Stopping Evil Then and Now

If you’re a regular reader of my writing, you know that I often quote Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of Boyce College and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I listen to his Briefing podcast every weekday morning because his analysis of current events is spot-on.

On Thursday’s edition, Mohler discussed Holocaust Remembrance Day and the unspeakable evil that took place under the rule of Nazi Germany. He pointed out that it wasn’t just leaders who went along with the atrocities; regular people did as well.

He said:

That reminds us of the very deadly combination of raw political ambition and political scapegoating. And as took place with the rise of the Nazi regime, we also have to deal with something else. When people say about the Holocaust during the Third Reich that they were shocked by the fact that it was discovered to have happened, you have to realize there are many Germans in proximity to these camps.
There were many people involved in driving the trains and for that matter, equipping the engines of death. They had to know. One of the hardest questions in terms of the reflection among the Allies after their victory in the war and the discovery of the death camps was how did you have these German officers who were involved directly in the intentional murder of millions of people? How did they go home to their wives and children, play with their children and read them stories and put them to bed? How could they live with that dissonance?

Mohler also pointed out that “Over the course of the next several decades, the moral questions just grew in significance. One of the very interesting patterns in moral terms that emerged towards the end of the 20th century is that you had younger Germans come to the inevitable conclusion that even though they might not have been born during the war or they were little children during the war, their older relatives either knew or were actively complicit in the culture of death.”

He added, “And that's when, as is now a recognized pattern, the children of those who had lived through the war years began to ask hard, inevitable, unavoidable moral questions. And then the question was, ‘How do we assign responsibility? What do we do now?’”

There had to have been plenty of soul-searching among at least some Germans after the war. “Never again” became a rallying cry, yet somehow we find ourselves battling antisemitism at every turn. The determined cry of “never again” too often becomes a weary sigh of “not again!”

Later, Mohler brought up another evil that confronts society today: abortion. Granted, the two issues may be an apples-and-oranges comparison, but the juxtaposition of the anniversary of Roe, the March for Life, and Holocaust Remembrance Day on the calendar brings them into focus at the same time every year.

Mohler is in Atlanta to speak at a conference (man, I wish I could be there), and he noticed a headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the “divide” over abortion. The two sides of the debate couldn’t be much more stark: pro-lifers find themselves pitted against an increasingly militant faction that wants to make abortion as routine as a check-up.

It can be disheartening sometimes when conservatives seem to cede ground on the abortion issue, but we can’t stop fighting. Abortion is a moral evil that we must do all we can to eradicate. It’s definitely a long game, but we can’t stop calling plays.

Mohler reminded his listeners that we may one day face the same questions about abortion that generations after World War II asked about the Holocaust:

But you know, you cannot help in the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp from understanding the same questions that pressed upon the human conscience then, such as how could this have happened?
The questions coming from the children to their parents, “How could you have let this happen?” Those same questions are one day going to be asked about this generation of Americans and Americans alive in the second half of the 20th century into our own times.
“How did this happen? How did you let this happen?” I think it's very telling that some of the hardest of these questions in the 20th century, toward the end of the century, came from the children of the Germans who were adults during the Third Reich.
The question, “How did you let this happen?” You have to wonder whether our own children or the children of our children will one day turn to their parents and to us and simply ask, “How did you let this happen? What did you do to avoid this happening? How did you stand for the sanctity of unborn life? What did you do?” It is healthy for us all to know that question is coming.

Hopefully, we’ll have a satisfactory answer to questions about what we did to stop the evil of abortion.