Five articles
Some 2023 writing on living in Babylon, battling abortion, thinking about evolution, and pitching while thinking Christianly.
I had a good time writing in 2023. Product #1 — Two books with publication dates today (Moral Vision, Simon & Schuster, Feb. 13) and one month later (Pivot Points, P&R, March 13). Product #2 — 95 articles for eleven different publications.
The eleven, with my thanks to editors: Fix Homelessness (fixhomelessness.org), Olasky Books (discovery.org/t/olasky-books-newsletter), Current (see my Substack post last month), Religion and Liberty (rlo.acton.org), The Dispatch (the dispatch.com), the Human Life Review (humanlifereview.com), By Faith (byfaithonline.com), Religion Unplugged (religionunplugged.com), Evolution News (evolutionnews.org), the Wall Street Journal, and the Institute for Family Studies (ifstudies.org).
Below are five of the articles. I hope you’ll read the print publications and websites that gave the 95 articles a home. Several have paywalls, others are free. The Olasky Books newsletter can be emailed to you each month for free.
1
CHRISTIANITY TODAY
We Live in Babylon, Not Israel
Biblical history reminds Christians to serve and build a kingdom not of this world.
MARVIN OLASKY JANUARY 20, 2023
Late last year I asked on Twitter, “Do we live in ancient Israel or a modern Babylon?”
Put a different way, to what extent are biblical lessons regarding life in the Holy Land normative for Christians who live as religious minorities—that is, in “unholy” lands dominated by non-Christians?
Looking back to ancient Israel, the emphasis was on purity, not evangelism— God sent Ishmael and Esau into the wilderness, told Joshua to destroy the Canaanites, and instructed Ezra to insist that the Israelites put away foreign wives. To make the Holy Land holy, God commanded a zero-tolerance policy: There shall be no abominations among you.
The Holy Land was humanity’s greatest opportunity to live in a new kind of Eden, where God chose a particular nation to become its inhabitants. He provided commandments so they would know how to act and promised them (in Deuteronomy 28 and elsewhere) that if they obeyed, all would go well.
God established ancient Israel as a model nation for the world—a perfect test case of whether good rules would cultivate a good people.
The Israelites were warned not to follow the “detestable ways” of other nations while living in the land (Deut. 18:9). But God’s rules and statutes were not just for the Israelites; they were also for any stranger that stayed in the land (Lev. 18:26, 28).
In this way, the Old Testament is highly location specific—the ancient Israelites’ charter was designed to protect the purity of the land God had given them. They were to cleanse it from defilement and then preserve it as holy.
Evangelism was not a priority. When some Israelites married foreign women, leaders did not celebrate an opportunity to evangelize the newcomers and increase the numbers of Israel. Instead, they looked on such intermarriage with horror.
The prophets were indignant when the Israelites trashed their semi-Eden. Jeremiah—the prophet whose godly fury led to our word jeremiad—wrote, “This is what the Lord says: ... ‘I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruits and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable” (Jer. 2:5, 7).
And yet Jeremiah had a very different tone when he spoke to Israelites living not only outside the semi-Eden but also in the anti-Eden, the city of Babylon:
This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. ... Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” (Jer. 29:4–5, 7)
Other parts of the Old Testament also indicate that Israelites outside the borders of Israel should have a very different political agenda than those inside. For instance, God banned soothsayers from ancient Israel (Deut. 18:10–12), yet Daniel was appointed to oversee the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the other wise men of Babylon (Dan. 2:48).
Daniel thought and acted independently from these ungodly people, but nowhere did he indicate a plan or desire to wipe them out. As a stranger in a strange land, he had to coexist with them—which makes him a role model for us. For at least 66 years, from 605 to 539 B.C., Daniel lived and worked under Babylonian authority, always trying to serve a strange public while remaining true to God.
In the process, Daniel faced down death threats, as did three of his friends. When Nebuchadnezzar set up a 90-foot-tall image of gold and commanded all his officials to bow down and worship it, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did not harangue the assembled pagans. They merely refused to bow. But that was enough to get them arrested and thrown into a fiery furnace, from which God preserved them.
The Israelites publicly tolerated differences while following God’s commands in their own lives and within their own households. Daniel prayed in his own house but did not demand public prayer or Bible reading in Babylonian academies. The books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther show how other Jews living in Persia—part of an empire with 127 provinces and a vast number of ethnic groups and languages—lived peaceably under laws not their own.
In the Old Testament, all idols in the land of Israel were to be destroyed. And yet in the New Testament, the apostle Paul never tried to remove pagan altars and idols from public streets in the city of Athens (Acts 17:17–31). He and the gospel writers emphasized proclaiming the Good News of Christ at every opportunity, without calling for the imposition of biblical law.
Again, the Bible is location specific—proper action in one place was not proper in another.
We even see this in the work of Jesus. He drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, the holiest place in the world, but did not drive Romans out of any other places. Israel had already become a most unholy land by A.D. 70, when Roman soldiers destroyed the temple. After that, one land was not considered holier than others.
The great tragedy of ancient Israel was that God’s people sinned in a land that of all lands should have been the least conducive to sin. If ancient Israel’s laws, given by God, did not bring about righteousness in this most hospitable of environments, how likely are holiness laws to succeed in less favorable environments?
Old Testament history teaches us not to be prideful in thinking we can create earthly utopias or even sustain the ones handed to us. The lesson is this: Sin comes from within, not from our surroundings. God taught humanity that sin crouches at our door even in the best of environments, whether the original Eden or Israel’s semi-Eden. He has shown us our desperate need for Christ and the necessity of accepting no substitutes.
As early Christians came to understand the meaning of Israel’s history, they were ready to understand the New Testament’s emphasis on evangelism. The Jewish answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” was at the most “Your fellow Jew.” But Jesus added to that understanding by saying anyone in need is our neighbor—and by including women, Samaritans, and even enemy soldiers among God’s people.
Jesus’ embrace of others strengthened early Christians. Instructed to take the gospel into all nations and not concentrate on defending one, Christians were free to evangelize and admit into their church fellowships anyone who confessed faith in Christ, regardless of pedigree, past sins, race, or ethnicity.
Without a land to preserve but with a gospel to proclaim, the primary directive for early believers was to bring in the sheaves rather than to try enforcing biblical law.
As “Christian nationalism” now spreads across America and some other countries as well, we can learn from our predecessors: We have no holy land or temple to defend, but churches should aspire to be model cities in God’s kingdom—where, by His grace, individuals can and will be changed from the inside out.
Institute for Family Studies, JANUARY 19, 2023
Dobbs Dealt a Blow to the Supply Side of Abortion; Now Pro-lifers Should Focus on the Demand Side
by Marvin Olasky, @MARVINOLASKY
Pro-lifers rejoiced over last June’s Supreme Court decision that liberated the United States from a half century of Roe v. Wade. It was an earthquake. But since then, we have had a pandemic of bad news.
Here are just three of the difficult developments. First, the number of abortions has probably not declined very much. Tragically, frightened women carrying unborn children have headed to blue states for abortions; big corporations have sometimes paid their transportation costs. Other women have swallowed abortion pills in the privacy of their own apartments, all alone, all apart from pregnancy resource centers that could help them.
Second, the federal government stands firmly on the side of abortion. The Justice Department says the Postal Service can deliver abortion pills to women in states that make abortion illegal. The Food and Drug Administration announced that retail pharmacies can now sell abortion pills. And so on.
Here comes strike three: K in baseball is the symbol for a strikeout, and referenda votes in red states like Kansas and Kentucky have brought punchouts of pro-lifers. My old newspaper, The Boston Globe, recently ran an article glorifying the architect of victory for the abortion side in those elections, Rachel Sweet, who works the churches in which congregants say, I don’t like abortion, but I’m worried about a religious tyranny being imposed. Sweet stokes fears of “extreme bans, ban with no exceptions. Those are really out of step with mainstream values.”
That’s a reaction the pro-life side should ponder. When is it right to emphasize the overwhelming majority of abortions that occur for a variety of personal, social, and economic reasons, and, for now, not try to ban the small minority that occur after rape and incest?
I’ve been involved in this battle for 40 years, ever since my wife Susan and I moved to Austin, Texas. I went there to teach at The University of Texas, but I suspect God wanted us there so Susan could start the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center. Through her work, she brought me into the pro-life movement. Over the years, I’ve dug deep into abortion history. Last week brought the publication of my latest book on the topic, The Story of Abortion in America, written with Leah Savas.
The real-life stories in my new book, I hope, are interesting in themselves. But they also show the truth of what Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe: Abortion has never been “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” At the same time, the stories we share reveal the limits of law. In the 19th century, every state passed laws against abortion, but those laws were rarely enforced.
In the 19th century, laws [banning abortion] worked on the supply side but did little to decrease demand. Here's one prime example. In 19th century New York City, abortionists bribed or blackmailed police and judges. The most famous abortionist, Madame Restell, was unpopular but advertised openly. The city’s major newspapers profited from her ads and protected her. One newspaper that did not take her ads, the New York Express, said
Those who are most guilty are bound by their fears to protect her.... Names, and dates, and circumstances are all recorded, and her downfall would shake society to its very centre.... In a word, Madame is a woman of genius who understands her position and knows how to use its advantages.
New York law made it a crime to give a pregnant woman any drug for bringing about an abortion, or to use any instrument to cause one. But the law was not enforced. In Massachusetts, which had a similar law—along with some district attorneys who tried to enforce it— 32 abortion trials between 1849 and 1857 produced zero convictions. The most-used medical jurisprudence textbook in 1855 said it is “easier to pass laws against abortion than to make them work.” In trials, one or two jurors usually held out. If the jury was unanimous, bribed judges overturned verdicts.
That’s the way it worked. Pass a law, hurrah. Try to enforce it, bah. Laws worked on the supply side but did little to decrease demand. Madame Restell was an abortionist for 40 years, from 1838 to 1878. She did go to prison once—for a year—where she received special, almost luxurious, treatment. She came out saying news reports of her trial were easily worth $100,000 to her in advertising—that’s millions today. She lived in a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue in NY City, a block north of where a new church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, was being built.
Other abortionists, from 1900 on, stayed out of jail, with rare exceptions. Four of the most infamous were publicly known for decades in Oregon, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and California. One performed abortions primarily out of revenge on men. Another—victimized by racism—had embraced Marxism. A third was a convinced materialist and Darwinist.
The fourth, Inez Burns, was destitute following the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. I imagine her standing like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, saying, “I’ll never be hungry again.” From the 1910s to the 1950s, Burns performed about 50,000 abortions in San Francisco and Oakland. She gained a mansion with a walk-in closet that had slots for 320 hats. She purchased diamond collars for her two pet Pomeranians.
In 1946, an ambitious district attorney, Edmund “Pat” Brown, went after her. He persevered through one trial where the jury was 11-1 against her, but juror 12 would not budge. Brown tried again: another hung jury. The third time, he got a conviction. Burns went to prison for two years, then came out and resumed her abortion business. She invested half of her revenue in payoffs and bribes: $6,000 per week to downtown officials, $12,000 per month to San Francisco police, and $5,000 to every politician running for office.
Inez Burns died in bed at age 89. She had a statue of a little boy in front of her house. She left instructions that her abortionist tools should be put in the casket with her: “I relied on them.... They are what got me everywhere.” She also “got” Pat Brown everywhere. Since abortion was not deeply rooted in America, Brown gained popularity by cutting down one stalk. Trial publicity helped him become governor of California. Later Brown’s son became governor.
Going forward, pro-lifers need to emphasize compassionate approaches that can reduce demand for abortions. Red states that maintain opposition to abortion and manage to keep their laws against it intact in the 2020s and 2030s will nevertheless still have abortions: mostly by pill, some by surgery. I’m not saying the Court’s recent decision, and the pro-life laws some states will maintain, are useless; they will restrict the supply of abortionists. They will save some lives. But in big blue states like California, New York, and Illinois, abortion will still be rampant. In cities like Austin that are blueberries in bowls of tomato soup, I will be amazed if a jury of 12 randomly-selected men and women finds an abortionist guilty.
Going forward, pro-lifers need to emphasize compassionate approaches that can reduce demand for abortions. Prime among them: pregnancy resource centers that offer free material, psychological, and spiritual help to women (and men) in need. They provide 3D or 4D ultrasounds so pregnant women and the fathers of their unborn children can make an informed choice, and they provide a new support community for women when their old one has rejected them. They don’t abandon women who choose abortion, and instead offer post- abortion counseling.
Besides, God told Moses, “Vengeance is mine.” In 1878, when Madame Restell was 65, she began to pace the richly carpeted halls of her mansion like a latter-day Lady Macbeth, looking at her hands, bemoaning her situation. I’d like to say she crossed over to the pro-life side, as some recent abortionists have, but no, she committed suicide.
What’s said and what’s true// Human Life Review, winter, 2023
by Marvin Olasky
Readers of the New Testament are familiar with one way Jesus and later Paul explained to their listeners and readers the difference between what evildoers argue and what is true: “It is written.” For example, when Satan asked Jesus to turn stones into bread (chapter four of two gospels, Matthew and Luke), Jesus replied, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” This “it is written” phrase, followed by an Old Testament quotation or paraphrase, appears 63 other times in the New Testament (English Standard Version). I’d like to use that approach in regard to five frequent memes we hear from abortion advocates. I’m not saying the responses I suggest have biblical authority, but I am saying they undermine pro-abortion propaganda.
First, if you watch or listen to abortion advocates, you’ve heard that abortion follows a discussion between “a woman and her doctor.” That suggests the two deciders have a pre-existing relationship of the kind popularized in TV shows like Marcus Welby, M.D., which in 1970-1971 ranked #1 in the Nielsen ratings. (Actor Robert Young, the kind father in the 1954-1960 Father Knows Best, played Dr. Welby, with a warm and fuzzy bedside manner and a willingness to make house calls.) Delve into documents, though, and you’ll find that it’s rare for a woman climbing onto an abortionist’s table to have seen him before. Any counseling comes from somewhere else: The clinic abortionist is an assembly-line worker.
Second, abortion advocates who acknowledge the rarity of a Santa Claus Dr. Welby often say that the woman makes the decision by herself. Studies, though, show that the most ardent abortion proponent is often the male partner. For example, one researcher in abortion-friendly Norway found that 25 percent of aborting women spoke of “pressure from male partner.” And if we look at the historical record of abortions in America, 100 percent of the first three clearly documented abortions involved such pressure.
Some specifics: It is written in the Archives of Maryland (1652) that Captain William Mitchell mixed an abortifacient—a potion that could kill the unborn child—with a poached egg and forced Susan Warren, the indentured servant he had impregnated, to eat it: “He said if she would not take it he would thrust it down her throat, so she being in bed could not withstand it.” Four years later Francis Brooke beat his pregnant wife Ann with a large pair of wooden tongs. Brooke then forced an abortifacient on her, and their unborn child died. Midwife Rose Smith described the 3-inch corpse: “a man child about three months old and it was all bruised one side of it.” The Archives of Maryland in 1663 show Jacob Lumbrozo reneging on his promise to marry pregnant Elizabeth Weales. Lumbrozo gave Weales an abortifacient and there “came sumthing downe as big as her hand from her bodie.”
Other colonies showed the same pattern. One young Massachusetts woman, Sarah Crouch, testified in 1669 that Christopher Grant demanded sex and promised that “no hurt should come of it,” because if she became pregnant he would marry her. When she did become pregnant, his marriage proposal became conditional: “He said he would marry me if I would make away with the child, which I did refuse to do, for which I bless my God.”
Third, abortion advocates say the “post-abortion syndrome” spoken of by prolifers is myth or exaggeration. And yet, it is written: The New York Times in 1976 ran a column by Linda Bird Francke that contrasted her abstract thinking during a pro-choice march with her “panic” moments before she was about to abort. Francke wrote, “Suddenly the rhetoric, the abortion marches I’d walked in . . . peeled away, and I was all alone with my microscopic baby.” Her tale ended poignantly: “It certainly does make more sense not to be having a baby right now But I have this ghost now. A very little ghost that only appears when I’m seeing something beautiful, like the full moon on the ocean last weekend. And the baby waves at me. And I wave back at the baby.”
(Even in the 1870s Dr. Rachel Gleason described how “Remorse for the deed drives women almost to despair.” In 1875 Elizabeth Evans’s The Abuse of Maternity quoted women who mourned their abortions years after they occurred. One said her “thoughts were filled with imaginings as to what might have been the worth of that child’s individuality; and especially, after sufficient time had elapsed to have brought him to maturity, did I busy myself with picturing the responsible posts he might have filled. [I never] read of an accident by land or by water, or of a critical moment in battle, or of a good cause lost through lack of a brave defender, but my heart whispered, ‘He might have been there to help and save.’”)
A fourth “you have heard” is the contention by some newspaper editors that they’ve already covered the abortion debate, and enough is enough. Actually, when it comes to abortion, for 50 years now many newspapers have deviated from the standard journalistic practice of “show, don’t tell.”
Earlier Americans could get from their newspapers a glimpse of reality. The New York Times, for example, emphasized specific detail in 1871 in a long and vivid story headlined “THE EVIL OF THE AGE. Slaughter of the Innocents . . . Scenes Described by Eyewitnesses.” The Times included descriptions of “human flesh, supposed to have been the remains of infants, found in barrels of lime and acids, undergoing decomposition.”
On the first day of summer in 1883, the New York Times headlined a story “TWENTY-ONE MURDERED BABIES.” The story showed a detective pushing his shovel through basement dirt and finding tiny skulls, ribs, and leg bones, the remnants of 400–500 unborn children killed by a Philadelphia abortionist. The Times reported that when a district attorney shook the cigar box containing 21 corpses, the bones rattled like “hard withered leaves.” A Philadelphia newspaper offered specific detail: The “remnant of arms and hands” had “their natural shape.”
Today’s abortion reporters, though, often abandon street-level journalistic best practice. Instead of speaking plainly about abortion and unborn children, they offer abstract terms like “pro-choice” and “products of conception.” But it is written: Reporters could learn from the work of Magda Denes, a 42-year-old Holocaust survivor in 1976 when her extraordinary account In Necessity and Sorrow hit the bookstores.
Denes supported legal abortion yet had the journalistic integrity to hate “the evasions, multifaceted, clever, and shameful, by which we all live and die.” Here’s one description that shows how she did not run from reality: “I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person in there floating in a bloody liquid—plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But then perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises.”
Denes also quoted one abortionist who said, “You can feel the fetus wiggling at the end of that needle and moving around, which is an unpleasant thing.” She quoted another: “You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity of the fetal heart is not important, everything is going well, she is going to have a nice baby, and then you shut the door and go into the next room and assure another patient on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it’s fine if the heart is already irregular, she has nothing to worry about, she is not going to have a live baby.”
Here’s a fifth and last “you have heard”: For most women, abortion is no big deal. This meme began a half-century ago, when the Omaha WorldHerald quoted “Betty” describing her abortion experience: “I had to stay quiet for 15 minutes. When I got up, I felt like a brand-new woman. I felt so happy.” The Long Island Press quoted “Susan” telling the abortionist when the operation was over, “Oh, thank you, thank you.” The reporter added, “Within the next half hour she will have some cookies and a soft drink in the recovery lounge . . . and be on her way back home”—probably skipping, the article seemed to suggest. The San Francisco Chronicle told how a woman “put a bright scarf over her hair” and told a patiently waiting mother, “I’m starved. Let’s go to lunch.” The reporter said abortion “is so simple and over so quickly that [women] have no feeling of guilt.”
Magda Denes, though, described the women she observed: “Their pinched faces are full of determination and terror. Big-eyed, bird-like, pale, hawkhanded in fright, they seem like lost souls before the final judgment.” After an abortion, one patient’s drained face was “indistinguishable from the white sheet on which she lies.” Though Jewish, Denes was familiar with the New Testament, so I suspect it was no accident that when she portrayed a woman coming out of anesthesia and asking if the abortion was complete, she had a nurse answering, “It is finished.”
That’s what Jesus said just before he died, relinquishing his life for the sins of many, as aborted children relinquish their lives—but they can’t absolve their parents from wondering what might have been, or the rest of us from wondering what an America without hundreds of thousands of abortions could be.
Marvin Olasky is co-author (with Leah Savas) of The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652-2022, published in January.
4. Life as a Half-Full Glass // Evolution News
Marvin Olasky January 3, 2023
Life is full of semi-miracles: Let us rejoice and be glad.
If you’ve ever sat in a mark-up session where senators edit prospective federal laws, you’re not surprised that most legislation is messy sausage-making.
If you’ve ever visited a Hollywood set and seen how complicated the filmmaking process is, you’re not surprised that most movies flop.
If you’ve ever watched a major league pitcher before the game fine-tuning his fastballs, curves, and sliders that can cross a corner of home plate at different speeds, heights, and angles, you’re not surprised that even the best ballplayers hit successfully only three out of ten times.
I’ve observed legislators, movie directors, and pitchers. Some processes have irreducible complexity. Mix into all the complications our human sinfulness, and the difficulties escalate. Great success is rare. Let us rejoice when something goes right.
A shocking fact: Most things go wrong. If you’ve ever run a small enterprise, with all the complexities of getting the right combination of people and products, you’re not surprised that most enterprises fail. In marriage, how do two people become one flesh? It’s a semi-miracle that half do.
Our children in this society are under enormous pressure to conform to anti-theistic worldviews. It’s not surprising that many give up on God in college and in their 20s and even 30s. It’s a semi-miracle that some stand strong, and others who gave in bounce back in their 40s.
John Newton, the 18th-century slave-trader turned pastor and hymn-writer, often received letters from those who despaired about their ongoing sin. Neither shocked nor even surprised, he typically responded (I’m paraphrasing), Of course, you’re a sinner. Sinners sin. When we don’t sin, for a few seconds, let us rejoice.
Only when we realize how helpless we are in our own power are we ready to submerge our pride and turn to God. We have a tendency to blame God when things don’t work, but we should thank Him. If everything worked our egos would expand and we’d worship ourselves instead of Him.
Jesus summarized all the commands in a few words: Love God, love others. Knowing how to love others in a fallen world, and not merely massage their sins and ours, is sometimes complicated. Loving God is more straightforward: Stop complaining, start praising.
A 2018 book by biologist Nathan Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, is full of complaints. The author, for instance, complains that our backbones leave us vulnerable to slipped disks, pinched nerves, and lower back pain. Troubling and sometimes maddening as those problems are, would we rather be jellyfish?
Professor Lents, indeed, has been answered in detail most recently in the new book Your Designed Body, by systems engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman, and in a recent video by mechanical engineer Stuart Burgess, “Why Human Skeletal Joints Are Masterpieces of Engineering.” Burgess explains why rather than Human Errors, Lents’s book should be titled Lents’s Errors. See here for more commentary from Evolution News.
Our “glitches,” rather than proving neo-Darwinism right, whisper that it is wrong. (Partly not Darwin’s fault: He didn’t know what we know about molecular and cellular biology.) Scientists early in the 20th century acknowledged that Darwin’s mechanisms for change were insufficient, so they brought in Gregor Mendel’s genetic discoveries and argued that mutations over time would lead to new and improved species. But mutations, like revolutions, usually make things worse rather than better.
Some of Lents’s major examples affirm that. He says a mutation in one of our distant ancestors forces us to get vitamin C to keep from dying of scurvy. Hmm: Let us rejoice that somehow humans did not lose out in the struggle for survival.
Lents complains that koalas “can do fine eating just one kind of leaf,” but humans “have very particular needs for very specific micronutrients. Why? Because we lost the ability to make them for ourselves.” Hmm… wouldn’t those who lost it be less fit, and thus deserve a Darwinian death? In any event, let us rejoice that we don’t have one kind of leaf for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I did appreciate Lents’s discussion of how babies are conceived: “Even when eggs make it into the fallopian tube, it’s a miracle that sperm are able to locate them; sperm cells must travel around 17.5 centimeters to meet the egg, which is a challenge given that this is more than 3,000 times the length of their bodies.”
He concludes, “Considering the challenges of even fertilizing an egg, never mind the other hurdles that developing fetuses must overcome between conception and childbirth, every baby really is a miracle.”
Yes, a miracle. Let us rejoice and be glad.
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A Tribute to a Quiet Baseball Star in an Age of Christian CelebrityInstead of flashy religiosity, Tim Wakefield had a privately influential faith.
MARVIN OLASKY OCTOBER 3, 2023 CHRISTIANITY TODAY
With the regular season over and playoffs beginning today, the baseball world is honoring retiring Tigers hitter Miguel Cabrera and Guardians manager Terry Francona while mourning the deaths of Orioles great Brooks Robinson and beloved Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield.
Wakefield had a long career, winning 200 major league games from 1992 to 2011. He had a short life, dying at age 57 following surgery for brain cancer. And one line in his Wikipedia bio is most important: “Wakefield became an evangelical Christian in 1990.”
There’s a lot behind that sentence, and yet I was a little puzzled that none of The Boston Globe’s four stories about him Sunday evening mentioned his faith—nor did articles on ESPN or in The Athletic.
They did report his stats and his biggest win, receiving the Roberto Clemente Award in 2010—which goes to only one major league player each year and is said to represent baseball’s best through sportsmanship and community involvement.
Red Sox principal owner John Henry spoke of Wakefield’s “warmth and genuine spirit,” as well as his “remarkable ability to uplift, inspire, and connect with others in a way that showed us the true definition of greatness.”
Team chairman Tom Werner said, “It’s one thing to be an outstanding athlete. It’s another to be an extraordinary human being. Tim was both.” Likewise, Red Sox CEO Sam Kennedy said Wakefield “exemplified every humanitarian quality in the dictionary.”
But how did Wakefield’s Christian faith underlie all those good qualities? None of the business leaders connected the dots, at least in their press release statements.
Betsy Farmer did, though. She founded the Space Coast Early Intervention Center in Melbourne, Florida—Wakefield’s hometown. On Sunday, Florida Today quoted Farmer saying, “Tim led me to the Lord and I’ll never forget that.” She said she texted Wakefield on Saturday that she was praying for him, and he responded with a heart emoji.
While I’m disappointed many are neglecting to mention his faith, this says something significant about the way Wakefield as a public figure approached Christianity in an age of empty virtue signaling and flashy displays of religiosity. That is, while Wakefield privately influenced many with his faith, religion was not something he made a big show of publicly.
The first time I interviewed Wakefield was in 1993. He had seen success as a slugging first baseman at a Florida high school and then at Florida Tech. Drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1988, he failed in the minor leagues and saw that his only major league hope lay in becoming a pitcher and throwing the knuckleball his dad had taught him. It’s a twisting pitch that only one or two major league pitchers in each decade master and most hitters can’t corral.
Wakefield made it to the majors in 1992. His knuckleball fluttered and he became the National League’s Rookie Pitcher of the Year with a spectacular 2.15 earned run average. But the knuckleball, like God’s providence, is mysterious. In 1993 Wakefield lost control of it, walking nine batters on opening day and dropping back to the minors in July.
That year, Wakefield told me about his coming to faith in Christ and the effect it had on him: “Before, I worked hard but I wasn’t at ease. Now, in a lot of tough situations ... knowing that God is gracious regardless of my performance helps me to control my frustrations.”
He continued, “The gospel has given me inner peace. I still have a lot to learn, but there is that inner peace.” He needed that gospel in 1994 when the Pirates gave up on him. And he remembered it in 1995 when the Red Sox signed him and the knuckleball worked again. Wakefield won 16 games and was the American League’s Comeback Player of the Year.
Then came a comedown. In 1996, his earned run average soared to 5.14. In 1997, he led major league baseball by hitting 16 batters with pitches. He kept having ups and downs. In 2003 he gave up the home run to Aaron Boone of the New York Yankees that caused the Red Sox to lose the American League Championship Series. But in 2004 he pitched crucial innings in games that gave Boston a league championship and its first World Series triumph since 1918.
In 2005 The Boston Globe ran a feature about Wakefield and a dozen other players under the headline “Faith binds many on Sox: Evangelical Christians give sport a spiritual context.” Reporter Bob Hohler quoted Wakefield as saying he had “accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior. ... It’s so easy to be thankful when you’re on top of your game and everything is going right. But when I gave up the home run to Aaron, I had to be thankful for that, too.”
Wakefield was not as vocal about his faith as some other players are, but those who covered the Red Sox—or those who asked—knew about it.
I interviewed Wakefield again in 2011, during his last year in the majors, as he was doing pre-game loosening-up exercises by third base. Wakefield said, “Some people lead by example, others by words. I don’t talk about it much, but when reporters ask, I’m happy for them to let people know about my beliefs. They generally don’t ask."
But they did ask about his unusual avoidance of the long-term contracts that other players demanded. Starting in 2005, Wakefield deliberately went year by year. He later reflected, “Money isn’t that important, and I had already made a lot. I wanted to pitch as long as I could contribute, and didn’t want to hang on if I couldn’t.”
Wakefield also contributed in big ways off the field.
One Boston Globe headline yesterday declared, “Tim Wakefield remembered for his selfless charitable works, including for the Jimmy Fund.” It’s ironic that cancer killed him, because the Jimmy Fund benefits the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, New England’s premier center for cancer research and patient care. A Dana-Farber statement made an unattributed reference to Matthew 5:41—Wakefield “always went the extra mile.”
In Wakefield’s home state, Betsy Farmer told Florida Today that he had volunteered at the Space Coast Early Intervention Center in high school and stayed committed to it. Farmer said Wakefield promised her “that once he made it to the big leagues, he would help. And he kept that promise,” donating and raising more than $5 million for the center, now called Space Coast Discovery.
Wakefield’s teammates also knew that he kept promises. During Wakefield’s last eight pitching years, I once asked Terry Francona, then-manager of the Red Sox, if he was concerned about his performance during a game in which Wakefield gave up four home runs. Francona responded, “No. He’s a solid professional every day, doing his best. He’s the same, good day or bad day.”
That’s also a description of some mature Christians who make a not- necessarily-spoken profession of faith in Christ by steadiness under pressure. They don’t get arrogant in good times or anxious in bad ones.
In 2021 Francona observed regarding Wakefield, “He was always ready to help out. Any time we were short on pitching, he’d come find me and he’d say, ‘I got my spikes on.’” And maybe that’s a Christian way of life we can all learn from.
Marvin Olasky chairs the Zenger House Foundation and is a Discovery Institute senior fellow and an Acton Institute affiliate scholar. He was World’s editor in chief from 1992 to 2021.