CBN News reported on one of president Trump’s final edicts in declaring
Friday, January 29 National Sanctity of Human Life Day.
Below is an excerpt of the article, or you can read Trump’s entire statement at CBN:
“The pro-life organization Operation Rescue named the president its pro-life person of the year for 2020, saying:
“The Malachi Award is given by Operation Rescue every year to recognize individuals who sacrificially work to advance the cause of protecting the pre-born. …during President Trump’s administration, he has done more to protect unborn lives than any other president in U.S history.”
NATIONAL SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE DAY, 2021
– A PROCLAMATION BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA –
– DONALD J. TRUMP –
“Every human life is a gift to the world. Whether born or unborn, young or old,
healthy or sick, every person is made in the holy image of God. The Almighty Creator gives unique talents, beautiful dreams, and a great purpose to every person. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we celebrate the wonder of human existence and renew our resolve to build a culture of life where every person of every age is protected, valued, and cherished. . .
“. . . Since my first day in office, I have taken historic action to protect innocent lives at home and abroad. . .
“. . . As a Nation, restoring a culture of respect for the sacredness of life is fundamental to solving our country’s most pressing problems. When each person is treated as a beloved child of God, individuals can reach their full potential, communities will flourish, and America will be a place of even greater hope and freedom.”
The hypocrisy of this statement is glaring, even though the same accusation could be laid at the feet of every presidential administration. After all, hypocrisy is at the heart of American politics.
However, as an American evangelical, I am always troubled by the anti-abortion movement’s hypocrisy in calling itself pro-life. For, as I and many others have said before, groups like Operation Rescue are anti-abortion activists NOT pro-life activists.
It is no small difference. Words matter.
Standing up for the sanctity of all human life everywhere is nowhere to be found on the agenda of evangelical activists. Neither was it a concern of Donald Trump’s.
In fact, Donald Trump’s total disregard for human life — other than his own — has been obvious over the past 4 years. The list of his anti-life actions is too long to cover here, so I will give only a few examples.
I could begin with his cluster of hurried federal death penalty executions in
the final weeks of his presidency. Trump’s last minute execution spree has killed more federal prisoners (including one mentally ill woman) than any previous president. (Yes, I believe every Christian, every American, must object to the death penalty.)
I could talk about Trump’s anti-life border policies — separating refugee families; losing track of children taken from their parents; keeping children in holding pens; arresting legitimate asylum seekers, labeling them as 
illegals, and then sending them back to their countries where they will face certain death.
These are not the actions of a pro-life president.
But I want to focus my attention on only one specific humanitarian scandal that has been enormously worsened by Trump’s policies: the war in Yemen.
As Kathy Kelly writes at Common Dreams:
For more than five years, Yemenis have faced near-famine conditions while 
enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already caused 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 deaths from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.
Systematic destruction of farms, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation plants and health-care facilities has wrought further suffering. Yemen is resource-rich, but famine continues to stalk the country, the UN reports. Two-thirds of Yemenis are hungry and fully half do not know when they will eat next. Twenty-five percent of the population suffers from moderate to severe malnutrition. That includes more than two million children.
All of this blood is on American hands.
And if American church-goers were genuinely pro-life, we would be emphatically anti-war. We would be marching in the streets, pressuring the president to stop the bloodshed anywhere and everywhere that American power is killing, maiming, and suppressing the Image of God in this world.
But, then, that behavior would require us first to truly believe in the “sanctity of all human life” — which we obviously do not.
Sadly, few American evangelicals care about places like Yemen because we are a painfully provincial and ignorant people, too distracted by the obnoxious glitterati of commercialized, Christian success stories to look beyond our own self-centered existence.
The Yemeni civil war is another among America’s several proxy wars where we use others to do our bidding and kill our “enemies” (whether or not they have ever done anything to us).
In this case, the real enemy happens to be Iran, even though it’s the Yemeni people who now have the privilege of suffering from American terrorism in their own country.
Our sub-contractor in this horrific proxy war is Saudi Arabia, a long-time enemy of Iran — which makes outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s audacious accusations about Iran now providing safe harbor for Al Qaeda terrorists a laughable, buffoonish statement that should not only have set his pants on fire but left his body an ash heap on the podium.
(Perhaps I should stop being so surprised when infamously dishonest people like Mike Pompeo attend DC Bible studies and offer smiling testimony to their devout, evangelical, Christian faith.)
Even worse, the State Department has recently declared the Houthi/Yemeni 
group that is fighting against the US/Saudi-backed rebels “a terrorist organization,” opening the flood gates even wider for US military attacks in the future.
This is another long, sad story, because the truth is that the US is now allied with Al Qaeda (remember the 9/11 guys?) in Yemen.
The fact of the matter is that WE, the good old US of A, are the real terrorists who are destroying, not just Yemen, but a host of suffering nations around the globe.
As a radical, Salafist, jihadist, Sunni organization, Al Qaeda originated in Saudi Arabia. They are sworn enemies of the Shia nation, Iran.
So, Al Qaeda now happily works with us (as we happily work with them) in assisting their countrymen, the Saudis, to destroy the people of Yemen.
Saudi Arabia has been slaughtering people in Yemen, largely civilians, since 2015. Its #1 financier and weapons supplier is none other than the USA.
In March 2019 both houses of Congress passed a bill requiring the US to end its financial support and military involvement the Yemen war.
But President Donald J. Trump vetoed that bill as an “unnecessary” and “dangerous” attempt to weaken his powers to make war.
How very pro-life of him…
Thus, the slaughter in Yemen continues with the help of US intelligence services, covert ops, training, money, fighter jets, missiles, bombers, and other US military equipment.
As Ahmed Abdulkareem writes in his recent Mint News article, “Yemen’s Leningrad: The Unforeseen Consequences of the State Department’s Houthi Designation:”
The war-torn country of Yemen is in the midst of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world thanks in large part to a Saudi-led war fueled by American weapons. Now, as the war nears its six-year anniversary in March, any hopes for a diplomatic resolution have faded faster than the presidency of Donald Trump, whose outgoing administration recently announced plans to designate the Houthi rebels, the principal force battling both the Saudi-led Coalition and al-Qaeda militants in Yemen, as a foreign terrorist organization. The move effectively eliminates any ray of hope for the more than 24 million people struggling for survival amid war, siege, famine, and countless diseases and epidemics, according to the United Nations.
The largest humanitarian crisis in the world, made possible and sustained by United States of America. (Also see Juan Cole’s article at Informed Comment.)
These tragic events illustrate the obscenity which lies at the heart of American politics, our foreign policy, and the evangelical, Christian nationalism that perpetuates the anti-life lies of American exceptionalism.
While purportedly Christian news organizations such as CBN prostitute themselves by offering establishment propaganda about a pro-life president and American evangelicals, here are a few hard, cold, truths to be faced:
- Evangelicals, by-in-large, are not pro-life people. We may be anti-abortion people. But we then use that pro-life label like an infant’s pacifier to sooth ourselves into a comfortable, conscienceless coma allowing us to ignore the slaughter of foreign innocents.
- American is not a great, humanitarian nation. Rather, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The United States is the greatest purveyor of death, violence, and destruction in the world today.” (My favorite line from his anti-Vietnam war speech; a speech that is rarely included in the bastardized memorials touted on MLK Day).
- No, electing Christians to political office does not improve anything. In fact, it only confirms the doctrine of total depravity. Mike Pompeo is only one of millions of Donald Trump’s loyal, evangelical enablers.
Christian support for Trump was the equivalent of an anti-spiritual hysteria spread like a virus within the church. I pray that the fever will break soon.
For years, the Religious Right insisted that voting Christians into high office was the solution to America’s problems. But Mike Pompeo (and his numerous minions now scattered throughout DC bureaucracy) is only the latest poster-child for how very, very wrong-headed that idea has always been.
- We may debate when exactly life begins. But we can all agree that a fully human life has entered this world with the delivery of a new baby.
Sadly, however, evangelical pro-lifers behave as if life ends at birth. Why else would anyone care more about the unborn than those who have been born?
Genuine members of the Kingdom of God will honor the sanctity of all human life everywhere; will work to defend those lives globally; and will seek to stop the deliberate destruction of human life anywhere and everywhere.
No. Neither president Trump nor the evangelical church in America have ever been noteworthy defenders of the sanctity of human life.
In fact, American foreign policy relishes trampling upon the Image of God without a second thought.
And that is our shame.
