It occurred to me this morning that my position on the hot-button issues – gays, transgenders, abortion, socialism, immigration, yada yada – would be the same if I’d never heard of God or the Bible. Even though some of my positions do mesh with the evangelical Christian ones, I could explain and defend them without any reference to God, the Bible or biblical morality.
I think this is how it should be. Non-Christians, and even many fellow Christians, simply don’t care what you think “God’s position” is on these issues or what you think the Bible says about them.
Even if you think the Bible says an abortion a week after conception is murder, for example, NO ONE ELSE CARES. This is Inside Baseball sort of stuff for people who care what the Bible says. Your view may be important to you, and may motivate you to aggressively oppose abortion, but NO ONE CARES that you think the Bible says abortion is murder. If you oppose abortion, you have to be able to explain why in rational terms to a world that mostly doesn’t care what the Bible says (or what you think the Bible says) about it.
There is an apologist named Frank Turek (“I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be An Atheist”) whom I often listen to and mostly laugh at. (He once used one my emails as fodder for three of his podcasts, completely misrepresenting what I had said and arguing against a straw man version of me to make the same tiresome points he always makes.) He said again this morning that abortion is a matter of “God’s morality," as though this were an objective standard like Section 24-3 of the Texas Penal Code.
Yes, it is a matter of God’s morality – but only to people who believe (1) there is a God, (2) this God is the God of Christianity, (3) the Bible is in fact this God’s Word, and (4) the Bible in fact unequivocally teaches abortion is immoral. To the rest of the world, not so much. The vast majority don’t believe some or all of (1)-(4).
The rest of the world – secular and religious alike – is interested only in rational arguments for and against abortion and other hot-button issues. If you can’t explain or defend your position on any of these issues without reliance on God and the Bible, you really don’t have a rational position the world cares about or, frankly, should care about.