We’ve all heard these words in one form or another, so many times over the past decade from family members, church friends, neighbors, and strangers on social media that we’ve stopped even responding to them.
We’ve long ago exhausted our willingness to confront a lazy, intellectually-dishonest catch-all statement that covers a multitude of moral compromises and shortcut politics, and so we let it simply exist without challenging it.
It’s sometimes difficult for us to remember just what a complete sham claiming alignment with Donald Trump in the name of protecting life really is; the sickening irony of it all.
Being a pro-life MAGA voter is to be a living, breathing oxymoron whose actions are antithetical to their words.
How exactly will another President Trump Administration be helpful to life?
What about the lives that will face illness and injury without affordable healthcare to prevent sickness, ensure health, and avoid death?
What happens to the lives born into a generational poverty that they will be helpless to extricate themselves from, with the absence of any social safety nets or communal systems of support?
What becomes of young lives that will languish in purposefully underfunded public schools, with no opportunity to expand their minds, nurture their gifts, or find their callings?
What happens to lives, that because of their sense of identity, sexual orientation, or inclination to love, are turned into pariahs and outcasts to be bullied and erased in the name of an extremist minority religion that has become the law of the land?
What will happen to the lives of tens of millions of immigrants whose presence here is rendered almost impossible or made miserable by an aspiring president promising mass bloody deportations, one who traffics in the dehumanization of foreigners?
What about the lives whose ability to participate in the electoral process and to chose leaders to represent and protect them will be legislated away or gerrymandered nonexistent?
What happens to lives growing up in schools where mass shooter drills are normalized, by laws that offer more protections for weapons of mass carnage than those whose bodies are decimated or destroyed with them?
What will become of lives that will, because of their geography and social status, never have a viable opportunity to afford higher education, purchase a home, or access the American Dream, because such things will only be available to the wealthiest few?
What happens to elderly lives whose financial supports, healthcare protections, and soft places to land have been discarded when they are most vulnerable and deserving of a season of exhale?
What about the lives forcefully thrust into an increasingly overcrowded, rapidly-heating planet that will grow more and more uninhabitable where once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters become commonplace?
Just what life will find rest and refuge and joy, then? Whose lives will be made more whole or safe or peaceful?
In all practicality and tangible reality, what someone is really saying by empowering Donald Trump in the name of being pro-life, is that they’re willing to force hundreds of millions of human beings into this world, all so that they can experience a lifetime of suffering, scarcity, and sadness, that these self-identified life-lovers will feel no obligation to alleviate in any way.
They’re willing to subject people to a horrible existence where basic healthcare, elemental human rights, a decent education, and economic opportunities will be all but impossible to possess—all so they could experience the cheap high of feigned morality.
Sadly, Donald Trump will likely again get 85+ percent of the white Evangelical vote, and may again be elevated to the Oval Office by people claiming to be doing it in defense of life.
And in the process, they will be doing irreparable harm to hundreds of millions of human lives—and they won’t see what a deadly farce it has all been.
To all the true lovers of life out there who understand what that really looks like and truly means, please show up to defend it.
John Pavlovitz
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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