Earlier this week, I wrote an essay that made lots of folks angry at me, including old friends. (Don’t read my very, very ugly Facebook wall.) The essay was in Time, and the title was provocative. It got people going. “Donald Trump Is Not Pro-Life,” it said. “His Response to COVID-19 Proves It.”
My argument was simple. There is a difference between being simply anti-abortion and being pro-life. This is a profound theological and cultural truth perhaps best articulated in the modern era by Pope John Paul II:
As a young pro-life activist, I still remember the publication of Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, its words touched this Protestant’s heart, and when he rooted the pro-life principle in the “incomparable worth of the human person,” it crystalized not just my opposition to abortion but also an aspirational ethic of care for all persons—from conception to natural death.
“Life on earth,” said John Paul, “is a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters.”
Thus, a pro-life person seeks a culture and politics that respects and protects human life in its totality. It’s not easy to create such a culture—and there will always be profound and good-faith disagreements about how to achieve the goal—but the goal is still clear.
Yet there is no definition of “pro-life” that fits the president’s extraordinary and consequential decision to repeatedly mislead Americans about the danger of COVID-19, his mocking of masking (and the right-wing anti-masking movement his mockery helped create), or the reckless way his administration treated the lives and health of his own colleague and friends.
Yes, Trump has been nominally and ineffectually anti-abortion. He was the first president to address the March for Life, for example. But Planned Parenthood received a record amount of taxpayer funding in 2019 and an $80 million taxpayer bailout in 2020. He has appointed two Supreme Court justices—and nominated a third—but there is no indication that any of them are willing to overturn Casey. I ended my piece with strong words:
We know what it looks like when Trump is committed to a cause. Witness his deployment of the military to the border and his defiant diversion of military funds to begin construction of his border wall. Has he showed the same commitment to, say, ending taxpayer support for the nation’s largest abortion provider?
The bottom line is that Trump will end his first term with the nation’s abortion laws largely intact and without engaging in a single serious effort to defund Planned Parenthood. He will also end his first term with a legacy of deception, failure, and callous disregard for the lives and health of even his friends and colleagues in the face of an infectious disease that has killed more than 200,000 of his fellow citizens.
Look at Donald Trump’s complete record. Examine all his rhetoric. Is his presidency characterized by words and deeds that affirm the “incomparable worth of the human person”? Has he treated “life on earth” as a “sacred reality” entrusted to him? The answer is clearly no. His selfish and reckless actions have cost lives. They’re still costing lives. By no fair measure is Donald Trump truly “pro-life.”
The reaction was volcanic. People I’ve known for decades insulted me in the most personal of terms. There are certainly fair arguments to make against my thesis, including that one in fact shouldn’t broaden the definition of “pro-life” beyond the abortion debate. But what struck me was how thoroughly partisan the pro-life movement has become and how dangerous partisanship can be for a movement that needs to do far more than win elections to achieve its goals.
Let me back up a bit. Last year, I spoke at an event at John Brown University, a marvelous Christian college in Northwest Arkansas. I urged the students to avoid some of the mistakes I’d made in my political life, and my central advice was to “avoid the partisan mind.”
The partisan mind creates an identity around party affiliation. Yes, you might join the party because it agrees with you on a key and important idea (such as opposing abortion or defending religious liberty), but when one adopts the partisan mind, the health of the party becomes inseparable from—and often, as a practical matter, superior to—the value of the idea.
The partisan thus acts and lives as an unpaid lawyer for his political client. Because you’ve made the judgment that your party is a superior vehicle for your motivating idea, you suddenly find yourself in the position of defending the party and its politicians even on matters far removed from your core concerns—even when the party’s ideas are bad or its actions are dangerous.
This is how a pro-life Christian can find himself—almost four years into the Trump presidency—minimizing payoffs to porn stars, rationalizing a brutally punitive family separation policy, waving away valentines to dictators, ignoring increasingly volatile national divisions, and excusing dreadful lies about a deadly disease (or bizarre mask culture wars). Why? Because if he’s held politically accountable for these bad acts, he’ll lose. And no matter how bad Trump is, on the core issue (abortion) Biden is worse.
But how does the rest of America experience this pro-life Christian’s political activism? The partisan pro-life Christian thinks they’re saying, “Life, life, life.” The world hears “Trump, Trump, Trump.”
Compounding the problem, the partisan mind is vulnerable to groupthink and confirmation bias. When you’re acting as the unpaid lawyer for your political cause, you vacuum up media that helps bolster your argument. You learn your opponents’ ideas often (if not mainly) through essays and commentaries rebutting a caricature of your opposition.
Your attitude hardens. Your inflexibility grows. And the partisan mind achieves its platonic form—suddenly, you find that your team isn’t just right about abortion, it’s right about everything else as well. Look, for example, at the chart below. This is how groupthink forms and partisan divisions grow extreme:
In my discussions with students, I urge them to do two things. First, seek out and read the best expression of the other side’s point of view. In other words, don’t learn about, say, critical race theory solely by reading a conservative’s rebuttal of critical race theory. Read a critical race theorist.
If you adopt this practice as a habit of life, you’ll shed partisanship almost by necessity. The straw men will wither away, and you’ll instead face the messy and complex reality that there is quite often abundant right and wrong on both sides of the aisle.
In other words, you stop being a lawyer. You join the jury.
Second, regarding those political values that are most important to you, it is better to treat a politician’s agreement as necessary for your support, but not sufficient. This is doubly true when your issue is not and will not be the dominant priority of your political candidate—or a matter within his ultimate control. Otherwise, the consequences can be devastating to your credibility in front of a skeptical public. You can do harm to the cause you love.
To leave the Trump topic for a moment—I know many Alabama Christians who voted for a man as unfit as Roy Moore because he was going to be one pro-life vote out of 100 in the Senate. But in the effort to carry him over the finish line, they found themselves in the uncomfortable position of rationalizing and minimizing not just corroborated claims that he sexually abused teenage girls but also a truly remarkable amount of bigotry and lawlessness.
They thought they were saying, “Life, life, life.” Their fellow citizens heard, “Hate, hate, hate.”
On Earth Two, from day one after his election, pro-life Christians could have done two things at once—applaud and encourage the Trump administration’s admirable pro-life policies while also feeling zero compulsion to defend any other aspect of his administration. In fact, they could have vigorously and loudly opposed those policies and actions they found incompetent or repugnant.
But we don’t live on Earth Two. We live on this Earth, and on this Earth, pro-life Christians respond to a White House that demands unconditional loyalty and thus spend an extraordinary amount of time rationalizing and defending malice and incompetence. Their dominant, outward-facing message to America often has little to do with the causes that motivate their engagement. Instead, they lurch from crisis to crisis, hoping against hope that their advocacy can forestall the disaster they fear.
And during that time, have they been declaring in word and deed that “Life on earth is a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters”? Is that the message this administration sends?
Sadly, no. Instead, the message is something different entirely. Donald Trump leads a nation in mourning, suffering through a wave of death unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. He says, “It is what it is.” And what does the world hear from the pro-life movement? “That’s our man.”
One last thing …
So it looks like HBO is releasing a special episode of the West Wing. I never got into the show when it first aired, but lots of my friends love it. Here’s the trailer for the new episode. You tell me. Cool or cringe?
Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
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