IF ABORTION IS ONE OF THE TOP SINS CAN THE CHRISTIAN REALLY LOVE THE PERSON HAVING AN ELECTIVE ABORTION? 

Christians claim to love the person who has an abortion for they feel they had no alternative.  But what about the wealthy person who has one for the pregnancy wrecks the holiday plans?  What if the pregnancy is well into the second trimester?  The Christians do not love you if you feel you had to kill your aunt to get her money to feed your kids so their love for the person who saw no other way than abortion is dubious.  It does not fit their argument that abortion is heinous for it is a mother killing her own child and killing one of the most innocent and defenceless forms of human life.

Love the sinner but do not love the sin and/or love the sinner and hate the sin is the core of Christianity and the message of Jesus. This is related to the command to love everybody for God does.  It is related to the doctrines that God is infinitely perfect and opposed to evil and has given us free will which we use to bring about evil.

The teaching causes offense for people know passive-aggression when they see it.  Even if it were not inherently toxic the fact is we do not really think that most people who see us as having committed specific sins really love us much. We suspect hate.  Poor love can be as bad as hate.  Damage results.

It has been noted that when a person loves you and hates your sin it is only specific sins they care about.  Maybe you are in a gay relationship.  Maybe you stole their trinket and they don't seem to worry that you have lied to them about their tax returns.

If this teaching is evil then the core of Christianity is dead and good riddance to it. Even if you can make a psychological distinction between who a person is and what they do in response to who they are why should anybody believe you?  Nobody has to agree with you.  Yet being in a Christian culture means people will be pressured.  You will judge those who admit or indicate that they are sceptical.  It is not a true recipe for peace.  It is a recipe for keeping up appearances.

With abortion and other things, you will be told that if you carry them out you are distorting your human reason and your human feeling and are becoming in some way less human than the person who would not abort or whatever. Some say that is true of you until you repent. So for them love the sinner and hate the sin only applies when the sinner wants to change.  Others say that loving the sinner and hating the sin is incompatible with making out they are monsters to some level and less than human.  It is obvious who is right.  The fact is a person accused of evil will not get equality with another. They are regarded as inferior. If the evil is not evil they are defamed.

Religion says God hates evil but only tolerates it for love always wins.  So putting up with it is worth it. It says that hate gives way to love and can even lead to a greater love in the end. So love and hate somehow need each other.  Such a doctrine is too much like making out hate and evil are good things or don't really matter.  It adds to our suspicion about those who supposedly hate sins and not sinners.  Even if they do, their love is too fragile when they think hate is not that bad in the end.

Jesus said in Matthew 18:5-10 that whoever receives a child receives him. The implication is that whoever aborts one aborts him. He said that no child should be despised for the child’s angel sees the face of the God the Father himself in Heaven. This cleverly opens the door to the idea that from the moment you start off in the womb you get an angel and that is what matters not how developed you are.  Yet abortion rights are largely based on the concept of the unborn not being a person yet.  A person who hates abortion on secular grounds does not need this doctrine.  There is enough to encourage hate.

We affirm that love the sinner and hate the sin can be as sugary as it wants to be but our sense that there is something threatening about the person who claims to love us and see us as offenders against God is real.  If when the doctrine is unsaid it is there and places of worship are not a true safe space.



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