A dilemma for pro-life, pro-Trump evangelicals

Last September, Matthew Schmitz and Sohrab Ahmari, founding editors of the post-liberal magazine Compact, published an essay urging religious and traditionalist voters to move their support toward Donald Trump and away from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the 2024 Republican nomination for president. Their argument was straightforward: It is Trump and not any of his more mainstream competitors who can truly “drain the swamp” of bureaucratic government and deliver conservatism from its globalist, politically correct captivity. “Trump put the interests of the American people as he saw them ahead of ideological purity,” they wrote.

While the masthead at Compact is decidedly not in the conservative mainstream, recent polls suggest this argument has real traction within the GOP, even prompting some right-wing pundits to suggest that DeSantis should sit out 2024 completely.

If Trump’s poll numbers translate into primary season momentum, conservative Christians will have no choice but to confront a dilemma: The president whose Supreme Court appointees delivered the pro-life movement’s biggest gain seems to blame that movement for his party’s recent struggles. In January, Trump said pro-life conservatives had “poorly handled” the issue and “lost large numbers of voters.” A recent Rolling Stone feature cited anonymous sources who confirmed that Trump believes his party is “getting killed” because of abortion legislation and is privately urging pro-life activists and lawmakers to roll back their ambition and change how moderate voters see them.

Trump’s offering Republicans a scapegoat for their poor showings is about more than just one candidate’s maneuvering. The conservative case for Trump has always leaned heavily on his role as a disruptor of business-as-usual politics, especially his contempt of political correctness and willingness to explicitly vilify “the woke.” These are attractive qualities to many conservatives. But with Trump in particular, and with the anti-woke movement in general, a willingness to offend liberal pieties has not consistently been accompanied by a robustly pro-life worldview.

So you have Fox News hosts skewering snowflakes in one segment, and in another, declaring the GOP “would have been better off” if Roe had not been overturned. You have Ann Coulter warning that “there will be no Republicans left” if pro-lifers keep at it. Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur–turned anti-woke whistleblower–turned GOP presidential hopeful, has openly stated his opposition to a federal abortion ban. The upshot is clear: “Owning the libs” may signal what a conservative thinks about free speech and trigger warnings, but it is not nearly as helpful in revealing what they think about the personhood of the unborn.

The attentive pro-life reader will notice two things here. First, for all the populist right’s self-styling as the enemy of conventional politics, blaming social conservatives for Republican losses is about as swampy as it gets. There may be a case that the post-Dobbs right has talked too glibly and too dismissively about continued incrementalism, but these are intramural concerns often debated among pro-life conservatives. The idea that Republicans are being punished because of pro-lifers echoes instead the party’s infamously dismal 2012 “autopsy,” which genuflected toward diversity quotas instead of reckoning with the party’s moral aimlessness. The future of pro-life governance depends on a conservative movement that sees the humanity of the unborn as fundamental to its mission, not an obstacle to its positioning.

Second, the narrative of a GOP held hostage by its pro-life activism means evangelicals might well have to choose between the most spectacularly anti-woke candidates and the most consistently pro-life ones. Is backpedaling on the pro-life agenda an OK price to pay for a president unconstrained by norms and unbeholden to the woke? Would a more “moderate” position on abortion be acceptable for social conservatives if it meant someone with a bigger, louder track record on higher education or immigration? This is not a trick question. It could quite literally be the choice facing American conservatives in the coming months.

Elections are complex things. They require wisdom and discernment rather than simplistic dogmas. In the recent past, evangelicals with a commitment to the humanity of the unborn have found themselves encouraged and represented by conservatism’s populist flank, which has the courage to name journalistic malpractice and call woke capital’s bluffs. But the merry band of dissenters from the Great Awokening is not a monolithic bunch. The demise of Roe and the pressures currently on the Republican Party have brought a diagnostic test for conservative evangelicals: Is pro-life governance more than an accessory item in an anti-liberal package? Is it worth punching right and not just left?