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I wonder if any of you sometimes feel that someone of the outgroup just made a good move or just a good point (in other words, produced useful propaganda) in the culture war that takes you by surprise. A long time ago I noticed some liberals quoting a statement from a Christian pastor regarding abortion and I now decided to trace it back to the original source. According to Snopes it’s from pastor Dave Barnhart of the Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 2018:
"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
I have to say that even though I doubt I’d ever agree with him on these issues, it sounds kind of…witty? Snappy? Clever? It all comes across as on point. It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it. If I had to find something about it to nitpick, the only thing I can come up with is that the people who usually resent the patriarchy, condescension and political incorrectness are normally suburban middle-class college-educated white liberal culture warriors and their mulatto allies of similar backgrounds, not any of the groups the pastor mentioned, especially not widows. I can’t even tell why he brought them up at all; maybe it seemed to be a better idea than to bring up single mothers. And I might also argue that yeah, advocating for groups that are morally complicated as hell is probably not a good political move. Which also makes me sound kind of an asshole though.
It has not gone unNoticed by wrong-thinkers there exists a large segment of the white religious right (and mainstream conservatives as a whole) that forms an unholy alliance with progressives when it comes to simping for women and non-Asian minorities. After all, it wasn’t irreligious members of the right self-flagellating and washing the feet of blacks while BLM was going strong. Someone on the Motte or the culturewarroundup subreddit once wholesomely referred to members of such a segment as “lefty Christ cucks,” for sharing the values of one group of people that hates them and bending the knee (in the aforementioned case, literally) for another that also hates them.
This segment is united with progressives in maintaining that Women are Wonderful, and are more than happy to punish and vilify men for women’s coffee moments. Men aren’t entitled to anything from women, but men as a whole should subsidize women, and any given man should be ready to launch himself into action like a zombie from World War Z to serve as a meatshield for any random woman in distress. Instead of thot-patrolling girls and young women, they’d rather blame boys and men. Instead of reducing the freedom of girls and women as a tradeoff to increase the protections afforded to girls and women, they’d rather keep or increase female freedom, increase female protections, and reduce both the freedom and protections afforded to boys and men. See, for example, the excommunication of Trevor Bauer—who as the result of false rape accusations—got relegated from the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Yokohama DeNA BayStars and now wears a red hat as a scarlet letter for the Diablos Rojos del México.
This segment is united with progressives in blank slatism and being oblivious or outright hostile to HBD. The alliance believes in the psychic unity of mankind, that differences between individuals and groups of people are only cosmetic, that every criminal and Person of Unhousedness can be redeemed if we just tried harder, that the poor are only poor due to bad luck and thus deserve extra help and wealth transfers. Blank slatism has been long referred to as “liberal creationism” for a reason. This segment also sometimes attempts to play the DR3 card in discussions about abortions, since blacks get abortions at disproportionate frequencies.
I suppose the most relatively novel part is claiming that being Allies for the unborn is morally convenient compared to being Allies for prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, widows, orphans and accusing those who advocate for the former but not the latter groups of picking off low hanging fruit, taking the easy road, and not Doing Enough as Decent Human Beings. However, as someone who is pro-abortion (because I really support women’s choice and stuff, of course) and not exactly a devoted advocate of the latter groups, I find this unmoving (shocking, I know). It reminds me of “it’s not enough be non-racist, you have to be anti-racist.” Additionally, this attitude of you should also be an advocate for X2, … , Xn if you’re an advocate for X1, because being an advocate for just X1 is too easy, reminds me of Calvin’s dad and Misery Builds Character.
I wouldn't be surprised if pro-abortion becomes the mainstream view of the religious right in a decade or two, or if the unborn become but one group among many that warrant advocacy and compassion, without extra distinction. The unborn and the unhoused, side by side in the priorities of the religious right. Such a shift in views has happened before. For example, in just eleven years among white evangelicals, support for gay marriage has increased substantially, looking like a graph of stock markets going up. As of 2017, support for gay marriage among young white evangelicals was already nearly at parity, so it's likely the majority now. Catholics and mainline Protestants as a whole are already above parity. So it appears the conviction of the religious right was never all that strong about marriage being a sacred union between man and woman. The saying that conservatives are but progressives driving the speed limit comes to mind.
Widows make one question patriarchy all right, albeit in the manner opposite of which the pastor presumably intends. Women have always been the primary victims of their husbands working harder, enduring more stressful lives, and dying earlier. While already Stressed and Traumatized, these poor women have to perform the physical and emotional labor of managing the estates that their stupid husbands let behind, or hiring/appointing someone to do so.
Investment companies often deploy this angle when advertising their portfolio management and financial advisory services to widows (a selfless act of compassion, naturally, at the modest fee of 1% of AUM yearly). Some employees at these companies are likely cynical and self-aware as to what they’re doing (to which I say: slay, kings!) but some are true believers of widows being the primary victims of their husbands dying earlier. Thus, here we even have a three-party unholy alliance between the religious right, progressives, and the financial services industry.
I want to ponder a couple of your observations a bit more, because I have some thoughts to untangle. But as a religious righty myself, I would encourage you to distinguish three groups:
In particular, I think that the growth of the second group is distinct from drift within the third group. That doesn’t imply that the religious right proper isn’t changing at all, because it is, but if you try to plot its course by following, e.g., Russell Moore, you are going to be confused.
I was somewhat using religious right as a metonym for white Christians, in a descriptive sense rather than a personal judgment call as to what's left or right.
Things certainly may change, but in ${CurrentYear}'s popular discourse, the religious right and white Christians are pretty much office_pam_its_the_same_picture.jpg—or at least the latter is generally considered a subset of the former. If you're (you in the general rather than personal sense) white, religious, and anti-abortion, most people across the political spectrum would consider you firmly on the right, even if you exhibit progressive views toward women, non-Asian minorities, and the 2SLGBTQI+. After all, being a good Ally for Vulnerable Groups is neutral, non-political, and just doing the Bare Minimum.
The religious right is not a monolith and Not All White Christians Are the Same (NAWCATS), hence why I pre-empted with "a large segment of..."
However, there may also be some element of No True Scotsman when hypothetically splitting a putative religious left from right. No True Religious Righty would ${XYZ}.
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