Conscience

What are the names of the hospitals in your city? I suspect you’ll find some with the primary terms being “community” or “public” or even “mercy”. Now look again. What other names do you see? If your city is anything like mine you probably have a ‘saint’ or two listed like Saint Matthew’s, Saint Mark’s, or Saint Luke’s. In my case, my primary care group is called Saint Vincent’s. Now I would like you to make one more observation. Do you have any Friedrich Nietzsche hospitals around you? I’m serious. I doubt very much that you will see many if any hospitals named after Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a celebrated philosopher for a number of reasons, including the fact that he was an atheist. Now I’m not saying atheists don’t build hospitals. What I am saying is that if there is any group known for building hospitals it would be Christians. Since Christianity’s inception, caring for others has been associated with Jesus’ followers. Rodney Stark in his The Triumph of Christianity documents sources showing [Quote] “Christianity provided an island of mercy and security” for cities in the Roman empire. [End Quote].

Christians have played a beneficial role in health care for 2000 years. So one would think government agencies would leave hospitals alone. But in January the Obama administration stipulated that all health care facilities must include abortion-producing drugs in their employee insurance plans. The so-called “morning after pill,” an abortion-producing drug, is a mandated insurance policy from the federal government. Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius supported the policy saying

“Scientists have abundant evidence that birth control has significant health benefits for women and their families [and] it is documented to significantly reduce health costs.”

Church-based health care facilities will have to go against their pro-life consciences in order to comply with the pro-abortion mandate of this administration. As you might imagine, Catholic leaders from Pope Benedict to Catholic hospital administrators are livid. Pope Benedict referred to this law as an oppressive show of majority rule. Even the liberal Catholic voice of E. J. Dionne from The Washington Post called the Obama administration’s ruling “a breach of faith”.

During the Roman Empire some rulers tried to get their pagan priests to compete with Christian charities. Pagan priests in Rome offered no help to people in need because they had no ethical reason to do good. Christian organizations do good because they have ethical reason: an others-centered lifeview. Now the Obama administration is mandating that Christian health care providers go against their conscience by being forced to offer abortion-producing drugs in their insurance plans. The alternatives? Cease your belief or cease your existence. Hospitals bearing the names of saints—doing good works—should not be shackled to bad law. For Moody Radio, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.

This audio-blog will air on Moody Radio in March or April, 2012. Information for this post was taken from: Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity (HarperCollins, 2011), pp. 105-19; https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-breach-of-faith-over-contraceptive-ruling/2012/01/29/gIQAY7V5aQ_story.html; and https://www.tmatt.net/2012/01/30/the-pope-the-president-and-religious-liberty/