Posted April 23, 2026
You read that headline correctly. Organizers in Israel are planning “Pride Land,” a four-day event this June at the Dead Sea to promote the LGBTQ community and to highlight the region as a destination for LGBTQ tourists.
The fact that the Dead Sea is the likely area of Sodom and Gomorrah has not gone unnoticed by commentators across the cultural spectrum.
As the “America Reads the Bible” emphasis continues in Washington, DC, this week, we’re thinking together about relating God’s word to our secularized culture. We’ve discussed the power of Scripture to change hearts and lives when we submit to its truth in accountable community.
Today, let’s apply this discussion to the most crucial moral issue of our time. Despite the constant attention our culture gives to LGBTQ issues, today’s topic is even more urgent, not just for millions of lives but for the very future of our nation.
According to Guttmacher data, 1,125,930 abortions were performed by clinicians in the United States in 2025. So-called “medication abortions” account for 63 percent of all abortions in our country. A recent Pew Research Center study adds that nearly four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a majority of Americans continue to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
I understand why, I think. Pro-life advocates such as myself are up against four cultural currents.
One: Many Americans have privatized truth and are therefore convinced that morality is individual and subjective. “My body, my choice” is the rallying cry of the pro-abortion movement.
Two: Our society is equally convinced that illegality should be defined by harm done to others. What consenting adults do in the “privacy of their own homes” is no one else’s business, or so advocates for LGBTQ sexual activity say. Pornography, prostitution, and polyamory are similarly (and wrongly) termed “victimless crimes,” which is why prohibitions against all three are being liberalized today. Many see abortion in the same way, tragically ignoring the fact that every abortion kills a baby.
Three: In the “age of Trump,” evangelicals are increasingly caricatured as dangerous to society. When we promote biblical sexual morality, we are accused of puritanical legalism akin to The Handmaid’s Tale. When we stand for the preborn, we are supposedly waging a “war on women.”
Four: The more our secularized society stigmatizes evangelicals, the more we are tempted to keep our views to ourselves. I’ve sometimes heard Christians say, “I wouldn’t choose to have an abortion, but I have no right to tell someone else what to do.” In this way, they can maintain the veneer of biblical faith without paying the price of proclaiming it to its opponents.
In such a culture, it is especially critical that God’s people embrace and advance biblical morality, whatever the cost to ourselves. The sicker the patient, the more urgent the cure.
To this end, consider a passage I read recently referring to the Israelites’ entrance into Canaan:
They did not destroy the peoples, as the Lᴏʀᴅ commanded them, but they mixed with the nations and learned to do as they did. They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood. Thus they became unclean by their acts, and played the whore in their deeds (Psalm 106:34–39, my italics).
Is sacrificing “sons and daughters” not akin to sacrificing preborn children (cf. Leviticus 20:2)?
How did God respond?
The anger of the Lᴏʀᴅ was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his heritage; he gave them into the hand of the nations, so that those who hated them ruled over them. Their enemies oppressed them, and they were brought into subjection under their power (Psalm 106:40–42).
A holy God cannot bless that which is unholy. Nor can a loving Father bless that which harms his children. Accordingly, God withdrew his hand of protection and blessing from his people, and they were “brought low through their iniquity” (v. 43; cf. Leviticus 20:4–5).
Is God doing the same with America?
Many Americans, especially those in the middle class, are deeply unhappy about the economy. More workers are pessimistic than optimistic and work is “joyless,” while anxiety is an epidemic and “life often seems meaningless.”
But there’s more:
We have faced individual threats akin to these dangers before, from world wars to threatening technological advances to pandemics to geopolitical enemies. But never have we faced such threats at the same time.
I have no prophetic authority by which to state with certainty that our nation is being judged by God for the horrific sin of abortion. But I cannot state with certainty that this is not the case. And I know with certainty that every life lost to abortion is a child created by God and precious to him (Psalm 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5).
I also know with certainty that every mother who chooses abortion becomes its victim as well. As Mother Teresa noted, “Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three quarters of its victims are women: half the babies and all the mothers.”
It is therefore critical that America’s Christians declare and defend biblical truth regarding the sanctity of life from conception to natural death. Abortion is far and away the leading cause of death in the US. As many babies die from abortion in our country as Americans die from heart disease and cancer combined.
If you could do something to prevent all heart attacks and all malignancies, would you do it?
If you could prevent just one, wouldn’t you?
“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love is abortion.” —Mother Teresa
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