Dr. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, sat down with Live Action president and founder Lila Rose to discuss some of the most pressing issues surrounding society today: abortion, sex, and gender.
The eldest of four children, Mohler first learned about abortion when he came home one day at age 13 and saw graphic pamphlets on the table showing what an abortion is and does, including images of the remains of aborted children. His mother was a nurse to an OB/GYN and was one of the very early individuals involved in the pro-life movement.
At seeing those images — which he believed were unintentionally left where he could see them — Mohler said he felt “both repulsion and fear.”
The yuck factor
“I mean I had baby brothers at the time,” he continued. “This just doesn’t add up. And just to be very clear, these were graphic photographs of a fairly late-term abortion. Now, abortion is the killing of a human person at any point from fertilization until birth. This was a picture that to a 13-year-old set of eyes was just incomprehensible and honestly, I was scared. It’s hard to say this, but at the same time we had Holocaust survivors living in the community… and if they can do this to them, they can do this to me or someone I love.”
He explained that Jewish philosopher Leon Kass called this the “wisdom of repugnance” or “the yuck factor.”
“He points out that a society that loses and denies that wisdom of repugnance is a society that will kill anyone,” explained Mohler. “… That’s part of how those pictures were effective.”
Abortion advocates often deny that images of abortion victims are real, and at the same time will work to hide them from others. This is because those images share the truth of abortion and will cause a “yuck factor” reaction in those who see them, turning them away from the idea that abortion could ever be a moral good.
Young president
“It was a time of war in our denomination,” Mohler said of becoming president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at the age of 33. There was a theological war brewing among Baptists, and one of the issues at hand was abortion.
“The theological issues for we Baptists were primary, but the issue that demonstrated the result of the bad theology was abortion,” he explained. “And so it quickly became the dividing line in ways that are predictable in retrospect but weren’t predictable at the time. So if I could just say this — [abortion] became shorthand for the entire set of theological issues. Southern Baptists learned to ask people their position on abortion and they worked back from that to the theology.”
He added, “Abortion has become the issue that forces us backward.”
Mohler explained that abortion is directly connected to the sexual revolution: “The [birth control] pill was a determined effort as part of a moral rebellion that was already there. The pill didn’t come from people on the right, who basically are far more pronatalist anyway, but from people on the left who saw babies as an imposition upon the liberation of women, a natural constraint women had to overcome.”
He added, “You can’t have any of this [sexual freedom] without the revolution in the self. And so if you look at someone born in the 19th century and someone born say in the midpoint or later in the 20th century, their notion of self was entirely different, at least in Western societies. Now you have an autonomous self. You have the self as the center of all meaning, and so any imposition on the self is something that has to be overcome. And that imposition might be called a baby.”
Gender, marriage, and abortion
Most women who have abortions are unmarried — 86%, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute. Mohler told Rose that the biggest drivers of the sexual revolution are the ideas of free love and free sex as a rebellion against what was deemed a restrictive society. He explained that you can’t have free love and free sex when you have objective realities such as babies. This mentality led to the birth of the so-called rights to birth control and abortion on demand — an attempt to separate babies from sex. Mohler added that you also can’t have free sex and free love without redefining marriage as those behind the gender movement have worked to do.
Pastors, he said, must connect the dots between scripture and abortion, marriage, gender, and sexuality.
“If you look at moral rebellion, certainly feminism… had a massive, massive impact but the greatest failure of any society is going to be the failure of men and that’s exactly what you see here,” he said. “And unfortunately, you see it in the church in so many ways. And holding men accountable is what a society has to do. And look, we’re in the midst of a society that’s trying to find every way to tell men, even young men, boys, you’re not really accountable. And so we’re reaping what we have sown.”
Looking to the future
Mohler was clear that moving forward, pastors must understand what true leadership looks like when it comes to sex, gender, marriage, and abortion. Churches must welcome everyone while remaining faithful to the word of God.
He explained, “The Christian hope in Christ is that all things can be made well. Now in this world, we will have trouble, Jesus said, but He said, fear not, I have overcome the world. … [N]ot every eye is dry and every tear is wiped away until the kingdom of Christ. But between here and there, the Church is to be made up of people who, together in obedience to Christ, are instilling hope in each other and caring for one another in the shared love of, first of all the local church, and then the shared love of the family and the shared love of friends in Christ for one another. And that’s an open hope, so in other words, we want others to join with us.”
