Thread by @mattleeanderson

This is an admirable piece by @JohnPiper. But I'll confess I'm perplexed by the argument that pride is killing people equivalently to abortion, and that we should include that as part of our *political* reasoning. desiringgod.org/articles/polic…

One question is simply empirical: *does* a "culture-saturating, pro-self pride" actually kill people in the sense relevant that we could even compare it to abortion?

It certainly kills the soul, and we should fear that worse than the death of the body (Mt. 10:28).

While pride's effects on the polity may be considerable, they also seem indirect. Whether and how the government constrains the evils that arise from pride would therefore seem like an extraordinarily difficult matter of prudential judgment.

The killing of abortion is radically distinct from that, though: the injustice is transparent and obvious, and it is immediately inflicted upon another citizen--and in the body of that citizen, upon the rest of the community.

It seems to me like the government's responsibility to judge that wrong, and to prevent it, is much more weighty than even its responsibility to promote some nebulous 'common good.'

The pro-life position is not simply a matter of counting deaths, but requires discerning the unique badness of *killing* the innocent--which not even the inept politician who negligently fails to protect his citizens from a pandemic can be said to do.

Note that this isn't an argument for or against Trump. It's an argument about the reasons Piper brings forth for his position (and hopefully a constructive argument, at that).