Despite Trump’s imperfections, I’ll be casting my vote for him during the 2020 Presidential Election. Why would I vote for him if I think some of his views are dubious? Because Trump is pro-life.
First, I respect your choice and I do not hate people who disagree with me. But I have to say this:
I voted straight Republican from 1972 until 2012. Beginning in 2015 I finally reached the point where I turned away both from Donald Trump and from the whole Republican party.
Why? Because I finally took the time to study the abortion argument (and other Republican platform positions) in the light of Scripture. I am a Bible college graduate and have served in ministry in Christian churches and schools for over 40 years. My starting point is that the Bible is inspired and inerrant. So figuring out what it really says is critical. I discovered that what I previously believed made good sense,
but I had been overlooking some important holes in the arguments. Nobody had ever confronted me with those holes, and I never saw them on my own until 2015.
First, I saw that using Psalm 139 and Jeremiah1 to "prove" that life begins at conception doesn't work. Both passages are focusing on God's foreknowledge. He knew all of us not just from our mother's womb, but from before the foundation of the world.
There are no passages in the Bible that directly state when a spirit enters into a person. And that is the part that is missing from the modern abortion debate. Nobody is talking about the topic of the human spirit. The question of whether a fetus possesses "life" is actually a question of whether a human spirit is in that fetus. And just
assuming that if there is a body, a spirit
must be present, is actually a heresy in terms of basic Christian belief. It is the heresy of materialism.
There have been Christian leaders--good Christian leaders--who have taught that a spirit enters into a baby at the moment the baby takes its first breath, because of the connection between the words "spirit" and "breath." Other Christian leaders have taught differently. And that's the point: since the Bible does not answer the question clearly and plainly, it is a matter of individual conscience. And nobody has the right to bind the conscience of another person. Therefore, even if I personally disagree with what another person decides regarding abortion, it is morally wrong for me to force that person to follow my beliefs.
I mentioned other Republican positions, but I will not go into them here. I'm only saying that the historical Baptist focus on freedom of conscience--which all American Christian denominations claim to support now--includes respecting the freedom of conscience even of other people whom I disagree with. I have to step back and allow God to be the judge, not me.