The Chilling Effect of the Truth

[The following excerpt was taken from Pastor Randy Ballard's book 'The Culture Crafters" published by Authorhouse in 2004 and available at Amazon.com]

If you want to be less actuarial than cultural in your thinking, it's hard to believe that we don't all know, down deep, that abortion has not made our country a gentler place. I believe we haven't begun to appreciate the effect on our children and their developing understanding of life that they are told every day, on television and in magazines, in advertisements and news stories, that we allow the killing of children. It's not good for them to know that, not good for them to be told over and over that they live in a place where life is not necessarily respected and inconvenient life can be whisked away. Knowledge like that has a chilling effect on the soul.
- Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

For two consecutive years, the church that I pastor performed a drama where a variety of brief scenes were acted out during a thirty-minute tour. Each scene depicted the consequences of certain permissible social practices like abortion, homosexuality, substance abuse (alcohol and drugs), sexual promiscuity, and dabbling in the occult. Of the thousands of people that went through these tours, approximately eighty per cent of them were teens and young adults. In twenty-three years of pastoral ministry, I have never seen so many people so physically and emotionally shaken. After a reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer completed the tour, she described it as “disturbing.”

Why was it disturbing and troubling for so many people? For most, it was the painful reality of the lies that had been laid bare before their very eyes. Lies told by the gay community, Planned Parenthood, sex educators, beer companies, tobacco producers, Humanists; lies perpetuated by political, religious, corporate leaders, and the media. Lies like “if it feels good, do it,” or “its not a life, its only a cell,” or “I can’t help that I’m gay, this is they way God made me” and so on.

Consequently, millions of American adults have believed and bought the lies of the social crafters. The majority of these celebrate their freedom and independence upon making their choice, when in reality they are foolishly surrendering themselves into captivity. What the thousands of people that walked through our church’s dramatic scenes saw was the captivity and the destruction that the social crafters don’t tell us about; and why would they want too. As Peggy Noonan writes, “Knowledge like this has a chilling effect on the soul.”