Whoopi Goldberg won a two-week suspension and public spanking from The View because she waded into the teeth of a global moral consensus: the Holocaust was genocide and thus, unmitigated evil. Goldberg did not deny the evil. But her denial that the Holocaust was about race was heard as a dialing back of mandatory Holocaust hate — and that’s rightfully abhorred no matter one’s color, gender, social status, or political location. The Holocaust-equals-evil consensus bears unique fruit, including exquisite sensitivity to even slight attenuation of that evil. It also welcomes the naming and blaming of a person, Adolf Hitler, and of his political party, the Nazis, as the evil perpetrators of the genocide.
The same cannot be said of other historic and ongoing genocides. However deserving of equal status with Hitler and the Nazis are Stalin and his party’s purges and gulags, Mao and his party’s revolutionary corpse production, and the multiplying tens of millions of dismembered, crunched-up, bloody littler corpses across the world today, all three are denied the full global moral disgust the evil of the Holocaust enjoys.
The effectiveness of progressive genocide protection displays itself magnificently among some of the most prominent and ostensibly conservative pro-life evangelicals.
Political parties and movements that manage to win even a smidgeon of sympathy from progressives also manage to shield themselves from deserved Holocaust-like repudiation. The historic appeal of Marxism to many Christians and Jews together with the massive Marxist-friendly, pro-choice-committed, university-based industry that churns out the world’s political and institutional leaders inscribes mitigating asterisks over massive body counts, especially in the case of abortion. An aura of intended compassion envelops and de-intensifies even if it cannot eliminate revulsive recoil from left-wing atrocities. As the American writer Joseph Epstein learned from Shelby Steele, “[liberals] have, or at least feel they have, cornered the market on virtue. To put the liberal story in two words: They care.”
None of these pastors would dare attempt such false equivalence and genocide protection on behalf of the Holocaust, Hitler, or the Nazi party.
The effectiveness of progressive genocide protection displays itself magnificently among some of the most prominent and ostensibly conservative pro-life evangelicals. Bestselling author and pastor of McLean Bible Church in Virginia David Platt flatly declares abortion a modern Holocaust but then rebukes Christians who say one should not vote for the political party that has made abortion rights a non-negotiable dogma of its platform. Famed Baptist John Piper, who for years insisted he is a political novice who must lean on the expertise of others where politics is concerned, nevertheless rushed out with a blog post on the eve of the 2020 election to defend the comparable deadliness of abortion and Trump’s unrepented infidelities. Pastor Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington shamed Republican-voting, pro-life Christians as simpleton single-issue voters who compare unfavorably with the more sophisticated, multi-issue voting African Americans who vote Democrat. Of the Deplorables, Dever lamented, “I don’t think they know any other way to think about voting.”
All three pastors follow the lead of superstar former New York City pastor Timothy Keller, who made the sanctification of voting Democrat a pillar of evangelical church-planting strategy since at least 2009. As a result, attenuation of abortion’s heinousness found safe harbor in the now collapsing Keller-inspired evangelical industrial complex which included the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Gospel Coalition, and Christianity Today magazine.
None of these pastors would dare attempt such false equivalence and genocide protection on behalf of the Holocaust, Hitler, or the Nazi party. Why the double standard? Whence the moral blindness? Even Whoopi Goldberg couldn’t skate scot-free when she clipped the outrage-protecting tripwires.
How did those who consider abortion to be a genocide on the level of the Holocaust arrive at that moral conviction? Some read up on abortion and faced the facts. Others fell under the influence of a trusted pro-life friend or voice of authority. Some inhabit “red” communities where the pro-life position wins social capital and so embraced that community standard. Some had abortions and could not erase the horrific reality of what they’d done from their minds nor ease their consciences. Some medical professionals performed, assisted in, or witnessed abortions and the babies themselves and saw with their own eyes the crushing and dismembering instruments and the mangled mess of flesh and bone they knew moments before had been a living little human being.
But these paths to knowledge for some do not achieve for abortion and its facilitators the universal and limitless heinousness from which the words “Holocaust,” “Hitler,” and “Nazi” suffer. What does abortion, and for that matter, Stalin, Mao, and their political parties, lack that might win for them the global opprobrium genocidal evils merit? Here’s the answer — iconic, globally distributed images of the atrocities committed.
How small a percentage of the planet’s populace reaches puberty without viewing and appropriately recoiling from a photographic gem or two preserved from Auschwitz, Dachau, or Treblinka? Utter the words “Holocaust,” “Hitler,” or “Nazi” and ghastly images pop involuntarily into both the individual and global consciousness. Not so when we hear the words “Stalin” or “communist” or “abortion” or “Democrat.” Some images and even footage of these lesser-hated genocides are available. But none have gained the distribution required for the achievement of global icon status. Unless and until they do, blue community politicians and pastors will find sufficient incentive to flatter the moral conceits of the Democrat-voting constituencies upon whose largesse they depend.
The 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is upon us. If Christian and Jewish leaders, for whom “thou shalt not kill” is the commandment of almighty God, will not level Holocaust-like condemnation upon abortion and name and blame the Democrat Party which celebrates its perpetration, can we expect the pampered pre- and post-Marxist prodigies pumped out of our universities to do so? Not unless and until the masses they must face are confronted with the sine qua non of global moral outrage — images of the horrors of abortion. Only such widespread viewing shall fuel the righteous hatred abortion deserves and trigger rescuing love for the lives of the little ones at risk. The world has shown it can bring requisite hate to genocide. It does so when it sees the evil with its own eyes.
