The End of the Moral Majority

The pro-life movement is one of the first casualties of a political architecture built for a country that no longer exists

Roe vs. Wade has been repealed, and Republicans in Washington haven’t banned abortion yet. The pro-life movement is not pleased, and they’ve found a culprit to blame: President Trump.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal, “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem.” Pro-lifers like her are upset he has appointed abortion supporters like Robert F. Kennedy to key positions in his administration, is allowing mail order abortion pills, and is leaving abortion policy to the states.

Dannenfelser says Trump’s approach means “the movement as we know it is finished.” She’s right that it’s finished. But it’s not Trump who ended it. It’s the American public. The movement to ban abortion stalled not because of him, but because abortion bans have been shown to be a loser at the ballot box. We now know that a majority of Americans want abortion to be legal.

Abortion has been on the ballot several times since the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, and the pro-abortion position has dominated in terms of results. I can only identify two cases in which the anti-abortion position won a majority of the votes, in South Dakota and Nebraska.

There’s also a wide belief among analysts - even among opponents of abortion themselves - that abortion was the reason Democrats significantly over-performed in the 2022 midterms. This was a shock result in an election that should have otherwise been a “red wave.”

In this voting climate, Republicans are not going to line up to support social policies that are proven political losers. The pro-life movement is not prepared for this reality, and their reaction makes it clear.

An Obsolete Architecture

The pro-life movement is not a one-off exception. It’s just one early example of a much larger institutional challenge facing social conservative movements and organizations in coming years. They were largely created during a period from the 1970s through the 2000s on two founding assumptions that are no longer true: that traditional morality was still held to by a majority of Americans, and that the way to ensure their triumph was through Republican politics.

I call this combination moralistic-majoritarian politics. It’s moralistic in that it believes its positions are moral absolutes, so compromise is impermissible. In abortion, this means abortion is murder and thus must be stopped at almost any cost. It’s majoritarian in that it is structured around winning political victories in electoral politics, which comes with the implicit assumption that its beliefs are broadly popular in society.

With abortion, moralistic-majoritarian politics works, in theory, like this:

It’s no surprise that moralistic-majoritarian sounds like Jerry Falwell’s flagship social conservative organization Moral Majority. In my “three worlds” framework, this is a relic of the Positive World, in which Christianity is in decline but still viewed positively by society. In this era it was plausible - if not necessarily accurate - to claim that social conservatives still spoke for the American mainstream. The theory was that the secular left had been getting its way through institutional capture and procedural manipulation, but that their ideas weren’t actually held by most people.

Fast forward and America is now in a Negative World, where traditional morality and social norms are now expressly repudiated on a range of issues extending far beyond sexuality matters like abortion. This shift in the religious culture of America is one of the most important parts of the American transition now under way.

In this new, Negative World America, moralistic-majoritarian politics fails because social conservative positions are not actually supported by a majority of the people. Hence efforts to ban abortion lost momentum quickly after the repeal of Roe vs. Wade as this became clearly evident at the ballot box.

This is particularly hitting the pro-life movement because it has an audacious goal, and abortion is a particularly polarizing issue that has been subjected to repeated direct ballot box tests. But similar reckonings are coming for churches and denominations, Christian colleges, and other such groups and movements.

Despite what you are reading about a vibe shift, packed Catholic masses, or a Gen-Z religious revival, generational turnover is only going to accentuate this trend, eroding the demographic base of support for banning abortion. As Ryan Burge has noted, each generation is less religious than the last, and with the large and very religious Boomer generation set to pass on, this will produce a steep decline in the number of religious conservatives who are the base of movements like opposition to abortion. There’s no prospect of moralistic-majoritarian politics succeeding anytime soon, except on marginal or popular matters, or on a very temporary basis.

Political Coalition Implications

Moralistic-majoritarian politics on abortion - or other social issues - is a problematic fit for today’s Republican Party. Social conservatism was never that popular with the dominant libertarian/classical liberal and foreign policy legs of conservatism’s proverbial three-legged stool. Populist or MAGA conservatives are more interested in cultural conservative policies like immigration than social conservative ones like abortion. Add to these abortion bans being a proven electoral loser, and GOP politicians are going to pivot away from the issue.

The pro-life movement has done itself no favors within the Republican coalition by attacking Trump, and even opposing him during parts of the 2024 campaign, as prominent pro-life activist Lila Rose did. Politicians are never going to be fully comfortable with people who view themselves as on a holy crusade, and these behaviors are only going to further marginalize the movement.

Some pro-life people in one state I know complained to me that pro-life groups had been marginalized during their state’s process of developing abortion restriction legislation. I used to be puzzled by this, but after seeing how people like Marjorie Dannenfelser and Lila Rose conduct themselves, it now makes sense to me.

Pro-life groups have also lost credibility through many years of claiming polls showed that the public was on their side or was trending their way. This turned out to be completely wrong. Yet these organizations continue to publish what they claim are favorable polls. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America still maintains a polling dashboard. Live Action recently touted that a “new Pew poll shows gains in pro-life sentiment.” People are going to treat claims coming out of these groups with increasing skepticism - as well they should.

New Politics for a New Age

The travails of the pro-life movement augur for a new kind of politics for religious conservatives: prudentialist-minority.

It is minority politics in that it recognizes that their moral vision is not presently accepted by the majority of the public. It is prudentialist in that rather than taking an all-or-nothing stand on moral absolutes, it accepts that in a fallen world, politics will always fall short of a perfect moral standard. It asks what the most reasonable and realistic approach to improving the general welfare is right now in light of the present culture, public opinion, institutional and political realities, etc.

A prudentialist-minority approach recognizes that change is a long-term, probably multi-generational game, and that trends are running against the preferences of religious conservatives. Thus the first imperative is to sustain moral integrity within your own community. Then, while achieving what victories are possible within the realm of prudence, working to change hearts and minds in society over time. This project requires a broad-spectrum set of initiatives.

The left did this. The book The Sexual Revolution was published in 1936. The Summer of Love was in 1967 - 59 years ago. Today we are still going through the outworking of ideas and efforts ongoing for nearly a century. And sexual liberation proponents are still aggressively working for cultural, not just legal change. Christianity has pulled off similar changes over time, as with the early church itself and the abolition movement. So it has this tool in its toolbox as well.

The pro-life organizations no doubt feel they were playing the prudential coalition game, but when it came to be their turn to get what they wanted, the GOP pulled the rug out from under them. This is understandable. Still, keep in mind, they did get their biggest ask delivered, the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. But when it came time to then ban abortion, the times and public sentiment had changed. The GOP took big swings at this in some places, but electoral reality intervened. It’s not the Republican Party’s fault that the public was much less supportive of banning abortion than pro-life groups had led it to believe. It’s a different world today post-Dobbs, and post-referendums on abortion.

The Anti-Pornography Example

The religious right has already made this shift from moralistic-majoritarian to prudentialist-minority in at least one important area: anti-pornography activism. Not long ago, religious conservatives wanted to ban porn. Legally and culturally, that turned out to be a loser. No surprise, as Politico put it in 2018, “the GOP gave up on porn.”

In response, anti-porn activism changed its approach. Some organizations rebranded around opposition to sex-trafficking, a more popular cause. Porn itself was rebranded as a personal moral failing that needed to be opposed and disciplined inside the church. Non-religious couples today might happily be watching porn together at home, but the church was not going to accept porn for its own members.

The ubiquity of minors accessing hard core pornography on their smart phones opened a door to renewed political action. Nobody wants 11 year old boys having access to this material. So state legislatures have passed popular laws requiring age verification for access to porn. This won’t keep the likes of Pornhub out of those states forever, but it does show the kind of policy advances that are possible when there’s broad popular support for them. Prudentialist politics doesn’t necessarily mean you get nothing. And over the long term, who knows what shifts in public beliefs are possible?

I expect that it will take some time before the pro-life movement adjusts to this new reality. The current moralistic-majoritarian approach is deeply rooted in the pro-life ecosystem. The moralistic side of that is not a political ploy, but a deeply held moral conviction, one mostly aligned with historic church teaching. This conviction need not change in order to adopt a new political approach, but in practice it inhibits adopting one. The movement has a lot of older, long-time leaders and funders who are unlikely to change course at this stage of the game. The realities of demographic decline in the church have yet to become fully manifest to them.

But ultimately a new approach will be forced on them, if only to stave off irrelevance. Other religious conservative groups and movements should take note and adjust before they encounter their own crisis.

Cover image: Donald Trump with Marjorie Dannenfelser and others in happier times in 2017.