Jonah Goldberg beat me to some of what I had hoped to say about the "Evangelicals for Harris" campaign in his remarks on David French's endorsement of Kamala Harris.
You should read the whole thing, but the gist of the piece is that who you vote for is, all things considered, a relative triviality, who you endorse (if you are a public figure) matters a bit more, and we can sometimes manipulate ourselves into doing unwise things by over-valuing the importance of a single vote and convincing ourselves that if we vote for someone we should also publicly endorse them. But, again, read it all.
That said, since Goldberg covered what needs to be addressed regarding the specific act of voting, I wanted to pick up a separate strand of the argument that will be of greater concern to social conservatives.
One of the most salient facts in American public life today is that we live in a nation in which one of the two vice presidential candidates supports legalized access to drugs that will induce an abortion while the other has signed into law a bill that allows doctors to decline care to children born alive after a failed abortion.
To be sure, these are not morally equivalent positions: The GOP is softly pro-choice in as much as they are quite content for states to adopt pro-choice legislation. The Democrats are much more strongly pro-choice in as much as the bulk of the party's leadership thinks laws like the one signed by Governor Walz are just and good. To say the two are equally bad is wrong. But to observe that both are pro-choice and, thus, share a certain tolerance for cruelty is obvious.
I did not say that these facts are the only salient facts about our nation's public life, but I did say they are amongst the most salient, and this is why: The way we choose to treat those unable to help or benefit us is often an excellent window into how we view human persons more generally. By this measure our nation's failures to protect the unborn actually are tightly bound up with many of our other failures as well.
This is an essential point to understand as we consider something like the recently announced Evangelicals for Harris group. When, for instance, participants in the Evangelicals for Harris forum suggest that we need a broader, thicker conception of politics than that offered by some pro-life conservatives of the past, I do not disagree. There have been cases in which life issues were attended to adequately but many other forms of cruelty bound up in America's public life were tolerated and even supported by many professing evangelicals.
That said, in the Evangelicals for Harris space this line seems to cash out to "therefore we can support a robustly pro-choice candidate because we think her policies more generally will lift up the vulnerable and because we think she will hear pro-lifers out when she is governing."
To say this is to get the point about a thicker sense of political society completely backwards.
In the first place, it is a quite shocking misreading of what the Harris-Walz ticket promises with regards to life issues. It quite obviously ignores Walz's own appalling record on life issues, but it also ignores the fact that when a California man published video evidence of Planned Parenthood selling the remains of aborted infants for profit the California Attorney General, Kamala Harris, responded to these revelations not by prosecuting those profiteering from aborted fetal remains, but instead by investigating the man who brought these appalling revelations to light. Harris's successor as AG then filed a number of charges against Daleiden. If you genuinely think a Harris-Walz administration will have any time for pro-lifers I can only conclude that you've totally ignored both Harris and Walz's actual records on these issues.
The problem is deeper, however. We are told that we need a thicker approach to public life than that proffered by old-single single issue voting Moral Majoritarians. I agree. But the upshot of adopting such a politics should not cause us to relativize our commitment to life, but should actually strengthen it. On this matter, the Roman church is far clearer than many Protestants—and that is to the shame of the Protestants.
Consider these words from Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si, which is primarily concerned with environmental stewardship, in which he discusses the idea of "human ecology" and relates our approach to environmental stewardship to our approach to the integrity of the human body:
Human ecology also implies another profound reality: the relationship between human life and the moral law, which is inscribed in our nature and is necessary for the creation of a more dignified environment. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of an “ecology of man”, based on the fact that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will”.[120] It is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings. The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it”.
The point being made here is that issues of care cannot be parsed out into discrete packages, easily isolated from one another. The error behind our desecrating of God's creation is the same as the error behind our disdain for the human body and for biological sex.
Pope St. John Paul II made a similar point in Evangelium Vitae nearly 30 years ago, writing that,
In fact, while the climate of widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity of today's social problems, and these can sometimes mitigate the subjective responsibility of individuals, it is no less true that we are confronted by an even larger reality, which can be described as a veritable structure of sin.
This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death". This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency.
Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated.
In this way a kind of "conspiracy against life" is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.
In the paragraph immediately following this, by the way, the pope condemns the very sort of pharmaceutical drugs that Sen. Vance, himself a Catholic, says should be widely available.
If you wish to critique certain right-wing evangelicals or Trump voters for having a narrow, blinkered moral outlook, you can certainly do that. In many cases it is a just charge.
But if you wish to think more deeply and along Christian lines about the nature of politics and common life and the demands God places on us as members of various communities, that path will not lead you toward politicians who plainly have no regard for the most vulnerable and unwanted amongst us. Indeed, Governor Walz's bill in Minnesota legitimizes the notion that aborted infants are unwanted by tacitly instructing us that even if the unwanted child survives an attempt on its life and is born alive, it can still be left to die! Any law teaching us that the measure of a life's worth is whether that life is desired in the eyes of others is not simply unjust, but is a moral abomination. I can think of few clearer instantiations of John Paul's "culture of death" than such a law. And don't miss the fact that when the financial structures propping up the abortion regime were made explicit and unmistakable in California, Harris took the side of finance rather than the side of life. (I always find it telling what we do and do not submit to left-wing economic critique.)
So by all means let us pursue a more robust and pervasively Christian account of politics that is not artificially constrained to one issue. But let's not pretend that such an approach will somehow legitimize a retreat from pro-life commitments. And yet on their website's 'issues' page, the Evangelicals for Harris team does not even mention abortion.
This is not, to be frank, a group searching for a thicker political conception that foregrounds care for the vulnerable and at-risk. It is, rather, a group whose error bears a striking resemblance to that of the many Trump supporting evangelicals they spend so much time attacking: It is a group that is giving away their votes and endorsements while demanding nothing from the campaign they are supporting and utterly ignoring that campaign's serious failures and shortcomings as judged by Christianity. This is not an alternative model to the failed vision of the old Moral Majority; it is merely a left-wing recapitulation of it.