Hello, my friends,

You may have seen a headline or two about Trump shifting his position on abortion in recent weeks. Naturally, this has caused a lot of fractures within the pro-life movement. While others are discussing the political ramifications of these recent events, as a pastor, I wanted to invite us to think about the beliefs around the topic of abortion itself and how these beliefs influence how we understand and engage the issues as Christians. I think this deeply matters if we do in fact want to respond to this issue according to the gospel of Jesus.

But before we get into it, here are this week's recommended resources: ​
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​-Good Neighbor Map in this moment of social conflict and political division, I encourage you to participate in something truly special—a Christian storytelling platform called the Good Neighbor Map, where you can share your much-needed stories of Christ's love, kindness, and compassion in action. Share your story on the map and let’s show the world what Jesus’ love really looks like.

​-You’re Not The Boss of Me from Hidden Brain. I found this podcast episode on the psychology behind the experience of having our freedoms infringed upon to be both insightful and important. Some of the data they discussed pointed to how when governments imposed a particular religion, adherence to that religion actually dropped rather than increased. Imagine that. They also discuss really helpful ways to communicate in ways that don't cause others to feel like you are infringing on their freedoms. I highly recommend it.

​-Abortion: Reimagining our Christian Response I wrote this article in November of last year. In it, you will find a ton of resources I have found helpful, including the data that shows how 7 out of 10 women who have had abortions in the United States consider themselves Christian. I also point to the scriptural account of Mary's context when she discovered that she would be pregnant and how her community responded with compassion rather than control.

​-Abortion About-Face by Kristen Du Mez. This substack from Kristen highlights the recent work of Pete Wehner, who writes about politics and religion for The Atlantic. I reference some of this article here today, but I highly recommend reading this piece when you have the time.

​-Despite Bans, Number of Abortions in the United States Increased in 2023 by the Guttmacher Institute. This is recent data on the impact of the numerous abortion bans that have been passed into law across our country since Roe was overturned. It is a very important read.

​-Former Anti-Abortion Speaker on Planning to End Her Pregnancy After Becoming Widowed Mom of 6 by People Magazine. It is really important to hear the lived experiences of women whenever possible. This heartbreaking story is significant as she is a Christian who was an anti-abortion activist whose awful circumstances left her considering an abortion.

​-Why We Should Stop Using the Term “Elective Abortion” by Katie Watson, JD. This entry in the AMA Journal of Ethics explores the moral origins, rather than the medical origins, of the term "elective abortion." It is a really illuminating read on such an often-used term.

Okay, onto today's content.

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​The Pro-Life Fracture

As you may have seen, Donald Trump has publicly moved further and further away from a staunch “pro-life” position, which was instrumental in gaining the support of Evangelical Christians and others in the pro-life movement during the last two elections.

I have watched the reactions of many voices online within the pro-life movement that range from complete rage at Trump and rejecting him for this flip-flop to others expressing disappointment, but stating that they will still support him in November. This is emblematic of the fracture Trump’s shifting on this issue has caused within the pro-life movement, especially among Evangelical Christians.

For example, Pete Wehner wrote in his recent piece in The Atlantic, “The pro-life justification for supporting Trump has just collapsed.”

Pete Wehner is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He is a longtime Republican and an Evangelical Christian. Pete has also been a critic of Donald Trump ever since Trump stepped into politics.

Here is a small three-paragraph excerpt from Wehner’s article that I believe states the current fracture within the pro-life movement well:

[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.

*Be sure to read the rest of Pete's article when you're able.*

As you might imagine, many people feel betrayed by Donald Trump about this issue, and rightly so. As I have believed since Donald Trump arrived on the political scene, he will use anything, from Christianity to abortion, to pursue power for himself. When it is no longer advantageous for him, he will abandon it for something else. This is a purely transactional relationship for him and nothing more.

I cannot help but imagine how terrible it must feel to be betrayed by such behavior. Many people are angry and worried about this fracture and they are dealing with some really big questions about their beliefs about this issue as Christians and how to proceed forward this November.

That is why I wanted to talk about our beliefs around this issue today in hopes of possibly adding some clarity and grounding in a very complex situation.

From Far Right To Fracture

As many of you know, I grew up in small-town Idaho within a deeply conservative Christian community. I was as far right theologically and politically as one could be for the majority of my life. This included the topic of abortion of course.

As Pete alluded to above, the topic of abortion was framed as one of--if not the--greatest evils of our time. The Fundamentalist and Evangelical leaders I listened to had very specific rhetoric they would use to describe the issue. According to them, the scourge of abortion was due to the continued moral decay of our nation and immoral, selfish women were at the center of that particular decay. Unborn babies were the innocent result of women’s immoral behavior and they were the innocent victims of women’s choice to end their pregnancy. According to them, abortion was murder, without question, and must be brought to an end.

This rhetoric is still alive and well today. Just last week, a pastor from my previous denomination shared a viral meme that read “Your unborn baby shouldn’t have to lose their life because of your poor decisions. Choose life.”

My fundamentalist and evangelical leaders would also frame the Democrat Party as the platform of Satan because they not only believed in the murder of babies, but they wanted to create a “welfare state” where people became lazy and reliant on “handouts.” According to them, such a society would no longer encourage self-reliance or the importance of family and would inevitably lead to the downfall of the United States. They would say repeatedly, "You just can’t be a Demon-crat and be a Christian at the same time. It’s impossible.”

Naturally, this made me deeply suspicious of women and the poor while also fostering a deep hostility towards Democrats. By the time I reached college, these convictions were deeply part of my faith. I found myself writing several angry papers on the topic and getting into very heated arguments on campus. I genuinely believed innocent lives were being murdered and I knew the enemies who were taking those lives. I wasn’t going to stop until they were completely conquered.

As it often happens, my perspective on this issue began to change when someone I loved terminated their pregnancy. It broke my brain and my heart because it wasn't anything like I imagined. It was a very wanted pregnancy. The crib was bought and the nursery was painted. The decision was made because of complications that I had never heard of before let alone even considered possible. There was no selfishness in this decision, let alone joy or delight. Rather, I saw heartache and grief.

It was the first time that I questioned my hardline stance on abortion. It was the first time it was actually humanized for me. It was the first time I witnessed someone on the frontline of the issue itself. It was the first time I realized it was so much more complex and nuanced than I had ever considered before.

As time went on, I soon realized that I couldn’t hold my hardline stance on abortion without also holding demonizing beliefs about women and disregarding their lived experiences. I realized that in my belief system, I wasn’t loving women as my neighbor like Jesus was calling me to, but rather, I was treating them like an enemy to be conquered in order to save the unborn. I realized that I wasn’t really “pro-life” because I was dismissing the lives, rights, and well-being of women. Instead of seeing their lives as being just as sacred as the unborn, I reduced their entire personhood to an immoral caricature of someone I was told to hate. I was accusing people of dehumanizing unborn babies, yet I was dehumanizing pregnant women in the same way. I was just doing the same thing to women I believed other people were doing towards the unborn.

As I continued my theological and historical education, I discovered for myself that abortion is never directly mentioned in the Bible. The Bible was written in a world in which abortion was practiced and viewed with nuance. Yet the Hebrew and Greek equivalents of the word “abortion” do not appear in either the Old or New Testament of the Bible. I would also discover that the main reason abortion became such a charged political issue for my tribe of Evangelical Christians was not because of Roe v Wade as I had previously thought, but because of another Supreme Court case: Brown v Board of Education. The abortion issue was championed to mask the real issue that gave rise to the Religious Right: opposition to desegregation.

I also learned in my study of the Bible that while it doesn’t mention abortion directly, there are however several thousand verses calling for the use of wealth and resources in a way that prioritizes the needs of the poor, the immigrant, the marginalized, and the oppressed. This is the same call I would read Jesus preaching about all over the gospels.

This disillusionment caused a fracture for me. I still cared about the lives of unborn babies, but now I also cared just as much about the lives of women and the poor and wanted to discover how to approach this complex issue in light of the gospel of Jesus.

As I began to move away from my hardline stance, I noticed a backlash from my Evangelical community almost immediately. They called my questions about the issue a "slippery slope" and even labeled some of my perspectives as “justifying evil.” I will still get angry messages from fellow Christians whenever I share my journey as I am today. It is the same way I acted towards others in the past about this issue.

This experience has caused me to realize something really important about my previous stance. It was so much more about a commitment to power and dogma than it was ever about caring for the unborn.

Because if it was actually about caring for unborn babies, we would look at the actual data about what actually reduces abortions, which is deeply connected to reducing poverty and the circumstances it causes women. We would have taught about this data instead of relentlessly demonizing "those people" and chasing after making abortion illegal rather than ever understanding the complexities behind the root causes of the issue itself.

Please read: Overturning Roe is a Poverty Issue​

If it was actually about caring for unborn babies, we would have taken an equal look at men, who play an equal role in causing pregnancy, rather than just have a hyper fixation on women when it comes to morality and legislation. In fact, men can impregnate at a far greater rate than women can become pregnant, yet men’s role and responsibility when it comes to pregnancies, especially around the legislation regarding abortion, is rarely discussed if at all.

If it was actually about caring for unborn babies, we would support the building of stronger social programs, like greater access to education, healthcare, better wages, paid family leave, affordable childcare, free meals at schools, and other initiatives that help struggling families rather than opposing these things out of fear of losing personal responsibility to a potential “welfare state.”

If it was actually about caring for unborn babies, we would not tie our allegiance to a single political party without question, but we would work alongside whatever political efforts are actually reducing abortion. As Pete mentioned above, the data shows that abortion rates dropped under the last several presidents from the Democrat party, yet spiked higher than it has in a long time under the Trump administration. If we were actually committed to reducing abortion, we wouldn’t allow partisan allegiance to stand in the way of that effort, but pursue what actually works.

If it was actually about being pro-life, then it wouldn’t just be about the lives of the unborn, but we would also work to uphold the rights of women and advocate for their wellbeing, especially among the poor and marginalized, which saves more lives of babies and women than bans ever will. If it were actually about being pro-life, we would want women to decide the best path of their medical treatment with actual medical professionals, rather than leaving the decision up to the medically untrained government.

The scripture passage that keeps coming to mind for me about this topic is two sections from Matthew 23.

Verses 1-4 says, “Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

Then verse 23 says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”

When I read these verses, I just can’t help but see how the pro-life convictions I was given centered just around political action that would force those who I thought were my “enemies” to conform to my interpretation of “God’s law” all while ignoring the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faithfulness towards others. I can’t help but see how the pro-life convictions I was given demanded laws that would require all the personal sacrifice from women all while opposing laws that would provide social services for her circumstances. Sounds a lot like “tying up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and laying them on people’s shoulders.”

Abortion is one of the biggest areas politically where we Christians have gained a reputation for carrying out dogmatic legalism rather than embodying the gospel of Jesus. Where we are heard singing Amazing Grace on Sunday and then demanding some of the harshest legislation towards others Monday through Saturday.

I believe these fractures we are seeing within the Pro-Life movement today provide us with a really valuable opportunity to reckon with what the goal around the abortion issue actually is if we would only take this opportunity.

Is the goal actually going to be about embodying the gospel of Jesus towards others? Or will it only be about unquestioned allegiance to a political party and demanding strict adherence of others to an ideology filled with conquering particular enemies? Because it can’t be both. It can either be about being pro-life for all involved or pro-control, but it can’t be both.

The reality is, dogmatic legalism is easy. Honestly, it’s theologically lazy. It turns complex issues like abortion into simple either/or, right or wrong categories, which releases anyone from having to actually think too much about the issue itself beyond which "side" to be on. The gospel of Jesus is difficult because it actually takes into account the complexity of life and the lived reality of our neighbors whom we are called to love as ourselves. The gospel of Jesus is difficult because it calls us to take on the sacrifice of making the world a better place ourselves like Jesus did for us on the cross, rather than just coercing others to conform to what we think is right. Narrow is the way and few find it.

In these moments of fracture, may we choose the difficult way of actually loving others as ourselves on the front lines of all the issues we claim to care about.