Hope in the headlines

WORLD’s News of the Year issue is an easy venue in which to reflect on the bad news of the past year (though we’ve tried to highlight the year’s positive developments in our photo roundup too). But we all need to find some hope in the headlines.

The end of the year’s news cycle continued to give us plenty to bemoan, but Christians can take heart at some of the news too. We shouldn’t seek a Pollyanna view of the world, but we can see reasons not to despair in the big headlines of the day. Here are a few hopeful signs as 2021 waned and 2022 waxed.

Backbones exist in Congress

Despite the temper tantrum the Biden administration threw following his announcement, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia continues to remind his party that Americans didn’t elect Joe Biden president in 2020 with a sweeping mandate to launch a leftward salvo on the country. Exhibit A: the thin margins Democrats have in Congress. Manchin’s refusal to cave on Biden’s Build Back Better package should effectively end the administration’s attempts to ramrod massive progressive legislation through Congress on razor-thin votes.

Besides stymieing an administration acting as if the electorate gave it such a mandate, Manchin (and other senators, such as Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema) represents hope that perhaps Congress will get back to working as it used to: by debating legislation and building consensus, not by party leadership foisting its wish list upon its members and lobbying for the bare minimum in support. Congress is broken, and it’ll take more brave legislators (such as Republican Liz Cheney in the House of Representatives) to buck party leadership’s stranglehold and act on principle rather than the nihilistic will to power.

From pandemic to endemic

Spikes in COVID-19 cases made headlines again in late 2021, but the spike’s driver—the Omicron coronavirus strain—hopefully signals the changing nature of the pandemic. Though data into the new year indicated Omicron is more contagious, those vaccinated against the coronavirus generally fared relatively well with milder symptoms. Data from South Africa show waves in new cases may level off sooner than with earlier strains. And at least one research paper indicated Omicron may help push out the Delta strain.

These developments—along with advances in treating COVID-19 itself and vaccine availability—hopefully signal a return to normalcy. COVID-19 may be with us for a long time in some form, but vaccines and medicinal treatments give us ways to fight back and avoid the sweeping shutdowns of 2020. Vaccines will hopefully ward off infection altogether, but evidence points to them certainly helping mitigate severity of COVID-19. Subsequent strains that bring less severe symptoms and even greater transmissibility could be a sign that we’re adapting and life can normalize.

Seeing abortion for what it is

As we reported in the previous issue of WORLD, a look at attorneys’ arguments and Supreme Court justices’ questions in the recent Dobbs v. Jackson oral arguments show how far the pro-life movement has come since 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision or 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey: Even many pro-aborts concede the unborn are human.

Pro-lifers hope that the Supreme Court will unwind at least parts of Roe and Casey with its decision on Dobbs. But even a full victory in the decision itself won’t bring full victory in reality. If the court overturns Roe, then the legal fight shifts from Washington to state capitals and local courtrooms.

But there, pro-lifers have an advantage: a thriving culture in which crisis pregnancy centers for decades now have demonstrated love for both the unborn and their mothers. Even though public polling suggests most Americans don’t want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, more and more Americans acknowledge the full humanity of the unborn and want more restrictions on abortion itself.