ON BEING PRO-LIFE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

Back in August (2024), Ed Stetzer wrote a piece (linked HERE) for Church Leaders.com entitled ‘What’s A Pro-Life Christian To Do in this Election?’ He surveyed the dizzying series of events that began with the first assassination attempt on Trump including the replacing of Biden with Harris. Amidst it all, he highlighted the Republican National Committee abandoning its pro-life plank for the first time in decades. Stetzer then notes, “I’ve voted for a convictional pro-life candidate in every presidential election since I was allowed to vote. It’s not a political choice, it’s a moral choice. I’ll vote pro-life again this time, because the unborn still matter.”

Stetzer then goes on to list the ‘radical abortion’ parts of the Harris/Walz agenda. He compares the Republican stance of pushing abortion legislation off to the states versus the Democratic Party’s advocating for legalizing all abortion at the federal level. And, although he refuses to “tell people how to vote,” and says voting in elections is akin to “calling balls and strikes” in a baseball game, Stetzer nonetheless says the facts are important: “the unborn deserve better, and I’ll use my vote accordingly.” In other words, pro-life is a key (if not the key) moral consideration dictating how Ed Stetzer will vote in the coming election. Christians should vote for the least of two evils: the Republican ticket.

But is it this simple?

Stetzer joins a moral end with a political means that requires discernment. For Stetzer, there is no issue with using a nation-state legislative means to accomplish the Christian moral end of protecting the life of the unborn. Stetzer seems to bypass this issue as if it’s not even a consideration. But is it this simple? Given a presidential candidate like Trump, I suggest the pro-life stance requires more of us Christians than what Stetzer offers us. I propose at least three additional layers of discernment for every pro-life Christians who thinks voting for Trump is pro-life.

Can Legislative Power Accomplish a Specifically Christian Moral Conviction?  

First of all, changing moral behavior by legislation has never been the Christian way. “For what the law was powerless to do … God did by sending his own Son.” (Romans 8:3). Changing a person’s moral life, moral convictions, moral character is a work of the Spirit made possible in the person and work of Jesus Christ. We call it ‘sanctification.’ It cannot be done through imposing laws. A country may be preserved by laws, and their enforcement, but it cannot be redeemed, reconciled, healed by the laws. 

Even Luther and Calvin agreed on the law’s limits. For Luther the work of the law should never cross over to do God’s work (Reckoning with Power pp. 94-95). Most evangelical protestants, who claim we are saved by faith not by law, would also seem to agree.

And so, we must discern as churches whether the conviction – that embryonic life in the womb is a sacred creation of God always to be protected the same as we protect all life before God – can be known outside of one’s living under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We can not simply assume that this conviction makes sense to any and all people regardless of faith.

Certainly, an argument can be made that abortion is murder as a matter of civil law. But there is also evidence that suggests this conviction (in our post Christian culture) - that life created in the womb is a sacred work of God to be protected at all cost, - is a conviction one only knows through regeneration in the Spirit (or else it would be obvious to many outside of Christian life?). If so, we should not impose through law what can only be known in the Spirit as a member of the body of Christ.

Is abortion is ‘obviously’ murder or is it a conviction revealed by the Holy Spirit?: this is a discernment which should not be passed over. We should as churches discern this before we vote this. The very act of discerning this by churches across the country will not only shape how we vote but how we live in a world that does not believe like us.

Culture is changed not through the coercion of the state, but through the powerful witness of a people living a way of life that challenges ideologies that drive a culture’s injustice. This witness, disrupts ideologies, opening space for the Spirit to work, leading to reconciliation, repentance, transformation, and hope and a new consensus. But this is the work of God, by the Spirit, on the ground, through a people’s non-violent witness to the work of Christ as Lord, not through imposition via the legislative branch and the courts.  

The Supreme Court Doesn’t Do What You Think It Does

We may think moral change in a culture can come through the Supreme Court, i.e. through legislation imposed on a culture. But we have seen what happens when moral change is imposed via the Supreme Court. The opposite, from what we intended, occurs. Force, coercion, only leads to its opposite reaction. And it is not the way of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. 

The culture of post WW2 Quebec serves as an example. Quebec was under the rigid control of the Catholic church. In cooperation with the state, the church controlled and ran health care, social services, and education. But the Catholic Church’s seeking to control the moral tenor of Quebec, via education, health care and social services, eventually backfired. Beginning in the 60’s, the Catholic hierarchy was replaced by an explicitly secular government of Quebec. The so-called Quiet Revolution secularized Quebec as a reaction against the Catholic hold on the society through law and institution. Today, if the Quebec province was a country unto its own, it would be the most secular country in the West. Under 4% of the population attend church services.(HERE’S a piece from Christian Century on the Quiet Revolution). Enforcing a morality upon a culture was a massive failure.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court’s ‘Dred Scott decision’ illustrates how the force of the courts could not dissuade the good moral direction of a culture when the culture is going in the right direction. Dred Scott, an enslaved man in Missouri, where slavery was legal, was brought across the state border to Illinois, where slavery was illegal. When he was brought back to Missouri, he sued for his freedom because he had been taken to Illinois where he was automatically granted the status as free, and thereby legally no longer a slave. Ultimately the Supreme Court (1857) ruled against Scott, saying he could not, as a man of African American descent, enjoy the rights and privileges of the American Constitution, as a free man, under the law of the free state.

The court acted believing this case would settle the moral conflict over slavery in the country. It did not. The moral conviction sweeping the North in towns and villages was that slavery was immoral. The abolitionist movements, fermented by the Holiness churches, led people to this consensus on the ground. And so, the Dred Scott decision of Supreme Court was out of step with the people’s moral convictions. Its use of law to impose its (im)moral convictions enflamed outrage across the land and led to the Civil War. The decision itself was eventually overturned post the Civil War with the 13^th amendment.

And so, from a different perspective, the Dred Scott decision illustrates again how the Supreme Court cannot impose its moral will on a people (even when it is immoral!). Whether it acts to impose a moral conviction, or maintain an immoral one, the Supreme Court can only act legislatively to preserve society in its status quo. It cannot change, heal or transform a society to a moral wholeness, nor can it hold back a culture that is being transformed on the ground (such as in the case of the North and slavery). History suggests that any coercion of the courts will surely backfire with a furious reaction against it. Seeking to impose a moral culture, a Christian culture, via legislation accomplishes little, if the groundswell, and an already existing consensus, does not already exist as led on the ground by the churches.

To vote for Trump therefore as the means to overturn, or continue the overturning, of Roe v. Wade, is misguided, if it imposes the will of the minority on the majority. Indeed it will most likely achieve the opposite of the intended effect. The country will rebel and become more pro-abortion rights than before. A vote for Trump is ultimately anti pro-life.

“It's The Culture Stupid”

All of the above argues for the mantra that “culture precedes legislation.” It is culture change that brings legislative change, and not the reverse. And yet installing Trump as the leader for pro-life change works against the very culture change needed to make any legislative change meaningful. Let me explain.

Trump, by his example (the locker room talk, the groping, the sexualizing of women, the multiple divorces, the rape indictments, the misogynous comments toward women, the multiple scandals), promotes a sexualizing-of-women culture through his own example and the people around him. He represents the debasement of sex, the mysogynyzing of women, the culture of recreational sex devoid of procreative union, that leads to abortions.

To affirm Trump as president puts him before the culture as the exemplar of sexualizing of women. Trump parades before America what it means to be successful, a man, how to look at women, etc., etc., You can have all the laws in the world, but if the (young) men of this culture see Trump as the values that ‘successful men’ in USA live, the Trump presidency is a complete failure on the pro-life issue. His life and moral character are ultimately more pro-abortion, less pro-life, than pres. Obama ever was.

Ultimately therefore, former pres. Trump, even though he appoints a pro-life judge, is a pro-abortion president. The most pro-life thing Trump could do is visibly repent of his behaviors before a listening nation. Until then, he serves as a mentor for the sexualizing of women to be exemplified for this culture. And for this I grieve.

Instead of Telling People How to Vote, Let’s Discern the Issue Locally

Ed Stetzer’s advice on voting pro-life is an exercise in missing the point. Let us instead urge all churches to discern how to live and give witness to the profound conviction that God is at work, in all of procreation, in each new life in the womb, for his purposes in the world. Instead of making this discernment into a one-line item that requires of us a simple vote in the next presidential election, let us discern as churches what it means to give witness to this conviction, not merely through a vote, but how we ourselves take care of children, how we minister to pregnant women, how we theologize about the meaning and sovereign work of God in adoption. And yes, let us discern whether a vote AGAINST Trump might indeed be more pro-life than the alternative.

Read my entire book on how power works, including the section on discerning abortion, by getting it HERE.