With the gift of clarity coming to us in greater and greater abundance, the question facing those who earnestly desire to see child sacrifice eradicated has primarily become, what now?
The History of Child Sacrifice
When child sacrifice becomes deeply ingrained in a culture, it is exceedingly difficult for it to be entirely uprooted. This fact is attested to throughout Scripture. Chief among the sins of the Canaanites, who possessed the Promised Land before the Israelite conquest, was their prolific practice of child sacrifice. God warned His people before entering the land: “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they did in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes…You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 18:3, 21). This prohibition was sanctioned in the strongest terms imaginable, indicating both the individual and collective guilt wrought by child sacrifice:
Say to the people of Israel, Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones. I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name. And if the people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do not put him to death, then I will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech (Leviticus 20:2-5).
In the idolatrous worship of the pagan Canaanites, child sacrifice was commonplace, so much so that the covenant people of God could easily assimilate into the Canaanite culture and adopt their abominable practices.
Of course, this is precisely what happened. Though the first generation of Israelites who entered the Promised Land under Joshua were faithful, it did not take long for the people, who failed to complete the prescribed conquest of the land (Judges 1:27-36), to begin to serve the false gods of its previous inhabitants. However, although the people certainly accrued guilt and suffered discipline for their infidelity to God, there is no express indication that Israel adopted the practice of child sacrifice for generations after entering the land. Despite all their unfaithfulness, it seems as though the particular evil of child sacrifice was suppressed and largely conquered by the people of the true and living God, at least in the mainstream of society. That is until the reign of the most wealthy, wise, and, from an earthly perspective, successful king in Israel’s history: Solomon.
After the prohibitions in Leviticus, the next mention of the god most lustful for the blood of children, Molech, comes in 1 Kings 11:7: “Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem.” Just like that, after generations of liberation from the bloodguilt of child sacrifice, the formerly wise and glorious king Solomon, in his rebellion, re-introduced the god who demanded the practice, and this proved to be the beginning of the end for Israel.
As gross idolatry became more and more deeply embedded into the national life of Israel, and later Judah, child sacrifice re-emerged as a common practice among the supposed people of God, so much so that the kings even publicly participated in it (2 Kings 21:6, 2 Chronicles 28:3). It is no coincidence that the revival of child sacrifice in the land corresponded to the spiraling dysfunctionality of the monarchy, beginning with the split of Israel into Northern and Southern kingdoms, and continuing through a virtually perpetual downgrade in the quality of the kings, as well as in the religious and national life of the people, finally culminating in exile from the land and the destruction of the temple. Throughout, God sent prophet after prophet to confront the people’s sins and call them to repentance, often explicitly regarding child sacrifice:
When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood (Isaiah 1:15).
They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin (Jeremiah 32:34).
For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. With their idols they have committed adultery, and they have even offered up to them for food the children whom they had borne to me (Ezekiel 23:37).
The biblical portrait is clear: nothing brings forth wrath like the bloodguilt associated with child sacrifice, and this particular sin, when it becomes acceptable in a nation, will assuredly bring it to destruction.
It is the very perversity of sin that produces an impulse to perform the most abhorrent and unnatural deeds. Indeed, this is the case with child sacrifice, in which the hands of mothers and fathers, those specifically tasked with protecting their children, turn instead to murder them when the very ones called to lay down their lives for their offspring instead substitute the child’s life for themselves. This unnatural and sinful impulse can be suppressed, as it was for generations in Israel and as it had been for centuries in the Christian West. Yet once legal legitimacy and cultural approval are voiced for this practice, it will once again open up the floodgates of innocent blood, and these, once opened, are nearly impossible to close, just as Solomon’s erection of a high place for Molech initiated a long and practically unstoppable assault on Israelite children, despite some very sincere efforts by godly kings to end it. Once child sacrifice has a foothold in a nation, it is not easily eradicated.
Embedded In The Culture
Many in the United States are at last beginning to learn this fact. Child sacrifice re-emerged on the North American continent in the wake of the sexual revolution, centuries after the spread of Christianity had all but ended it. With the modern, “sanitized,” and politically popular practice of abortion becoming culturally and legally acceptable in the 1960s and 70s, the demonic institution returned with a vengeance, while the politically emasculated church remained supremely ineffective in addressing the issue. This ineffectiveness has persisted to our day, even after the great bogeyman of the pro-life movement, Roe V. Wade, was cast aside in 2022. The reality that has become increasingly clear in the nearly two years since that development is that the Republican Party, the Pro-Life lobby, and sadly even many big evangelical organizations never had a coherent strategy to oppose child sacrifice, and for some of these, there seems never to have been a genuine desire to actually end abortion ultimately.
The most recent example of this disturbing fact came last week when former president and leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump first released a policy platform statement on abortion, in which he vowed to keep the federal government entirely out of the business of combating child murder. Then, less than two days later, he condemned the Arizona State Supreme Court for “going too far” in a decision to uphold an 1864 law criminalizing abortion doctors. These comments follow similar statements that Trump—heralded by many as the most pro-life president America has ever had (which, sadly, may be accurate)—has made denouncing “extreme” six-week abortion bans and heartbeat bills. In addition to all of this, the Pro-Life lobby, led by organizations such as National Right to Life, has consistently stymied efforts to criminalize abortion across numerous states over the past several years.
These facts are all a part of a larger narrative propagated by the GOP, with President Trump at the forefront, asserting that abortion has been a losing issue for Republicans ever since Roe was overturned, that electoral success depends upon radical compromise when it comes to protecting lives in the womb. These amount to a claim that the cost of victory for Republicans is several more thousands, if not millions of human lives, and that this is a cost worth paying. Child sacrifice, when it becomes embedded in a culture, is all but impossible to remove.
The Dobbs decision of 2022 that overturned Roe V. Wade has left the pro-life movement fragmented and directionless. The easy answer of fighting abortion by donating to pro-life organizations and voting Republican has proved to be no answer at all for those actually interested in ending abortion since neither of these entities is willing to pursue that aim fully. With the gift of clarity coming to us in greater and greater abundance, the question facing those who earnestly desire to see child sacrifice eradicated has primarily become, what now? How ought the church to respond to overt political compromise and corruption in a way that maintains integrity and yet is effective in defeating abortion?
Asa, Jehosaphat, and Jotham
It must be said upfront that none of this is meant to bind anyone’s conscience. There are many faithful Christians who, even after Trump’s recent remarks, will continue to make the case that Christians can and should vote for him, while others are bound by their consciences to refuse to do so. This is an area in which we must affirm that “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23), so we must allow others the liberty of letting God and His word speak to their consciences and then cast their vote accordingly. Yet this understanding does not mean that we ought not to attempt to persuade one another, or at the very least to challenge one another to deeply and critically contemplate what God would have us do regarding electoral policy during this time of upheaval and realignment. The latter is the purpose of this article.
Firstly, we must acknowledge the legitimate limitations of our federal government and the realities of our constitutional system. It is quite true that, politically and pragmatically speaking, the federal government fully criminalizing abortion is currently unimaginable, and therefore, to campaign on such a platform is a poor strategy, to say the least. Again, I say that this is true pragmatically. It is also true that, without the courage to do and say the unpopular thing, the criminalization of abortion at the federal level will remain a seemingly unattainable pipe dream. Yet, to point out once more, the spirit of child sacrifice, once it has taken hold of a culture, is challenging to exorcize.
This is reflected in the history of Judah, in which several righteous kings—described by God Himself as righteous—reigned faithfully and yet failed to expunge idolatry and child sacrifice from the nation. One such example is Asa:
And Asa did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, as David his father had done. He put away the male cult prostitutes out of the land and removed all the idols that his fathers had made. He also removed Maacah his mother from being queen mother because she had made an abominable image for Asherah. And Asa cut down her image and burned it at the brook Kidron. But the high places were not taken away. Nevertheless, the heart of Asa was wholly true to the LORD all his days (1 Kings 15:11-14).
Even though he failed to remove the high places, Asa was a faithful king who walked in obedience to God as much as he was able to in his office. Another king—one who successfully removed the high places—was Jehosaphat. However, this righteous king chose time and again to ally with the wicked house of Ahab in Israel for pragmatic reasons, military, economic, and the like. Through these alliances, Ahab’s evil lineage nearly completely usurped power in Judah, and ultimately, great wickedness flourished for a season, yet nevertheless, Jehosaphat was regarded as a faithful king. Yet another example is that of Jotham, who “did what was right in the eyes of the LORD…But the people still followed corrupt practices” (2 Chronicles 27:2).
None of these biblical examples correspond to the American situation in anything close to a one-to-one fashion. America is not Judah; Trump is not Jehosaphat. These examples illustrate that idolatry, perversity, and bloodshed are issues that run far deeper than the head of state, and if a people is given over to these things, they will find a way to get what they want. Similarly, if the hearts of the people are set on abortion, then abortion will prevail on the ballot, and so, like Asa and Jehosaphat and Jotham, Trump’s alliances with evil and his toleration of child sacrifice ought not to utterly negate the good he has done and presumably will do if re-elected. The economy still matters. Immigration still matters. Religious freedom still matters. This is the case for maintaining support for Trump, and I believe it is defensible given the near stranglehold the bloodthirsty party of death (i.e., Democrats) has on American political power.
Pontius Pilate
However, integrity also matters, and passing abortion to the states, or even turning a blind eye to it—as unrighteous and cowardly as these are—is not the same as condemning those seeking to consistently and biblically protect the pre-born, as Trump did with the Arizona judges, and as the pro-life establishment has done regarding abolitionist efforts over the past several years. As Christians, we must be a people tethered to objective reality, and so to recognize the political reality that state-level abortion bans are the most promising political path to ending child sacrifice, as opposed to hitching our wagon to the federal government, is both reasonable and wise. Yet when the head of the conservative movement, perhaps the most influential man in the country, is actively attacking those state-level efforts, that is more than mere pragmatism and shrewdness. Comments such as these from a man of Trump’s stature actively hinder and harm the cause of the pre-born because they make the positive case that winning elections justifies the shedding of innocent blood.
Trump’s comments are not simply a recognition that a people demanding child sacrifice will find a way to get what they want; what they amount to is complicity in that sacrifice and an argument that these sacrifices are essential and must be protected if it means that Republicans can win elections. In this way, Trump is clearly no Jotham but much more closely resembles Pilate, declaring the Lord Jesus innocent and washing his hands before delivering Him over to be crucified in a cynical play to retain political power. Such is the case for refusing to support Trump, which is likewise defensible.
As was mentioned earlier, child sacrifice is uniquely abominable and calls down wrath like few other public sins. Thus, Christians should not be surprised when our quality of leadership is pitiful, when their lack of courage is palpable, and when the majority of the population is more than content for the streets to pile with more and more innocent blood. God will avenge every drop of pre-born bloodshed in America, and this grim reality must be understood and proclaimed by the church entrusted with exercising Christ’s prophetic office here on earth. Yet it is true that somehow, God’s longsuffering with America persists; the opportunity to repent remains. Therefore, Christians must be laboring toward that end. We must work ceaselessly while time remains for our country to turn from child sacrifice and beg the Lord Jesus for forgiveness.
The Call To Action
This means several things. First, Christians must not buy the GOP line that abortion is a guaranteed losing issue on which we must keep silent. To repeat, this claim is to assert that child sacrifice is permissible, provided that the blood is used to purchase Republican victories. We must keep the pressure on our representatives to stand courageously for the pre-born, and if they refuse to do so, we must do all we reasonably can to replace them.
Secondly, it is on state-level politics that these efforts must be primarily focused. Winning actual, consistent, biblical pro-life victories on the state level is not only feasible in a way that doing so on the federal level is not, but they also change the conversation and work to shift the perceived possibilities and re-calibrate the political calculus at every level of government. As counterintuitive as it sounds in our day of mass media and information overload, your governor and state representative are more critical in the fight against abortion than your president and senator. The political means of incentivizing national-level politicians to begin consistently protecting life in the womb is to make consistent, biblical, just laws at the state level so standard that it becomes impossible to ignore.
Yet, for this to happen, the church must be a united front. It is easy to point the accusing finger at people like Donald Trump—and it is not unjustified to do so—yet he and many others like him are, to a large degree, simply reflecting the church’s inconsistency, unclarity, and cowardice. It is an utter shame that it has taken the political Left in the wake of the Dobbs decision to push opponents of abortion to consistency, and frankly, they have called the pro-life bluff. With Roe out of the way and the Left rightly pointing out that the pro-life position, consistently worked out, must end with mothers being condemned as murderers, Republicans have raced to compromise. And many segments of the church have been far too eager to line up right alongside them.
The failure of the church to clearly, consistently, and on the unapologetic authority of Scripture condemn abortion as murder and demand our representatives to treat it as such is the chief reason why child sacrifice remains so pervasive in our nation. We have not called on the God of gods, the Lord Jesus Christ, to crush the false gods demanding the blood of children but have instead sought to make some kind of peace with these abominations, and this compromise will not be honored by God, it will not mitigate the bloodshed.
The thing that is most essential and of most significant importance is for the church—not just a handful of consistently reformed, vocal, and usually small congregations—but all the faithful believers as a whole, from Big Eva to Bible Belt Baptists, to declare with one voice that abortion is murder, that child sacrifice will not be tolerated, and that our representatives must repent. We are Christ’s heralds; we have been entrusted with the oracles of God, and it is our solemn obligation to proclaim the truth of His authority boldly.
It is our everlasting shame if we refuse to do so.
