June 2008 Issue

Protecting Our Children

Reaping the Fruit of "Life Devalued"
Child Abuse and Neglect
by Richard Land

Are human beings simply specks of cosmic dust blown on the winds of fate? Is there no meaning or purpose to existence? Or, has each human being been created with a purpose and plan for his or her life? Do we possess any more inherent value than anything else God created? Are we just another species within the animal kingdom, or are we made in the image of God?

David, the shepherd-king of Israel, gives the answer in a lyrical and beautiful description of our place in the universe in Psalm 8: "Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is Your name throughout the earth! You have covered the heavens with Your majesty," he marvels. "When I observe Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You set in place, what is man that You remember him, the son of man that You look after him?" he asks, marveling that the Creator of such a vast universe would stoop to lavish His attention on frail human beings.

"You made him little less than God and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him lord over the works of Your hands; You put everything under his feet: all the sheep and oxen, as well as animals in the wild, birds of the sky, and fish of the sea passing through the currents of the seas" (Psalm 8:1, 3-8).

Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. Each person is a unique creation of God, of incalculable value to Him, and ultimately accountable to Him (Psalm 139). Each of us has a God-given destiny to fulfill, not only for today but also for all eternity. What difference does it make when a society believes that some lives are more valuable than others? Moral chaos supplants God's perfect order, and the smallest and most defenseless among us are in mortal danger.

The assault upon innocent children, unborn and born, reflects our culture's moral confusion and is revealed in crimes of violence — physical, emotional, and sexual — against children.

In a culture engulfed and submerged in moral relativism, children are particularly vulnerable to the depraved sexual appetites of adults. Loving parents who bond with their children will stop at nothing to keep them out of harm's way, protect them from imminent danger, and rescue them from crisis. Yet the evidence of how America raises her children looks like anything but such loving care.

Child abuse is at epidemic proportions in the United States, at all socioeconomic levels. It is an issue for which everyone must take responsibility, both in terms of reporting and adequate supervision of children. And we all need to examine the societal reasons that have turned this country from the child-nurturing society that it once was to the child-neglecting and child-abusing society that it is now in the first part of the twenty-first century.

Children who have been victimized bear emotional scars and are tormented by the fear they will be targeted again. Too often, their psyches damaged, they pass along the ugly legacy of violence against children.

Years ago, Carl F. H. Henry observed that twentieth-century philosophies have succumbed to man-centered rather than God-centered focus and orientation. Man rather than God defines truth and goodness in most contemporary universities: "The greatest overturn of ideas and ideals in the history of human thought ... [that] assumes the comprehensive contingency of everything, including God; the total temporality of all things; the radical relativity of all human thought and life; and the absolute autonomy of man." Obviously, Christianity has become marginalized.

In words that should haunt every thinking Christian, Henry wrote of "a multitude of seething and tormented minds" that "speak now and then of right and wrong, but never of absolutes. They live in a world no longer sure of definitions. Some occasionally churn up the vocabulary of values, but their values take on the sense of mere wants and desires."

This recalls the account in Romans 1:21-28: For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man.... Therefore God delivered them over in the cravings of their hearts.... God delivered them over to degrading passions. ...God delivered them over to a worthless mind to do what is morally wrong.

The noted Evangelical philosopher G.K. Chesterton observed that: "The nineteenth century decided to have no religious authority. The twentieth century seems disposed to have any religious authority" [Illustrated London News, April 26, 1924, emphasis supplied]. To expand upon his insightful line of thought, we might say the twenty-first century appears to have forgotten there ever was such a thing as religious authority or moral absolutes of any kind.

It is paramount that the body of Christ do all it can to protect these little ones, from insuring that the church and all her ministries are a place of comfort and safety to reaching out to new moms and dads who are — more often that not — suddenly overwhelmed by the challenges of parenthood. A church that allows any child to be harmed through negligence or neglect soils its witness in the community and brings public disrepute to God. We must be ever vigilant in protecting the children within our midst.

Yet the greatest contribution the church can offer to remedy this scourge of abuse and neglect upon innocent children is to reassert boldly the Truth that all human life is precious and should be protected.

In his foreword to the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission publication, Our Southern Baptist Heritage of Life, my friend Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School, warns of the "correlation between the decline in Bible-based faith and morality and the successful assault on the sanctity of human life." The trends offer a chilling parallel with the infamous genocides of Hitler. Once the German people rejected the premise that all human life is created by God and is sacred to Him, then it became possible to do virtually anything to at least some human beings. The first victims of the Third Reich's diminishing of human life were not German Jews, but mentally challenged German boys and girls who were decreed to have lebensunwertes Leben — lives unworthy of life.

America is practicing child sacrifice. We are victimizing our unborn babies through abortion and our young children through abuse and neglect because we have forgotten God and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator. The wholesale abortion of approximately one third of our children for more than three decades has brutalized and desensitized our society and has caused the collective societal devaluation of human life itself.

No child deserves to be assaulted, abandoned, or maltreated. The rotten fruit of a culture that allows human life to be devalued renders a vile stench that should sting our nostrils. It is for those of us who know God, having surveyed the tragic landscape of our culture and with our hearts broken over the shattered lives of so many of our nation's children, to resolve before God that we will do everything within our power to revalue each and every human life and to extend to every child — born and unborn — the protection they deserve — and that is their "unalienable right" as a human being.

Richard Land is a member of Clearview Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.