I am an evangelical Christian. That means I am called to evangelize, to share the Good News, which is the Gospel. My tradition calls me to share this spiritual awakening in a loving and forgiving God by “doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly.” I am continually challenged to live out my life as an evangelical Christian.
That said, being an evangelical does not mean adopting a political party. It does not mean favoring one ethnic group over another. It does not turn a blind eye to lawlessness and lies or to advance grievances and hate. Specifically, an evangelical Christian does not condone any identification with white nationalism. Nor does a genuine evangelical claim any human being as akin to Jesus.
I declare, from my heart, that I will not allow my spiritual heritage, which comes out of an immigrant evangelical church, to be co-opted by those who misuse this precious New Testament word. May God have mercy upon us all.
The Rev. Martin Deppe, Chicago
Regarding The Post’s June 20 article “Christian right sees opportunity in a second Trump term”:
I was so upset by the picture accompanying this article, which captured paintings and prints for sale depicting former president Donald Trump and Jesus side by side during the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023. This should have never been allowed. There is only one God and one Jesus, and Mr. Trump is neither.
Lonalu Lamb, Selbyville, Del.
The fight for reparations
Joe Davidson’s June 22 Federal Insider column, “Feds well-positioned to provide slavery reparations, Harvard study argues,” failed to make the case for payments to the descendants of people who were enslaved.
Mr. Davidson quotes a Harvard University study’s list of Americans who have received compensation for past harms, which includes “coal miners; farmers whose crops have failed; workers whose companies have gone bankrupt; victims of terrorism and natural disasters,” and the list goes on for eight more categories, followed by the catchall “and numerous other categories.” All of these examples provided payments to identifiable people for specific harm to them. They involve provable damages, not reparation payments to people based on unprovable, unquantifiable harm suffered long ago by people who might or might not be ancestors of people claiming reparations today.
Harvard should study harder.
As The Post reported in June, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a case for reparations brought forward by the last known surviving victims of the Tulsa Massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher (as well as Hughes Van Ellis, who died last year at the age of 102). Their claim was denied one week before Juneteenth and ended any hope for the state to rectify one of the greatest atrocities committed on American soil in the 20th century. Even when the direct victims of racial atrocities bring forth claims and proof of injury, they are often denied justice. Although disappointing, the Oklahoma court’s ruling is consistent with a pattern of discrimination against Black Americans that predates the nation’s founding.
America doesn’t have a problem with reparations: It has a problem with making reparations to Black Americans. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and signed into law a bill that paid the victims of Japanese internment $20,000 each. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the Native American apology resolution, a statement of regret “on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native peoples by citizens of the United States.”
Other countries and institutions have made similar gestures of recompense. The University of Glasgow created a reparations fund of 20 million pounds to support a research center at the University of the West Indies after acknowledging the university benefited financially from the Scottish slave trade. Starting in 1953, West Germany paid $845 million to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the newly founded state of Israel; in 1988, the country paid $125 million directly to Holocaust survivors, and in 1999, it began compensating Jewish slave laborers for the work they were forced to do by the Nazi regime. Enslavers were even paid reparations in D.C. when the enslaved people of the capital were emancipated in 1862.
By contrast, reparations for Black Americans have been ceremonial gestures that fall far short of repair for past harms.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” America’s failure to formally apologize for a narrative that cast Black Americans as only three-fifths human is a stain on the garment that binds our destiny. Until this stain is cleansed, this moral failing will forever prevent the United States from reaching its full potential.
I read with great confusion Kate Cohen’s June 23 SundayOpinion column, “A memorial for the lives lost to Dobbs.”
She came across as complaining that the estimated 32,000 annual additional births and lives saved by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling and subsequent rise in birth rates in some U.S. states are bad things. This is after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that in 2023, “the general fertility rate in the United States decreased by 3% from 2022, reaching a historic low. This marks the second consecutive year of decline.” A declining birth rate is often the sign of a declining society. It certainly means fewer future workers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers in our country to fund Social Security and help pay off our over $34 trillion in national debt.
I was also taken aback by what she seemed to imply when she wrote, “And we will never know how many lives Dobbs altered, stunted, constrained and burdened. How many educations it deferred or denied, how many careers it derailed, how many families it broke.” If you believe, as I do, that the act of conception creates a new human being, how can you justify killing that person to preserve one’s education goals or career path?
But Ms. Cohen did have it right when she stated the number of lives adversely affected by Dobbs will never be known. That includes, however, something she didn’t appear to consider: the number of women who are now experiencing the unexpected joy of bringing a new, loving and wonderful human being into the world, and who avoided the guilt, depression and self-loathing caused by knowing she killed her own child.
Unfortunately, this is the underlying problem with all debate on abortion. Both sides are talking — or, more accurately, shouting — past each other, and we do not have nearly enough data on the number of abortions, who is having them and why, given that states are not required to report this data to the federal government.
So, until all are required to report abortion statistics (including the use of abortion-inducing drugs) to a central repository, we can never have a data-driven, fact-based debate on the pros and cons of legalized abortion — a debate that just might lead to some common ground and a sensible national policy. In this pursuit of informed debate, I would like to challenge Johns Hopkins University to create an online abortion dashboard similar to its outstanding covid-19 dashboard launched to help spur data-driven decisions regarding covid mitigation policies. But until that happens, we will continue with the inflammatory testimonials, caustic rhetoric and ascribing the most evil of intentions to those on both sides of the debate.
Kate Cohen refuses to accept the reality that there are two human lives at stake in an abortion. Like so many others who defend abortion on demand, she uses terms such as “reproductive freedom” and “the right to end a pregnancy” as if these were inalienable. With conception, a genetically unique and unrepeatable human being comes into existence, and now there are two human lives at stake that must be cherished.
Activist Gianna Jessen, who was born during a procedure intended to terminate her birth mother’s pregnancy, asked during her 2015 congressional testimony: “As a nation, we are continuously exchanging the truth for a lie. We have neglected our soul. And what will it take for us to awaken from our numbness and indifference regarding this? Will we ever awake?”
Now is the time for national soul-searching and healing. With the end of Roe v. Wade, many thousands of human lives have now been saved. Let us continue to work at the national and state levels for laws that protect both the mother and child. May God help our nation if we fail.
Philip C. Wehle Jr., McLean
