It appears that non-religious coded communication against abortion or vice/social issues has been more effective than religiously coded communication. I think many were surprised when Donald Trump in presidential debates had his Democrat opponents on their heels when talking about abortion. Democrats would run against the make abortion illegal under any circumstance message. Trump, and Vance too, have pinned Democrats on the make abortion legal under any circumstance message. Comments from the former Virginia Governor, Ralph Northam, have added to Democrat problems with this when late-term abortions were brought up in the controversy. Non-religious coded messaging has come off as stronger and put opponents more on the defensive, which can lead to the opponents making a mistake.
Churches have not been effective at messaging against the growth of vice. My Catholic Church has poker, bingo, other forms of gambling at its annual summer festival. The Knights of Columbus sells square games for NFL scores. How are they going to be effective at talking about the downsides of gambling? How will they lobby against an advertising ban on gambling, similar to tobacco, when you see it in the church bulletin?
My more cynical take is that the Pro-Life movement always knew this deep down and carried on collecting donations and support from well-meaning evangelicals anyway, because like many other crusades it became a jobs program for people to have cushy careers in DC rubbing shoulders with powerful people and being seen advancing a righteous cause.
Edit: Also, the fact that Live Action spends time fighting stuff like copper IUDs and condoms is utterly stupid and demonstrates they are not serious people.
The legal right to abortion is a subset of the ancient and rarely-exercised Roman right (later limited) of the paterfamilias to kill any subordinate family member at any time for any reason. This right, long-abrogated by Christian influence, was transferred and vested to women within certain limits first created by Roe and then by Dobbs and subsequent state legislation (and some state constitutional amendments). It is a delimited privilege or license to kill; it is not like a qualified privilege to kill like the right to self-defense. This license makes women more powerful in society than they otherwise would be. Even a non-exercised license to kill makes women as a class more powerful; the optionality improves their negotiating leverage.
If you think about how hard it was for the feminist movement operating from the 19th century onward to transfer away exclusive rights of fathers and husbands, it is sort of stupid to think that you could accomplish a similar feat of transfer using less sustained effort and no economic engine. I think it also has to do with taxes. The party most strongly in favor of guaranteeing female independence benefits massively from protecting and enhancing female rights. The engine behind it is really less popular enthusiasm and more that it is good for boosting shareholder value and good for tax revenues.
My suggestion is that as the benefit to shareholder value and tax revenue deriving from this license to kill starts to become questionable for various reasons, to look to older forms of taxation that required political leaders to furnish people to the service of the state as part of their tax obligations. In the middle ages, when money was not easy to come by, political leaders often took tax payment in kind in the form of both conscripts, professional soldiers, and even bureaucrats. If the government needs the states to kick people up the chain, making it obligatory to do so is a proven method that has worked all over the world in dramatically different governing systems and time periods. This puts pressure on states also to restrict abortion rights further and to ensure the people being kicked up the chain for service are prepared to serve adequately. Cash payments in lieu of people or other stuff has worked well for our social development for a long time but when you start to run out of people, you can't rely on that substitution forever.
What non-sex adjacent (and non-sectarian) moral positions do people reject? I'm having trouble thinking of any. It really has been all about sex. No one is advocating to repeal laws against theft, graft, blackmail etc.
In addition to the good examples Aaron cites below, another salient area where people increasingly reject Christian teaching would be assisted suicide/euthanasia.
There is a dominant legal movement to prioritize violent crime and to leave most property crimes to the civil courts. Judge Rakoff is the most prominent advocate, but the legal and political culture is basically 99.9% against him; the enthusiasm about this dissipated after Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank.
Functionally this makes it so most of these things above the street crime level are not enforced by the criminal courts, unless you reach a certain large threshold that may attract the ire of civil plaintiffs, state AGs, and federal regulators. Higher pleading standards for fraud and misrepresentation also make it so that a lot of bad things that normal people would consider fraud are not straightforwardly actionable.
Similarly if you do not care about the reputational impacts of felony convictions, as long as you don't actually kill people and limit your violence to minor stabbings, slashings, and bashings, you can live your life like you're a gamer on a PvP server for basically your entire young adulthood and not necessarily suffer serious criminal penalties depending on the jurisdiction. Modern people are uncomfortable with executions or corporal punishment but also do not want to pay for indefinite penitential sentences for all the felons doing felonious things all the time.
Re: Functionally this makes it so most of these things above the street crime level are not enforced by the criminal courts, unless you reach a certain large threshold that may attract the ire of civil plaintiffs
This has long been the case. Courts (and the police, and the penal; system) have limited resources so the trend for many years has been to keep small dollar cases out of the system and resolved by other means, including plea bargains which keep the plea level below the felony, and jail sentence, level. This is not remotely a "moral" issue-- good grief, you will not find anywhere a majority of people saying "Oh, theft isn't wrong". This is a wholly practical issue based in the limitations we must necessarily live with.
I disagree. This is part of the problem with the way that our society teaches what it means to be morally upright. In our schools and churches we laud people who can articulate the morally right position, but we de-emphasize actually doing what is righteous. Put another way, in one day, I can have an LLM write 7,000,000,000 essays articulating that theft is wrong, but that output is less morally meaningful than punishing one thief and providing justice to one victim. Similarly we should see a man with imperfect knowledge of right and wrong who nonetheless acts justly as much better than the person with near-perfect knowledge who acts against what they know to be right.
I am not sure I understand your point. I do not expect schools to teach us personal morality-- that's a role for parents and for churches. It was my parents' examples (sometimes for ill, but mostly for good) to which I owe my own moral perceptions. Schools at most taught me the rules of engaging with other people in polite and common situations. But that sort of morality is merely practical and has nothing to do with higher things. One finds neither salvation nor theosis in being a nice person, well spoken of by one's fellows.
And we do need to acknowledge the limits of the possible. Perfect justice is never possible for humanity. We do the best we can, and that is all. Assuming we can do everything and perfect ourselves is utopianism, and long experience has shown us that is another name for a road to Hell.
Gambling bans are a classic example of sectarian legislation., much as Prohibition was. There is no generic ban on all gambling in the Christian faith, although some (Protestant, mostly Evangelical churches) do tout that. And historically gambling was tolerated but regulated in Christendom. Good grief, there were and are Catholic parishes, like my childhood Catholic one, that do fund raising with Bingo games.
Drug legislation is not and never was about morals. It was about public health. Drug laws were first made in the Progressive era under the infant FDA to combat worthless "patent medicines" which were brewed up with strong narcotic drugs (and alcohol) to make people feel good-- and addict them. Meanwhile hard drugs (e..g, meth, heroin, coke...) remain illegal even if pot has increasingly come under a regulatory regime similar to alcohol and tobacco. In the 2010s we even greatly strengthened regulatory limits to prescription opioids.
Usury laws were rendered null and void years ago-- not recently-- and mainly under the Reagan administration. Yes, I was a teenager at the time and may not have been tuned in to the minutiae of public debate, but I do not remember any real controversy about it, and the Moral Majority did not raise a fuss, being wholly on board with President Reagan's actions. The underlying reason for the change had nothing to do with morality-- and everything to do with a hard reality. When the Fed raised its funding rates sky high to combat inflation at that time banks had to be able to raise their interest rates above the Fed rate to stay in business or else the economy would have undergone the equivalent of cardiac arrest. Hence the rulings that state usury rates could not apply to out of state institutions and the "race to the bottom" among states to keep their banks functional.
My friend Marjorie has forgotten a pretty important point. In 2016, Donald Trump was a pretty new convert to the pro-life cause, and took a typically maximalist position: if abortion is murder, then aborting mothers should be punished. This flipped the lids of pro-life leaders, who were TERRIFIED that they'd lose the country over this. So they attacked Trump mercilessly (admittedly in part because nearly all of them, like me, were for Ted Cruz) until he recanted.
Not at all unreasonably confused, Trump wanted to know why this perfectly logical conclusion was unwelcome. And our pro-life leaders told him: all we're asking from you is to overturn Roe. As a matter of principle, this is a state issue, it should not be addressed by the federal government, and we need you to appoint judges who will make that happen.
Trump took them seriously. Roe was overturned, which no one believed possible. And that created two problems for the pro-life movement, both self-inflicted.
First, Trump really did take them seriously. So once he made it possible to overturn Roe, he believed them -- the experts -- that there was no more need for federal action. Yes, he's against Planned Parenthood funding, and yes, I think under the right circumstances he'd prefer to let states ban the abortion pill. But if abortion is purely a state matter, how could he ban it outright? Californians want it, so the FDA needs to allow it, right? Makes perfect sense.
Second, the pro-life leadership circa 2016 didn't just ask for too little from a Trump who was willing to give them more than they wanted. They also had no plan for what would happen once Roe was overturned. Why? Well I've been in more than my share of those rooms, and I can tell you firsthand: hardly any of them believed Roe would ever be overturned.
Oh they said they did. They raised money saying they did. I think they told themselves they did (these are not bad people). But in their hearts, they thought Roe was part of the firmament, a permanent loss that would be undone "someday" but only after God provided a miracle. And they didn't believe Donald Trump was that miracle. Their mindset was like pre-1994 Republicans, who were certain there would never be a Republican House majority in their lifetime. The result was that when Roe was overturned, they were like the dog who caught the car.
They literally had no plan for what came next. They had no plan to convince Americans abortion was wrong. They had no answer when the abolitionists came along. They were caught flat-footed. Because they thought they'd be fighting Roe till the day they died. And suddenly Roe was gone, and they couldn't adjust.
Your points are correct, Aaron: I am certainly not arguing with you. I am, though, adding a bit that I personally witnessed and that I find utterly tragic. Some of us argued that Roe actually could be overturned, and thus that we needed a plan to convince and persuade, not to assume and to lecture. Yet here we are.
I'm very grateful for what Donald Trump has done for us. I'm very much saddened by the fact that it may take another generation for our movement to get its act together and actually win the hearts and minds of this people. And my sense is, that will have to come from churches evangelizing rather than any existing pro-life organizations, however valuable some of them might be or become.
I mostly agree with your comment, with one caveat. The post Roe “plan” was to win through referendums. Nobody expected Kansas, a state that went for Trump by 14 points in 2020, to reject the referendum banning abortion by 18 points, a 32 point swing. Pro life activists didn’t want to accept this, which is made it difficult for them to come up with good strategies.
Republican state level politicians have been mostly good at banning abortion. Setbacks have been due primarily to referendums backed by popular will. Ironically, pro lifers should be appealing MORE to the Republican party because it’s our outsized influence in the GOP, and not majoritarian mores, that allow us to get victories.
You're correct, but we are not disagreeing. Aaron's key point is that the movement assumed broad support. But "Assume makes an ASS of U and ME". Winning requires persuasion, persuasion usually requires money, and the left was always going to have the upper hand in both. So we got annihilated, even in Kansas, because we didn't do the groundwork required to win.
And yes, our state legislators have mostly been great. None better than my friend Bryan Hughes in Texas, but my home state of Florida has been solid too (among others). Your prescription regarding the Republican Party is spot-on.
The handwriting was already on the wall. When Roe still stood voters in very conservative states were rejecting symbolic pro-life referendums at the ballot box.
Pro abortion advocates believed they were more popular, but they thought the Kansas race was a tossup, as polling suggested. In their most optimistic scenario they didn’t expect to over perform by 30 points.
Pro lifers believed that polls and symbolic referendums were undercounting pro lifers due to social desirability bias. In fact, “moderates” were more pro abortion than they felt comfortable letting on.
That graphic of the sequence is missing a vital step right at the end: Passing A Constitutional Amendment. Were the pro-life leaders really this clueless, or was that just an omission by the graphic-maker?
Thing is, the polling has always been pretty consistent on this. The median American voter wants abortion to be legal with restrictions. Now, this will vary state by state--the median California voter, forex, probably favors few to no restrictions, while the median Alabaman probably favors heavy restrictions to full abolition--but only about 20% of voters actually want a full ban, and that number has been consistent for decades.
It appears that non-religious coded communication against abortion or vice/social issues has been more effective than religiously coded communication. I think many were surprised when Donald Trump in presidential debates had his Democrat opponents on their heels when talking about abortion. Democrats would run against the make abortion illegal under any circumstance message. Trump, and Vance too, have pinned Democrats on the make abortion legal under any circumstance message. Comments from the former Virginia Governor, Ralph Northam, have added to Democrat problems with this when late-term abortions were brought up in the controversy. Non-religious coded messaging has come off as stronger and put opponents more on the defensive, which can lead to the opponents making a mistake.
Churches have not been effective at messaging against the growth of vice. My Catholic Church has poker, bingo, other forms of gambling at its annual summer festival. The Knights of Columbus sells square games for NFL scores. How are they going to be effective at talking about the downsides of gambling? How will they lobby against an advertising ban on gambling, similar to tobacco, when you see it in the church bulletin?
My more cynical take is that the Pro-Life movement always knew this deep down and carried on collecting donations and support from well-meaning evangelicals anyway, because like many other crusades it became a jobs program for people to have cushy careers in DC rubbing shoulders with powerful people and being seen advancing a righteous cause.
Edit: Also, the fact that Live Action spends time fighting stuff like copper IUDs and condoms is utterly stupid and demonstrates they are not serious people.
The legal right to abortion is a subset of the ancient and rarely-exercised Roman right (later limited) of the paterfamilias to kill any subordinate family member at any time for any reason. This right, long-abrogated by Christian influence, was transferred and vested to women within certain limits first created by Roe and then by Dobbs and subsequent state legislation (and some state constitutional amendments). It is a delimited privilege or license to kill; it is not like a qualified privilege to kill like the right to self-defense. This license makes women more powerful in society than they otherwise would be. Even a non-exercised license to kill makes women as a class more powerful; the optionality improves their negotiating leverage.
If you think about how hard it was for the feminist movement operating from the 19th century onward to transfer away exclusive rights of fathers and husbands, it is sort of stupid to think that you could accomplish a similar feat of transfer using less sustained effort and no economic engine. I think it also has to do with taxes. The party most strongly in favor of guaranteeing female independence benefits massively from protecting and enhancing female rights. The engine behind it is really less popular enthusiasm and more that it is good for boosting shareholder value and good for tax revenues.
My suggestion is that as the benefit to shareholder value and tax revenue deriving from this license to kill starts to become questionable for various reasons, to look to older forms of taxation that required political leaders to furnish people to the service of the state as part of their tax obligations. In the middle ages, when money was not easy to come by, political leaders often took tax payment in kind in the form of both conscripts, professional soldiers, and even bureaucrats. If the government needs the states to kick people up the chain, making it obligatory to do so is a proven method that has worked all over the world in dramatically different governing systems and time periods. This puts pressure on states also to restrict abortion rights further and to ensure the people being kicked up the chain for service are prepared to serve adequately. Cash payments in lieu of people or other stuff has worked well for our social development for a long time but when you start to run out of people, you can't rely on that substitution forever.
What non-sex adjacent (and non-sectarian) moral positions do people reject? I'm having trouble thinking of any. It really has been all about sex. No one is advocating to repeal laws against theft, graft, blackmail etc.
In addition to the good examples Aaron cites below, another salient area where people increasingly reject Christian teaching would be assisted suicide/euthanasia.
OK, this is a good example
There is a dominant legal movement to prioritize violent crime and to leave most property crimes to the civil courts. Judge Rakoff is the most prominent advocate, but the legal and political culture is basically 99.9% against him; the enthusiasm about this dissipated after Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank.
Functionally this makes it so most of these things above the street crime level are not enforced by the criminal courts, unless you reach a certain large threshold that may attract the ire of civil plaintiffs, state AGs, and federal regulators. Higher pleading standards for fraud and misrepresentation also make it so that a lot of bad things that normal people would consider fraud are not straightforwardly actionable.
Similarly if you do not care about the reputational impacts of felony convictions, as long as you don't actually kill people and limit your violence to minor stabbings, slashings, and bashings, you can live your life like you're a gamer on a PvP server for basically your entire young adulthood and not necessarily suffer serious criminal penalties depending on the jurisdiction. Modern people are uncomfortable with executions or corporal punishment but also do not want to pay for indefinite penitential sentences for all the felons doing felonious things all the time.
Re: Functionally this makes it so most of these things above the street crime level are not enforced by the criminal courts, unless you reach a certain large threshold that may attract the ire of civil plaintiffs
This has long been the case. Courts (and the police, and the penal; system) have limited resources so the trend for many years has been to keep small dollar cases out of the system and resolved by other means, including plea bargains which keep the plea level below the felony, and jail sentence, level. This is not remotely a "moral" issue-- good grief, you will not find anywhere a majority of people saying "Oh, theft isn't wrong". This is a wholly practical issue based in the limitations we must necessarily live with.
I disagree. This is part of the problem with the way that our society teaches what it means to be morally upright. In our schools and churches we laud people who can articulate the morally right position, but we de-emphasize actually doing what is righteous. Put another way, in one day, I can have an LLM write 7,000,000,000 essays articulating that theft is wrong, but that output is less morally meaningful than punishing one thief and providing justice to one victim. Similarly we should see a man with imperfect knowledge of right and wrong who nonetheless acts justly as much better than the person with near-perfect knowledge who acts against what they know to be right.
I am not sure I understand your point. I do not expect schools to teach us personal morality-- that's a role for parents and for churches. It was my parents' examples (sometimes for ill, but mostly for good) to which I owe my own moral perceptions. Schools at most taught me the rules of engaging with other people in polite and common situations. But that sort of morality is merely practical and has nothing to do with higher things. One finds neither salvation nor theosis in being a nice person, well spoken of by one's fellows.
And we do need to acknowledge the limits of the possible. Perfect justice is never possible for humanity. We do the best we can, and that is all. Assuming we can do everything and perfect ourselves is utopianism, and long experience has shown us that is another name for a road to Hell.
Consider: gambling legalization, drug legalization, or the repeal of usury laws.
Gambling bans are a classic example of sectarian legislation., much as Prohibition was. There is no generic ban on all gambling in the Christian faith, although some (Protestant, mostly Evangelical churches) do tout that. And historically gambling was tolerated but regulated in Christendom. Good grief, there were and are Catholic parishes, like my childhood Catholic one, that do fund raising with Bingo games.
Drug legislation is not and never was about morals. It was about public health. Drug laws were first made in the Progressive era under the infant FDA to combat worthless "patent medicines" which were brewed up with strong narcotic drugs (and alcohol) to make people feel good-- and addict them. Meanwhile hard drugs (e..g, meth, heroin, coke...) remain illegal even if pot has increasingly come under a regulatory regime similar to alcohol and tobacco. In the 2010s we even greatly strengthened regulatory limits to prescription opioids.
Usury laws were rendered null and void years ago-- not recently-- and mainly under the Reagan administration. Yes, I was a teenager at the time and may not have been tuned in to the minutiae of public debate, but I do not remember any real controversy about it, and the Moral Majority did not raise a fuss, being wholly on board with President Reagan's actions. The underlying reason for the change had nothing to do with morality-- and everything to do with a hard reality. When the Fed raised its funding rates sky high to combat inflation at that time banks had to be able to raise their interest rates above the Fed rate to stay in business or else the economy would have undergone the equivalent of cardiac arrest. Hence the rulings that state usury rates could not apply to out of state institutions and the "race to the bottom" among states to keep their banks functional.
My friend Marjorie has forgotten a pretty important point. In 2016, Donald Trump was a pretty new convert to the pro-life cause, and took a typically maximalist position: if abortion is murder, then aborting mothers should be punished. This flipped the lids of pro-life leaders, who were TERRIFIED that they'd lose the country over this. So they attacked Trump mercilessly (admittedly in part because nearly all of them, like me, were for Ted Cruz) until he recanted.
Not at all unreasonably confused, Trump wanted to know why this perfectly logical conclusion was unwelcome. And our pro-life leaders told him: all we're asking from you is to overturn Roe. As a matter of principle, this is a state issue, it should not be addressed by the federal government, and we need you to appoint judges who will make that happen.
Trump took them seriously. Roe was overturned, which no one believed possible. And that created two problems for the pro-life movement, both self-inflicted.
First, Trump really did take them seriously. So once he made it possible to overturn Roe, he believed them -- the experts -- that there was no more need for federal action. Yes, he's against Planned Parenthood funding, and yes, I think under the right circumstances he'd prefer to let states ban the abortion pill. But if abortion is purely a state matter, how could he ban it outright? Californians want it, so the FDA needs to allow it, right? Makes perfect sense.
Second, the pro-life leadership circa 2016 didn't just ask for too little from a Trump who was willing to give them more than they wanted. They also had no plan for what would happen once Roe was overturned. Why? Well I've been in more than my share of those rooms, and I can tell you firsthand: hardly any of them believed Roe would ever be overturned.
Oh they said they did. They raised money saying they did. I think they told themselves they did (these are not bad people). But in their hearts, they thought Roe was part of the firmament, a permanent loss that would be undone "someday" but only after God provided a miracle. And they didn't believe Donald Trump was that miracle. Their mindset was like pre-1994 Republicans, who were certain there would never be a Republican House majority in their lifetime. The result was that when Roe was overturned, they were like the dog who caught the car.
They literally had no plan for what came next. They had no plan to convince Americans abortion was wrong. They had no answer when the abolitionists came along. They were caught flat-footed. Because they thought they'd be fighting Roe till the day they died. And suddenly Roe was gone, and they couldn't adjust.
Your points are correct, Aaron: I am certainly not arguing with you. I am, though, adding a bit that I personally witnessed and that I find utterly tragic. Some of us argued that Roe actually could be overturned, and thus that we needed a plan to convince and persuade, not to assume and to lecture. Yet here we are.
I'm very grateful for what Donald Trump has done for us. I'm very much saddened by the fact that it may take another generation for our movement to get its act together and actually win the hearts and minds of this people. And my sense is, that will have to come from churches evangelizing rather than any existing pro-life organizations, however valuable some of them might be or become.
Well said
I mostly agree with your comment, with one caveat. The post Roe “plan” was to win through referendums. Nobody expected Kansas, a state that went for Trump by 14 points in 2020, to reject the referendum banning abortion by 18 points, a 32 point swing. Pro life activists didn’t want to accept this, which is made it difficult for them to come up with good strategies.
Republican state level politicians have been mostly good at banning abortion. Setbacks have been due primarily to referendums backed by popular will. Ironically, pro lifers should be appealing MORE to the Republican party because it’s our outsized influence in the GOP, and not majoritarian mores, that allow us to get victories.
You're correct, but we are not disagreeing. Aaron's key point is that the movement assumed broad support. But "Assume makes an ASS of U and ME". Winning requires persuasion, persuasion usually requires money, and the left was always going to have the upper hand in both. So we got annihilated, even in Kansas, because we didn't do the groundwork required to win.
And yes, our state legislators have mostly been great. None better than my friend Bryan Hughes in Texas, but my home state of Florida has been solid too (among others). Your prescription regarding the Republican Party is spot-on.
The handwriting was already on the wall. When Roe still stood voters in very conservative states were rejecting symbolic pro-life referendums at the ballot box.
Pro abortion advocates believed they were more popular, but they thought the Kansas race was a tossup, as polling suggested. In their most optimistic scenario they didn’t expect to over perform by 30 points.
Pro lifers believed that polls and symbolic referendums were undercounting pro lifers due to social desirability bias. In fact, “moderates” were more pro abortion than they felt comfortable letting on.
Exactly.
That graphic of the sequence is missing a vital step right at the end: Passing A Constitutional Amendment. Were the pro-life leaders really this clueless, or was that just an omission by the graphic-maker?
Thing is, the polling has always been pretty consistent on this. The median American voter wants abortion to be legal with restrictions. Now, this will vary state by state--the median California voter, forex, probably favors few to no restrictions, while the median Alabaman probably favors heavy restrictions to full abolition--but only about 20% of voters actually want a full ban, and that number has been consistent for decades.