I excoriated yesterday, as I intended to, a Doug Wilson defender who chimed in on Wilson’s continuing attempt to position himself as a rational being regarding slavery and contemporary racism by suggesting that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, has been “ten times worse” for Black Americans than slavery was. This, he based on the number of abortions performed on Black women, which, he says, exceeds by a factor of 10 the number of kidnapped Africans and their descendants enslaved by the Confederacy.
So there, he says.
I found the attempt to minimalize the horror of chattel slavery by comparing it — on the basis of numbers only — with a woman’s decision to end her pregnancy beyond pathologically self-serving. Something about the equating of a 10-week-old fetus’ well-being and rights with that of a man, woman, or child held in the violent grip of “patriarchal Christian” slaveholders upset me. I hope it always does.
You can read the post; I won’t belabor my point further. But I would suggest that the pretense of giving a whit about the state of African-American citizens and the loss to that community of its aborted fetuses is doubtful — profoundly so — when the one who cares so deeply fails to grasp that the slavery he minimizes is part of what continues to plague Black America to this day.
Emancipation from the slavery he assures us wasn’t THAT bad did nothing to decrease bigotry and violence against Blacks; the “Christianity” of the racist Confederate die-hards did that. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Klan, lynchmobs, and the stinking theology of neo-Confederate “Sothrens” and Kinists ensured then and ensure now a grossly uneven playing field for people of color, most often in the name of Christ.
I don’t envy a man whose thinking is so muddled that he fails to consider that God will ask for an account of every careless word he speaks, perhaps most obviously when he wishes us to believe that his bizarre reasoning is the product of genuine care for the well-being of those whose previous enslavement he shrugs off. I’m not going to fall for it, a Holy God surely won’t, but a great many slavery apologists and neo-Confederates now have additional ammunition for their continued bleating about the unfair judgment slavery has brought against them.
Loving God with one’s mind would preclude that, of course. Loving God with one’s heart and soul would lead to repentance and grief. My prayer is that the classicist Christians who appreciate this man’s analysis would remember that their embrace of Western literature, art, music, and political history — not to mention abortion statistics — is a cheap counterfeit when accompanied by stubborn, obdurate hearts intent on defending what can only be condemned.