We’re All Incrementalists

Introduction
We here in the Moscow Mood have been celebrating and implementing a particular tactic for ending legal abortion in our land that we like to call “Smashmouth Incrementalism.” This is a full-throated recognition of the humanity of preborn babies from the moment of conception and the insistence that God’s law provides equal protection for those human lives and so human laws should do the same, along with a deep commitment to embracing all of God’s Word for the wisdom, tactics, and principles necessary to do so in full obedience to Christ. I recently had the opportunity to have a discussion about this here, although I had written most of this article prior to recording that, so this is not a direct response to that conversation. 

We stand on the shoulders of our faithful pro-life fathers and mothers with deep gratitude for the way that they stood in the gap for decades, some of them sacrificing significantly, ultimately leading to the overturn of that bloody monstrosity of Roe v. Wade. At the same time, we do not mind calling out some of the rot that has developed in the Pro-Life Industry, the suits and haircuts that show up at any relatively successful ministry in order to shrink wrap and sell it, creating various perverse incentives along the way. It’s one thing for a pro-life ministry to decline to be at the tip of the spear for some particular bill (different parts of the body of Christ with different strengths and tactics); it’s another thing entirely to actively campaign against lawful attempts to end legal abortion. Pro-life organizations that have actively teamed up with abortion-supporters to kill bills of abolition should be ashamed of themselves. 

Smashmouth Incrementalism
Smashmouth incrementalism is happy to cheer on all lawful attempts to end legal abortion as quickly as possible in our land. We support heartbeat bills and bills of complete abolition because a left jab to the gut is just as much part of the battle as a right hook to the jaw. And wherever possible, we should run one or the other bill and not both at the same time. Politicians will tend to take the less courageous route, but if you live in New York or California, I doubt very much that they would conflict. Every opportunity to proclaim the full humanity of the unborn is to be celebrated. We are incremental in that we believe it is biblically permissible to advance the cause of equal protection by passing laws that stop short of full justice for the unborn, not because we’re OK with injustice but because God’s Word allows for some regulation of immoral practices as steps towards discouraging and limiting immoral practices. Several biblical examples of that in a minute. 

We are “smashmouth” in the sense that we are committed to not resting until the laws of our states and nation provide equal protection for the unborn. While we will celebrate minor victories along the way, we are committed to working for the eradication of all laws that protect the murder of any unborn person for any reason. 

In the midst of this conversation, other brothers have responded by calling themselves “immediatists.” I’m not identifying anyone in particular; I’ve just seen the term bandied about. And so what I want to do here is explain why basically everyone is an incrementalist of some sort, and true or consistent “immediatism” is either impossible or immoral and possibly both. 

So the very purist form of “immediatism” – the immediate end of all abortion – is not humanly possible because that would seem to require a Thanos-like snap of the fingers, ending all human abortion in the world. We are not God, and we do not have that power. Speaking of which, clearly, God is an incrementalist. We are two thousand years out from the resurrection, and God is making slow but steady progress on putting all of His enemies beneath His feet. Death will be the last enemy, and then will come the end (1 Cor. 15). But God is the only One who has the power to end all suffering and injustice immediately, and in His infinite wisdom, He has chosen not to. This is no excuse for apathy or laziness on our part, but it does form the context in which we labor night and day for justice to be established. We labor at His pleasure. We labor as His servants.  

The next most pure form of immediatism would seem to require some kind of armed and violent uprising. If abortion is murder, why don’t immediatists take that seriously and go to war? Incidentally, this is why I do not care for the name “abolitionist,” though I do not mind its technical meaning. Of course we want to “abolish” abortion, but “abolitionism” has a sordid and violent past at least in America. It connotes the abolitionist movement to end slavery, and despite the laudable desire to see race-based chattel slavery ended, that movement was radically infected by deeply anti-biblical sentiments and ultimately violence. The Bible addresses the evils of slavery, and it outlines a distinctly Christian means for ending it, violence and war not being one of the biblically sanctioned means. Lincoln’s invasion of the South and the subsequent 600,000 lives lost was not biblical or constitutional, despite true evils that needed reforming.

There are several good answers to the question of why armed confrontation is not a biblical solution to abortion, the most basic being that wide-spread commitment to murdering your own babies is not the kind of soul cancer that can be solved that way. When faithful kings in Israel sought to end child sacrifice, they destroyed the pagan altars on which the children were offered. We have a radical spiritual problem, an idol problem. The worship being offered in many of the Christian churches in our land is corrupt and diseased. The desire, fear, or in some demented cases, delight, that drives the killing of our own offspring is a demonic, psychopathic judgment that God has given us over to and therefore requires something far deeper than a military solution: repentance. As we have already begun to see, if you outlaw abortion in one place, we have the kind of madness that drives these people to other states where abortion is legal or at least more easily assessable. 

The Bible also generally requires lesser magistrates to lead and conduct defensive wars, and it generally prohibits guerilla style vigilante justice – not to mention the massive tactical blunders involved. Nothing like mafia or militia-style assassinations of abortion doctors to set back the prolife movement for another five decades. Magistrates bear the sword of God’s justice; it is their God-given responsibility to protect all human life within their jurisdictions. They must be called upon to use their authority to protect the most vulnerable and to punish those who brazenly take it. 

But I suspect that most “immediatists” would agree with me on all of this, to which I reply, “and welcome to incrementalism.” Obedience to God’s law means we are required by God to take incremental steps in ending the atrocity of legal abortion in our land. God requires incrementalism. But of course the immediatist comes back and says, ‘sure, I have no problem with “lawful” incremental steps, what I object to is the regulation of evil.’ It’s one thing to standby waiting for God to give us the clear shot; it’s another thing to pass a law that says you can kill your baby so long as it’s before 6 weeks or 12 weeks or after an ultrasound or something. The immediatist says he will not participate in that kind of “compromise.” Now, let me be clear that I certainly appreciate the skepticism and the scrutiny of prolife motivations and measures. I’m truly grateful for the pressure of the immediatists. A great deal of prolife reluctance to ending abortion is a failure of nerve. At the same time, I don’t think the immediatist has solved the purity problem. 

So you have your equal protection bill – fully biblical as far as you can tell. Now what? You get a sponsor for the bill, and the sponsor agrees to introduce it in some legislative committee. But look here: you are playing by immoral rules. The murder of babies should end immediately, and there are a million bureaucratic boobytraps designed to bog your bill down in committees. Now, don’t misunderstand me: I do not object at all. I believe this is the way to end abortion. But you are playing by the rules of their immoral game. They are saying that you must submit your bill in this way, run the gauntlet of these bureaucratic shenanigans, and maybe, just maybe, it will see the light of day on the floor of the full legislature. But we are talking about the murder of babies, and you are participating in ducking, spinning, weaving, and all manner of twister moves to get your bill to the floor of the legislature. Now, I think there are very good reasons to do so, and if I were to bring all of this to your attention, double-checking to make sure you didn’t actually agree with all of that bureaucratic red-tape (e.g. “you’re not saying that it’s ok to protect the murder of babies by these bureaucratic machinations, are you?”), you would simply say, “no, of course not.” But you’re playing the legislative game? And, I assume you would say, “Yes, that’s what you have to do to get a bill passed.” Great. And I would say the same thing about a heartbeat bill or 12 week ban in certain states. 

While you may have a tidy category for the purity of your “bill,” you are working in an entirely impure system, built on the blood and bodies of babies. I deny that a heartbeat bill is necessarily any kind of compromise, any more than working within the corrupt system designed to defend the bloodshed is approving of the corrupt system. None of us are saying, “and then you can kill the baby.”

A Brief Review 
We have used these examples before, but it’s worth mentioning them again. In Biblical law, we find that some regulation of immorality and injustice is designed to communicate disapproval and works to dismantle and discourage those practices. It is simply not biblically accurate to assume that if there are regulations of a sinful or unjust practice that is somehow an implicit approval or participation in the iniquity. 

For example, slavery was regulated in Scripture. God permitted the purchasing of chattel slaves under certain conditions and for those same slaves to be part of the inheritance passed down to descendants (Lev. 25:44-46). Some folks might be tempted to conclude that this is therefore a good thing since it is regulated, others are tempted to explain it away since it is part of the Israelite law code, but I want to argue that this was a regulation (among others) that was actually designed to slowly eradicate man-stealing and chattel slavery. The New Testament repeatedly gives instructions to slaves and masters for their mutual respect and care (Eph. 6, Col. 3, 1 Tim. 6). The fact that Paul returned Onesimus to Philemon is pretty striking. The regulation itself does not mean that if you meet the law’s requirements, God necessarily approves of what you are doing. Civil permission is not the same thing as being morally upright. 

Another example of regulation of sinful practices in the Old Testament would be polygamy and divorce (Ex. 21, Dt. 24). Is polygamy or divorce sinful? The biblical answer in both cases is usually. 

In the case of divorce, we can say that God “hates” it, and that it covers those who participate in it in “violence” (Mal. 2:16). Not only that, God hates divorce because it destroys our “godly seed” (Mal. 2:15). Jesus also clearly taught that most divorce causes adultery (Mt. 19:9). And adultery was the kind of civil crime that could require the death penalty in certain circumstances (Dt. 22:22). So in the case of civil law regulating divorce, we have the authoritative teaching of Jesus that Moses permitted divorce more broadly because of the hardness of Israelite hearts (Mt. 19:8). But that law was part of the Torah, the holy law of God, the most perfect law for a human society ever devised, a light for the nations, and the foundation of our Christian common law tradition. And that law included in it some regulation of practices that God hated, that crushed little ones, and often led to adultery. That regulation did not approve of the practice of divorce, it was a God-inspired regulation aimed at limiting and discouraging divorce.

Likewise, God regulated lynching through the introduction of cities of refuge. The blood-avenger had some right to seek justice for the wrongful death of a close relative. God was also in the process of establishing normal courts of law and a primitive justice system. But in the meantime, God regulated some measure of vigilante justice in order to slowly end it. 

God sometimes regulated sinful practices in order to discourage, reduce, and limit them, with the goal of ultimately ending their legal protections. 

Conclusion
So we are all incrementalists. The faithful abolitionist who preaches at the abortion mill and sees one baby saved and goes home for the day is not saying, “it’s OK for the rest of you to keep killing babies.” He has done what he can do for today, and he will be back soon to save more. The faithful smashmouth incrementalist who works to get a heartbeat bill through a hard-hearted, mostly pagan state legislature (like New York or California), is not saying that it’s OK to murder babies if you do it before a heartbeat can be detected. 

Obedience means you cannot do all good things at once or immediately. This is not a utilitarian argument. This is not pragmatism. This is looking at the law of God and submitting our tactics and strategy to His Word. Good and faithful kings in Israel and Judah were sometimes described as doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord except that they did not remove the high places. You can have laws and magistrates that are good in the sight of the Lord that do not fully establish justice, that do not do everything that might have been done. 

In broadly conservative and predominantly Christian states I would advocate for bills that simply outlaw abortion. Full stop. Period. Prior to Roe being struck down you had *some* additional challenges with convincing Christians to defy Roe (which I previously argued that we should do). But now that Roe is struck down, conservative states should simply exercise their authority to protect all human life under their jurisdictions. Idaho is an interesting case because we are actually heavily Mormon. We have a near ban, but we still need to chip away at the exceptions, etc. 

But in states like California and New York, you don’t have a Christian majority to appeal to. Obviously preach the gospel, but if you can get a fetal pain bill onto the floor of the New York legislature, I think that would likely be a marvelous opportunity to explain the full humanity of all unborn babies to a room full of pagans who might not otherwise ever hear it. Likewise, a heartbeat bill may be all you are likely to get a hearing on for many years, and I think it tactically wise to try to get that passed as a means to arguing for the full human rights of preborn babies, while we preach the gospel, testify against the bloodshed, and wait upon the Lord for the Reformation and Revival that will change the hearts of our nation. 

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash