No left turn: Young evangelicals are pro-life, not pro-liberal

How many of us let headlines create lines in our foreheads? With TV and internet reports around the clock, it's easy to become manic-depressive news junkies—and that's why I'm often called to be a contrarian. Are you feeling good about "revolution" in Egypt? See "Leadership in a vacuum" in this issue. Are you feeling bad about domestic trends? Read on for good news concerning young Christians and pro-lifers.

First, let's take on pundits and pollsters who purportedly provide answers to the age-old question, What's the matter with kids today? You've probably heard a typical moan: They're leaving the church, so gotta become relevant, gotta take up liberal positions—or else the kids are gone. You may even have seen shows answering YES to the question of "Are Young Evangelicals Skewing More Liberal?" (ABC) and "Are Young Evangelicals Leaning Left?" (PBS).

Hmm. Baylor University researchers Byron Johnson and Buster Smith, after crunching polling data about evangelical political identifications and attitudes, have concluded that (1) younger evangelicals hold views similar to older evangelicals on most issues, and (2) young evangelicals remain significantly more conservative than non-evangelicals on those issues.

Johnson and Smith found that age, among non- evangelicals, is an important predictor of political stance: 50 percent of the young are liberal but only 33 percent of those older. Among evangelicals, though, 70 percent of the young are conservative, 74 percent of the older: No big deal. Maybe non-evangelicals have to learn from hard experience that liberalism doesn't work, and evangelicals know that from the Bible. (Only about one of 10 evangelicals, young or old, calls himself "liberal.")

The conservatism of young evangelicals is apparent issue by issue. Some 72 percent say the use of marijuana is always or almost always wrong, compared to 73 percent of older evangelicals. You may have heard that young evangelicals accept homosexual marriage, but the survey says otherwise: The old (83 percent) oppose it, but the young (85 percent) oppose it even more. Only on issues like "global warming" is there a young/old divide among evangelicals, with the young much more concerned.

And here's the particularly good news: Younger evangelicals are more pro-life than older ones. To take the hardest case, 61 percent of the younger say abortion is wrong even if pregnancy is the result of rape, compared to 50 percent of their elders. Only one in 10 evangelicals, whether young or old, says abortion is right if a family can't afford another child.

Despite Washington temperatures in the 20s on Jan. 24, tens of thousands of younger evangelicals put their legs where their hearts are by joining the annual March for Life. Even the usually snarky Washington Post admitted that "more young people appeared to be participating than in previous years." A decade ago many pro-life leaders worried about the graying of the movement: Those concerns are now gone.

On Feb. 1, 22-year-old Lila Rose threw Planned Parenthood into a tizzy by showing with an undercover video how a New Jersey branch of America's largest abortion provider was happy to help a supposed pimp grow his sex-trafficking business with 14- and 15-year-old victims. Take a look at her sensational work on YouTube.

The abortion lobby, of course, is fighting back with attempts to discredit Rose and pro-life crisis pregnancy centers. Attacks on crisis pregnancy centers by abortion's media allies are nothing new: My wife and I confronted one in Austin 25 years ago, and we've seen the same smear attempts every five years or so elsewhere. We played Austin American-Statesman editors a tape that showed how their hatchet-woman twisted quotations and facts, but most reporters aren't so sloppy.

So we need to keep fighting. Happily, a judge late last month declared the Baltimore City Council's attempt at harassing crisis pregnancy centers (CPC) there to be a violation of freedom of speech. That decision may give pause to the Washington state legislature and the New York City Council, both considering anti-CPC bills. A Bronx Rally to Save the Life Centers on Feb. 7 drew pastors and other Christians, including leaders from predominantly black churches angry that abortionists kill most African-American babies.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." That's the concluding line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Christians always beat against the current—but some worried two years ago that we might be swamped. No way. Thanks be to God.

“Maybe non-evangelicals have to learn from hard experience that liberalism doesn’t work, and evangelicals know that from the Bible.”

That’s part of it, but IMHO, biblical evangelicals tend to do more self-searching. I see no encouragement in modern society to sit and think daily on spiritual and self-examination issues, and how things stack up to principles one works hard to find and develop. They simply “go with the flow”.

So young Christians, much earlier, have examined their philosophies and spent time thinking rationally on their lives. The MSM would balk at that statement, as their template says Christians are less rational, but in my experience this is the dividing point.

They won’t vote for a president, say, because he’s “cool”.

We'll just make sure they're subscribing to publications like The Weekly Standard, where they'll read the truth about issues like global warming and population implosion:

...On the other hand, it is quite easy to make an accounting of abortion’s effects. Before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the tide of public opinion in America was against abortion. Accordingly, there were relatively few abortions, even though most states allowed for early-term abortions. In 1970, for example, there were 193,491 reported legal abortions. Certainly, this number undercounts the real total because it does not include illegal abortions. But let’s take 200,000 as a baseline. In 1973, as Roe created a universal abortion right, the number of reported abortions rose to 744,600. The next year, that number rose by 20 percent, to 898,600 abortions. By this time all abortions were legal, and so we can be confident that this number is fairly accurate. Over the course of the next 15 years the number of abortions rose by almost 100 percent.

"In 1973—the year of the Roe decision—there were 3.1 million babies born. Over the next 10 years that number rose only slightly, despite the fact that America’s total population was increasing quickly. Why weren’t there more babies born in the decade following Roe? Because during that time, 13.6 million were aborted—meaning that 28.5 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion. Since Roe more than 49.5 million babies have been aborted in the United States, and the fertility rate has varied inversely to the abortion rate, generally declining when abortion is on the rise and rising when abortion is on the decline." ...

"...But on this question there are two Americas today: a secular population that wants small families (or no family at all) and a religious population that wants larger families. Religious affiliation is part of the story, but the real difference comes with church attendance. Among people who seldom or never go to church, 66 percent say that zero, one, or two children is the ideal family size, and only 25 percent view three-or-more children as ideal. Among those who go to church monthly, the three-or-more number edges up to 29 percent. But among those who attend church every week, 41 percent say three or more children is ideal, while only 47 percent think that a smaller family is preferable. When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they’re making a cultural and theological statement.

"And the truth is, America needs more of such statements. The United Nations Population Division’s projection of our demographic future makes for stark reading. Native fertility rates are so low that without a continual influx of immigrants to stave off population decline, our population will shrink from 308 million to 290 million by 2050."

"Our challenge is to balance three needs: (1) a stable population, (2) a plausible ratio of workers-to-retirees, and (3) a manageable number of immigrants. Yet, for instance, to keep the worker-support ratio at high levels would require, as we saw earlier, gargantuan levels of immigration. Keeping immigration at a reasonable level (the U.N. uses 760,000 immigrants a year as a baseline) would mean that our population would increase to 349 million in 2050, but that our worker-support ratio would be cut in half. If we cut off immigration altogether the worker-support ratio would be even lower, and in addition, we’d face rapid population decline."

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