Cover Story: Neal Horsley

I went in the Air Force the day after I got out of high school. I served in the military from ‘62 to ‘66. It was in that period when Vietnam was just beginning. When I got out of the Air Force, I became ever more convinced the exercises in Vietnam were a waste of human life. I did everything in my power to resist what the government was doing.

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I was incarcerated in 1976 because part of the way I fought the war was helping to build a counterculture by turning on as many people as I could to the use of illicit drugs — specifically marijuana. I early on took responsibility to grow as much marijuana as I could, and I got put in prison for 21 months.

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Before jail, I had been a child of the Atlanta and San Francisco street scene. In that environment, I led an abandoned life. I was a practicing hedonist. I abused drugs for years and years. Living as an outlaw is an enormously stressful and tense reality. I just exhausted all of my resources — personal, psychological and spiritual. By the time I was in prison, I had reached the end of myself. I felt I was burning up inside, and I reflexively said, “Jesus, if you want me to die, I’m ready to die. And if you want me to live, you’re gonna have to show me how.” I experienced a presence of a being that answered to the name of Jesus. He told me to pay attention and that it would be all right.

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I enrolled at a seminary in 1983. One day, we were discussing the 106th Psalm. I understood then that my service to the Lord Jesus Christ required me to defend the least among us as my first priority. I realized I’d been ignoring the fact that the real least among us — unborn babies, the smallest tiniest human beings in our midst — were being legally slaughtered and it just freaked me out. I realized that in fact I was a part of it. By being a citizen in the United States of America, I was culpable. I emerged from that process absolutely determined to do everything in my power to abolish legalized abortion.

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Patriotism is in fact the defense of the father. The word, etymologically speaking, comes from the word patros, which I guess is the Greek word for father, and that’s precisely how I look at it. If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it is a document that says that all rights are endowed by the Creator, the original father. The first of these is the right to life. The idea of the Declaration of Independence is that government is established in order to defend the rights that the father gave to all men.

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I contend that when I inherited the responsibility to be a citizen in the United States of America, I inherited the duty to do precisely that. I see our legalization of abortion as marching us straight toward another time of accounting.