assist those women in caring for their children, combat poverty and homelessness, and reform an overburdened and often malfunctioning foster care system are—first and foremost—about the individual lives being served.

The key pro-life insight is that a life’s worth is not about power, “viability,” or state of dependence. Each life is, as the saying goes, an entire world.

But it is also important to understand how such care shapes and forms our consciences to pay attention to those we might otherwise keep invisible.

Eboo Patel would not agree with me on the abortion issue, but he does understand how social reform movements work. In his new book, We Need to Build, Patel makes the case that civic institutions at the local level can lead to change at the national level.

He points out the example of Jane Addams’s Hull House, which cared for the poor and immigrants on the West Side of Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. Through Hull House, Patel argues, Addams not only cared for thousands of poor people, many of them children, but she also led the house to be a kind of “laboratory” that showed the rest of the world what was possible.

“For virtually every problem that they discovered in Chicago, they modeled a concrete solution,” Patel writes. Those who thought adolescents in such environments were doomed to delinquency and crime saw how Hull House changed young people’s lives. Those who expected people to gather only in saloons saw a different model. Those who thought different ethnic groups or classes could not find common ground saw those tensions overcome at Hull House. Those who thought women didn’t have the intellect to lead saw a thriving example of Addams doing just that.

The fact that local presence can shape consciences by modeling a different reality should be of no surprise to Christians. The late theologian (and Christianity Today’s first editor in chief) Carl F. H. Henry argued that the church is called not just to evangelical proclamation but also to evangelical demonstration. The church, he said, is to “mirror in microcosm” what the future kingdom of God will be like.

“Never is the church more effective in doing so than when she provides a living example in her own ranks of what new life in Christ implies, and never is she more impotent than when she imposes new standards on the world that she herself neglects,” Henry wrote. “A social ethic is not some kind of bureaucratic imposition by the church upon the world, but a mirroring to the world of the joys and benefits of serving the living God.”

That’s what the church of the New Testament did in caring for not just the majority-culture widows but the Greek ones too (Acts 6:1–7). James, the brother of Jesus, sought justice for the vulnerable poor who were being harmed (James 5:1–6) and called for the church to embody a picture of the coming kingdom in which the poor are equal heirs by faith (2:1–14). This starts, he wrote, with a choice as seemingly trivial as who sits where in church.

There is real power in churches like that—who not only call the government to do its job in protecting the most vulnerable among us from the womb outward but also embody what it means to love, in word and in deed, those whom others classify as “problem pregnancies” or “burdens on society.”

No church can do everything, of course. And learning how to serve people effectively involves failing and persevering in the search for what works. But a church that consistently and self-sacrificially lives out a pro-life vision will be a catalyst not only for saving and serving countless lives but also for awakening and reshaping many consciences in the long term.

Are Churches Changing Ministries After Dobbs?

Last week, I asked you to let me know what your churches are doing to care for women and children in crisis. Have your efforts changed at all in light of Dobbs, or are you doing what you’ve been doing for years? What have you seen work to help apathetic churches come alive in some way—whether through pregnancy resource centers or foster care ministry or any other initiative? Where did you fail?

I am learning a lot from the messages many of you have sent already. If you haven’t responded yet, please do (to questions@russellmoore.com). And let me know if I can use your name. (I won’t unless you give me permission.)

In a future newsletter, I’ll discuss some of the things I’ve learned from y’all on this.

What Bookstores Have to Do with Bible Reading

If you don’t receive my friend Tish Harrison Warren’s weekly newsletter from the New York Times, you really should sign up. It is well worth your time every Sunday morning. This week she addresses a subject I bring up all the time: what we’ve lost with the closure of so many bookstores around the country.

I feel guilty whenever I go on such rants because (a) our recycling bin is full of Amazon boxes and (b) it sounds too much like when my grandparents would complain about the loss of drive-in movie theaters or malt shops.

Even so, Tish makes the excellent point that one key thing bookstores bring is serendipity. You scan the covers, read random pages, and come across books you might never otherwise see or know about.

Amazon is great, and I use it all the time. But the strength of Amazon is also its weakness. Amazon knows what you like. The algorithm picks up on what you’ve already bought and nudges you toward other books like that. Again, that’s helpful—like having a friend who says, “You like Wendell Berry, so I’ll bet you’d like Marilynne Robinson” or something like that.

But by itself, this sort of algorithm can mean there are all sorts of books you might love but never know exist—all sorts of changes you might make if only you had a surprise prompt rather than a prediction.

The more I’ve thought about it this week, the more I’ve realized that reading Scripture is a lot like the kind of surprises that can come with bookstores.

There’s a place and a time for going to specific passages for specific questions or in specific times of need (repentance: Psalm 51; worry: Matthew 6; and so on). But much of what we need from Scripture, by God’s grace, comes to us ahead of time, in ways we can’t map out. We don’t know that we need Nehemiah or how relevant it is to us at the moment, but we walk through it anyway. And we find God doing startling things with it—if not now, then later, when what’s embedded in our hearts is exactly what we need.

This week’s submission comes from reader Clyde Austin, an East Tennessee native who now lives in Kinston, North Carolina. Clyde writes that he would like to have done a bookstore instead of a shelf because he looks at his shelf and thinks, How could you leave that out? Here’s his list:

1. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (Alfred Lansing)—This is just simply the best book I have read on courageous servant leadership.

2. Lost in the Wild: Danger and Survival in the North Woods (Cary Griffith)—Not giving up, from the perspective of the searchers and the lost.

3. What’s So Amazing about Grace? (Philip Yancey)—Grace, just grace. I could have picked multiple books from Yancey.

4. The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Henri Nouwen)—God uses us in our weaknesses, not in our strengths. Keeps my ego in check.

5. Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best (Eugene Peterson)—More servant leadership, following God when it scares us to death.

6. The Finished Work of Christ: The Truth of Romans 1–8 (Francis Schaeffer)—The best thing I have read on Romans.

7. Paul: A Biography (N. T. Wright)—So helpful, made Paul so very real. And more understandable.

8. The Old Man and the Boy, and The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older (Robert Ruark)—This is about life and growing up, and just a fun read. Really two books, but since I had them in one volume, I decided to put both on my bookshelf.

9. King’s Cross (Timothy Keller)—There is so much to pick from that Keller has written. This is just grace, the gospel.

10. Mere Christianity (C. S. Lewis)—How do you pick one from C. S. Lewis? Just go with the classic.

11. Alcoholics Anonymous (Bill W)—I am alive because of this book, and it led me to Jesus.

12. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)—This is about life, how messy we all are, and how God keeps pursuing us.

Clyde writes, “I could add another twenty without a problem but then would want another dozen besides that. Feel like I shortchanged Philip Yancey, N. T. Wright, Henri Nouwen, and C. S. Lewis but tried not to do two from the same author.”

Thank you, Clyde!

What do you think? If you were stranded on a desert island and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you for the rest of your life, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like.

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Onward,
Russell Moore