The pervasiveness of human waywardness
It extends even into that which ostensibly points the way out of it
My present train of thought is catalyzed by the fact that abortion was such a decisive factor in Democrat success in Tuesday night’s off-year elections around the country.
The division between those who are pro-life and those who assert the necessity of legalized abortion hinges on the notion of a human soul, and whether one is present from the moment of conception. That’s why the rejoinder to the right-to-make-my-own-decisions-about-my-body argument is to assert that more than one body - and hence more than one soul - is involved when a woman is pregnant.
I’ve never been demonstrative about my own pro-life position, never attended any rallies or dinners or engaged any elected officials about the matter. It may not be the most laudable way to be pro-life, but I’ve reacted to the state of affairs over the last fifty-plus years by being sad. Sad that pro-choicers want to put worst-case scenarios - rape, incest and fathers unwilling to be fathers - first. What a hard and cold way to view human development. What would it take to uphold the ideal of family, that most basic of social units, where, when it’s in a healthy condition, is the environment in which we learn about how to lovingly interact with other people? What about venerating nurturing, guidance, encouragement, team spirit, humor, and generosity?
There seems something bitter at the core of a pro-choice position. Its inclination is to respond to what I’m saying in the above paragraph with, “Yeah, show me an actual family that unfailingly venerates those things, that sustains the happiness of everyone in it, that isn’t fraught with underlying issues.”
And there’s a valid point there. Any family anywhere is comprised of fallen human beings. That’s why I used the term “ideal” rather than “actual.”
It doesn’t help that a lot of Christians go about their family-venerating in the most boneheaded way they possibly could.
In 2023, we’re not going to be able to avoid the hot potato of patriarchy and complimentarianism. Not only is it going to make a society-wide conversation difficult if not impossible, given our polarization, but Christians are at a standoff about it among themselves.
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is a lightning rod within institutional Christianity. Its Nashville Statement looks at first glance like a tidy summation of proper relations and dynamics between the sexes. But men being what they are, they can indulge their inclination to imperiously shoot off their mouths and alienate a whole lot of their sisters in Christ. Witness John McArthur’s advice to Beth Moore to “go home.” The ripple effects of that one are still being felt.
I’m not the first Substacker to weigh in on the role of abortion in Tuesday’s elections. Kaeley Triller Harms has offered some thoughts that we all ought to consider:
. . . here are a few pointers I would like to give to conservatives as we navigate these issues in the future:
STOP TELLING WOMEN WE HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN OUR CHILDREN AND OUR OTHER PASSIONS. In so doing, you are pouring salt in the very wounds that inspired abortion in the first place. Throughout history, women have always managed both careers and family life. We can, too! Read some Dorothy Sayers, for crying in the night!
Stop crapping on single moms. Seriously. Stop telling them their children are destined to fail without fathers. Stop blaming them for the decline of society. Stop throwing shade at them on social media. In the past week, I’ve seen no fewer than half a dozen popular conservative Twitter threads taking pot shots at single moms. One self-declared abortion abolitionist pastor actually referred to them as “sloppy seconds.” Men’s groups are encouraged to hold these women in suspicion, to treat them like damaged goods, to brand them with a scarlet A. What we ought to be telling them is, “Thank you.” Thank you for loving well enough to hold down the fort. Thank you for prioritizing your child even after you were abandoned. Thank you for choosing life. Thank you for your sacrifice and heart.
The way we talk about welfare isn’t much better. Wanna know one of the very first things we did for women in crisis who visited us at the pregnancy center? We connected them to state assistance with medical insurance-because they needed it. Earlier this week, a man I know in real life told me he didn’t think I should have been allowed to vote while I was on welfare. These are the types of things people to say to unwed mothers all the time. Over time, it can be pretty discouraging. I weaned myself off of food stamps as fast as I possibly could, but I promise the one thing I did not need while relying on them was the judgment of other people who seemed to believe I should only eat ramen until I could get my act together.Stop platforming “abortion abolitionists.” They are the Westboro Baptist Church of this movement, and they’re a hideous liability. Pro-lifers need to value and elevate the voices of women who regret their abortions. Instead, too many zealots who identify as abolitionists are working to put these women in prison cells instead of behind microphones. This makes me want to bash my head against a wall.
Do I think abortion should be illegal? Yes. Do I think we should prosecute the women who've been conditioned to believe it's just a lump of tissue? No!!!! Prosecute the butchers who account for the limbs and know damn well what they're doing, not the women who believe they're just getting rid of blobs of tissue. I promise you that if you put a living breathing baby in the arms of 99.9% of these women, they would never commission its slaughter. Intent is everything when it comes to criminal convictions. Stop exacting revenge, and start binding wounds already!
Some of the most abortion-vulnerable women are sitting in pews next to you on Sunday mornings. The stigma of their sexual sin can be downright paralyzing. What can we do to foster a church culture that maintains high standards of conduct while also communicating the grace we all need? Is your church a safe place for the abortion vulnerable to turn?
Adoption isn't the magic cure-all for a crisis pregnancy, and we need to be sensitive to the message we communicate to women when we flippantly say, "Oh just give it up for adoption if you can't take care of it."
This point always gets me in hot water with adoptive parents, so I'll take this opportunity to reiterate that adoption can be a BEAUTIFUL thing. There are people out there who legitimately aren't capable of parenting, and their children deserve a loving family to embrace them as one of their own. Some of you are amazing adoptive parents whose children are blessed to have you.
But whenever possible, we need to be doing everything within our power to keep babies with their mothers. If you are willing to spend $30k on adopting a baby, would you be willing to spend that same amount of money to help keep a mom with the child she would only relinquish under extreme duress? These are prickly conversations that don't win me very many fans, but my gosh, are they important.
In a recent study of post-abortive women, a large number of the women interviewed explained that adoption felt even more like death to them than abortion did. In abortion, they had to process a feeling of loss once. In adoption, they had to experience 9 months of physical identity as a mother only to have that identity suddenly cut off and the emotional bond abruptly severed.
We don’t have to validate or agree with that mentality, but our feelings about it are irrelevant. The fact is, that’s how they felt and why they chose their course of action, and we would be foolish not to listen to the information these women are providing for us. A question we should be asking more often in these scenarios is, “How can we keep the mother and baby together?”
Foaming at the mouth and screaming "Murderer!" outside abortion clinics is just about the least effective way to affect change I can imagine. If you're doing this, please stop. When is the last time anyone changed your mind about anything by screaming at you or telling you that you're going to burn in hell? Reel in the crazy. "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." "It is the goodness of the Lord that leads to repentance," not a vindictive self-righteous picket sign.
I think abortion is a scourge that grieves the heart of God. I won't be silent about that. It's an idol that needs to fall. I think it either breaks a woman's heart, or it hardens it. But I have long maintained that the very best way to save the unborn is to learn to care as much about their mothers as we do about their babies. Conservatives, we’ve got some work to do in this space.
Historian - and Christian - Kristin Du Mez, in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, makes the hard-to-refute point that something toxic has been going on for some time. She explains in this interview:
Mona Charen: Kristin . . . your thesis, as I understand it, is that the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump is not a departure from their beliefs. It’s the fulfillment of their beliefs. Is that right?
Kristin Du Mez: Yes, and that’s a good synopsis. And I came to that conclusion by paying attention to evangelical popular culture, and particularly to evangelical ideas about masculinity. And I started noticing more than twenty years ago a growing embrace of a very kind of militant, rugged, even militaristic conception of what it meant to be a Christian man, a kind of warrior. And I traced that up to the present and heard so many echoes of that in evangelical support for Trump—he was their ultimate fighting champion, who would do what needed to be done to advance their aims.
Charen: Now this is interesting, because at the same time you’re saying this was happening within the evangelical world . . . there was a lot of worry that masculinity itself was in crisis in the larger society. So what’s the interaction there between evangelical pop culture and ordinary regular pop culture?
Du Mez: Yeah, evangelicals are Americans and evangelicals do influence other Americans. So, it’s always important to kind of keep those together, to hold those together. That said, you can see in the recent history of evangelicalism kind of an ebb and flow of perceptions of masculinity and what’s wrong with masculinity.
So if you go back to the 1990s, you had the rise of Promise Keepers and an evangelical men’s movement, where their preferred masculinity tended to be more of a “tender warrior” motif or a “servant leader”—a kind of kinder, gentler one that maybe went hand in hand with a compassionate conservatism.
And then you see that pendulum start to swing, and by the early 2000s, an embrace of a much more of this kind of “warrior” mentality. And you can see some similar patterns in the broader culture. And today, you kind of see some parallels—in terms of what we see happening in evangelicalism and really brought to mainstream evangelicals through religious culture—and some of what we see happening in some more fringe spaces, like the “manosphere,” both really embracing this kind of rugged masculinity that is not uncommon if you look at the history of authoritarianism, to be frank. It kind of goes hand in hand with a reactionary populism. . . . You see it . . . across the spectrum, both in religious and in secular spaces.
Charen: How do you analyze the dramatic change among evangelicals between the Clinton era and today? So, in the Clinton time, leading evangelicals, and I think people in the pews as well, had a very strong view that ethics and personal morality were incredibly important in a leader. And they felt strongly that Bill Clinton was failing them, failing the country in that regard. Now, during the Trump era, polls show that there’s been a complete reversal, and that evangelicals are the least likely to think that personal morality is important in a leader.
Du Mez: Yeah, that survey data really does depict in dramatic style [how] it’s easy to kind of stand up for moral values when Bill Clinton is under critique. It’s proven much more difficult in recent years, particularly around Donald Trump. . . .
One of the things that I saw in my research is that this is not a new trend. If you look at how many conservative evangelicals responded to abusive leaders, abusive pastors in their own churches and in their own organizations . . . time and time again you see evangelical communities ending up defending perpetrators of abuse—of sexual abuse, of abuse of power—and doing so in the name of protecting the witness of the Church, [and] blaming women for leading men on or for seducing men. All sorts of excuses, really.
And that was stunning to me in my research. And what I saw is that there is a longer pattern here, of protecting men with power, who are perceived to have an important role to play in protecting and defending the faith, [and] protecting Christianity. And that’s exactly the rhetoric that we have heard and continue to hear around somebody like Donald Trump.
So there it is. It must be dealt with.
I’m going to include a somewhat different matter in this post. I don’t really consider it a digression, because it raises the same ultimate issue: the glossing-over of difficult questions in the name of trying to inject some Christianity into the public square.
Currently up at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s website are two pieces that bother me a fair amount. EPPC has long been a think tank that has particularly won my admiration, but these essays are causing me misgivings.
Of the two essays in question, Patrick T. Brown’s does the far better job of taking into consideration what Never Trumpers find objectionable about the selection of Mike Johnson as House speaker:
The MAGA wing of American conservatism often seems more unified by its enemies than what policies they share. They dislike globalists, a left wing they see as obsessed with race and gender, and Republicans who seem to care more about mainstream approval than “fighting” for conservative victories.
But which battles are worth fighting for can sometimes be nebulous. The right flank of the GOP applies its populist impulses in, at times, opposite directions — some want to protect entitlements, others to reform them. Some seek to dismantle the administrative state, others to use it to advance conservative principles. Some Republicans still talk about balancing the budget or ending the Fed, while others want to see investments in industrial policy or pro-family tax incentives.
This fluid swirl of priorities made the intense drama over replacing former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy largely about internal party dynamics rather than any meaningful policy disagreements.
But that doesn’t mean Rep. Mike Johnson’s elevation as speaker won’t have a significant impact on the priorities of the Republican caucus going forward. No one can question his bona fides as a conservative’s conservative — which may help different factions of the party feel like their concerns are being heard and keep the thin Republican majority in the House together.
Johnson, who represents the Shreveport, Louisiana, area was a relative unknown before this week, even to political insiders. But he has long been an ally of social conservative groups who see their mission as protecting the unborn from abortion and strengthening traditional family values.
His official website proclaims an appreciation for “free markets and free trade agreements,” and hits familiar notes around cutting spending and regulations, reducing the scope of government and ensuring America “remain[s] the strongest military power on earth.”
If McCarthy was willing to wear any number of new skins to position himself as leader of the Republican conference, Johnson can’t hide his spots even if he wanted to — a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who stands up for traditional Republican principles even if others in the party wish the GOP would evolve past them.
Just last month, former President Donald Trump was calling Florida’s six-week abortion ban, signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a “terrible thing” and suggesting he’d be willing to compromise on an issue many conservatives see as one of life and death.
National Review’s Noah Rothman reacted to news of Johnson’s selection by lamenting Republicans had nominated a speaker who “opposes same-sex marriage” (as do about two-thirds of self-described conservatives). Buckets of ink have been spilled about the party’s increasingly complicated relationship with free trade and limited-government economic policy.
Johnson’s selection — at a time when the relationship between social and religious conservatives, establishment-wing Republicans and the MAGA movement had shown signs of fraying — may prove to have long-lasting ramifications. He has introduced bills seeking to prevent public schools from teaching children under 10 about sexuality and “gender ideology,” to prevent minors from being taken across state lines to procure an abortion without a parent’s consent and to require men to pay child support during pregnancy.
But when Brown gets around to describing the crux of what disturbs non-MAGA conservatives, he does so with kid gloves:
As many politicians have, Johnson has made some statements that strike many today as tone-deaf. Like many Republicans, he played footsie with conspiracy theorists after the 2020 election and his policy stances on cutting government spending may not be popular with the median voter.
“Played footsie”? Really?
He was up to his ears in culpability for what happened on January 6, 2021:
Johnson, who was the GOP caucus vice chair and is an ally of Trump, led the amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states Biden won: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called on the Supreme Court to delay the electoral vote in the four states so investigations on voting issues could continue amid Trump’s refusal to concede his loss. It alleged that the four states changed their voting rules without their legislatures’ express approval before the 2020 election.
Johnson at the time sought support from his GOP colleagues for the lawsuit, sending them an email with the subject line “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.”
“President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned Members of Congress,” Johnson wrote in the December 2020 email, which was obtained by NBC News.
“He specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join on to our brief,” he continued. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
. . . As rioters were overtaking the Capitol on Jan. 6, Johnson told Fox News in an interview that there was "nothing unusual" about Republican lawmakers' objections to the Electoral College certification and that "there’ve been many objections over the years.”
“I’m here as one of the advocates on the Republican side, stating our concerns about this election and the allegations of fraud and the irregularity and all that," he said.
The other piece, by Andrew T. Walker, disturbed me even more. Its tone is along the lines of well-well-guess-all-the-secularists-will-have-to-hold-their-noses:
The American project ended on Wednesday with the ascendency of Congressman Mike Johnson to speaker of the House.
That’s what the political left is telling the American people.
The carnival barkers who warn of so-called “Christian Nationalism” have fired up their presses to do what they always do—find yet additional justifications to ridicule and exclude conservative Christians (mind you, from the same crowd championing “inclusivity”). All this is done under the banner of “analysis,” and the “analysts” function as America’s self-appointed defenders of democracy.
The label “Christian Nationalist” has been invoked over and over again in the last few days to describe Speaker Johnson. Bill Maher compared Speaker Johnson’s prayer life to the same “voices” allegedly running through the Maine mass shooter’s head. So, it’s clear that our elites are very obviously reasonable and cool-headed in their analysis. It’s as though the Bat Signal alert has flickered, churning out the same talking points whenever conservative Christianity is brought into political discourse.
My disappointment is profound. Walker is an EPPC scholar I’ve particularly admired. He’s always demonstrated a healthy set of priorities, as well as depth of faith formation. But I cannot understand why Johnson’s election denialism isn’t the glowing red factor of most importance for him. It seems to run counter to what I’ve come to know of Walker through his whole body of writings.
So, yes, the simple practice of Christian faith on a personal level - prayer, taking communion, getting baptized, immersing oneself in Scripture, worshipping with other believers - is, I don’t think I need to convince you, of foremost importance.
But institutional Christianity has some matters on its plate that are going to require some hashing out. Avoiding them may work in the short term, but they’re going to show themselves to be what will continue to marginalize the faith within our society, which is starved for its core message.