Selling Our Souls

It is, according to CS Lewis, one of the most potent pulls into sin, the desire to belong. Were Maslow a bit more honest in ranking our “needs” I suspect the approval of others would make the top five of his hierarchy. For teens we call it peer pressure. Sadly we tend to diminish its power to those clear crossroads moments, when the joint is passed around the circle or when some back seat Lothario is pushing a peer to fornicate. The temptation, however, is likely more powerful when the stakes seem lower, and our guard is down. It is in the ordinary that we sell our souls.

Consider abortion. When we come to those crossroads moments sadly we don’t do too terribly well. One in six clients at your local abortion mill is a professing evangelical. It’s a disheartening statistic to be certain, as we wonder how it is possible that one of us could murder their own. But it tells us something about our desire to belong. First, certainly a percentage of these women never had genuine evangelical, or genuine pro-life convictions. But they claimed to have such convictions. They claimed to believe and to be something they weren’t, for the sake of belonging, fitting in. Second, when a pregnancy would have led them into shame, exposing their sexual misconduct (which itself could be grounded in getting the approval of a man), the baby had to be killed to protect reputation and standing.

It is not, however, just the sexually immoral that have the same problem. We are willing to be pro-life, so long as we are not asked to be radically pro-life. That is, we’re willing to ally ourselves with the right side of the aisle, to take our position on this political, social issue. We’re even willing to get up in arms from time to time, when a Kermit Gosnell comes on the scene, or when a late term abortion hits the news for some reason. As long as the practitioner or the reason for, or the timing of the abortion is sufficiently repugnant to polite society we’re willing to condemn. In those circumstances where even the pro-aborts begin to blush, we’ll fuss and fume.

But the ordinary abortion, in the sanitary clinic, because of Down Syndrome, before the scientists have to concede the baby can feel pain, that we are generally silent over. That we at best think little of, at worse, approve of. All because we don’t want to look weird to our neighbors, don’t want to lose their approval. We want to focus our time and attention on those elements of Scripture that are palatable to our neighbors, the parts about being nice. And there we sell our souls for a mess of respectability pottage.

When we hear a still small voice warning us to be reasonable, to consider our position, to maintain our credibility, we must learn to feel the forked tongue tickling our ears. We must learn to smell the stench of demons and the death they love. We must learn that the real challenge isn’t whether we will denounce Christ to save our lives, but whether we will be silent over His littlest image bearers to save our reputations. The first thing that must die as we lay down our lives for the kingdom is our reputations.