Trump Owes Pro-Lifers Nothing and That’s a Good Thing

By: Darrick Taylor, originally published on July 12, 2024, Crisis Magazine

Devout Catholics and their Protestant allies need to recognize that they no longer represent “the people,” and approach politics more transactionally.

Pro-lifers and other social conservatives have probably heard by now that the Trump campaign has insisted upon and apparently approved a party platform for the 2024 Republican Convention that makes little mention of abortion, other than to descry the late-term variety. Other issues important to social conservatives, such as religious liberty, also received short shrift. According to one source, when one Evangelical leader complained about the lack of concern for its issues, a Republican official told them, “Where else are your people going to go?” 

Pro-life conservatives, which at this point mostly means Christian conservatives, have complained about this rather loudly on social media. Some think this a great betrayal by Republicans, while others blamed those who supported Donald Trump in the first place, despite his moral peccadillos and his obvious lack of personal belief in social conservative causes. And still some are complaining about pro-lifers’ “betrayal” of Trump, who delivered them the overturn of Roe v. Wade they sought for so long. 

So, what do we make of this? I know that some Catholics will feel this to be an intolerable betrayal by the Republican Party and demand that GOP leaders take their causes seriously. No doubt, pro-life leaders should remind them that they are part of their coalition and just brazenly telling their representatives that they can take their votes for granted as they remove an important plank in the party platform is stupid and unnecessary.

That having been said, devout Catholics and their Protestant allies are going to have to make some adjustments in the way they approach politics. For a long time, they have fought their battles as if they represented “the people” against a cabal of elites who imposed abortion-on-demand, gay marriage, and now transgenderism on an unwilling populace. This is, in fact, what happened, so this made sense.

The problem is that, with the exception of the transgender craze, socially conservative Catholics and their allies are no longer “the people.” They are a minority, one that simply does not have the power to do what they most want—ban abortion and return marriage law to sanity. The problem is that the cultural revolutionaries who effected these legal changes have also managed to turn public opinion firmly in their favor. Most Americans favor some restrictions on abortion, but the majority want it to be legal in at least some cases. 

Serious Catholics are rightly appalled by this. You live among people who simply do not value all human life as deriving from God Almighty. And though this principle is the ultimate justification of the pro-life movement, practical politics—the immediate task of attaining this or that goal—is about power. Pro-lifers simply do not have the power to effect their ultimate goals for the present. Trump and his tactless GOP crony are right about that much.

However, that does not mean giving up or simply lying down for Trump and his allies as they take over the party. But it requires pro-lifers to stop thinking of practical politics in terms of loyalty, as if the GOP were a family of some sort to whom we owe obedience. Some people are still upset that Catholic or other religious voters made the choice for Trump in the first place. They must understand that, at some level, politics has to be transactional. Not every political choice you must make is going to be about principle.

Trump delivered, more or less, on what voters like me expected from him, and vice versa. Now that he has gotten what he needs from such voters, he is moving on. That may sound terrible, but we don’t have that much in common, and when you are a largely non-elite minority, you must make these types of choices. (Things are different, obviously, if you are the elite.) You cannot avoid them. You simply don’t have the leverage to demand everything you want. 

Remember, if Trump owes you nothing, you owe him nothing as well. You need not worry about “betraying” a politician to whom you never swore undying loyalty in the first place. (And you never should swear such loyalty to any politician, no matter how much you like them.)

The removal of a plank committing the GOP to a policy (enshrining an abortion ban into the Constitution) which they have no hope of achieving and never intended to pursue anyway, is at least a gain in honesty. Most Republican politicians were never being serious about pursuing pro-life goals anyway, and frankness about this is preferable to the illusion of their personal belief. 

That may sound terrible to devout Catholics, who are very idealistic and feel deeply that a total ban on abortion is the only goal worth pursuing. This idealism is powerful, and I would never dampen it. But there are still issues pro-life leaders can press the GOP on and successfully get them to pursue. Someone on Twitter, for example, made the very good point that pro-lifers should push to have the Hyde Amendment and Mexico City Policy mentioned in the platform (these prevent the use of federal funds for procuring abortions). This is the type of lesser political goal that our allies on the Right who are not full-spectrum pro-lifers will support. Our leaders should focus on these types of issues at the national level for the time being. 

At the state level, things are more positive. In many places, such as my home state of Florida, pro-life governors have already enacted wide-ranging abortion bans, and there are several things that governors and state legislatures can do to not only eliminate abortion but provide for alternatives such as support for crisis pregnancy centers and adoption. I know some feel like national politics is what ultimately matters, but as with other issues, such as immigration, we have seen that the states can be important when the federal government fails to act.

What the contretemps over the Republican platform should make clear to Catholics is that we are now firmly living in a post-Christian world where they cannot take for granted that their beliefs will be taken seriously—even by their political allies—on every single issue, even that of human life. This is a reality Catholics and our Protestants allies are going to have to learn to live with for the time being. We need not retreat into political quietism, but we must understand that being strategic does not equate to treason. 

At the national level, pro-lifers and social conservatives will have to be “wise as serpents” while playing the long game—something they have done successfully, as the Dobbs decision proved. We need to let cooler and wiser heads prevail and not let failure to achieve concessions from political allies sabotage our long-term efforts to ensure that all the unborn are protected in law.

Darrick Taylor earned his PhD in History from the University of Kansas. He lives in Central Florida and teaches at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL. He also produces a podcast, Controversies in Church History, dealing with controversial episodes in the history of the Catholic Church.