Marvin Olasky’s Capitulation to the Left

Evangelical Elite Thinking on Abortion Must Be Rejected

One of the most striking chapters in Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale is Big Eva’s muted response to the Dobbs decision in 2022. Many of the most well-known names in evangelicalism like Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and Karen Swallow Prior were, writes Basham, noticeably “less than celebratory” when Dobbs swept away the Roe regime—a decision that pro-lifers had been working toward ever since 1973. Instead, she notes that many of Big Eva’s brightest stars “used the fall of Roe as an opportunity to argue for bigger government and to bolster the pro-abortion narrative that Christians only care about babies before they’re born.”

Enter Marvin Olasky, the former editor-in-chief of World who was also Basham’s former boss. In 2019, Basham recalls Olasky telling reporters that pro-lifers should have the freedom to vote for pro-abortion candidates. He touted voting for a candidate, Basham recounts, “whose official platform was pro-abortion but who supported subsidizing day care or paid family leave.” Another option was supporting a candidate who “promised to address systemic racism…given that better education and higher paying jobs might lead more minorities to keep their babies.”

In a piece published on Tuesday at Christianity Today, “Triumphalism After Dobbs Was a Mistake,” Olasky confirms that Basham’s reporting was spot on. He openly denies that Dobbs was a “great victory for the pro-life cause.” Olasky chides pro-lifers for failing “to understand the mourning on the other side: 50 years of reproductive rights down the tubes.” “Our side should have acknowledged that Dobbs was scary to many women.” 

But mending hurt feelings is not in any way analogous to celebrating the end of a “constitutional right” to child sacrifice—a “right” that strikes directly at God’s moral law. As Bethel McGrew quipped on X in a critique of Olasky’s piece, “You mean we failed to nod sympathetically and murmur that we could see where the feminist harpies were coming from, we just think they’re tragically mistaken?” Though Christians are clearly called to care for babies and tell women of their sin in obtaining an abortion and bring them to repentance, this is fundamentally a mission for the church—not for legislators.

With the downfall of Roe, it was right, good, and just for Christians to rejoice that one of the worst rulings in Supreme Court history was overruled, one that left over 60 million dead babies in its wake. That’s something worth praising and thanking God for—publicly and loudly. 

The political victory of ending Roe was essential to everything the pro-life movement was founded on. Though they clearly have had a difficult time dealing with the political realities of a post-Dobbs country, this in no way means that striking down Roe was not a substantial victory. 

The pro-life political response to abortion was always simple in principle: stop abortion through prudential means—even sometimes moving the Overton window on public opinion to protect life. As Ben Crenshaw wrote at American Reformer last week, Americans who are against abortion must be capable of working “slowly and incrementally within the system” and also to “capitalize on moments of weakness or disorder to effect radical and lasting change where possible.” Rightly judging circumstance and acting with purpose in sometimes highly fluid situations is what any good legislator is called to do. Principles by themselves do not tell us anything about how to achieve them in practice.

Continuing on, Olasky writes that instead of showing “compassion” in the wake of Dobbs, “some pro-life advocates competed to see who could back the toughest laws.” As if that was a bad thing. It is possible that some legislators didn’t correctly gage what would work in their states, thus stalling their own efforts and hurting the overall mission of stopping abortion. But this doesn’t mean, as Olasky intimates, that they showed a lack of care for babies. Counseling mothers is not fundamentally a political goal—Olasky again confuses the civil and ecclesial realms. Basham rightly notes that “legislators can do more to discourage murder besides outlaw it, but they should not do less.”

Olasky correctly points out that finding ways to stop the distribution of the abortion pill, which he says is behind “two-thirds of abortions” today, is key to stopping abortion going forward. But, again, he seems to deny any room for the political in solving this grave problem: “Stopping pills by law would require opening mail, frisking visitors, and going after senders based in states (like New York and Massachusetts) that offer them legal immunity.” Instead, he writes, “Convincing parents, one by one and two by two, not to kill their unborn babies, is more important than ever.” While persuasion certainly has a role to play in politics, so does the force of law. It’s not the legislator’s job to convince each and every parent: it’s their job to judge public opinion, even shaping it at times, in order to secure the common good of the citizens under their rule.

While trying to get a clear view of political realities, Olasky ends up adopting much of the Left’s framing on abortion. He cites Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s “chasing” Kate Cox,” a “31-year-old mother of two who sought an undesired abortion in an exceptionally hard case,” out of the state. He calls this “a pro-life win in the style of an ancient saying, ‘One more victory and we are undone.’” But as Bethel McGrew writes, “Cox’s unborn child was diagnosed with Down Syndrome. She wasn’t allowed to kill him in Texas.” And as she further noted in a report at World on the Cox case, “As a C-section mom, Cox risked uterine rupture by continuing to carry her child, who was diagnosed with Trisomy 18. But that risk wasn’t unique to this particular pregnancy, and she would presumably have taken it with a healthy child.” Why would Olasky tell the same tales that are regularly trotted out by pro-abortion Democrats to scare women?

Of course, Olasky does the obligatory chiding of Trump voting evangelicals—the “problem of pledging allegiance to an unethical leader.” He even insinuates that Trump himself was to blame for the widely reported fact that abortion rates rose during his term, increasing 8% between 2017 and 2020. As the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute contended in a 2022 report, however, the rise in abortion during Trump’s presidency was due to two overall factors: national pro-life policy pushed by the Trump administration as well as policies instituted by a number of states to protect abortion. Also, it can’t be discounted that the fever dreams ginned up the by Left of the U.S. turning into a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia had a role to play as well. Any president who seriously campaigned on overturning Roe as Trump did was going to be made into boogeyman by the Left, which would have the obvious effect of prodding yet even more women into having more abortions.

Since the Dobbs decision, abortion has risen even further, as Olasky notes. Does this mean he’s correct to claim that anti-abortion legislation fundamentally doesn’t work and that, paradoxically, the party that wants abortion-on-demand is better at saving babies? In a word, no. Citing a more recent Guttmacher study, the rise in abortion since 2022 is linked to the ubiquity of telehealth, a massive push by pro-abortion providers to direct even more funds toward abortion, and laws in certain states that shield abortion providers from legal consequences. This is akin to blaming Trump for the Left’s massive efforts to “fortify” the 2020 election that Molly Ball famously reported on for Time.

Olasky puts forward a fanciful—and ultimately untenable—compromise for Democrats: “They could return to the Clinton mantra of the 1990s: Instead of seeing abortion as victory, they could defend its legality but work to make it ‘rare.’” There’s no hope that the party of death will do such a thing. This is the party that ran off all pro-life Democrats, including former House member Dan Lipinski, because they did not back the central sacrament of orthodox leftism. Though Hillsdale’s David Azerrad is right to argue in the new Claremont Review of Books that the “beating heart of the far Left today…is wokeness,” there is no question that the glue holding the Democrats’ 2024 electoral coalition together is abortion.

Olasky’s Christianity Today piece shows the errors of the evangelical elite mind when it comes to abortion: shunning politics when it might be used to achieve right-wing ends, abusing the term “pro-life” to mean everything but stopping abortion, and, ultimately, confusing the duties of the civil and ecclesial realms. Americans who are against abortion need to fundamentally reconsider the tactics of those who have been leading them for decades, and also those who have been shaping the evangelical mind on how to think about abortion. As with so many other political questions, extricating yourself from the Left’s moral and political framework is the first step toward a true and lasting reformation.

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