Saving Ireland - Full Documentary Film

The Right to Life and the Prayer for Revival

I think we should note that since the Constitution was introduced in 1937 and voted on by the people, this is the first time that we've been asked to put forward a bill that would take away a fundamental human right from people, in other words the most fundamental of human rights, the right to life.

I pray.

With all my heart God that you would by your spirit revive your church here in Ireland across denominational barriers, you would unify the church and your truth, that you would Lord hold back the injustice, the slaughter of innocent.

Children. I fight for repeal, I fight for sex work decriminalization. God we plead.

For your mercy, we ask you to be merciful to my nation and to this one and I plead Lord God for your mercy and patience on our nations and I pray with all that's in me God, please spare us of this evil and please use us to do it.

We say together, unified, here I am, send me. In Jesus name, Amen. So in Ireland right now, both Northern and Southern Ireland, they are one of the last standing historically Christian nations that have criminalized abortion.

It's illegal in both Northern and Southern Ireland to kill your child via abortion. As a matter of fact in Ireland right now if you do kill your child via abortion, in say Southern Ireland it often carries even a 14-year prison sentence.

So historically Ireland is a Christian nation, covenanted to God and a lot of the residual identity and worldview and cultural identities associated with the Christian worldview are still there in both Northern and Southern Ireland.

But in Southern Ireland right now they are fighting for a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment and what the Eighth Amendment is, is an amendment that equalizes the life of the child with the life of the mother.

So it recognizes the humanity of the child, the value and the dignity due to the child that's in the womb, in the safety of the womb of the mother. The Repeal the Eighth Movement is a movement that seeks to do away with the Eighth Amendment which equalizes the life of the child with the life of the mother and it ultimately works to effectively decriminalize abortion in Ireland.

In 2018 you can be a part of making history. You can join a grassroots movement of women, LGBTQ and young people, community and workplace activists. So we can win repeal and abortion rights. The political establishment has finally given in to the pressure from the pro-choice movement.

We have won a repeal referendum. Rose Espy headed Civil Disobedience with the abortion pills. In 2016 five pregnant people a day had safe medical abortions with pills. The reality of abortion happening in Ireland can no longer be ignored.

So we need to fight. We need to shout. We need to stop being silent. We need to find that hybrid feminist inside and let it out. Because who else will speak for us? So be bold for change and let's repeal the Eighth.

Abortion as Murder and the Loss of the Christian Metanarrative

Not only is it a conspiracy for mass genocide, it is the worst form of child abuse that we can conceive of and.

The Irish state is allowing to happen. For us in Ireland though the pendulum swing is right nearly up at the tip of a desire to utterly eviscerate the Christian metanarrative from our culture. Okay. And so we're nearly right at the tip of that pendulum swing.

Okay. And so any kind of references in any context to anything got to do with religion or the Bible is absolutely anathema. Yeah. To the liberal agenda which has become the accepted narrative.

In our culture. Yes. Predominantly Ireland is a pro-life country. You know I've got many friends and people I know who would claim to be agnostics or atheists who are absolutely pro-life. They were brought up in a country that valued the life of the unborn to the point where the country decided okay this is the practice in our country but let's actually put it into law.

Hence the reason the Eighth Amendment was created. Yeah. Just to absolutely cement that in. And now this fight is coming against us. Coming against it saying no the unborn child isn't a child. It doesn't have the same rights.

Right. Unfortunately the Supreme Court have just made a ruling in in that way but the ruling doesn't actually reflect what the law states. That's right. The law states that the child the unborn child is has equal rights to the mother.

That's right. And the mother who's born the child in the womb has the same rights. So what they're.

Trying to repeal is that. So according to the Irish Constitution it is currently illegal in the state of Ireland to campaign for the murder of children. It is a criminal offence. It's to undermine the authority of the state.

It's to commit treason against the state. This currently is not being enforced. Another example of how the Irish Constitution is not being enforced is under Children Article 42A1. It says the state recognizes and affirms natural and imprescribable rights of all children and shall as far as practicable by its laws protect and vindicate those rights.

Well the right to life is a fundamental right and the Irish state is not vindicating the right of the unborn. I.

Mean there's an opinion here about referendums in Ireland which I think is accurate is that the referendums are never about the issue themselves. Yeah. They're actually always about a more base level issue.

And in this case it's about removing the Christian narrative from our culture. And it's interesting. Socialist Karl Marx said that in order to destroy the Holy Family, in order to destroy the Holy Family of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the earthly family must first be destroyed.

And we know that as the families of this earth, Christian families particularly, that God has made family as the fundamental building block and the institution by which he advances his purposes throughout the world.

His redemptive purposes. It is his institution. And so we see that abortion is fundamentally an attack on God's familial nature in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But it is also an attack on his great plan of salvation.

The Scale of Abortion in the United States

How do you.

Describe abortion? Well in the United States right now since Roe versus Wade we've had about 60 million children die via abortion in the abortion industry. One of the organizations Planned Parenthood kills about a thousand children every single day in our country.

There's about 3 ,000 children who die every single day in our communities across the United States. And they're killed through abortion. There's a number of different ways that you can take the life of your child in our country through abortion.

You can kill your child via a pill. They have medical means of abortion through a pill that you take into your body and it ultimately kills your child through a medication. There's also means of abortion that are most common in terms of the surgical abortion where the doctor goes into the woman and essentially pulls the little boy or little girl apart limb from limb.

So sharp instruments and tools are forced into the woman to tear the child into pieces, literally into pieces. They will take the legs off of the child, the arms off of the child, they'll disembowel the child, they'll pull the skull of the child out or even crush the skull where the brains will flow out and they'll pull little bits and pieces of the child out of the mother.

And what will take place often is they will take that child that they've dismembered and they'll put them on a tray in the operating room and they'll put the child back together again like puzzle pieces to make sure that they haven't left any pieces behind that wouldn't cause the woman to be septic or to get an infection.

And so there's the means of chemical abortion where they essentially burn the child with chemicals and ultimately set them on fire. There are a number of different ways that abortionists and the abortion industry have discovered to creatively and to safely kill a child in the womb of their mother.

That's what abortion is and it takes place in our country the tune of about 3 ,000 little image bearers of God every single day.

That die in the safety of their mother's womb. And establishing the value of the unborn child in the womb as we have, as God's Word does, we now reach an inescapable conclusion about this. Abortion is murder.

It is the unjustified and premeditated taking of life with malice aforethought. The Christian.

Worldview established justice for all people, everybody in the image of God, which is every human being, no matter where you're at. The handicapped, the black, the white, women, everywhere we went, the biblical worldview infused that truth of the image of God and the dignity of every human being and to every culture that it's gone into.

And now we've lost that in our culture. We've lost it in the United States. We now have all these children killed and it's the duty of the Christian church to rise up and to fight for justice. As a matter of fact, God explicitly commands us in the book of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter 24, God commands us to rescue those who are being led to the slaughter, those who are stumbling to death.

It is a command of God that Christians be a part of protecting people who are being led away to the slaughter. We also learn from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, His most famous sermon, the most famous sermon in the history of the world.

We learn that Jesus calls the church the salt and the light. Salt is a preservative. It preserves things from spoil and decay and light dispels darkness. And Jesus says that we are that city set on a hill.

We are the light of the world and God commands us to uphold justice, to be light in darkness and to preserve the culture round about us from spoil and decay. And it's actually a command of God that Christians not only preach the good news of salvation and redemption, but that Christians are the ones that stand as the salt and the light and the force to preserve justice in the world.

So standing for the lives of the pre-born is a command of God. And I want to say that so much of what's wrong around us is because we've failed to be salt and light to the culture and that is our task.

One Christian before said something that stuck with me and I'll never forget it. He says this, the culture around you is the report card of the church. The culture around you is the report card of the church.

How are you doing? The church.

In the States has failed to assert the authority of Christ in all things. And again my prayer is that you will not follow in our footsteps. Let me be clear, I am in no way asserting the failures of the church in my culture onto you.

This is simply a warning to not make the same mistakes that we have. For various reasons which I won't get into today, the church militant or the true believers presently alive forming the Christian Church ultimately has abandoned the culture in my nation.

Unlike Knox, we have stopped speaking the truth into the culture. We have stopped holding the magistrate to biblical standards. We have left the culture to its own devices. And in two nations, my.

Nation and your nation, that were at one time considered Christian nations in covenant with God, we look around us today and we see so much brokenness, so much depravity, so much of the breakdown of the family and gender.

We see all these things that are distorted in human sexuality. We see the theft rampant on a widespread scale. And we have to ask the question, how are we doing as a church? Because at one point we could have called ourselves Christian nations and covenant with God.

We look around us today and we say what happened? The church as a.

Whole in my culture has developed what I call a retreatist mentality. So rather than exhibiting biblical influence, we duck and cover. We deliberately prolong the tying of our shoes. In other words, it's like, oh there's abortion, I got to tie my shoe for 45 years.

Still tying it. That's essentially what we've done.

The Pro-Life Movement, Gospel Neutrality, and the Need for Repentance

It's important that as Christians we realize that there's going to be any darkness dispelled by the light. It's going to happen because of the witness of the church. It must be a work of the Bride of Christ.

It must be a work, a movement that is centered around Christ in the biblical worldview. And the challenge that we've seen is that Christians have handed over this fight for unborn children. We've handed over this fight to the pro-life movement.

The pro-life movement that is very, very diverse, which is good. We want diversity in terms of people fighting for the lives of the pre-born, but theologically diverse and ideologically diverse and ultimately, explicitly at times, neutral.

And that is to say that the pro-life movement in the United States of America is generally neutral in its approach to ending abortion. It is not explicitly Christian. It is not explicitly fighting from the Word of God as the foundation.

It's not explicitly fighting as a gospel issue, recognizing that when a nation determines to deliver their children over to be destroyed by mothers and fathers, that is fundamentally a heart issue. It's an issue of sin.

It's an issue of malice. It's an issue where there needs to be redemption and heart change. And the only way that that can take place is not through neutrality. It's not just merely through rational, reasonable, or traditional argumentation.

It's not through appeals to emotion. It is through the biblical gospel and the call of people, the call to turn from sin, to be reconciled to God, to be forgiven, to come to Christ and live. The work in our nation that needs to be done to fight against abortion must be from a gospel-centered perspective.

It must be with Christ as the center, as the very foundation of our fight. And the pro-life movement has largely abandoned any explicit commitment to Christ, to God's Word, and to the gospel. As a matter of fact, you have many pro-life leaders, leaders that we've interviewed, that say that they will not use biblical definitions of abortion.

They will not use the explicit biblical gospel to war against this in a culture. They say that it has to be a backdoor approach. It has to be more secular argumentation. It has to be more dealing with the woman, calling the woman a victim, rather than somebody who needs Christ and forgiveness.

She's a victim. She's not guilty of a sin, a crime. She's a victim. There are even pro-life leaders that have said that the woman who has an abortion is as much a victim as the child that she kills.

The pro-life movement has a lot of women who are active in it who have had abortions. And they very much argue that the mother who got the abortion is also.

A victim. So just in terms of trying to understand how the pro-life movement engages abortion in Ireland, is it generally accepted, or let me put it this way, is it generally understood that a woman who has an abortion is a victim or a murderer?

What's the consensus amongst the pro-life movement? A victim or a murderer? I'd say it's a victim. She's a victim? Yeah.

Because the pro-life movement here is not just about going and aborting a kid, it's love both. Yeah. You can see that on that umbrella over there. Right, love both. That love both aspect of it is huge.

I've been to other European countries, and it's probably kind of, but not as big as here in Ireland. Here in Ireland, they always look to really love both the mother and the kid. Sure, but in terms of like the.

Legislative fight, right now. Abortion is illegal. It's murder, essentially, in Ireland. So when you guys are trying to push forward against those who want to see children killed in the womb, you would want, legislatively, as a form of law, is she guilty of murder when she does it, or is she just, we just want her.

To be seen as a victim? Preferably as the victim. But I mean, it's, like, in extreme cases where she actively is actually killing her own kid, fine. But if it's something that is okay, like, she went into abortion clinic, they talked something into her, and in that case, no, nobody would actually say she's a murderer.

If a woman who has an abortion is a victim, then that means, watch, she is not guilty. And if she is not guilty, she does not need Christ in that.

The Word of God tells us that those who intentionally premeditate the murder of another human being have violated their God-given moral instrument that distinguishes between right and wrong, and are actively fighting to stifle it.

This is something vitally important for Christians to grasp. In labeling a vast majority of women who have abortions as victims, the pro-life movement has framed the act of abortion as a horrible thing, but not a crime that should be legislated against to protect the victim that is the unborn child.

If you go to your legislator and you say, I want abortion to end, they're gonna ask you why. And if you don't have an issue of justice to present before them, then you can expect to have abortion no ministry in Ireland.

Ireland, foundationally, had a biblical worldview. The law itself, the law itself that says that the life of the pre-born child is equal to the life of the mother, that is through and through from the biblical worldview.

And it's interesting because the pro-life movement in the United States of America is so heavily influencing Ireland and its fight against the pro-choice and the pro-abortion movement. And it's amazing because Ireland has such a strong position.

They already have a law that recognizes the personhood of the pre-born child. They already have a law that says that the woman is not a victim, but actually a perpetrator of a crime. They already have a law that criminalizes the act of abortion.

And now the pro-life movement, the failed pro-life movement in America, and I hate to say that, but it's true. The failed pro-life movement in America is influencing Ireland and actually undoing the strength of their position.

Just consider it for a moment. Now, the pro-life movement says she's not a criminal. She's not guilty really of any sin. She's a victim like the child. And that's undoing the strength of the position of the Irish church and the people in Ireland.

Their law says it's a life. It's a human life. It's equal to the life of the mother and it's a criminal act to kill that child. And the pro-life movement in America comes in and says, no, she's a victim.

We see crisis pregnancy centers. We see pro-life counseling done in our nation talking about helping a woman decide for herself what is the right choice to make with her child without any appeal to God's scriptural directive.

All the while claiming to be Christian, they encourage women to make the best choice for them and define abortion in terms of a woman's autonomous will that is unaccountable to anyone else. Only what's doing best for her, even if that choice includes the killing of her unborn child.

The Authority of Scripture, Human Sexuality, and the Gospel as the Answer

What are some of the failures that you see in terms of terminology in the pro-life movement in Ireland?

I think there's the vast majority of people who are here are Christians or from a Roman Catholic background or they're of faith. But there's a lot of people, there's a lot of hesitancy to link that in consistently and say, oh, you don't have to be of faith and we're happy to have atheists for life and everything.

And to an extent we want to drag along as many people as we can.

Right. Of course.

It's inconsistent because these guys believe in the sanctity of life because they believe human life is in the image of God.

That's right.

And what do you do if you're trying to use Sled or something and you get someone who says, it's a human, I just don't care. At some point you have to go, your worldview is wrong. This is created in the image of God.

Yes.

Do you know that? Do you need to repent and actually acknowledge that?

Yes.

Common ground on the issue so far?

When the church begins to change, it's always to do with the authority of Scripture and a move away from Scripture and the operative authority of Scripture. In the area of human sexuality, we see that.

So in my particular denomination, where there is a desire to move away from a clear biblical understanding of human sexuality, indeed of gender, it is a removal and a reduction of trust in and the operative authority of the Bible.

So when that happens, there is nothing left to say really because it's just your opinion. Why not say everyone's opinion is equally valid? I think it's just back to the basic issue in relation to the health of the church, the vitality of the church in relation to the Word of God.

We see within the major denominations here a gradual shifting away from the Bible, an embarrassment around the exclusive claims, for example, of Jesus Christ. If you're embarrassed of that, then you'll have to be embarrassed and cut out swathes of the Bible that speak of the uniqueness of Christ.

So whilst there may indeed be a holding on to some of the morality, some of the Christian vision in terms of life, in terms of human sexuality, in terms of the uniqueness of Christ, while there's still maybe a desire to hold on to those things, it's entirely unfounded and just becomes a matter subject to opinion.

And then move into the next generation and you've lost any kind of memory of the Bible and lost any kind of memory of exactly what you should believe because the previous generation believed that, but there was no foundation.

The gospel is the answer.

That's the answer.

I've realized that a lot of things, like we're trying to pluck the branches when we can just go to the roots of the tree. Like John the Baptist said, the axe is laid on the root of the tree. That's where the biggest problem is.

That's the answer.

That is the gospel.

That's the gospel.

That's the reason why the message can be out there, abortion is wrong, but then what's going to get rid of thieving? What's going to get rid of stealing, adultery, and so on? I mean, the whole idea is just go to the roots.

That's where the problem is, the heart is not changed. And if the heart is not changed, nothing else is changed.

The issue of abortion, this has been upon us before. As a matter of fact, in history, the Christian church has been, since the very beginning, opposed to abortion. You had abortion taking place in the Roman Empire.

You had, even at times, Roman emperors either fighting for or against abortion. But since the earliest stages of the Christian church, the Christian church has been a force to be reckoned with in terms of ending the slaughter of fatherless children in any culture that it's been in.

And so this has been a fight that's been long going, and Christianity has won this fight in history. And it's sort of happened in cycles. As a matter of fact, early on in American history, we had a very profitable and rising abortifacient industry that came into our land, and it was defeated by the Christian church.

So as the people of God, we can do something. We're not our backs to the wall and doing nothing. We can do this on our knees and we can fight this battle on our knees. But we do need, as the people of God, to take responsibility ourselves and get before God and seek God's face on this so that people like you who can go out and engage in very meaningful and very intelligent conversation have power.

We can hold up Moses' hands, surely. There's an awful lot of people out there who are quietly pro-life, and it's encouraging to be out there amongst them. The other great thing about it is I'm out knocking doors, and I've got a Catholic partner or a Mormon partner one night.

I'm doing it, hopefully trying to do it in a gospel-centered way.

You get to witness to them too.

You know, I can do it for the price of one.

Amen.

And then they've got to hear it at the next door. So, you know, be encouraged and seek to spread that sense of encouragement around others that this is not a done deal. The media are trying to manufacture a consensus, and it's far from it.

We can't win this fight if it's not going to be Christian. It's not salty, it's not light if it's not Christian. It doesn't bring any heart change if it's not foundationally from the gospel itself. You know, if our nation is at the place where it believes that a mother and father has the right to kill their own child in the womb with malice of forethought, then we're not going to solve that problem with emotionally laden argumentation.

We're not going to solve it with traditional values argumentation. It has to be at the source, the foundation. We are sinners against God, and we have feet that are swift to shed blood. We're not righteous, we're not good.

Our feet are swift to run to evil, and the only way to change that direction, the only way to have a heart change, a complete turnaround, is through repentance and faith in Jesus. And the only consistent position to argue from is a Christian position, from the biblical worldview.