Some years back, Justin Trudeau made it a requirement that all Liberal MPs had to support abortion. MP Lawrence MacAulay had, to that point, been known as pro-life, but he indicated, via a series of tweets, that he would follow his party leader Justin Trudeau’s new requirement for his MPs. MacAulay wrote:

“I’d like to clarify my comments to The Guardian the other day. I am personally pro-life, and have long held these beliefs; however I accept and understand the party position regarding a woman’s right to choose. Despite my personal beliefs, I understand that I will have to vote the party position should this issue ever come up in the House of Commons.”

Broadly speaking, there are two sides of the abortion debate:

1. those who know it is a baby and recognize that this is a life and death situation
2. those who don’t understand (or at least claim not to understand) that abortion ends the life of a precious human being

But there is a third group. This group is made up of those who know it is a child, know it is a life and death situation, and knowingly advocate for death.

This is the group Lawrence MacAulay joined. He called himself “personally pro-life,” so he understands a life is involved. And yet, knowing what he knows, MacAulay pledged support for the murder of 100,000 Canadian children each year. This is the most indefensible of all positions – the most outrageous stand of all.

So how should we respond when someone in public office takes such an outrageous position? We can write about them to the local paper, and we can write to them via an email or letter, and when we do, we should then be civil…but we should not be calm!

Calm isn’t appropriate

We communicate things in how we say them, just as much as by what we say. That’s why when we sing to God, it should be with gusto – mouthing the words, even if they are wonderful words, sends a mixed message, or simply doesn’t praise Him at all.

In the same way, a calm, quiet response to Lawrence MacAulay’s betrayal wouldn’t match up with what he’d done. The confusion he created certainly cost children their lives. Any woman who was considering abortion at the time who then heard this professedly pro-life MP agree to support abortion would have had to understand this as an acknowledgment that abortion isn’t really a life or death matter – it can’t be if he’s not even willing to take a stand. That’s the implicit message he spread.

And in how we respond, there’ll be an implicit message sent in how we say what we say. So if someone is promoting the slaughter of the unborn, we can’t talk to him like we would if he was proposing an increase in the GST by a per cent or two. (Sadly, if MacAulay had done that, he’d probably have gotten more heated responses than he ever got for his tweets.) This isn’t about money, but about lives, so if our response doesn’t have some heat in it, we’re not doing it right.

Does that mean we should just go off on him? SHOULD WE TYPE OUR LETTER IN ALL CAPS? Should we call him every name in the book?

Of course not.

But we should use powerful words. We should use clear words even though we know they will offend. There is no getting around offending someone in this situation – people will get offended when you confront them about the blood on their hands. But we should not offend him with spurious insults, or with demeaning talk.

Here is the letter I wrote this MP at the time:

Dear MP Lawrence MacAulay,

As a pro-life citizen, I don’t appreciate your party leader’s stance. But your recent tweets left me more disappointed in you than him. Justin Trudeau, at least, can pretend he doesn’t know better. But why are you personally pro-life?

Of course the answer to that is simple – you know it is a baby. So let’s look back at what you tweeted and insert in your own pro-life perspective. Here then, is what you really said:

“I’d like to clarify my comments to the Guardian the other day. I am personally against the killing of unborn babies and have long held these beliefs; however I accept and understand the party position regarding a women’s right to choose to kill her unborn baby. Despite my personal belief against killing babies, I understand that I will have to vote to kill unborn babies – my party’s position – should this issue ever come up in the House of Commons.”

Being personally pro-life and yet politically pro-choice is the most damnable of all positions in the abortion debate. It means you know what is going on, but don’t have the courage to act. Please reconsider.

Jon Dykstra

If I were to have a second go at it, I would have started differently. “Don’t appreciate” and “disappointed” aren’t the sort of terms you use to tell someone to stop promoting mass murder – far too relaxed.

However, I’m not sharing this as an example of some perfect letter. There is no such thing, so that shouldn’t be our standard. But it is worth reflecting on what we could improve on for next time.

While my beginning could have been better, I got the right tone in the second half. No euphemisms, nothing to minimize what he is doing. My tone matches my message – the words I use bring with them a brutal clarity: this is killing children – this is damnable.

Conclusion

Christians are too often too calm. We live in a crazy culture in which there is a right to murder unborn babies; murder is also being touted as a “treatment” for the elderly, sick, disabled, and maybe soon even the mentally ill; and adults and even children are being told they are the wrong gender and that the fix is to have healthy body parts mutilated. That is crazy!

But too often our tone and the word choices we use simply don’t match the overall claim that we are making. Can we talk of being “disappointed” or not “appreciating” the actions of a man like Lawrence MacAulay and really expect to convince our fellow Canadians that 300 children a day are being slaughtered in our country? That’s not the right vocabulary. Back in 2014, at this same time that MacAulay was issuing his tweets, three Mounties were murdered in Moncton, N.B., and the newspapers were filled with words like “heartbreaking,” “horror” and “grief-stricken.” Those are the kinds of words we use in the face of a travesty.

How we sound does matter. If we’re going to convincingly communicate the truth of what’s being done to the unborn, the elderly, and the gender-confused, we need to talk like we mean it. Instead of being “disappointed,” we need to be “devastated.” Instead of being “regretful,” we should be “shocked.”

A deeper problem might lie not in our vocabulary and how we talk, but in our hearts and how we feel. It is hard to speak about being outraged when we aren’t actually outraged. Apathy is understandable in the face of an evil like abortion that is decades old, or even an evil like transgender mutilation, which is mostly happening to people we don’t even know. But apathy in the face of evil is also sinful. If we speak of being disappointed because that’s all the passion we can muster, then we need more than a change of vocabulary – we need a change of heart.

Please forgive us our apathy, Lord. Please turn around those who love the shedding of blood. And please, Lord, save the children and adults who are being killed and mutilated!

A version of this article first appeared in the July/August 2014 issue.