Abortion and America’s Final Christian Generation

“I don’t understand at all why pro-life Americans say they won’t vote for Donald Trump,” said the Hungarian pro-life activist sitting across from me. Well, let me explain—and say why European pro-life voices, however few, are urgently needed to steady the political thinking of their American counterparts.

Pro-life American Christians have been in crisis during this election season as Trump has steadily abandoned pro-life policies, and attempted to establish his pro-choice bona fides. The loudest cry of alarm went up when Trump last week said he would vote for a Florida ballot initiative that would effectively restore the permissive Roe v. Wade standard in state law. Trump’s campaign walked that back, which temporarily doused the fire, but make no mistake: pro-life conservatives are running scared.

They—we, because I am one of them—should be. It was always a fiction that Trump was pro-life. Only the truest of the MAGA faithful believed it. Nevertheless, Trump provided the Supreme Court justices who finally achieved the great goal of the pro-life movement for nearly fifty years: slaying the Roe dragon.

European readers should be aware that the effect of this was not to ban abortion, but simply to declare that there is no constitutional right to the procedure, thus, in the American system, leaving the decision to state legislatures. The Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned 1973’s Roe ruling, returned the abortion issue to democratic political deliberation.

So far, Dobbs has been a Pyrrhic victory for the pro-life side, which has lost all seven of the state referenda on abortion since Dobbs—even in red states. Trump has been backpedaling on abortion because polls show that the pro-choice line is popular with American voters. Many pro-lifers, for decades the most reliable GOP voters, are shell-shocked by the Trumpified party’s swift collapse on abortion.

They shouldn’t be. America is a pro-choice country. According to a Gallup poll, only 12% believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Almost three times as many—35%—believe it should be legal in any circumstance. Fifty percent say abortion should be legal under some circumstances (3% had no opinion). So: 85% believe in some form of legalized abortion.

Plus, 60% polled say that overturning Roe was a bad thing. That figure is not new. As Gallup says that number has been stable for the more than three decades that it has been polling on the question. It was easy for Americans who don’t feel strongly about abortion rights to downplay the issue in their voting when Roe was the law of the land. Now that abortion has been put back into political play, being pro-life has become an election liability.

What’s more, when it comes to in vitro fertilization (IVF), Americans overwhelmingly endorse it. An overwhelming 82% endorse the practice, while only 10% oppose it. IVF involves the lab creation of surplus embryos, which are usually frozen and stored. If one believes that life begins at conception, there’s no way around it: these embryonic human lives will one day die when they are thawed. There is no way to be consistently pro-life and pro-IVF—but a lot of American pro-lifers are. In fact, if the argument for or against abortion rights stands or falls on the moral status of the embryo at conception, you could argue that the only consistent thinkers about abortion are idealists at both extremes. 

The messy truth is that most Americans are squeamish about abortion, but most see it as a socially necessary evil. In a democracy, you should not be surprised when politicians shift their positions to go where the votes are.

In Trump’s case, there is a major difference between his moderate pro-choice position and Kamala Harris’s view. Trump wants to leave it to the states to decide. Conservative states can tailor their laws to the views of the majority there, and liberal states can do likewise. Harris, though, believes in imposing unrestricted abortion on every state, through federal law.

And this is what my Hungarian pro-life activist friend was getting at. She was visibly shocked that this is even an issue for American abortion opponents. Why would you see no meaningful distinction between someone who won’t give you everything you want on the life issue, versus someone who would take away everything you have, and shove her pro-abortion beliefs down your throat?

Besides, said the Hungarian, the Democratic Party is so opposed to what conservative Christians believe on other key issues—LGBT rights, religious liberty, and others—that the idea of U.S. Christians abandoning Trump to punish him is simply bizarre.

I told my companion that I agreed with her, and that her view is the result of living as a pro-life Christian in a culture and on a continent that has been de-Christianizing for several generations. America is not yet in that post-Christian spiritual desert, but its people are moving there quickly. I suspect that pro-lifers, most of whom are Christians, have been shocked by Trump’s walking away from pro-life orthodoxy because they haven’t confronted how post-Christian America has become in our lifetimes.

Put another way, they are shaken up by this because they—because we—are part of what it likely to be The Final Christian Generation.

This is a reference to The Final Pagan Generation, a 2015 book by historian Edward J. Watts. The title refers to Roman pagan elites born at the beginning of the fourth century, when the Empire changed gradually from pagan to Christian. 

What made them the “final” generation is not that pagans ceased to exist in Roman society after they died out. Rather, as Watts tells it, they were the last generation in Rome’s history to have lived in a time when paganism was the default religious mode of their civilization.

Historians typically depict the fourth century as a time of great tumult and conflict between the dying pagan order and the rising Christian one—a culture war that began when the emperor Constantine ended formal persecution of Christians with the Edict of Milan (313), and culminated in 380, when the Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the state religion.

This, argues Watts, is misleading. Ordinary Romans of the era would not have registered the shocks to the system that are now apparent from historical distance. Watts puts it like this: the 1969 Woodstock music festival is today regarded as a primary symbol of the revolutionary youth culture of the time, but the overwhelming majority of Americans neither attended it nor led lives consonant with hippie values. Yet we now know that Woodstock really did stand for a major turning point in American culture.

It was like that for the Romans too. The violent to-and-fro as Christians and pagans struggled for power over the course of the century went largely unnoticed by pagan elites. Even the destructive clashes of the 380s and 390s were not taken as seriously by the older pagans and Christians as they ought to have been. Says Watts, “They reacted instead as if they could not imagine a world in which traditional [pagan] religious practices did not have a part.”

Watts goes on:

The “final pagan generation” … is made up of the last group of elite Romans, both pagan and Christian, who were born into a world in which most people believed that the pagan public religious order of the past few millennia would continue indefinitely. They were the last Romans to grow up in a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority. This critical failure of imagination is completely understandable.

Why understandable? Because even though the deep cultural currents of social life carried Roman society inexorably in a Christian direction, daily life continued much as it always had. The temples were still open. The pagan religious festivals continued as they always had. Rome had been pagan for millennia, and always would be, they thought. They had been born into a pagan world, had grown up in it, started families and made careers in it, and had retired in it.

Beneath their notice, though, everything changed. The grandchildren of elites born into what they thought was a stable pagan order became Christians—and had no interest in tolerating paganism. Near century’s end, their elders were shocked to discover how weak their own position had become. Writes Watts:

This mattered particularly when Christian leaders acted aggressively against traditional religion in the 380s and 390s. In those circumstances, the final pagan generation sometimes seemed as influential as the president of Polaroid in the age of the smartphone.

It is impossible to read Watts’s book today without thinking, and thinking hard, about the post-Christian state of Western societies. Again, it is much easier for European Christians to grasp this than for American believers. For decades, the United States has been a great outlier in the West in terms of religiosity. That changed dramatically beginning around 1993, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but which likely has something to do with the end of the Cold War, and the vanquishing of the atheist Soviet Union.

It is also the case that Generation X, the first post-Boomer cohort, came into adulthood in the early 1990s. Though many may have been raised as churchgoers, they didn’t all stick with the faith when they set out to establish their own lives independent from their parents. The collapse has gathered speed in the Millennial and Zoomer generations. Today, the so-called “Nones”—atheists, agnostics, and those who claim no particular religious tradition—are the largest religious demographic in America. In fact, the Zoomers—those born after 1996—are the first generation in U.S. history in which a majority have no particular religion.

So: The churches still remain open in the United States, and Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter still take place, and it is entirely understandable how middle-aged and older Americans would still think of the U.S. as a Christian nation. But they’re wrong.

On the bright side, it might not be as bad for U.S. Christians as it was for Roman pagans. Recent polling data show that the rise of the Nones might have come to an end. Besides, an enfeebled Roman paganism faced a strong challenger in Christianity. No rival faith—not Islam, not neopaganism—has yet emerged to position itself as a replacement for desiccated Christianity. The post-Christians seem to have settled into the kind of consumerist nihilism that the French writer Michel Houellebecq depicts in his novels.

Nevertheless, the grand decline of Christianity has had profound social and political effects in American life. The civil rights speeches of Martin Luther King in the 1950s and 1960s were saturated with Biblical language and Christian moral concepts. They would be unthinkable today. The shattering of the Christian order by the Sexual Revolution—identified in 1966 by sociologist Philip Rieff as the century’s most consequential uprising—not only made abortion on demand possible, but also the triumph of gay rights, and now the mainstreaming of transgenderism.

In the 1992 Casey decision reaffirming the core of the Roe ruling, which found an implied right to abortion in the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy, Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy infamously wrote for the majority, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

That line was widely and justly mocked by conservatives as being sentimental libertarian gasbaggery. How can you make and judge laws on such a vacuous basis?

However risible Justice Kennedy’s legal philosophy was here, he understood something important about the way actual existing Americans thought about freedom. Three decades on from Casey, it is clear that Kennedy’s radical subjectivism is a more reliable guide to public sentiment about sexual matters than anything Christian legal thinkers have produced. This is in part because, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre first observed in the 1980s, moral discourse in American life is now dominated by “emotivism”—roughly, the idea that if it feels true, it must be true, and who are you to say otherwise?

The pro-life legal movement has been led chiefly by Catholic judges and legal scholars. The U.S. Catholic Church has been stalwartly pro-life in its teaching and activism. And yet, most U.S. Catholics today are pro-choice—and for that matter, pro-LGBT rights. In 2014, at a private seminar attended mostly by Catholic conservative intellectuals, I saw the oldest members of the group—men and women who had been intellectually formed in the 1950s and early 1960s—struggling to understand what the younger participants, all professors at Catholic colleges, were telling them: that the Catholic students they see today arrive knowing virtually nothing about Catholic teaching, and why it matters.

It’s not so much that Christian conservatives have lost the culture war—though we have—as it is that younger Americans don’t realize that the culture war existed. They are the first truly post-Christian generation, in that they were born into a world in which the old Christian verities no longer obtain.

It is sometimes said that we are also living in the emergence of a “postliberal” political order. This shocks the Final Liberal Generation—both left-liberals and right-liberals—who are left shocked and paralyzed by violence on campus perpetrated by fanatical young illiberal leftists. These mobs tear down statues with fervor that recalls ancient Christian crowds destroying pagan temples. Sooner or later, it will dawn on them that liberal democracy emerged out of Christianity, as historian Tom Holland rousingly showed in his book Dominion, and probably won’t survive Christianity’s eclipse.

In the meantime, American pro-lifers would do well to reach out for advice to European activists who share their passion for protecting the unborn. European pro-lifers have had to labor for many years in post-Christian cultures where abortion is considered a fundamental right. Even my Hungarian friend admitted that if Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the most openly and actively Christian of any European leader, proposed turning back the country’s liberal abortion laws, he would soon find himself thrown out of office.

Overturning Roe v. Wade was a monumental achievement, one legions of pro-life activists spent half a century marching and praying for. It would not have happened had Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in 2016. Pro-lifers should be grateful for what Trump did for us, but also accept that the post-Roe era and the post-Christian era now combine to create a highly unfavorable political environment for us. Protecting unborn life in this new dispensation is going to require far more cunning than idealism. Ask European pro-lifers; they know.