Why This Sounds Foreign to Christian Ears

The strangeness is itself evidence

A fair-minded reader may accept the arguments and still feel the conclusion is alien — not the faith they grew up in. The treatise takes that feeling seriously as a piece of evidence, and asks the diagnostic question: if this was ordinary Christian teaching within living memory, why does it now sound foreign?

The first answer is Paul’s warning: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Left untended, a Christian mind absorbs the assumptions of its age without deciding to. The strangeness may not be measuring this teaching against Scripture at all, but against assumptions breathed in from the culture and mistaken for the faith. The test is never “does this feel familiar?” but “does this survive the renewal of the mind by the Word?”

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A flattened view of man — and a silent pulpit

Over the last century, a broadly evolutionary picture of man has eroded the sharp scriptural distinction between man and beast. If man is only the most developed animal, his dignity has no secure floor: it becomes a sentiment extended by capacity, and revisable downward. Few Christians would say the embryo’s worth depends on his development — but many feel the loss of an early child as smaller, and that unexamined feeling is the flattened picture at work beneath a still-orthodox creed.

And there is a simpler reason: for a generation and more the church in these islands has largely not taught on this at all. But silence is never empty — where the church declines to teach, the culture teaches its own creed of autonomy instead, the condition of a people where “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6). That silence is recent, and it has to be explained.

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The Great Reversal

There was nothing inevitable about evangelical silence on public sin. Wesley’s last surviving letter — six days before his death in 1791 — urged Wilberforce on against the slave trade, “that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature.” The Clapham Sect spent decades mobilising Christians to change the law on a moral question, and won. Spurgeon’s American publishers burned his sermons rather than print his abolitionism, and he preached on.

Then, in the early twentieth century, the movement inverted — the swing historians call the Great Reversal (Moberg, 1972): recoiling from the liberal “social gospel,” many evangelicals recoiled from public obedience altogether. Within a generation, “politics” was worldly, social action a distraction, and the private sphere off-limits to the pulpit. Scripture will not have it: “whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). And the decades in which the church learned silence were exactly the decades when the questions of life and birth were decided.

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Comfortable Christianity

The fifth reason is not about ideas absorbed but courage lost: a church willing to speak, but only where speaking is safe. The modern church can find its voice to condemn whatever the culture has already condemned, and loses it before the largest ongoing destruction of human life in the nation’s history — a question that implicates the whole political class, and our own families. That is not moral courage; it is reputation management, the pattern Jesus rebuked in Matthew 23:23.

And silence has a body count. The church’s quiet handed the definition of “reproductive freedom” to a movement with a frankly stated eugenic vision: Sanger’s organisation became Planned Parenthood; Stopes opened Britain’s first birth-control clinic in 1921, and the provider bearing her name renamed itself in 2020 to escape her support for eugenics. The treatise is careful — it does not claim the pioneers were themselves the abortionists — but the institutions they founded now end hundreds of thousands of lives a year.

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The creed of autonomy — and why strangeness is not the verdict

Beneath it all lies one creed: “my body, my choice.” Scripture denies its premise at the root — “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20) — and the slogan fails again at the decisive point, because the conceived child is not the mother’s body at all but a separate human being with his own body, DNA, sex and life. The creed collapses twice over.

None of this proves the series’ argument; that case is made elsewhere from Scripture, history and the documented mechanisms. What this treatise clears away is the obstacle: the feeling of strangeness is not a reliable guide to truth. It is the residue of a worldview absorbed, a retreat unexplained, and a silence mistaken for peace. Weigh the arguments on their merits — unfamiliarity is exactly what a recovered truth should feel like at first.

Read this section in full in the treatise →

Questions to sit with

• Which of the five reasons best explains the strangeness you yourself feel — or have felt — about this teaching?
• The treatise says the generations that abolished the slave trade “would find our silence stranger than they would find this letter.” What one silence in your own sphere could you break this month?

Go deeper

Further material on this subject from allied abolitionist ministries (these links open external sites):

• Abolish Human Abortion — why abolitionism, not regulation (Abolish Human Abortion)
• Abolitionists Rising — the history and ideas of the movement (Abolitionists Rising)