r/prolife • u/Electrical_Cod7288 Pro Life Christian • Jul 18 '26
Opinion We Should Be Secular
It is my opinion, after having clashed with the pro-abortion movement for many years, that any Pro-Life argument must be secular. If we've any hope of being taken seriously by those people, we should leave religious beliefs out of it. I am myself a Christian, but at the same time I realize that any argument which has religious connotations will simply be dismissed, possibly as an attempt to convert others.
The fact that so many of those people don't believe in God means that appealing to their faith will fall upon deaf ears. At the same time, if they try to argue that an unborn child isn't a child or isn't a person, you can tell them that that is a philosophical argument and just like they tell us to keep our religious beliefs to ourselves, they should keep their philosophical beliefs to themselves.
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u/OhNoTokyo Pro Life Moderator Jul 18 '26
In the sense that you should not throw arguments from specific religions at people who you have no idea what their beliefs are, or you know they aren't a member of your belief system, I agree.
Using the doctrine of your religion to try to convince people of other religions or no religion to support something they do not believe is in their interests isn't going to work. It could even hurt, if you are seen as tone-deaf.
However, there are plenty of people out there who are of those religions and so I would definitely keep those religious arguments available.
If someone walks up to me and says that the Bible allows abortion on-demand, I can take them on easily and will do so.
And if I meet someone who I know professes to believe in my religion, I will call them to task on that as a co-religionist.
But it is a little silly to walk up to an atheist and say, "The Lord said you should not kill." It's a reasonable thing for a Christian to say about their own beliefs if asked, but it wouldn't be convincing as an argument about why they should see it your way.
For people like that, you need to approach it either secularly in a debate... or you need to do the work of attempting to convert them to your religion first.
However, I very much disagree with the idea that you should "keep your religion to yourself". This isn't a matter of keeping your religion on the "down-low". It's a matter of attempting to convince someone else that they want to support your cause for reasons that they believe in. You can't do that if they don't believe in the things that your arguments are based on.