Abortion is practically none of my business except to observe that the rhetoric has escalated to a point that it has divided the country. But the whole thing has gotten out of hand.

In Tennessee, they are arguing as to whether or not a 12-year-old girl, made pregnant by her father – the most hideous of sex crimes – should have an abortion. Well, in some states trigger laws are going to demand that she carry the pregnancy to term.

This girl has one life and when she is 12 years old religious zealots are going to destroy that life by meddling in her right as a Christian to make her own decision.

Maybe we should recall that two years ago a staunch anti-abortion married member of Congress who supported all of the anti-abortion legislation had the misfortune of getting his “girlfriend” pregnant. His first suggestion was abortion.

This is a frequent occurrence when the issue is in our own backyard. There have been anti -LGBT legislators who have had to change their tune when one of their own children came out of the closet. Suddenly, it isn’t so bad.

The irony of the abortion debate is that it is a Christian issue dragged into the secular public arena even though there is no scriptural justification for the idea that fertilized eggs are people. So where does this idea about fertilized eggs being human beings come from? For being a Christian issue, it has no Christian foundation.

This is not to deny the sanctity of life. Sanctity of life can be found in the whole of the New Testament but it has to be deduced rather than textual.

Killing human beings is a transgression of God’s values because He values every living human. Of course, there is a difference of opinion among Christians about the time a fertilized egg becomes a human being. The anti-abortion folks have hung their whole crusade on the specious conclusion that a fertilized egg is a human being. Who knows?

While we may proclaim that all beings have equal rights, the United States is a killing country. It doesn’t make the humanness question any simpler but we seem to value the lives of some but not others.

Christian America killed millions of Native Americans without a blip on the sin scale. The massacres of Native American women and children were not even tied into the Christian worth of the Native American people. The 2,000 mile “Trail of Tears” moving Native Americans 1,800 miles from Georgia to Oklahoma cost over 3,000 lives. Native Americans were slaughtered by Christian Americans who put land ahead of lives.

The same Christian America simultaneously killed millions of African-Americans over 400 years but few in Christian America had any feelings of Christian guilt. We also killed hundreds Chinese immigrants who came to build our railroads.

Now that we have some context for the issue of killing, we can address abortion as a Christian issue. This is undeniably a Christian issue that should be resolved in a Christian way. The proof is in the pudding – religious people have taken this to a secular world to decide a Christian issue. The Apostle Paul scolded the Corinthians for letting secular people decide a Christian issue.

According to the New Testament, a Christ-follower is a person who personally decides to live a Christ-like lifestyle and develop a relationship within the will of God.

In this one-on-one relationship, every Christian is accountable to God for his/her life decisions. By interposing our religious views on another person, we are breaking this personal relationship that is unique to each Christ-follower.

Even though most of us believe in the sanctity of life, we must also accept that fact that abortion is none of our business – it’s solely between God and His believers. This relationship is also sacred.

Lloyd Omdahl is a former lieutenant governor of North Dakota and former political science professor at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.