No Shame

James Wolcott finds that Dr. Dobson's organization isn't above manufacturing a few biblical truths to sell some books.

While roaming around on Dr. Dob's site, I came across this pecularity, a Post-Abortion Grandparents' Kit devoted to helping parents get over a daughter's abortion, which robs them of a future grandchild. "Your heart still aches for the grandchild you'll only hold in heaven." To ease the heartache, the kit includes a book titled I'll Hold You in Heaven. Every bereaved parent wants to know they'll see their child again. In I'll Hold You in Heaven, renowned Christian leader and pastor, Dr. Jack Hayford, presents not platitudes but solid biblical truth — the truth that babies lost to death wait for us in heaven."

Not hope, mind you, or thrilling speculation, but "the truth."

Admittedly my Biblical scholarship is on the thinnish side, but I don't recall any passages devoted to fetal eschatology. I wonder where they were unearthed. We were told in Catholic school that the souls of the unbaptized were warehoused in what H.L. Mencken called a "Limbus Infantum," but even then we knew this was something cooked up by church theologians in lieu of a real explanation to anything.

And I thought the money-changers in the Temple were bad.

I agree, with this post I am now beating a dead horse.