Adapted from two X posts from @WokePreacherTV
N.T Wright says Americans’ defense of gun rights is inconsistent with their defense of the unborn, because they are too polarized by social media, they accept “over-simplified” arguments to fall in line with a particular leader, they can’t handle “nuance,” and ultimately, they just aren’t an “educated electorate.”
But does this sound like a nuanced, educated take on gun laws?
“When I go to America, it always astonishes me that the same people are vitriolically opposed to abortion and vitriolically in favor of everybody carrying guns and being prepared to shoot people at any time.
On the one hand, you’d have thought if they’re so concerned about preserving human life, even in embryo and in vitro, etc., then why are they not concerned about preserving human life when it comes to, say, a school shooting by somebody who’s been able to walk into a store, even though mentally disturbed, and buy a weapon-grade automatic rifle? I mean, for somebody from the other side of the Atlantic, and I suspect for you [Carey Nieuwhof] in Canada, this is just nonsense.”
Furthermore. N.T. Wright thinks a substantial element of the pro-life movement is just “people nervous about sex” who get manipulated by “powerful men telling women what they could and couldn’t do.”
He says our discourse on abortion has failed to frame the issue as the idol of “male violence” vs. the idol of “a fulfilled erotic existence,” personified in the pagan gods Ares and Aphrodite (though he mixes up Ares for his Roman equivalent, Mars).
Yes, you heard that right: the people trying to stop abortion are unknowingly serving the god of war.
“It seems to me that abortion became an issue, not least because people were aware, certainly in my country and I think in America, that abortion was being used as an easy and inverted-commas [UKish for “quote-unquote”] form of contraception. And that that, in consequence, was licensing sexual immorality, or what used to be thought of as sexual immorality. Promiscuity, anyway.
So that the desire to have free abortion went with the desire to have free sex. And so people who were nervous about sex for whatever reason, and there’d be many reasons why people’d be nervous about sex, would say, ‘Oh, abortion is wrong, da da da da da da,’ and then produce all the standard arguments about, ‘Well, here is a picture of a fetus in the womb, etc., etc.’
Whereas then, conversely, that was turned into a power play by powerful people, often powerful men, basically telling women what they could and couldn’t do.
Which, then, you get two of the ideologies of our time: Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, Mars, the god of violence and war, who are kind of squabbling with each other.
Is this about male violence? Is it about the right to have a fulfilled erotic existence? Etc. And we haven’t named those issues. And in consequence, I think we’re often shadow boxing.”
This entire post is basically just @wokepreacherTV’s two X threads, written out in full.
