By The Craig Bushon Show Media Team
Free will is often celebrated as mankind’s greatest gift. From a Christian perspective, it is better understood as mankind’s greatest responsibility.
From the beginning of Scripture, free will was never presented as permission without consequence. It was a trust. God endowed humanity with the ability to choose, fully aware that those choices would reverberate across families, societies, and generations. Freedom was not designed to remove accountability. It was designed to reveal it.
That reality traces back to Genesis itself. The first great conflict in human history was not about power or territory. It was about truth. The serpent did not force Adam and Eve to rebel. He deceived them. He distorted God’s words, questioned God’s motives, and reframed disobedience as liberation.
“You will not surely die.”
“You will be like God.”
“God is withholding something from you.”
This was the original deception—freedom severed from obedience.
That pattern has never disappeared. Sin rarely presents itself honestly. It enters societies clothed in language that sounds compassionate, enlightened, or inevitable. It separates human beings from their Creator by persuading them that moral limits are outdated, optional, or unjust.
That same pattern is visible in modern American life.
The United States is not a pure democracy. It is a representative republic. This distinction is not academic—it is moral. In a democracy, responsibility dissolves into the crowd. In a republic, responsibility is delegated but never eliminated.
Citizens choose their leaders.
They empower those leaders to act.
And they retain the authority to remove them.
That means cultural outcomes, judicial rulings, and public policies are not acts of fate. They are acts of stewardship.
From a Christian worldview, that reality is sobering.
God does not judge self-governing nations the way He judges tyrannies. In dictatorships, guilt concentrates at the top. In republics, responsibility diffuses outward—into voters, institutions, churches, families, and silence.
Before addressing abortion policy directly, an uncomfortable historical clarification is necessary.
Many Americans were never accurately told what Roe v. Wade actually was.
The case centered on a woman using the pseudonym Jane Roe, later publicly known as Norma McCorvey. She claimed she was pregnant as a result of rape and needed an abortion. That claim was later admitted to be false. There was no documented rape, no verified medical emergency, and no unborn child whose circumstances justified a sweeping constitutional ruling. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, McCorvey was no longer pregnant. The Court ruled anyway.
In other words, a national policy affecting tens of millions of lives was constructed on a fictional narrative, detached from the factual circumstances it purported to address.
For decades afterward, Americans were told the decision was settled, inevitable, and untouchable. Yet Roe did not discover a constitutional right—it invented one through layered judicial reasoning.
The strategy was familiar.
Moral reality was reframed.
Consequences were obscured.
Autonomy was elevated as virtue.
And the public was assured that no real harm was being done.
Like the deception in Genesis, this was not merely legal. It was spiritual.
“This is about choice.”
“This is compassion.”
“This separates morality from consequence.”
And it endured not simply because judges imposed it, but because society accepted it.
Legislators defended it.
Voters rewarded it.
Institutions normalized it.
Churches often softened their language.
And responsibility was quietly outsourced.
That changed in 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe through Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Abortion did not disappear. What changed was the location of accountability.
The Court did not declare abortion moral.
It did not declare abortion good.
It declared that the Constitution never guaranteed it.
Responsibility returned to the states—and, by extension, to the people.
This did not reduce moral burden. It concentrated it.
Each state now stands exposed by its choices. Each legislature, governor, court, and voter owns the outcome of whether innocent life is protected or sacrificed under the authority of law. There is no longer a national ruling to hide behind, no distant institution to blame.
If abortion continues in a state, it does so because citizens allow it through their representatives.
This raises a question rarely confronted honestly.
More than sixty-three million unborn human beings have been lost since Roe v. Wade, including over one million in the most recent year alone by widely cited estimates. A loss of that magnitude cannot occur without altering the trajectory of a civilization.
Society continues to ask where the next great leaders are. Where the minds are that cure diseases, restore moral clarity, or elevate culture. Yet those questions are rarely connected to the scale of life extinguished before birth.
From a Christian perspective, the issue is stark.
God has not stopped calling people into purpose.
Society has stopped allowing them to live long enough to answer.
Potential leaders.
Potential healers.
Potential reformers.
Potential parents.
Potential voices of wisdom and courage.
Lost before their gifts ever enter the world.
At the same time, despite historic prosperity and technological advancement, the nation struggles to sustain moral momentum. Debt approaches forty trillion dollars. Families fracture. Mental health crises accelerate. Addiction spreads. Violence normalizes. Truth itself becomes unstable.
This is not prosperity anchored in wisdom.
It is freedom detached from restraint.
A further contradiction demands attention, particularly among those who claim Christian faith while supporting abortion.
In Scripture, Jesus intervenes to save a woman caught in sexual sin from execution. He extends mercy where condemnation is demanded. Yet He does not affirm her sin. His words are unambiguous: “Go, and sin no more.”
Mercy was never permission.
Grace was never endorsement.
Compassion was never approval.
Christ consistently showed mercy to sinners while condemning sin itself.
Abortion does not end sin.
It ends a human life.
And it does so without opportunity for repentance, redemption, or calling.
Scripture teaches that innocent blood cries out—not metaphorically, but morally. When societies build decades of law and culture on the destruction of innocent life, disorder should not come as a surprise.
This is not divine cruelty. It is consequence.
God does not always punish nations by striking them down. Sometimes He simply allows them to live with the outcomes of their choices.
Free will remains.
Responsibility remains.
God does not excuse injustice because it is legal.
He does not absolve societies because decisions followed process.
And He does not ignore moral failure because it arrived cloaked in authority.
Scripture is clear: to whom much is given, much is required.
The American experiment rests on extraordinary freedom. That freedom does not grant moral immunity. It intensifies accountability.
A republic does not shield a people from judgment.
It magnifies responsibility.
When citizens vote, remain silent, disengage, or tolerate injustice for comfort, neutrality is an illusion.
Participation is unavoidable.
Free will does not free mankind from God.
It places mankind directly before Him.
And just as in the garden, the question will not be whether deception existed—but whether obedience followed.
That is the price of free will.
That is the cost of self-rule.
And it is a debt no nation can indefinitely defer.
Disclaimer
This op-ed represents the theological, moral, and civic analysis of The Craig Bushon Show Media Team. It is intended as commentary and opinion, grounded in Christian worldview principles and historical interpretation. It does not constitute legal advice, medical guidance, or an endorsement of any political candidate or party. Readers are encouraged to engage critically, examine primary sources, and consider the arguments presented within the broader context of constitutional governance, faith, and personal conscience.
