Why Pro-life Christians Should Dump Trump

To some Christians, abortion is a primal sin blighting America’s soul. It’s a supervening moral issue guiding their politics; they can’t imagine voting for a pro-choice Democrat.

Pro-life is a legitimate moral stance that can be debated. Abortion does end a life. It’s reasonable to hold that at some point a woman bears some moral responsibility toward a life she’s carrying.

But can this justify support for Trump?

Michael Gerson (a Republican pro-life Christian) explored this in a recent column. He too, of course, understands why moral feelings about abortion drive some people’s politics. But he sees a problem when this becomes “a moral claim without a limiting principle.”

Abortion cannot be the only concern. Life is never that simple. You also have moral responsibility toward your neighbors, community, nation, and world. Their collective fate matters at least as much as the unborn. Gerson is saying that when you’re willing to justify anything in service to a single concern, sacrificing to it everything else, that is actually morally wrong.

Especially when it means supporting a man who, in so many ways, is shredding the basic principles, values, and ideals that used to govern America and its global role. That affects many more human lives, and is thus more morally consequential, than abortion.

Christians have a special burden here. They need to apply their overall Christian ethics not just to one issue but to the whole waterfront of what should be powerful moral concerns. The number of U.S. abortions is exceeded at least tenfold by living children who die of preventable illnesses globally. And shouldn’t “pro-life” mean wearing face masks and social distancing to keep people from dying of covid-19? And compassion for suffering refugees and their children? And when an obsession with abortion leads Christians to support a pussygrabber president who lies relentlessly, enflames racial divides,* flouts rule-of-law and democratic values —who rips children from mothers’ arms and puts them in cages — their moral compass is out of whack.** They’ve made a deal with the Devil. Jesus would not approve.

Furthermore, Gerson points out, such obviously messed up morality undermines societal respect for their religion, and its overall sway. People see it and conclude this religion is for the birds. Why listen to Christians prattling about morality when they clearly just don’t know right from wrong?***

Gerson also thinks they’re naive to imagine getting their way through raw political muscle. The hardline pro-life stance actually commands the support of only a small minority of Americans. At the end of the day, says Gerson, pro-lifers “are only going to win the abortion debate if we persuade enough people . . . We are not going to prevail by gaining power and imposing our view.” Persuasion requires thinking about how their arguments look to people coming to the debate with very different perspectives. And Gerson suggests that having those pro-life arguments linked with Trump — with all his baggage of vileness — “is not likely to be helpful.”

An understatement. Moral blindness has led them to miscalculate spectacularly in hitching their wagon to Trump. He is going down, and will take them with him.

* For some (not all), pro-life actually camouflages even from themselves what really drives their politics — hostility toward “the other” — other ethnicities and nationalities.

** Meantime, falsely claiming to “protect women’s health,” they try to restrict abortion by, for example, requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges in local hospitals, or even regulating abortion clinic corridor widths. Such dishonesty belies their movement’s moralism.

*** A true morality must be grounded in the reality of the world. Religion’s false reality undermines sound moral thinking.