Will The Church Ignore Abortion Like It Ignored the Holocaust?

Opinion   |   Susan Michelle Tyrrell   |   Dec 19, 2012   |   2:37PM   |   Washington, DC

A while back, I wrote a series for Bound4LIFE on abortion’s financial industry and its connections to the holocaust, which took me back over a decade. In 2000 I wrote my master’s thesis, which happened to be on children’s literature, using the novels Number the Stars and The Giver. The former is a beautiful story set in the Danish resistance in the Holocaust, the is latter a futuristic tale where society neutralizes everyone, getting rid of anything deemed inferior for the sake of the larger community. The title of my thesis was Hurtling Forward into the Past. The point I asserted was that if we continued in our present culture we would literally march forward into the past by creating a society in which we had a new and bigger holocaust because it would no longer be limited to only one people group.

Writing that thesis occurred in the same season as my revelation of real Christianity as it crashed against secular humanism in academia. Graduate school gave me a master’s degree, but it felt more like it was in theology than literature. I was challenged, and I found my faith in my secular university. Writing that thesis taught me what I live by now; you have to know what you believe and why you believe it before it is challenged, or it won’t survive. The family in the Holocaust novel already has that firm foundation and they do not hesitate to join the resistance movement. In the futuristic novel, the community has been desensitized by accepting things without challenge. No one can remember back to the time when people thought and acted freely. They have become a non-thinking people, subject to the control of very nice but inwardly wicked rulers.

Writing the series for Bound4LIFE began as a research project. I breathed pages of data. I had that same sort of feeling an academic gets, buried in books and papers, tied to a computer for the sheer reason that if I stopped I might forget where my train of thought was. I would have seven tabs open in Firefox at once, cross-referencing journals and websites. And the thing about academia in general is that it’s pretty easy to lose oneself in the work and forget the heart. But in this case, the work was my heart.

And then something odd happened to me partway through the 5th blog on university research, which I gave the same title as my thesis. The things I was reading were familiar because research protocol at universities all has an Internal Review Board (IRB), and as a doctoral student doing research, I had to go through IRB training. I remembered sitting there yawning because the research lessons were so dull I was just annoyed I had to sit through it to find out I was actually exempt since there was no risk to my subjects.

But I put that all in context with the abortion research. Suddenly I looked at the references to the Nuremberg Code which govern modern research and thought about all I knew from the Holocaust study I had done a decade ago, and how I study a new holocaust every day with abortion. The connection left me stunned, in tears. What I had written about novels ten years ago, I was writing about our lives today.

From my initial epiphany in my master’s program to my current work with Life issues, I saw the disturbing correlation. Over the past several months I’ve been remembering things I wrote in my own thesis about our society. At that time I was “anti-abortion” but didn’t yet have the revelation of Life, of shedding of innocent blood. As I look at my research from 2000 into a world that was desensitizing its people and creating a culture of control I see that I was really looking at today.

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Early last year a friend sent me the text of a speech delivered by a minister in 2000, about one month after I graduated with my master’s. In it, he makes comparisons to the Holocaust and what is happening in our current culture, and how we as a church are abdicating truth. What this man said in 2000, similar to my thesis and probably so much more we could find in that era, was disturbing and prophetic:

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he scornfully dismissed the church, and her pastors, as an irrelevant force which posed no threat to the Nazi agenda for that great nation. “I promise you,” he boasted to his inner circle, “that if I wish to I could destroy the church in just a few years. It is hollow, it is rotten, and false through and through. One push and the whole structure would collapse.”

“We should trap the preachers,” he said, “by their notorious greed and self-indulgence. We shall thus be able to settle everything with them in perfect peace and harmony. I shall give them a few years reprieve, why should we quarrel? They will swallow anything in order to keep their material advantage. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves, they will betray their God for us, they will betray anything for the sake of their miserable jobs and incomes.”

The dictator’s words proved to be tragically accurate. The great majority of Christians in Germany looked the other way and minded their own business. They kept their religion and their politics strictly separate from one another, and refused to vote on the basis of single issues which would have set them apart from the rest of the electorate. They blended in and they went along and they followed the path of least resistance. They did that which was expedient and practical and safe, while their country was dragged down into a swirling maelstrom of barbarism and death.

The irony of entitling one of my blogs with the same title as my master’s thesis haunted me. We have history; we have prophecy; we have a new holocaust. Indeed, it’s come full circle, and we have hurtled forward into the past.

So are we going to be part of the resistance?

Or will be be part of the mindless, non-thinking community who just does what its told without question because it feels powerless to change anything?

LifeNews Note:  Susan Michelle Tyrrell is the editor of Bound4Life’s blog.