Archbishop Chaput of Denver pointed out the inconsistency in the statements and actions of politicians like Pelosi. On the one hand, they “tend to take a hard line in talking about the ‘separation of Church and state.’” However, “their idea of separation [only] seems to work one way.”

“Public leaders inconvenienced by the abortion debate,” wrote Chaput, “also seem comfortable in the role of theologian.”

It is not only Catholics. Protestant politicians also play theologian. They desire the political benefit of professing faith without taking what they perceive as a politically costly position. So they insist that Christian teaching on the subject is “unclear” or that Christians have historically disagreed on the subject.

Of course, as the Bishops pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. As I write in my new book The Faith, the Didache, a first-century Christian document thought to be the earliest Christian catechism, called abortion “the murder of a child.” You don’t get it any clearer—or older, for that matter—than that.

Of course, this kind of clarity is, as Archbishop Chaput put it, “inconvenient” for those who find themselves in opposition to 2,000 years of Christian teaching. In that case, my suggestion is that these politicians spare us their uninformed and inadequate theories about what Christianity teaches.