Roxanne Green burning down an abortion clinic in Wyoming left people lionizing her like none other. They would post a picture of her mugshot and say things like, "Look at her eyes. It's like she's saying, 'Do what you must. I've already won.'"
While I don't know Roxanne Green, and I'm sure she probably had a few fine motivations, the only thing she actually achieved was putting herself behind bars and wasting 5 years of her young and potentially productive life. The clinic she torched in 2022 merely delayed their opening by a year, where it stands today actively killing children while she's helpless - behind bars.
The chances that Roxanne saved a single life are slim to none.
Instead, she's absent. She's not at the abortion mill trying to stop mothers and rescue children who are being brought to the slaughter there. Chances are, no one is there today at all. They're most likely killing children as I type this. Maybe in a different world, Roxanne would be there, and maybe in that world dozens of lives would have been saved by now.
Even still, the rhetoric on the Christian Right continues to defend abortion vigilantism, as if they're the ones who are really willing to "get their hands dirty", while abolitionists are merely cowards who talk a big game. What they don't understand is that we are immediatists, and we reject incremental strategies that delay the progress towards national repentance. Vigilantism is just that: a worthless incremental strategy.
In this post, I'd like to share some private messages I sent to someone who was publicly espousing these views, and praising the "Army of God" group, who advocates for violence against abortion mills.
Here are those messages, with a few slight edits. I'll share a few concluding thoughts afterwards.
Dear Anon,
My argument is not necessarily that vigilantism is inherently unjust, but that in this specific context, it's wrongheaded, and incrementalist in nature.
The immediatist says that we must call the culture to repent in the office of the prophets, and normatively, the prophets were not in the office of bearing the sword, but rather prophetically telling the kings where they were commanded to do so.
The Biblical argument against vigilantism is the one that admittedly sounds "Big Eva"-esque, but that's just because they often misuse this scripture: The weapons of our warfare aren't carnal. Big Eva stops there, but it continues: RATHER, our weapons are destroying lofty arguments and opinions.
...We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete. (2 Corinthians 10:5-6 ESV)
Our Biblically prescribed method of "punishing" disobedience is our mouths, to which divine power is attached (verse 4)
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. (2 Corinthians 10:4)
Just because Big Eva misuses that verse doesn't make it not true. They will use it to wrongly justify pacifism, but that doesn't nullify the verse itself. It has to mean something. However, Romans 13 tells us who truly does use the sword, as we both know. Holding the position that the governing authorities are normatively proprietary in their use of the sword doesn't make one a pacifist.
Trying to decipher when vigilantism is okay and when it's not comes down to pragmatism, in a sense. The kind of pragmatism that isn't sinful is the kind that God commands us to employ throughout the Scriptures. In the case of vigilantism towards abortion mills, will it end up achieving our goal, which is the total abolition of abortion?
God has explicitly called us to destroy arguments and lofty opinions against child sacrifice, so when we reach beyond that explicit command, what's in our hearts for causing us to want to do that? Do we not believe that God will establish the work of our hands? Are we being impatient with God's timing? For example, Isaiah was even told that he would fail in his mission, and he himself never took to the sword.
I would posit to you, that when we want to resort to vigilante violence, it could be that we are being an incrementalist in our hearts, because we're trying to go after a method of abortion rather than the root: abortion itself. If we tried to burn down abortion mills, we would be merely going after one of those methods, just like pro-lifers do when they try and ban forceps abortions, but leave many other methods legal.
The fact of the matter is: none of the people on that Army of God hall of fame list actually succeeded in anything, as harsh as that sounds. [The Army of God hall of fame was a list they published of people who were "martyred" in action or who are currently in jail.] Those "babies that were saved" were just taken to different mills, or they waited a couple days to reschedule, or they used some other method.
George Tiller, the abortionist assassinated by Scott Roeder, for example, was reportedly about to have his license revoked for his illegal activity, but then right before that happened he was killed by a pro-lifer and he became a pro-abortion martyr instead. Then, all those babies that were supposedly "saved" were just murdered some other way.
It's the same thing that happened with the Rescue movement. They operated with a clinic-centric mindset, that just puts good people in jail and leaves their children at home without good fathers, and leaves churches without church members, all the while the babies never actually get saved.
The Rescue Movement had lots of very good people in it, but there's a reason they don't do what they used to anymore. They would peacefully sit outside of abortion clinics and block people from going in, or they would bike lock the doors shut, etc. What would happen is they would just get arrested and the clinic would continue operating as normal as soon as they were out of the way.
I, for one, live in a state with no clinics operating, so I get to live somewhere where the "good" the clinic bombers were trying to achieve HAS ALREADY been achieved! There's no abortionists, there's no abortion clinics. But because pro-lifers had this short-sighted clinic-centric mindset, there's now MORE abortion than there was previously. That's a big problem with incrementalism: it merely causes the other side to get more efficient with their tools. In this fight, vigilantism against abortion doctors or abortion mills is in that same vein, and will only cause them to get better at democratizing abortion.
Now, let me be clear: if Hitler was alive, I could see arguments for killing him. Also, I think Jael was right to put a tent peg through Sisera's temple. Army of God asks these questions of their readers, and it's rhetorically powerful. However, I don't think these situations are analogous.
Think about it this way: the only way to ACTUALLY do vigilantism in the abortion situation effectively, would be to kidnap a pregnant woman and ensure that she brings the baby to term. If you blow up her abortion clinic, she'll just go to a different one, right? There would be no point in trying to blow up her mailbox, either. She'd just get the supplies some other way.
All of that effort that would go into kidnapping her, feeding her for 8 months, keeping her from seeing anyone else... Imagine if that same amount of effort instead went to standing outside of abortion clinics with the gospel, or holding signs, etc.
I personally have had one baby saved in my presence for sure, and Lord willing, dozens of others that I never found about. But if I went the vigilantism route, I don't think I ever would have saved even a SINGLE baby. Vigilantism is a form of incrementalism, because it eschews the hard work of abolition in favor of something easier and more accessible. It's like chopping the tail off of a dragon. It just grows back.
Let me make this personal: I have a good friend whose daughter murdered his grandchild by abortion a few decades ago. Imagine if you were in his shoes. It would be totally understandable to want to kill Larry Burns, the abortionist that carried out the abortion.
But here's the thing, Larry Burns wasn't the principal actor in the abortion, it was his daughter, who is now repentant. Larry was just the hitman she hired. The people who are perpetuating the genocide of abortion are not the abortionists, they're the mothers. Abortionists are merely meeting a demand. Pro-lifers have always refused to see it that way, which is why it's understandable when they see the abortionists as the villain that needs to be stopped.
But my good friend knew his daughter was guilty of murder, and he kept praying for her and sharing the gospel with her, and now she is a Christian abolitionist, and she is fighting against abortion as much as she can.
Imagine instead, if he had killed Larry Burns, the abortionist. This man wouldn't be around now to be the incredible help that he is to our organization, because he'd be in jail. Plus, all the babies he and his daughter have had a hand in saving since then would currently be dead. And her story wouldn't be something that has impacted so many lives for God's glory.
Now, he works with Abolish Abortion Oklahoma, and he's doing really great work in his spare time lobbying politicians and people running for office, and Oklahoma has more and more abolitionists in office every year as a result. That wouldn't be happening if he were in jail or if he was a felon.
I think there's a sort of vainglory that comes along with the Army of God folks, the Rescue movement to a lesser degree, and a lot of these chronically-online trolls who prop up vigilantes who have "done what needed to be done." There's glory to be found in their public displays that do no actual good, and they serve as something simple that trolls can point to in their half-baked critique of abolitionists who are asking them to repent of their apathy and join them in the work.
You can get your mugshot published for all the world to see when you do something like that, but you've helped none whatsoever. You know who doesn't get all of the accolades, though? The blue-collar worker who spends his free time emailing his legislators, giving his hard-earned money to good organizations, and having hard conversations with his co-workers about abortion. How about the guy who joins his church going to rallies for abolition, or standing outside of abortion mills trying to save lives? There's very little glory sent their way.
Every day I see photos people post online of a full parking lot at the mill they regularly stand outside of. "Another full day at the death mill". No one responds, because it's just a constant stream of weekly posts like this, and it's become mundane to read. That, or they ignore it because they're not in the mood to feel convicted about their own apathy. Yet, that's the kind of work that truly matters. The boring, faithful plodding towards the abolition of abortion that trusts God's timing and seeks his will.
Keep your eye on the prize, commit to doing the hard thing no matter how long it takes, and every step you take in that process will be blessed by God through prayer and faithfulness.
So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12 ESV)
