The most common argument made by former President Donald Trump’s evangelical supporters in defense of their support is that although Trump may not be a moral exemplar, what matters most in electing a president is his policies. And for them, abortion is primus inter pares.
Trump is a great pro-life champion, they say, perhaps the greatest in history, and that is what most distinguishes him from the abortion extremism of Kamala Harris. On that basis alone, they insist, Trump, regardless of his faults and failures, deserves their votes.
I understand that line of argument, though I strongly disagree with it. The rationale was always weaker than Trump’s supporters were willing to admit, because Trump’s moral depravity was always far worse and more dangerous than they were willing to acknowledge. And his achievements fell far short of their hopes and claims to end abortion.
But the pro-life justification for supporting Trump has just collapsed. Trump, who described himself as “strongly pro-choice” in the 1990s—including support for so-called partial-birth abortion—has returned to his socially liberal ways. “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” he recently declared on Truth Social. Kamala Harris couldn’t have stated it any more emphatically.
It’s true that Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court played an essential role in overturning Roe v. Wade. But ending 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. As Philip Klein wrote in National Review, “overturning Roe was only the necessary first step of a much longer battle to protect the lives of the unborn. And on that battle, it increasingly looks like Trump is joining the other side.”
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.
This is not a surprise. Betrayal is a core character trait of Trump’s. He’s betrayed his wives, his mistresses, his friends, his business associates, people who have worked for him, and his country. There is no person and no cause he will not double-cross. The pro-life movement is only the latest thing to which he has been unfaithful, and it won’t be the last.
The question to ask yourself is: Who in the pro-life movement—Al Mohler, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, and countless others—will speak out, publicly and forcefully and relentlessly, against Trump’s about-face? Will they tell the full truth, which is that abortions increased during the Trump presidency, that the pro-life movement is weaker than at almost any time in its history, and that, when it comes to making the Republican Party the home of the pro-life cause, Trump is doing unprecedented damage?
Will they now say of Trump what they say of liberal Democrats, that he supports the murder of innocent unborn children?
Now ask yourself this: How could an evangelical who claims to be passionately pro-life vote for a presidential candidate who now promises that his administration will “be great for women and their reproductive rights”? Especially when that person has cheated on his wives and on his taxes, paid hush money to porn stars, and been found liable of sexual assault?
And how can those who profess to be followers of Jesus cast a ballot for this candidate, once the excuse of casting a pro-life vote is gone? For a convicted felon and a pathological liar, a man who has peddled racist conspiracy theories, cozied up to the world’s worst dictators, blackmailed an American ally, invited a hostile foreign power to interfere in American elections, defamed POWs and the war dead, mocked people with handicaps, and encouraged political violence? How can they continue to stand in solidarity with a person who has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges; who attempted to overthrow an election; who assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol; and who encouraged the mob to hang his vice president?
Ben Marsh, a pastor at First Alliance Church in Winston-Salem, put it this way on X:
People who did not grow up in evangelical-political spaces have no idea how disorienting it is to be told for 30 years
A. You could not vote for a morally bad person
B. You had to vote for a pro-life candidate
Only to now be told you have to vote for a pro-choice felon.
This is not a hard call. Trump deserves the disapprobation of evangelical Christians, not their vote. But he will get their vote, in overwhelming numbers, even if he has sold out the very cause they once professed greatest devotion to. Character counts? That’s so passé. Being pro-choice is a moral travesty? Only, it seems, if you’re a Democrat. Moral relativism is a threat to our nation? Not if you’re part of MAGA world; in that case, taking a blowtorch to moral norms and truth is a blast. Love your enemies? Not if they’re progressive.
Donald Trump has done incalculable damage to our political and civic culture. But he has also performed, even if inadvertently, a public service. He is a political and moral CAT scan, showing the ethical core of many of his supporters. It has been quite the revelation.
The evangelical movement comprises tens of millions of Americans; many of them are people of integrity and faithfulness. My own life has been profoundly enriched by its adherents. But we cannot deny what is true: Much of the evangelical world has validated many of the worst indictments of the secular world. There are so many scandals, so much cynicism and hypocrisy, so much to grieve. Much of what evangelicals and fundamentalists have claimed to stand for, certainly in the realm of politics and culture, turns out to have been an affectation, an illusion. They want power and revenge. Donald Trump Jr., in channeling the attitudes of many Trump supporters, said at a Turning Point USA gathering in 2021 that the teachings of Jesus have “gotten us nothing.”
In his book The Subversion of Christianity, the French sociologist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul argued that what we call Christianity is “the opposite of what we are shown by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.” In many cases, and throughout history, according to Ellul, the Church, with its emphasis on moralism and its teachings in the political sphere, has perverted the Gospel. Ultimately, Ellul is hopeful because, as he puts it, “Christianity never carries the day decisively against Christ.” That is the hope many of us hold on to, but it’s hardly ideal. A movement that claims Jesus as its own should be more than a whitewashed tomb.
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