Abortion About-Face

What now, pro-life Christians?

“The pro-life justification for supporting Trump has just collapsed,” Pete Wehner contends in his latest piece in The Atlantic.

Pete is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and current senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. A longtime Republican and an evangelical Christian, he has been a consistent critic of Donald Trump since Trump arrived on the political scene nearly a decade ago. He has also critiqued his fellow evangelicals for sullying their witness by linking arms with a man who is “a convicted felon and a pathological liar, a man who has peddled racist conspiracy theories, cozied up to the world’s worst dictators, blackmailed an American ally, invited a hostile foreign power to interfere in American elections, defamed POWs and the war dead, mocked people with handicaps, and encouraged political violence,” who “has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges; who attempted to overthrow an election; who assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol; and who encouraged the mob to hang his vice president.”

No, he doesn’t mince words.

The Atlantic

Now, Wehner takes a hard look at the fate of the pro-life movement.

…[E]nding Roe is not the same thing as reducing the number of abortions in America. In fact, the number of abortions has increased since the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe….

From a pro-life perspective, though, it’s actually worse than that. Trump has done what no Democrat—not Bill or Hillary Clinton, not Mario Cuomo or John Kerry, not Joe Biden or Barack Obama, not any Democrat—could have done. He has, at the national level, made the Republican Party de facto pro-choice. Having stripped the pro-life plank from the GOP platform, having said that Governor Ron DeSantis’s ban on abortion after six weeks is “too harsh” and a “terrible mistake,” and having promised to veto a national abortion ban, Trump has now gone one step further, essentially advocating for greater access to abortion.

But that’s not all. The public is more pro-choice today than it was at the start of Trump’s presidential term, with pro-choice support near record levels. Approval for abortion is strongest among younger people, who will be voting for many decades to come. (Seventy-six percent of 18-to-29-year-olds say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.) Since the Dobbs decision, ballot measures restricting abortions have lost everywhere, including deep-red states such as Kansas and Kentucky. In addition—and this fact doesn’t get nearly enough attention—the number of abortions increased 8 percent during Trump’s presidency, after three decades of steady decline.

So voting for Donald Trump didn’t mean you were voting for fewer abortions. Abortions declined by nearly 30 percent during Barack Obama’s two terms, and by the end of his term, the abortion rate and ratio were below what they were in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. But they went up again on Trump’s watch. Public opposition to abortion is collapsing. Pro-life initiatives are being beaten even in very conservative states. The GOP has jettisoned its pro-life plank after having it in place for nearly a half century. And Trump himself is now saying he’d be great for “reproductive rights,” a position that pro-lifers have long insisted is a moral abomination.

This is not a surprise. Betrayal is a core character trait of Trump’s. He’s betrayed his wives, his mistresses, his friends, his business associates, people who have worked for him, and his country. There is no person and no cause he will not double-cross. The pro-life movement is only the latest thing to which he has been unfaithful, and it won’t be the last.

The question to ask yourself is: Who in the pro-life movement—Al Mohler, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, and countless others—will speak out, publicly and forcefully and relentlessly, against Trump’s about-face? Will they tell the full truth, which is that abortions increased during the Trump presidency, that the pro-life movement is weaker than at almost any time in its history, and that, when it comes to making the Republican Party the home of the pro-life cause, Trump is doing unprecedented damage?

Will they now say of Trump what they say of liberal Democrats, that he supports the murder of innocent unborn children?

There have been a few voices from inside the movement offering tepid warnings to the Trump campaign not to take the pro-life vote for granted, and a few signaling that they will vote American Solidarity instead. But for the most part, there is rationalization. The Democrats are worse. We need to think politically, and what’s important is winning. Think about the border. About immigration. We need to deal with reality.

Such nuance, if you will, is disorienting for those familiar with the movement. For years, any Christian who didn’t align 100% with the political strategy of the pro-life movement, which amounted to only ever voting Republican, has come under harsh judgment. Seeing such grace extended to Trump’s about-face is jarring.

I’m not aware of any political pollster who expects this change of heart to significantly affect Trump’s evangelical support. In fact, polling suggests that evangelicals prioritize many other issues over abortion when they cast their ballots—issues like improving the economy, health care, and immigration. Nevertheless, abortion has served as a strategic moral linchpin for the Christian Right, painting all who allign with their position on abortion as de facto moral voters and all others as immoral. This moral/immoral divide then extends to the broader party platforms, such that any Democratic proposal—no matter how decent— is necessarily tainted, and any Republican proposal—no matter how problematic—is whitewashed.

Wehner has observed these dynamics up close. As one who has challenged his own party, he has seen the cost to our political culture, and also to the church:

…This is not a hard call. Trump deserves the disapprobation of evangelical Christians, not their vote. But he will get their vote, in overwhelming numbers, even if he has sold out the very cause they once professed greatest devotion to. Character counts? That’s so passé. Being pro-choice is a moral travesty? Only, it seems, if you’re a Democrat. Moral relativism is a threat to our nation? Not if you’re part of MAGA world; in that case, taking a blowtorch to moral norms and truth is a blast. Love your enemies? Not if they’re progressive.

Donald Trump has done incalculable damage to our political and civic culture. But he has also performed, even if inadvertently, a public service. He is a political and moral CAT scan, showing the ethical core of many of his supporters. It has been quite the revelation.

The evangelical movement comprises tens of millions of Americans; many of them are people of integrity and faithfulness. My own life has been profoundly enriched by its adherents. But we cannot deny what is true: Much of the evangelical world has validated many of the worst indictments of the secular world. There are so many scandals, so much cynicism and hypocrisy, so much to grieve. Much of what evangelicals and fundamentalists have claimed to stand for, certainly in the realm of politics and culture, turns out to have been an affectation, an illusion. They want power and revenge. Donald Trump Jr., in channeling the attitudes of many Trump supporters, said at a Turning Point USA gathering in 2021 that the teachings of Jesus have “gotten us nothing.”

In his book The Subversion of Christianity, the French sociologist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul argued that what we call Christianity is “the opposite of what we are shown by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.” In many cases, and throughout history, according to Ellul, the Church, with its emphasis on moralism and its teachings in the political sphere, has perverted the Gospel. Ultimately, Ellul is hopeful because, as he puts it, “Christianity never carries the day decisively against Christ.” That is the hope many of us hold on to, but it’s hardly ideal. A movement that claims Jesus as its own should be more than a whitewashed tomb.

The hypocrisy revealed in the dissolution of the pro-life movement as we know it and its decoupling from the Republican party may not move the needle on the next election when it comes to how evangelicals vote. But it may in time open up space for a reexamination for what it means to be “pro-life” in a deeply divided and democratic society, a conversation that is unlikely to happen as long as the issue remains a political football.