Pastors, are you accessories to murder?

By Andrew Longman

You may have heard.

The state of California is trying to force Christian churches to pay for abortions. It seems the tyranny of the state would know no bounds unless Christians decisively push it back.

It's like we're in a concentration camp, a death camp, and the prison guard comes to us and says, "In order that you may live, you must kill one of these, your fellow prisoners. If you do not kill an innocent one here, you will be shot instead. Now, which is it – you or them?"

I imagine there are a number of theological treatises intended for the Christian audience that ostensibly would help you decide such hypothetical dilemmas. But this parable, this hypothetical, is today quite real.

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Let us suppose something less dire for the killer. What if there was typhoid in the prison camp, and you were healthy. Suppose guards told you that only medical care would be denied to you if you refused to murder your fellow prisoner.

Of course, I am asking the Christians about this. I'm not really interested in a humanist analysis of mechanical cost and benefit; universal abortion is humanism's worshiped epiphany.

Still easier: What if the prison guard told you that one only had to pay for the killing of your fellow prisoner with money? A prison guard would perform the messy killing, but you had to pay the executioner's labor, for the gas chamber, and so on. Would that make the killing more palatable to you? Would you do it?

Now, for churches in California who have just found out that the state is trying to force them to pay proxies to kill innocent children, I have this to say: If you agree, even for one day, that you are going to pay for the murder of innocent people, the prison guard will come to you in the morning and say that the administration is no longer satisfied with just money for the cause. They will require greater participation. Contrastingly, if the prisoners were to trust God with their health and commit their path to righteousness, come what may, the jailers would run out of co-murderers. Murder, it seems, might die of loneliness in the presence of mere conscience.

Yet what if the pious prisoners petitioned the prison system and requested that they be exempted from paying for the murder of others? Surely the very act of petitioning (while still paying) absolves their legal guilt as their fellows plunge into the furnace? Perhaps the prison graciously considers to hear the case, though, of course, the review might take some time. In the interim, the death-camp might require that you continue to kill other prisoners if you, in fact, still want medication to prevent typhoid? Fair deal? As long as all emotions have been expressed and your voice heard? Never mind the voice of the innocent – that scream is so irrational.

Would you recognize that the state – saying you must murder while litigating murder's cessation – is trying to just make a mockery of your convictions and show you for the fraud that you are – such that it may announce it has exterminated your beliefs? And suppose the review period lasted 20 months. Would you be entirely clear in your conscience before God with keeping up with the killing during the carping? After all, we must be submissive to the authority! At the end of 20 months of killing, when it deigned to grant you your exemption from further killing, would you be a murderer? Or would you speak indignantly about how you stuck to your principles by sending 10 bucks to the ACLJ?

California pastors who file a complaint with the state objecting to forced-pay for abortion – but who retain their killer health-care policies while waiting on some languid secular appeal – are accessories to murder.

Now, I respect there will be very pious reasons for being accomplices, such as the importance of providing medical care to staff and "obeying the government." But the Bible is clear that wherever the law of man transgresses the law of God, Christians are to obey God rather than that of men.

The proposition that Christian pastors should agree to pay money for murders so that pastors may retain medical care for church staff is tantamount to Nazi collaboration; you cannot knowingly send the Jews to the gas chamber in order to be admitted to the Reich hospital.

But of course, it is not like medical care is being denied to Christians who dump their abortion insurance. There are many alternatives for getting medical care when California insurance is not an option. Medical care and medical insurance are two different things. And to stand up for care – real care that God provides – there is a stark, distinguishing feature.

You have to pay.

Andrew Longman is a Christian and an applied scientist.