Source: Washington Post
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling tossing Texas abortion restrictions puts a massive spotlight on the new debate pressing evangelicals: Which is a worse sin, racism or abortion?
For decades, abortion has been the mother of all deciding issues for evangelicals, who make up about a quarter of the U.S. population and are strongly opposed. But in the 2016 race, with Donald Trump’s unusually incendiary comments about race, culture and religion, this second issue is becoming increasingly sacred.
This question of how to deal with Hillary Clinton’s robust support for abortion rights along with Trump’s challenging of the place of minorities is one of the most common at evangelicals’ dinner tables today, laying bare divisions between young and old and white and non-white. And it is a challenge to the evangelical-GOP alliance that has been sacrosanct for generations.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas restrictions on abortion are unconstitutional. This comes at a time of controversy over various Trump statements, including a proposal to ban Muslims and remarks that a judge of Mexican descent couldn’t be unbiased in a legal case against him because Trump is vowing to build a wall between the United States and Mexico.
Abortion “is the single greatest issue of our time, I don’t disagree, but in responding negatively [when he raises the subject of race], it shows they don’t want to think about race and racism,” Thabiti Anyabwile, an African American pastor in Southeast Washington and a council member of the conservative evangelical network the Gospel Coalition, said in an interview. “They want to say it’s vastly secondary, so why bring it up? … My response is, why can’t we talk about both things?”
Anyabwile wrote on the racism-abortion dynamic on his popular blog this month in a post that was shared thousands of times.
“If you talk about any issue other than abortion, especially a ‘racial issue,’ then you’re idolizing ‘race’ and betraying the unborn,” he wrote. “The uneasy coalition of inter-ethnic evangelical concern comes collapsing down. … The problem, we are told, is that African Americans need to quit bellyaching about racism and the mirage of systemic injustice and just get on with it.”
Categories: Christianity, Racism, The Muslim Times