Introduction
It is February, and thus it is Black History Month. The media is filled with affirmations of black people that are as offensively superior in their condescension as they are saccharine and superficial. The massive contributions of black people to American culture - let alone other cultures - cannot be quantified with such trite platitudes. Sing it Tom Petty: it’s Christmas - for black culture - all over . . . again.
So I will try to avoid clap-trap here. When it comes to issues as emotionally-charged as race, it’s best to focus: don’t throw your pearls at every squealing swine that crosses your path. Don’t waste your life barking at every issue. Speak to what is most important. Speak to the agonizing realities, the gremlins that plague black culture. One cannot say “I love my neighbor,” and remain silent about them.
Thinning the Herd
I will address the oldest and most evil of these gremlins: the eugenics project that we call abortion. “Eugenics” is a ten-dollar word for, “How some powerful white folk think the herd of other races should be thinned.” And how they have! Since Roe v. Wade, 62 million of our human herd have been culled. And a massively disproportionate number of those babies - tossed in bags like so much refuse - have been black. Black women make up 13% of the population, but they get 36% of the abortions.1 More truly put: black women kill their babies at a much higher rate than babies of other skin pigments.
Some will say it’s because systemic racism put black women in that position in the first place. Without arguing that point, there is this other inconvenient truth: Planned Parenthood has volitionally chosen to put disproportionately more of their locations within foot traffic of where black people live, now and throughout its history.2 If it’s because of systemic racism, then Planned Parenthood’s tactic is like someone opening noose and bathtub-toaster stores across the street from psychiatric facilities all across America. This is anything but “social justice.” This is the opposite of “health care.” The fictional “doublespeak” of Orwell’s 1984 is our present reality.
Yet the original intent of the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, has always been this: to simply have fewer black people in the world. Today the organization is trying to sanitize her name off the letterhead, but her awful desires carry on, powered and festered ironically by white, toxic femininity3. That is, by women who have been burdened by their guilt and led astray by their various passions, who have been weakened and captured by the leftist philosophies they learned on Instagram or from white preachers - err, I mean professors - at the secular temple we call State U.4 They are Sanger’s slaves, still working her plantation of death. Which is why I say this brand of femininity is toxic: because it believes that in order to save black women we have to kill them. You can pull out your Orwellian dictionary all you want, and call it “choice”, or “women’s rights”. But just one look at a bag of black babies’ body parts defies that empty sloganeering.5
Oh, For a Thousand “More Rebellious Members”
So do I. Count me among those who, in love for my fellow man and woman, defy this demonic logic. I will not lead the people of God to raise their voices in prim and proper hymns, within next-door earshot of this barbaric plantation, fastidiously ignoring the vocal chords of the vulnerable and the defenseless being cut. I defy Sanger, who wrote in a private letter to one Dr. Clarence J. Gamble: “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”6 Oh, good - Mrs. Sanger didn’t want to exterminate black people - just reduce their numbers. How comforting.
As a pastor, I could cover for Planned Parenthood, as Sanger wanted of Dr. Gamble. Many ministers do, to this day. Many serve as Sanger’s minions. Dr. Martin Luther King did.7 But then I would be serving another god, one who is no god at all - just the idolatry of our age. And then I would have blood-guilt on my hands. And just like Sanger’s name, you can wash off the blood, but the stain of the guilt goes a lot deeper. You can cover the horror of abortion with euphemisms, but it’s child sacrifice to the old-gods-dressed-up-as-new-ones all the same. And the guilt-ridden, lust-burdened white women who preside over the sacrifices as priests are assisted by a generation of men who are too emasculated by their own feminizing lusts to see it for what it is.8 In a less civilized time, we would call those guys “creeps.” Today they are “progressive.”
Emancipation Proclamation
The only way off this plantation of butchery and insanity is to listen to the voice of another Master. One who does not demand the blood sacrifice of life in order to give you life. For he has already given HIS life, his blood spilled on the ground, to cleanse us from all our noble butchery. Our guilt - all of it! - was placed on him, and he was killed, under God’s wrath, in our place. For all of it - your teenage abortion; your life of sexual “liberation”; your pressuring that girl that you “loved” - but whose name you can’t remember - to have an abortion; the pornography you digested that furthered those twin evils of sex trafficking and abortion; for preaching sermons that call righteousness evil and evil righteousness; for getting paid to administer abortions; for propagating the slaughter through executive orders - all of it was paid for, in the blood of Christ. Complete forgiveness - for those who trust in him.
And Jesus was then raised from the dead. Which makes him your King. Yet he holds out his hands, for you to have life. The life he lives he lives in utter goodness, peace, beauty, pleasure - as the Bible says, “abundant life.” And he calls to all, without prejudice: come, receive and live in this same newness of life. But you must leave behind the old philosophies and practices. And you can! He calls: you need only follow me, and trust me. Hear my call of emancipation, and walk towards me! This is not the call of a white preacher; nor is it the philosophy of “patriarchal, white evangelicalism”. No, not at all. It’s the call of one who
. . . had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?
9 And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied . . . (Isaiah 53:11)
“He shall see his offspring . . . He shall see and be satisfied.” Jesus died and was raised in order to be satisfied with his offspring - with those who are born again, by receiving his life, given for them. Will you? Will you believe the proclamation of emancipation, proclaimed to you by Christ himself? He was put through the worst anguish, that you, and your neighbor still attached to your girlfriend’s umbilical cord, might live.
Defiant Celebration
This is why this Sunday, in our church and others like it around the world, we will sing His praises. And in doing so, we defy Sanger, eugenics, and all the evil exterminators of our age. We will defiantly celebrate that we are His offspring - because in our vulnerable state of guilt before Him, He did not crush us and dispose of us as so much refuse, but was crushed himself, to give us grace and life forevermore, as a gift - all our atrocities covered by His blood. We will celebrate His welcoming us into His family, where we enjoy His perfect Fathering forevermore. We will celebrate because, in His Fathering, there is no prejudice because of color. And under His protective power, all the ravenous wolves who wait at the door of the womb or the soul are crushed. Then we will leave rejoicing, because worshiping him does not leave us with a deep residue of guilt and shame, but with clean freedom. His burden is light; his yoke is easy.
So much easier than the blood-thirsty yoke of our over-sexualized age. So we must turn, to Him. Because He will not endure the slaughter forever:
Isaiah 65 I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me;
I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me.
I said, “Here I am, here I am,”
to a nation that was not called by my name.
2 I spread out my hands all the day
to a rebellious people,
who walk in a way that is not good,
following their own devices;
3 a people who provoke me
to my face continually,
sacrificing in gardens
and making offerings on bricks . . .
5 . . . who say, “Keep to yourself,
do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.”
These are a smoke in my nostrils,
a fire that burns all the day.
6 Behold, it is written before me:
“I will not keep silent, but I will repay;
I will indeed repay into their lap
7 both your iniquities and your fathers’ iniquities together,
says the Lord;
because they made offerings on the mountains
and insulted me on the hills,
I will measure into their lap
payment for their former deeds.”
Either we turn, or He does. Either we repent and turn toward this gracious God for cleansing, or He will bring cleansing Himself. Before this holy, holy, holy God, there is no such thing as a “neutral middle”, and before His white-hot glory “American Exceptionalism” dissolves. America, and Uganda, and China - it all belongs to the risen King Jesus. And he will not restrain his hand forever. Turn, and turn we must.
Carol Swain, “Systematic Racism at Planned Parenthood”. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/systemic-racism-at-planned-parenthood
Ibid.
There has only been one other black president of Planned Parenthood, besides its current one.
2 Timothy 3:1-9
As G.K. Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy, “To admire mere choice, is to refuse to choose”. To say one is “against abortion but for choice” is to say nothing.
Ibid.
Dr. King received an award from Planned Parenthood. PP then used his acceptance speech for promo materials. See https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-gulf-coast/mlk-acceptance-speech
Thinking here of Theodore Dalrymple’s exemplary comment: “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” http://libertytree.ca/quotes_by/theodore+dalrymple