If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people.

In a previous article I responded to a claim published at byFaith, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which stated that “gun violence” is “the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” I referenced CDC cause of death data by age which showed this is false, and in a subsequent article requested that readers contact byFaith and urge them to retract. An unclear but apparently significant number of people did so, for which I am grateful.

As of this writing byFaith has not retracted the original claim, however. Their reason? Per the response to my complaint from some of their leadership, they maintain the original claim’s accuracy. They appeal to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that discusses how “firearm-related deaths” are the leading cause of death “among children and adolescents,” a group it defines as “persons 1 to 19 years of age.” That is an insufficient defense.

Problem one is that infants under the age of one are children, and that 18 and 19 year old adults are not. To give an idea of how much this statistical sleight of hand skews the results, consider that infants under one accounted for about 56% of child deaths in 2020, while 18 and 19 year olds had more firearm homicide deaths between them than the entire 0-17 age group (1,435 v. 1,376), and nearly as many suicides (~79% as many). One can only claim that firearms-related deaths were the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in 2020 by denying the majority of child deaths, in other words, and by also including many adults of an age particularly prone to criminal violence and self-harm.

Problem two is that “firearms-related deaths” and “gun violence” are not synonymous, as the former appears to include accidental deaths, whereas the CDC distinguishes between unintentional and violence-related injuries when it categorizes causes of death.

Problem three is that there is an implicit denial of the personhood of infants in any study that talks about children’s deaths that intentionally omits them from its findings. If one truly cares about children’s wellbeing and wishes to empirically study causes of its destruction, one must include all children. As the NEJM study did not do that, we can only include that they either do not regard such infants as truly being children, or else that they are more interested in pursuing a political agenda than in handling the data in a dispassionate manner. Neither of those commends the study in question as reliable, and yet byFaith has hedged its defense upon it.

Now let us trace the sequence of events up to this point. First, byFaith published an inaccurate claim. Second, it was publicly contradicted and was publicly and privately requested to retract the claim. Third, it refused to retract and attempted to defend its original statement by appealing to a source that speaks of a different category of deaths among a different group of people, and which seems to espouse sentiments – i.e., that infants under one do not count as children – that could be used to justify infanticide.

There is no gentle way of putting this, but suffice it to say that such actions do not constitute good journalism. It is one thing to make a mistaken claim of fact, though editors ought to verify the accuracy of articles before publishing them. It is another thing, and worse still, to try to justify one’s mistake by appealing to sources that do not, by their own description, purport to discuss the same thing or the same group of people as one’s own claims. Again, “children” are a different group than “children and adolescents,” and the proper definition of the former is people in the 0-17 age range, not the 1-19 age range that the NEJM uses (inaccurately) for the latter group. (Actually in common parlance children means either pre-pubescent people, but I am using it in its widest sense to refer to what the law typically calls minors.)[1]

It is worse still to justify all of this on the ground that the original article was an impassioned pro-life plea, as byFaith’s response to my private complaint attempted to do. Defending life by appealing to a source that has published pro-infanticide material in the past (compare this and this), and that appears to maintain infanticide-compatible notions about the personhood of infants in the particular study to which one appeals is a strange method, surely. And it is all the worse in that it distracts from what is an indisputably worse cause of death among children, abortion. In 2020 the top 20 leading causes of death for children counted by the CDC totaled 27,054 deaths; abortion accounted for 620,327, or nearly 23 times as many as all those others combined.

Two things before I proceed. One, miscarriage appears to be the largest killer of children, though unlike abortion it is not clear that it is directly preventable in many cases. (If anyone with a medical background believes that I am mistaken here, please drop me a line of correction.) Two, my own writings up to this point had the same effect as byFaith’s, in that they ignored prenatal deaths, which are vastly more common than deaths among children after they are born. Insofar as I believe that byFaith erred by distorting the nature of the matters in view, it is a thing of which I also am guilty. Mark that well, reader: Tom Hervey was wrong too, in that he lost sight of the larger picture.

There is a bit of a difference, however, in that I did not attempt to cast my position as being part of a larger, thoroughly pro-life plea as byFaith has done: my concern was with the inaccuracy of the original claim, and of how publishing it risked bringing our denomination into disrepute and played (if unwittingly) into the hands of political agitators who wish to heckle people into doing their bidding by the use of the same original claim about children and gun violence (often verbatim). Now to summarize, the PCA’s denominational magazine has been engaged in poor journalism, and has willfully persisted in that poor journalism in a way that unhelpfully distorts the nature of our thinking about pro-life matters.

If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people. We keep putting up institutions and celebrating, often more than is warranted, various individuals in our midst, and like clockwork they keep turning about and taking their cues rather from our wider society and its discourse and current events than from the people whom they are supposed to serve.

An example of that appears here as well. For some time now many evangelicals have been sorely embarrassed at the suggestion that preventing defenseless children from being murdered in utero is our foremost concern in questions of life and death. Our opponents frequently accuse of us of not caring about human life after it enters this world, and say things like ‘you talk about the sanctity of life for fetuses, but after they are born you are content to let them languish in oppressive and abusive familial and socio-economic circumstances – some love of life that is!’ And so now our prominent people have begun talking about a larger pro-life vision, and shift the focus from the first point of defending life (logically and chronologically), to talking about promoting a culture of life in general. That is not necessarily wrong as such, but it has the potential to become so by a) suggesting as true what is in many cases baseless slander by our opponents; and b) shifting the definition of what constitutes pro-life action.

It is the latter that is entailed in byFaith’s position here. Their original article regards it as imperative to “stop excusing our lack of progress in reducing mass shootings and work on creating and implementing the solutions that will foster a safer society for all,” and deems the present public safety situation for children in America as a “hellish” and “unsustainable” crisis that demands immediate action by everyone (“we must all start working for a safer society”).  In byFaith’s personal response to me one of their staff explicitly connected advocating to protect “elementary school children” (his phrase) to advocating against abortion.

There is no comparing abortion to criminal violence against children in general, or to school shootings in particular, and the attempt to do so is an exercise in moral blindness. Elective abortion is legal murder that is encouraged, protected, and subsidized by our government, and in the last 50 years has accounted for the deaths of tens of millions of children. By contrast, gun murder (and suicide) is in contravention of our laws. Legality and social celebration on the one hand and criminality and social deprecation on the other make the two things, abortion and firearm murder, vastly different in nature; and alas for us, the socially approved one is the more common by far, which is the real crisis that calls for our action.

If we limit our focus to school shootings, which were an important emphasis for byFaith (per the original article and their subsequent response), there is no comparison at all. In the entire 52 year period for which the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) has analyzed school shooting deaths they identified 371 that involved minors (and that includes suicides, accidents, self defense, and justifiable homicides by law enforcement). In that same period probably at least 223 million people have been students;[2] and 371 out of 223,000,000 across half a century is not a crisis, but an extreme rarity (comp. footnote), even granting there is probably some undercounting for the pre-Internet era.[3]

And yet, these things notwithstanding, byFaith would have us “get on with the good work that needs to be done” viz. gun violence and children’s safety in this country, whatever that entails (and neither they nor Cassidy have said, as others have noted). I think I speak for a great many people in the PCA when I say that we expect better from our official news agency, and that it is a point of some embarrassment and frustration that it not only published inaccurate claims that are popular with political factions that are in most respects our enemies, but has persisted in mistakenly asserting their accuracy in a way which draws their journalistic competence yet further into question and which, worst of all, redefines what is entailed in the single most important moral movement with which evangelicalism is involved.

Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.

[1]     Adolescents (ages 13-19) accounted for 2,543 firearm homicides and 1,239 firearm suicides during 2020, out of a total of 2,811 and 1,293, respectively, or about 90.5 and 95.8% of deaths among people in the 0-19 age group in those categories.

[2]     Figured by subtracting foreign-born residents and people over 65 and under 5 years of age from the nation’s total population as estimated by the Census Bureau, an admittedly rough estimate.

[3]     Figures for minors computed from CHDS’s raw data excel file. For comparison of firearm homicides in general among minors, per the Census Bureau persons under 18 accounted for an estimated 22.2% of the population in 2021, or approximately 73,989,838 people. The 1,376 firearm homicides in this group in 2020 (the last year available) represented the death of 1 in 53,772. Nothing which is so rare can be justly deemed an urgent crisis of the utmost importance. Abortion is vastly more common: 620,237 incidences against 3,605,201 births in 2020, per the CDC.