Why This Sounds Foreign to Christian Ears

A standalone treatise in the series On the Sanctity of Life, Abortifacient Contraception, and the Faithful Care of Christ’s Flock

A fair-minded reader may accept much of what this series argues and still feel a persistent strangeness about the whole of it. The arguments seem sound, the quotations check out, and yet the conclusion feels alien — not the faith one grew up in, not what one hears from the pulpit, not what one’s Christian friends believe. That feeling is worth taking seriously rather than suppressing, because it is itself a piece of evidence. This treatise asks a diagnostic question and tries to answer it in full: if the things argued here were ordinary Christian teaching within living memory, why do they now sound foreign to Christian ears?

We do not ask the question to score a point. We ask it because a conviction that feels strange is a conviction one cannot examine until one understands why it feels strange. Our answer, in short, is that the strangeness is not a sign that the teaching is wrong. It is a sign of how far the water we swim in has changed. We offer five reasons. The first three operate quietly, below the level of argument. The fourth is a matter of datable history, and it is the heart of this treatise. The fifth is the hardest to say and the hardest to hear, because it is about us.

1. Conformed rather than transformed

Paul warns the church at Rome, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). The warning assumes what we would rather not admit: that the default direction of a Christian mind, left untended, is conformity — that we absorb the assumptions of our age as we absorb its air, without deciding to, and often without noticing.

The strangeness, then, may not be measuring this teaching against Scripture at all. It may be measuring it against a set of assumptions we have breathed in from the surrounding culture and mistaken for the faith itself. The test Paul gives is not “does this feel familiar?” but “does this survive the renewal of the mind by the Word?” A teaching can be entirely biblical and still feel foreign, if what it is foreign to is not Scripture but the spirit of the age. Whole generations of the faithful have assumed things their grandchildren rejected as sub-Christian, and been corrected by a return to the text. The question is never how a claim sits with the consensus of the moment, but how it sits with the Word that judges every moment. Familiarity is not a doctrine.

2. A flattened view of man

One assumption in particular has done quiet work. Over the last century the broadly evolutionary account of human origins has, far beyond the laboratory, reshaped the popular sense of what a human being is — eroding the old, sharp distinction between man and beast. If man is simply the most developed animal, differing from the others in degree rather than in kind, then his special dignity has no secure floor. It becomes a sentiment we extend, and a sentiment we may also withdraw.

The results are visible and strangely inverted. A culture that has lost the doctrine of the image of God will sometimes treat animals with near-human tenderness while treating some humans — the unborn, the senile, the profoundly disabled — as mere matter, valued by their capacities rather than their nature. This is not because such a culture is crueller than Christians, but because it has no fixed place to stand. Worth that rests on capacities can always be revised downward as the capacities are found wanting. Only worth grounded where Scripture grounds it — in a nature we are, an image we bear, conferred by God and revisable by no one — can hold the line at the point where the weak most need it held.

We should be honest that this flattening has often entered the church not as open unbelief but as a mood. Few Christians would say aloud that the embryo’s worth depends on his development. But many feel the loss of an early child as a smaller thing than the loss of a late one, and that feeling, unexamined, is the flattened picture doing its work beneath a still-orthodox creed. When a Christian finds the insistence on the full humanity of the embryo strange, it is worth asking whether the strangeness comes from Scripture or from this picture, absorbed so early and so thoroughly that it now feels like common sense.

3. The silence of the church

There is a third and simpler reason the teaching sounds foreign: for a generation and more, the church in these islands has largely not taught on it at all. It has, by and large, said little from the pulpit about the sanctity of life, little about the theology of family and fruitfulness, little about the duty of a mother and father toward their conceived children, and little about the church’s calling to be salt and light in a nation shedding innocent blood. The subject has been treated as private, political, or simply awkward, and passed over.

But silence is never actually empty. Into a silence, something always moves. Where the church declines to teach a Christian mind on these questions, the surrounding culture teaches it instead, and teaches it a creed: that personal autonomy and the desires of the heart are the measure of right and wrong. This is not a new phenomenon but a very old one. It is the settled condition of a people among whom “there was no king,” so that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 21:25). A church that will not speak has not thereby stayed neutral; it has ceded the ground, and the world has planted its own doctrine in it. If this teaching sounds like news, that is itself a measure of how complete the silence has been.

But that raises the sharper question. This silence is not the historic posture of the evangelical church. It is recent. It has to be explained, not assumed. Why did a movement that once led the nation’s conscience fall quiet? The answer is the fourth reason, and it is the longest, because it is the one most people have never been told.

4. The Great Reversal: how a speaking church learned to be silent

There was nothing inevitable about evangelical silence on public sin. For most of its history the evangelical movement was the loudest voice in the land against national wickedness, and it did not regard “politics” and “personal life” as regions where the Word of God had no writ. The reverse was true. The gospel that saved a man was expected to reach his ballot, his business, his bedroom, and his nation’s laws.

Consider what the fathers of the movement actually did. John Wesley’s last surviving letter, written six days before his death in February 1791, was to a young Member of Parliament named William Wilberforce. Wesley urged him not to grow weary in the fight against the slave trade, which he called “that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature,” and bade him “go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.”[1] Seventeen years earlier Wesley had published Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774), a frontal assault on a legal, profitable, respectable national institution.[2] This was not a preacher confining himself to “spiritual” matters. This was the pulpit reaching directly into law, commerce, and empire, and naming a national sin by its name.

The Clapham Sect — Wilberforce and his circle of evangelical Anglicans — spent decades doing exactly what today’s church is told is improper: mobilising Christians to change the law of the land on a moral question. They won. And the same century’s greatest Baptist preacher was cut from the same cloth. Charles Spurgeon, the most popular preacher in Victorian London, was an outspoken abolitionist at real cost. American publishers who had eagerly reprinted his sermons began to burn them; booksellers in the South destroyed them publicly, and he received threats to his life — all because he would not soften his condemnation of slavery to keep his American market.[3] Spurgeon also refused the notion that a minister must keep silent on the great social and political questions of his day; he preached in the same London in which Karl Marx was then writing, and he warned his hearers against the materialist and socialist ideas rising around him.[4] (We should be careful here: the popular claim that Marx named Spurgeon “one of his greatest enemies” cannot be traced to any primary source, and even the writers who like the comparison concede the two men never met. We do not use it. Spurgeon’s courage needs no embellishment; his burned sermons are evidence enough.)

The point is not nostalgia. The point is that a speaking, socially engaged, politically unafraid evangelicalism is the historic norm, not an aberration. The Christians who abolished the slave trade, built the hospitals and orphanages and ragged schools, drove factory reform and the raising of the age of consent, did not think they were stepping outside their lane. They thought they were doing the plain work of a faith that claims the whole of life for Christ.

Then, in the early twentieth century, something changed, and historians have a name for it. The sociologist David O. Moberg called it The Great Reversal — the title of his 1972 study of how evangelical Protestantism, which had led social reform through the nineteenth century, swung hard toward a privatised faith that treated evangelism and social or political engagement as rivals, and increasingly abandoned the latter.[5] The turn is usually dated to the years around and after the First World War. Several forces converged. The fundamentalist–modernist controversy taught conservatives to associate social engagement with the liberal “social gospel” they rightly distrusted, and so, in recoiling from a gospel reduced to social work, many recoiled from social work altogether — throwing out the obedience with the error. A newly pessimistic reading of the times persuaded many that the world was only going to get worse and that trying to reform society was, at best, polishing brass on a sinking ship. And the sheer disillusionment of the Great War drained the confident, world-improving energy of the previous century.

The result, within a generation, was a quiet but total inversion. The evangelical church that had once thundered against national sins learned to regard “politics” as worldly, “social action” as a distraction from soul-winning, and the private sphere — marriage, sexuality, the begetting and rearing of children — as precisely the place where the church had no business issuing commands. Faith was to be personal. And “personal,” it turned out, came to mean cordoned off — a private devotional interior with no authority over the very areas of life where men and women make their gravest moral decisions.

This is exactly backwards, and Scripture will not have it. The Word of God claims the whole of life. “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The lordship of Christ is not a Sunday jurisdiction. The idea that a Christian’s convictions about the taking of innocent life are a “private matter” that must not “impose on” others, or a “political issue” from which the pulpit should abstain, would have been unintelligible to Wesley, to Wilberforce, to Spurgeon, to the Puritans, and to the apostles. It is not the old faith. It is the Great Reversal, dressed up as humility.

And here the two halves of this story meet. The very decades in which evangelicalism was learning to fall silent were the decades in which the questions of life and birth were being decided. When the Church of England became the first major Christian communion to permit contraception, at the Lambeth Conference of 1930 (see the treatise on the Witness of the Church), there was no longer a confident, publicly-engaged Protestant conscience to resist it as the whole church would have resisted it a century before. The watchman had already come down off the wall for other reasons; when the enemy came to this particular gate, the wall was unmanned. The silence on abortion and abortifacients that feels so normal to us is not the considered verdict of a church that weighed the matter and fell silent. It is the downstream result of a much larger retreat, decades earlier, from the conviction that God’s Word has anything to command in public and personal life at all.

So when this teaching sounds strange, part of what you are hearing is the echo of that retreat. It sounds strange because we have inherited a truncated faith and mistaken it for the historic one.

5. Comfortable Christianity: whom we are willing to rebuke

There is a fifth reason, and it is the most uncomfortable, because it is not about ideas we absorbed but about a courage we lost. We have become a church that is willing to speak — but only where speaking is safe.

Watch what the modern church will and will not condemn. It is often quite willing to distance itself from unfashionable political figures, because to do so costs nothing and may even win applause; the surrounding culture nods along. But on the actual life-and-death legislative questions of our own day, the church has been very largely silent — and those questions implicate not one party but the whole political class. Successive Conservative and Labour governments alike maintained and extended the Abortion Act; it was under a Labour-backed amendment that abortion was decriminalised in England and Wales in 2026, removing the woman from the criminal law in relation to her own pregnancy even at late gestation (see the treatise on Abortion in the United Kingdom). Where were the pulpits? A church that can find its voice to condemn a politician whom it is fashionable to condemn, but cannot find it to speak against the largest ongoing destruction of human life in the nation’s history, has not been exercising moral courage. It has been managing its reputation.

This is the pattern Jesus rebuked in the religious leaders of His own day: scrupulous about the safe, small, respectable things and silent on “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). We strain out gnats and swallow camels. We are careful to be seen on the right side of whatever the culture has already decided, and mute on the one issue where being faithful would actually cost us something — because our neighbours, our families, and possibly we ourselves are implicated in it. That is not prophetic witness. It is comfortable Christianity, and the generations before us would be aghast at it. Wesley did not calculate whether opposing the slave trade would make him popular; it did not. Spurgeon did not weigh whether abolition would protect his book sales; it destroyed them across half a continent. They spoke because it was true and because souls and lives were at stake, and they let the cost fall where it would.

And silence has a body count. This is the sober lesson our fathers understood and we have forgotten: when the church stays quiet, someone else fills the silence, and the someone is rarely kind. The birth-control movement of the early twentieth century is the case study. Its two most celebrated pioneers built the institutions that would become the largest providers of abortion in the world. In America, Margaret Sanger founded the organisation that became Planned Parenthood, today the largest single abortion provider in the United States; her movement was openly entwined with eugenics, the belief that the “unfit” should be discouraged or prevented from reproducing.[6] In Britain, Marie Stopes opened the country’s first birth-control clinic in 1921; the global abortion provider that still bore her name, Marie Stopes International, quietly renamed itself in 2020 precisely to distance itself from her enthusiastic support for eugenics.[7] Here is the historical irony that ought to sober us: it was contraception, marketed as the compassionate and liberating alternative, that built the organisations and the mindset from which mass abortion grew. The movement that promised to make abortion unnecessary became its largest machinery.

We do not say the pioneers of birth control were themselves the abortionists; the history is more tangled than that, and honesty requires the distinction. What we say is that the church’s silence handed the definition of “reproductive freedom” to people with a frankly stated eugenic vision, and the institutions they founded now end hundreds of thousands of lives a year. Consider the counterfactual the previous century poses to us. Wesley and the abolitionists did not stay silent, and the slave trade fell. Spurgeon did not stay silent about the ideologies rising in the London of his day. What might have been spared had more of the church, at the dawn of the birth-control movement, spoken with the courage of a Wesley? We cannot know. But we know the cost of the silence that was chosen instead, because we are counting it still, in a ledger no earthly office will ever fully total.

6. The creed of autonomy, and the answer to it

Beneath all of this lies a single creed, and it is worth answering directly because it is the deepest root. It can be stated in four words, and often is: “my body, my choice.” It sounds, to ears trained by the age, almost self-evidently true.

Scripture denies its premise at the root. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). The believer’s body is not an autonomous possession to be disposed of at will; it is a temple, blood-bought and Spirit-indwelt, held in stewardship under its Maker. Our motto cannot be “my body, my choice” but must be His temple, His choice. The self-ownership on which the whole modern edifice rests is precisely what the gospel takes away — and gives back transformed, as a life belonging to Another and glad to.

And even on its own terms the slogan fails at the decisive point, for the conceived child is in any case not the mother’s body at all. He is a separate human being within her, with his own body, his own DNA, his own sex, and his own life. We have neither the right to destroy our own bodies, which are not our own, nor the bodies of the children conceived within them, which were never ours to begin with. The creed of autonomy collapses twice over: once because we do not own ourselves, and again because the one whose life is at stake is not ourselves.

Notice, too, that this creed is the precise engine of the Great Reversal described above. It is the doctrine that faith must stay “personal” and never “impose.” But a faith that may not speak into the body, the marriage, and the law is not the Christian faith; it is a private hobby the world is glad to let us keep, so long as it changes nothing. The recovery this whole series pleads for is, at bottom, the recovery of the conviction that Christ is Lord of all of it.

7. Why the strangeness is not the verdict

None of this proves the argument of the series true; that case is made from Scripture, from the history of the church, and from the facts of what these methods do, in the other treatises. What this one establishes is narrower, and it is meant only to clear an obstacle. The feeling of strangeness that attends the whole subject is not a reliable guide to its truth. It is very largely the residue of a worldview absorbed rather than examined, of a historic retreat most Christians have never had explained to them, and of a comfortable silence we have mistaken for peace.

So we ask the reader to do the one thing the strangeness makes difficult: to set the feeling aside long enough to weigh the arguments on their merits. If, having weighed them, one finds them wanting, let them be rejected on that ground. But let them not be rejected merely because they are unfamiliar — for unfamiliarity, in a church so thoroughly conformed to its age and so long retreated from the field, is exactly what we should expect a recovered truth to feel like at first. The generations that abolished the slave trade would find our silence stranger than they would find this letter.

References

1. John Wesley, letter to William Wilberforce, 24 February 1791: slavery is “that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature,” with the exhortation “go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.” Christian History Institute, https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/wesley-to-wilberforce
2. John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774). University of Michigan (Evans Early American Imprints), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N10870.0001.001
3. On Spurgeon’s abolitionism and the burning of his sermons in the American South, see The Spurgeon Library, “The Reason Why America Burned Spurgeon’s Sermons and Sought to Kill Him,” https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/blog-entries/the-reason-why-america-burned-spurgeons-sermons-and-sought-to-kill-him/ ; and The Gospel Coalition, “Why the American South Would Have Killed Charles Spurgeon,” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-american-south-would-have-killed-charles-spurgeon/
4. On Spurgeon as a contemporary of Marx in London and his preaching against socialist and materialist ideas, see the discussion at Founders Ministries, “Karl Marx vs Charles Spurgeon” (which notes the two men never met and offers no primary-source Marx statement naming Spurgeon; the popular “greatest enemies” line is therefore not used here), https://founders.org/articles/karl-marx-vs-charles-spurgeon-an-epic-struggle-for-the-souls-of-men-in-19th-century-london/
5. David O. Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism and Social Concern (Lippincott, 1972); the phrase names the early-twentieth-century swing of evangelicalism away from the social and political engagement that had marked it through the nineteenth century. https://archive.org/details/greatreversaleva0000mobe_r6r5
6. On Margaret Sanger, the founding of the organisation that became Planned Parenthood (the largest single abortion provider in the United States), and the birth-control movement’s documented entanglement with eugenics, see Planned Parenthood’s own history page, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history , alongside critical treatments such as Capital Research Center, https://capitalresearch.org/article/margaret-sanger-part-1/
7. Marie Stopes International renamed itself “MSI Reproductive Choices” in 2020, citing its founder’s support for eugenics; it remains one of the world’s largest providers of abortion. The Christian Post, “Abortion giant Marie Stopes International changes name over activist’s support for eugenics,” https://www.christianpost.com/news/marie-stopes-international-changes-name-over-activists-eugenics-support.html

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version.

A note on this treatise. Sections 1–3 and 6–7 make an argument about culture and the church rather than a claim of external fact. Sections 4 and 5 make historical claims, and these are sourced above. We have deliberately declined to use the widely repeated claim that Karl Marx called Spurgeon one of his greatest enemies, because we could not trace it to any primary source and the very writers who favour the Marx–Spurgeon comparison concede the two never met; Spurgeon’s documented abolitionism carries the point without it. On Sanger and Stopes we have kept to the verifiable: that they were pioneers of the birth-control movement whose founded institutions became the world’s largest abortion providers, and that the movement was openly tied to eugenics — without asserting that either woman personally ran an abortion practice, which the record does not straightforwardly support. We would rather bring a smaller case that holds than a larger one that does not.