An Open Letter to Rob Schenck

Rob,

I had thought a point by point examination of your editorial would be the approach to take in answering your justification of the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade. Indeed, I have spent days pouring over your editorial piece to that end. There are so many manifestly wrong assertions – of the law of love, of reason, of judgment – that a full answer becomes, was it not on a matter so manifestly at the heart of God, nearly picayune.

Tell me I am wrong if I have misinterpreted your editorial. This is its sum and substance:

It is wrong to overrule Roe vs. Wade because there is an insufficient social safety net to support women whose impoverished existence prevents them from being the kinds of mothers that can give to their children the love, care, and sustenance necessary to their formation.

Thus, you will hoist children on petards you charge the church and the larger society either (a) with having created, or (b) with having at least maintained, or (c) at a very minimum, with having failed to deconstruct. In essence, you make the church and the larger society bearers of the bloodguilt of children killed by abortion because, as you seem now to see matters, a child’s mother cannot be directed by law to reject the death of another as an answer to fear or difficulty.

You don’t seem to be able to bring yourself to the stage where you propagate your newfound support for Roe by circulating photos of yourself licking a cake festooned with the message, “Abortion is Healthcare” as did Miley Cyrus recently. Indeed, you claim that every abortion is “a tragedy,” and every live birth is “ideal.” But you do not explain why these assertions are so. And you certainly do not explain why, if the reasons that these assertions are so are, as I suspect they are, why you would oppose restoring the once clear standard of legal protection for uterine children.

I think this is what you are not saying aloud but must be thinking:

Every abortion is a tragedy because it ends the life of a child in being. Every live birth of a child is ideal because such births continue in each being a life cycle of hope and the promise of entry into a life-giving relationship with the Creator God.

Is this why every abortion is a tragedy? Is this why every birth is ideal?

There are, of course, many ways to come to the question of whether an action should or should not be the subject of a positive prohibition in law.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King experienced frustration in confronting a society of self-styled Christians that exhibited the most ungodly despite and abuse of their fellows based simply on the color of their skin. He yearned for all men to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And many folks of fairer skin joined him in that yearning. But he wanted more than that. 

He wanted changes in the law that would afford equal status under law to colored people, so that they could enjoy, with the white man, the accommodations, businesses, and affairs of civil society unburdened by rank prejudice.

To that yearning, however, many fairer skinned folk balked. It asked, they argued, too much to enact positive prohibitions into federal law before hearts and minds were converted by the law of love. Let hearts and minds be won, then let laws be changed.

For this, though, Dr. King would not wait. He argued, as one might on a mound of God’s Word, that the civil rights laws should be enacted with dispatch, and not after hearts and minds were trained. Rather, as Paul to the Romans, Dr. King to his Christian interlocutors posed that it was right that the law should be changed so that it could teach the hearts and so that it could ameliorate the wrongs.

Dr. King explained:

“It may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed. And so there is a need for strong legislation constantly to grapple with the problems we face.”

You know that when the Apostles forbade abortion as a moral act, in the Didache, it was simply a restatement of the law of love, that we should not do to another, the nascent child, what we would not have done to ourselves.

And when the English common law, at least as long ago as the 13th Century, as confirmed by Henry de Bracton’s On the Laws and Customs of England, had concluded that abortion is a homicide of a living human, it did so for precisely the same reason. De Bracton wrote, "If there is anyone who strikes a pregnant woman or gives her a poison which produces an abortion, if the foetus be already formed or animated, and especially if it be animated, he commits homicide." 

William Blackstone explained the basis for the law this way: “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother's womb.”

Dr. King knew that the law should teach rightly, and thus should make a positive legal wrong of the morally wrong act of race hatred. 

So too the Apostles, the common law, and the positive statute laws of this Nation prior to Roe vs. Wade taught rightly that the human child in the uterus was a living being, a human one, and fully possessed of the natural rights endowed on each of us, at the moment we came into being, at conception, and not by passage through the magical gateway of the cervix.

You are at a crossroads, Rob. 

You must choose. It will be insufficient for those who have welcomed your editorial for you to merely assert, as you have, that Roe should maintain its legal status while begrudging that every abortion is a tragedy.

Lincoln understood how corrupting of the heart and mind the gospel of death could be. So, in addressing another evil, contumacious of the Imago Dei in every African slave, he put the slavers’ case as the slavers saw things:

“Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.”

And that certainty of moral right in the decision to snuff the life of a child out in the womb is what allows Miley Cyrus to lick the abortion cake, and allows thousands of adoring fans of child murder to applaud her depiction of doing so. But it is not just that she must be allowed to celebrate the moral rightness of abortion while you bemoan – in 90-pound weakling fashion – its tragic proportions. As Lincoln put the case for the slaver, so you must see the case for the abortionistas: full national recognition as a legal right and a social blessing.

Sadly, you are along the path to granting all that they ask because, while you claim to see every abortion as tragic, you reject the gracefully direct and instructive act of restoring the legal status of the uterine child as it was before the aberration of Roe and its progeny.

Indeed, as Lincoln continued regarding slavery, you must decide regarding abortion: 

“Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement.”

Only fools lay in the center of the road, Rob. 

There is no chance for life there. There is no chance for having God take delight in your soul there. Either choose life or choose death. But put an end to the mincing about the question. 

Frankly acknowledge that the lives of every black baby taken by an abortionist and given by its mother represents a grievous moral wrong that society can only correctly mark as a homicide. Or, celebrate the power of the poor to liberate themselves from the quaint notions of a curious desert religion.

Jim Henderson

Rob Schenck: The Armor of Light, or the Disarmer of Right

I haven't been invited to a screening. Nor have I been provided an advance review copy on DVD of the Disney documentary, "The Armor of Light."

These days -- when the choice is lights, water, food vs. movie tickets for a documentary that is, frankly, a preposterously stupid attack on good people exercising Godly discernment, well, I'm sticking with food, lights, water.

If Rev. Rob Schenck​ wants to send me a copy of his documentary, I'll provide an updated commentary. In the meantime, I'm simply going to respond to Rob's publicized comments on the topic.

To put things in perspective, I became acquainted with Rob and his identical twin brother, Paul, when I served as counsel for Operation Rescue back in 1992, when local abortion businesses sued for an injunction to prohibit the nonviolent antiabortion group from conducting sit-ins at Buffalo, New York, abortion stores. The Schenck brothers were, at the time, co-pastors of a Buffalo church.

I have assisted Schenck, his brother, Paul, and co-laborers of theirs, such as Reverend Patrick Mahoney​, in numerous matters.

Among those matters:

• I convinced the Marshal of the US Supreme Court to discontinue a long-standing practice of prohibiting small groups to pray on the Plaza at the Supreme Court. The Schencks and Mahoney would have the benefit of that decision from then to today, allowing them to gather and pray for the Court, its work, its justices, its decisions, annually on the National Day of Prayer. 

• When the District of Columbia threatened regulatory enforcement action after Faith and Action set up a Ten Commandments Monument in the front yard of the ministry's office across from the Supreme Court, I corresponded with the District and the threats were withdrawn.

• After a federal district court in the Schencks' hometown of Buffalo imposed speech restrictions on pro-life activists near abortion businesses in Western New York, I served as co-counsel in the matter, assisting them in both the US Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court in their challenges to those speech limitations. 

So, frankly, there is a history with Rob.

Not a deep one, as I had enjoyed, for example, with Pat Mahoney, who seemed to have me on speed dial to assist with legal aspects of pro-life and pro-religious liberty activism, but a history nonetheless.

Nothing about that history would have led me to anticipate Rob Schenck's Marcus Junius Brutus style knifing of pro-life Evangelical and Catholic Christians. Allow me to elucidate.

"Rob Schenck, long opposed to abortion, now opposes Christians owning guns"

That's what the lede screams in a recent Religion News Service article about Rob Schenck and the upcoming release of the new documentary. Of course, I would gladly welcome Rob's correction of this lede from the Religion News Service. Does he, in fact, oppose Christians owning guns?

If you have the chance to converse with Rob when he visits your church, you might ask him, "Do you oppose Christians owning guns?" That question, by the way, is one capable of a simple "yes" or "no" answer. Of course, the theology supporting his view, whatever it is, would be a welcome addition to any answer he might provide.

In that same Religion News Service article, Rob is either badly misquoted, or badly informed. 

Consider this assertion attributed to Rob, which he makes, apparently, when visiting churches to talk about the issue of gun violence:

Every person who carries in your congregation is prepared to kill someone today. Are you helping them with that decision as a Christian?

That is an ill presumption not formed well on the facts or informed well of the minds and hearts of those who go about bearing arms. Why does Schenck say that such people are going about "prepared to kill someone today"? How perverse that is to another truth, one that is actually informed by the thoughts and intents of good, but well-armed, people. That other truth is this: 

Every person who carries in your congregation is prepared to save lives today. Have you encouraged them in good work they are prepared to do?

Mere semantics?

Well, I suppose.

We could ask the millions killed by the Third Reich, who, unarmed, could not engage in the blessed ministry of life, saving others, themselves, women, children, the elderly, from savage brutality and murder. We could ask them but, alas, they are dead. Disarmed before the opportunity to engage in the life-saving ministry of the exercise of Godly discernment and Godly force, they cannot now tell us whether there is a difference between being prepared to go about killing and being prepared to go about saving lives.

Rob has had the opportunity to be challenged in his newly found views by others.

He says, "pro-life colleagues say to me, ‘More babies are aborted than adults are shot, so why are you taking this on?’” Well, no one has to be a one-note Johnny, so I suppose the question is a bit silly as stated. One can be working daily at their job, developing skills in their ministry, relating to family, friends, neighbors, and engaged in a host of other activities. So being criticized for "taking this issue on now" seems, at least to me, silly. You see, the problem is not Rob's timing. It's Rob's thinking.

He offered this explanation for taking the issue on:

“[E]very life is of equal value.” Well, at the level of generalities it is true enough. But the failure to recognize that a nine-year-old boy's life, taken in a murderous act in an urban alley, is of equal value to the gang-bangers, prevented the continuation in this life of Tyshawn Lee. So, honestly, it is an unhelpful truth to say that "every life is of equal value."

Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian killed by the Nazis for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler testifies contrarily. Bonhoeffer's actions testified that Hitler's life was not equal in value to the lives of Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, the prisoners of war, and the millions of others that would continue to be killed by Hitler's blood feud against Europe. Bonhoeffer, no doubt, struggled in coming to his fatal conclusion, that Hitler's life was worth less.

Bonhoeffer might well be a kind of model for Rob, but the effect of that model is a mirror reverse. Bonhoeffer came to the crisis of Nazism's rise and dominance on the continent a pacifist. He left it a conspirator seeking the assassination of Hitler and the overthrow of the Nazi regime. Here is a brief excerpt from a wonderful National Review article, republished on the 70th anniversary of Bonhoeffer's excommunication and exultation to glory:

Bonhoeffer’s part in the conspiracy was to work with the Allied authorities, specifically the British, to obtain their assurance that they would negotiate a peace with the post-Hitler government. Unfortunately, British prime minister Winston Churchill had decided that for propaganda purposes his nation’s enemy had to be not just the Nazis but all Germans, and he refused to cooperate with the conspirators or even acknowledge them. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt did the same. That decision delayed the end of the Nazi regime and ultimately doomed the anti-Hitler forces within Germany. There were at least three major conspiracies working against Hitler at the time, and the membership of these groups was overwhelmingly Christian.

While involved in one of these conspiracies, Bonhoeffer wrote an extraordinary essay, “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943,” in which he summarized his thinking about Christian duty and reiterated his views on the real source of good works:

“Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God — the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.”

Rob, as portrayed in the article, is fond of rephrasing well-known aphorisms in ways that impute ill intent and dark hearts to those who will bear arms. For example, there is a saying, "An armed society is a polite society." Rob's more loquacious restatement charges the circumstance with evil hearted darkness:

When people take a gun on their body, even if only to protect themselves and their loved ones, it changes the relationship you have with another human being because it suggests, at least, that if we find ourselves in conflict, you will be injured or die and I will survive and those are the terms of our relationship.

Really? So you support Trump, another supports Cruz. The resulting dinner table conflict will result in someone being wounded or killed? The hyperbole is great in this one. 

Why is Rob's take on conscientious gun ownership so disposed to perceive evil in the minds and hearts of gun owners? Why not say, instead, "When people are armed for self-defense and the defense of others, it assures those that are unable to do so that someone will stand for them when evil would strike at them?"

Oddly, Schenck serves as a religious liberties adviser to Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, a fact I became aware of when he published it on his Facebook account. No word whether the Bush campaign yet feels the need to distance itself from this new opponent of the natural right of self-defense. Remember, as Governor, Jeb Bush signed Florida's Stand Your Ground Law, the much-ballyhooed statute permitting the use of force, including lethal firearms,  Of course, the Bush campaign has other, more pressing worries, like whether it can survive to the primaries.

Schenck does seem intent on making a brouhaha about his views. That is evident from his decision to go on the offensive against the National Rifle Association. In the article, Schenck is noted to express "concern about how much the 5 million-member organization is shaping the[] mindset" of their evangelical Christian members. Speaking from both sides of his mouth, Schenck is quoted as saying, “I’m not anti-NRA” while criticizing NRA messages as "fostering a culture that suggests to people they can solve the problem of security threats to themselves and others by simply buying a gun and using it[.]"

It as this point in the article when bad exegesis of God's Word gets pressed into service to try and place Rob's views on a foundation of Holy Writ. Schenck invokes the incident during the Passion of Christ when Christ rebukes Peter for drawing a sword and using it to defend the Lord from capture. But Rob fails to address the unique character of the events of the Passion, and he neglects to balance that supposed doctrinal footing against other passages of the Bible in which God commands that plows be beaten into swords. Peter's natural response was unnatural in light of God's design. It is important to note, though, that Jesus didn't rebuke Peter for using the very same sword to protect women, infants, children from criminals or tyrants.

On one point, I can agree somewhat with Rob. He believes that many who are opposed to new restrictions on gun ownership and use are motivated by fear.

True enough.

I fear the moment when good people allow themselves to be disarmed, or worse, because of our republican form of government, order themselves to be disarmed. Doing so makes sheep of men, and strips families and communities of their nearest, natural (and therefore God-designed) defenders and protectors against crime and tyranny. Now we know that Rob is being half again too cute though in word choice and reasoning with this last point. He makes fear out as "a failure of faith, so it is a contradiction to the Christian life and message.” Yes, true enough. But that fear is the failure to place one's trust in God. Those who arm themselves because to do so is to keep tyranny and crime at bay do not go about in the faithless fear of the doubter. Rather they go about in the informed, reasoned understanding that broken man has seldom failed to plumb the depths of evil, and so to be armed is to be ready to prevent broken man from violating the image of God in others by heinous crimes and imperious interposition.

When Rob recently posted on Facebook that he had a "confession to make," I paid attention. I don't know Rob well. Perhaps he had one of the common garden variety vices? We had just then seen that R.C. Sproul got stepped back by the Board of Ligonier Ministries when he advised them that his email address would be revealed as part of the Ashley Madison email reveal. As it turned out, though he would not say anything about the relationship between his organization's financial need and his troubling decision to go to war with the Christian doctrine of justifiable force, his "confession" was one of pride. He stated that he had never asked for funding for Faith and Action, and had declined to do so because he enjoyed the appearance on not having to do so in order to survive as a ministry.

His decision to become an apologist for Christian disarmament, an apologist for a reckless, and unscriptural, view of self-defense and defense of others, and an antagonist within the pro-life movement, already often enough fractured, but now being fractured again by his taunt that one cannot be pro-life and pro-gun, these things, appear to be compelling Rob and his ministry to pay a financial exaction. Donations, according to the article, are down.

Not only are donations down, but, from appearances, his views have earned him some distance from pro-life leaders, and some admiration from rather strange bedfellows. Where Schenck's views opposing gun ownership were expressed, in the documentary, he is confronted by Troy Newman, of Operation Rescue, who rejects Schenck's take on the matter: “You’re afraid of firearms; I’m not.” On the other hand, an officer of the National Council of Churches, a liberal bastion, spoke glowingly of Rob's conscience-driven transformation: “I could see Rob was willing to go where his conscience was leading him even though this put him at a crossroads with his tribe. That’s one of the most difficult choices a person can make.”

Perhaps Rob's new course is fixed and unalterable. He is, however, a man, and unlike God, he can change. I hope that he does so, that he comes to his senses and turns from this unfortunate damaging dalliance with the notion that Christianity calls us to unilateral disarmament in the face of bullies and tyrants.