Human beings don’t value other human beings for their size, their level of development, their environment or their degree of dependency. When we do, we are wrong to do so. If someone murders another human being from a hate for that person’s race, not only do we consider the act of murder abhorrent, but the specific motive is an evil in itself.

Pro choice advocates have done a good job of confusing the public debate with the language of women’s rights while failing to answer the question of the moral status of the unborn. The pro-choice movement’s failure to address this question with honesty and clarity was on brilliant and tragic display last year at about this time when Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Palosi, and Joe Biden all gave similarly ambiguous answers to the question of the moral status of unborn life.

But that question is the only question of relevance. If they can answer that definitively, clearly and persuasively, they have won the argument.

No one argues about the reality of human life in the womb. The facts of biology testify that there is continuity of human life across its life stages, from conception to death. Instead, the debate has to do with the nature of that life and the moral status of that life. Is it the kind of life worthy of protection? Does it have moral dignity? We all agree that certain kind of life is worthy of protection. That’s why we have laws against murder. But when does one qualify as having the moral status worthy of that protection by fellow human beings?

The pro-choice position must argue that a human being acquires certain and necessary faculties or features to qualify as having dignity worthy of protection. Size, level of development, environment and degree of dependency do matter.

Enter ultrasound.

In the following interview, Mike Huckabee interviews a former Planned Parenthood Executive Director about her experience witnessing an abortion and deciding to turn in her keys. The ultrasound made obvious the obvious: No one’s right to choose what they do with their body extends to the jurisdiction of another human life. The unborn have rights of their own, endowed by their creator.

HT: Justin Taylor

New England is home to America’s oldest churches, or at least America’s oldest church buildings.

According to recent surveys, New England is now the least churched region in the country with a percentage of gospel believing Christians low enough to qualify as an unreached people group.

In an article published on Wednesday, Evangelists Target Spiritually Cold New England, the Associated Press reported on some encouraging developments in New England. This report focuses on a recent church plant, Redeemer Fellowship, in the Boston area which is part of an exciting network of churches supported by New England Theological Seminary.

It’s hard to tell in the quiet of a color-splashed autumn morning, but Redeemer Fellowship Church is trying to set roots in a rough neighborhood. For churches, anyway.

Until this new church opened last month, its 19th-century Congregational church building in suburban Watertown was empty for nearly two years. Just across the street, a closed Baptist church is filled with condos. So is a former Catholic church a half mile away.

…In a Gallup poll this year, all six New England states were in the Top 10 least religious in the country, with Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts claiming the top four spots.

New England’s religious apathy has developed over decades, but it’s striking where the Pilgrims landed seeking religious freedom and the great 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards helped spark the First Great Awakening. Stately churches near town centers all over the region are reminders of the central importance religion once held.

The article also addressed the question of how Christianity vanished from the northeast.

The Rev. Wes Pastor, head of the NETS Institute for Church Planting in Williston, Vt., said New England’s liberal mainline denominations, such as the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church, have been practicing a ”different religion.”

”I’m not saying it to be snooty, but they have a different belief system and that belief system … is a profound departure from historic Christianity,” said Pastor, whose group trained Bass and supports his Baptist church.

Rev. Pastor is absolutely correct and he is saying what Bible believing, gospel embracing Christians have said about such departures since the arrival of so called liberal “Christianity” on the scene.

In his book, Christanity and Liberalism, J. Greshman Machen expressed this conviction well; “In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religous belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christain faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.” Writing of this liberal Christianity which denied the supernatural, and thus the Bible’s divine inspiration, Machen continued, “It may appear that what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christain doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion whch is so entirely different from Christainty as to belong in a distinct category.”

Eighty six years after Machen wrote these words the trajectory of this religion has met its logical end. Today, New England is sprinkled with vacant buildings where once faithful gospel congregations met to sing, to read Scripture, to sit under the Word of God and to go out with the gospel. 

Let’s pray that many in New England will come to know the new birth as gospel congregations fill these old buildings.

I encourage you to read about this work of God in the northeast and to pray for these churches and the NETS church planting network.