Charles Camosy is a radical Roman Catholic animal rights activist who published a video last year at the ERLC calling factory farming “sinful” and equating animal life with human life. After backlash, the ERLC removed the video from their website and backtracked on their reasoning for publishing it, to begin with, calling it an “accident.” Yet, the ERLC took the time to platform the man anyways and record the video, knowing who he was and what he was about.
In one interview with the radical leftist animal rights activist, Camosy says it’s time to consider some animals as “persons.”
When gorilla have a vocabulary of over 150 words via American Sign Language, elephants pass mirror tests proving their self-awareness, or dogs show evidence of understanding the concept of justice, we need to at least consider the idea, for instance, that some animals are non-human persons.
You can watch another video of Charles Camosy here which summarizes his radical, anti-Biblical views of animals and animal rights.
Now, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) is back at it again, platforming this dangerous heretic and promoting him as a viable resource in the pro-life movement. Writing an article for Christianity Today, Dan Darling, the Vice President for Communications at the ERLC and well-known The Gospel Coalition contributor says,
Whatever our differences with Catholic social teaching, we should echo his opposition to “throwaway culture.”
One of the modern Evangelical social justice warrior’s tactics in advancing their cause is to hijack the pro-life movement by guilt-shaming pro-lifers into supporting social justice saying that being pro-life is also about wealth redistribution. In Darling’s article, he recalls a time about seeing a homeless man and not immediately feeling the need to drop everything to give him money. Then he goes on to promote Charles Camosy’s book which, in his view, rightly critiques this “attitude.”
It’s attitudes like this that Catholic theologian and ethicist Charles Camosy most wants to expose and critique with his book, Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured People. (He borrows the term “throwaway culture” from a speech by Pope Francis.)
Camosy champions the idea of a “consistent life ethic.” By this, he means that an authentically pro-life witness involves more than opposing abortion. The same values that commit us to protecting the unborn, he argues, should govern our thinking on a range of issues that weigh upon the lives of the most vulnerable—issues like capital punishment, assisted suicide, war and peace, and economic and social inequality. Proponents of this approach sometimes describe it as a “seamless garment,” a term coined by Catholic peace activist Eileen Egan and popularized in the 1980s by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago.
It’s mind-boggling to believe that our Evangelical leaders are so deceived that they believe they can spin a secular cause into something biblical by promoting the views of a radical Roman Catholic animal rights activist. Let’s just be clear, Charles Camosy knows nothing about biblical justice. Charles Camosy isn’t even a Christian. Why would we invoke the theology” of a Roman Catholic heretic and liberal wingnut to advance a cause if we thought the cause was in any way biblical or Christian?
The bottom line is that their cause cannot be advanced biblically. There is no biblical justification for the Evangelical social justice movement. But most baffling of all is that Darling asserts that Catholic teaching has something to teach us about the gospel.
Catholic social teaching has been a useful guide for understanding how the gospel compels us to love our neighbor.
This is absurd! The Roman Catholic Church does not have the gospel and knows nothing of it. Their gospel is false — why invoke a false church and a false gospel to try to justify ANY aspect of the true gospel? He finishes with a vague acknowledgement of “some differences,” apparently, minor to him. He would have liked to see a “bit more” of the “gospel storyline.”
Though this book is extremely helpful, evangelicals will have some differences with the author. Perhaps the most stark is the way Camosy grounds his arguments mainly in Catholic teaching, especially that of Popes John Paul II, Benedict, and Francis. This is unsurprising, of course, but those looking for standard biblical exegesis to guide them will be disappointed. As a reformed Baptist, I probably would have weaved in a bit more of the gospel storyline, showing how Jesus both affirms our humanity in the Incarnation and rescues our humanity in the Resurrection.
You can rest assured that there is no “gospel storyline” at all in any Roman Catholic’s theological works. If they had any gospel, they’d leave the harlot organization. When we should be marking and avoiding these people — as Scriptures command us to do — our Southern Baptist leaders continue to embrace and platform them. Again, Southern Baptists, this is what you are funding with your tithe money at Southern Baptist churches.
