There is a clip making the rounds of a progressive pastor named Caleb Lines, who believes he has debunked the pro-life position once and for all. He has not. What he has done is make a mistake that a seventh grader ought to be able to name, and the fact that it is landing with people says more about the state of our reasoning than it does about the strength of his case.

His question is the one he opens with: why on earth are religious groups so concerned about abortion? By religious groups he means conservative Christians who vote Republican, which is to say, people like me. And his answer is not that we have an argument he intends to answer. His answer is that our roots are rotten.

The story goes like this. Religious conservatives, including the Southern Baptist Convention, did not care about abortion before 1978 — in the 1970s the SBC was passing resolutions in favor of a woman’s right to choose. What they cared about was segregation. After Brown v. Board of Education, white parents in the South pulled their children out of integrated public schools and into private Christian schools, the so-called segregation academies, which held tax-exempt status until that status was stripped under the Nixon administration. Enter Paul Weyrich, a political strategist who had been using segregation to drive white evangelical turnout and suddenly needed a new issue. He tried several. In 1978 he landed on abortion, papered church parking lots in four low-turnout midterm races, and watched all four go his way. He helped Jerry Falwell — who by his own admission had not preached on abortion for years after Roe — found the Moral Majority. And so, the pastor concludes, abortion is really about racism.

That is roughly three minutes of sermonizing, and it goes off the rails in the first thirty seconds.

The Fallacy That Runs the Whole Argument

The entire presentation commits what is known as the genetic fallacy: faulting an idea based on its alleged origins rather than on its merits. Where a belief came from and whether a belief is true are two different questions, and the first one has no power over the second.

Here is how I would handle it if I were sitting across the table from him. Do not go after his facts first. That is the instinct, and it is the wrong opening, because it concedes that the history is where the argument lives. It is not. Instead, give him everything.

Fine. We are all racists. We are misogynists too, and whatever else is on the list. We oppose abortion only because we need cover for an agenda we are too ashamed to state out loud. Grant every word of it.

Now: how does any of that refute the argument?

The pro-life case is a syllogism, and it has not moved.

1. It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
2. Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.
3. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

That argument stands or falls on its merits, not on the motives or the behavior of the people advancing it. Bad people can make good arguments. A scoundrel can hand you a valid proof and it remains a valid proof. If premise one is false, show it. If premise two is false, show it — bring the science, bring the philosophy, tell me what the unborn are if they are not living human organisms. The pastor does not attempt either premise. He never touches the argument at all. He tells a story about where he thinks the argument came from and treats the story as a refutation, which is like refusing to check a bridge’s engineering because you dislike the contractor.

And notice the order of operations he has inverted. Before you can explain why a man is motivated to make a bad argument, you first have to show that the argument is bad. Motive analysis comes after refutation, not instead of it.

Now About Those Facts

Having granted him his point for the sake of argument, we can go back and collect what he got wrong, and it is a good deal.

Start with Brown. The 1954 decision held that public schools could not segregate children on the basis of race, and that was right — I agree with it without reservation. What it did not do is forbid a parent from putting a child in a private school. You may think a parent’s motive for doing so is ugly, and in the case he describes I would agree that it is ugly. But the decision did not say what he says it said.

Then the larger claim: that Christians did not care about abortion until it became politically useful. This is patently false. It is true that mainline denominations, and the Southern Baptist Convention while it was still functionally mainline, held pro-abortion positions in that era. He is right about the Southern Baptists coming late. What does not follow is that the witness of the church took no position before 1978.

Go back to the Mosaic era. Scripture is clear that human beings bear the image of God, and because they do, the shedding of innocent blood is strictly forbidden. That leaves exactly one question to answer: are the unborn human beings? If they are, the commands against shedding innocent blood apply to them the way they apply to everyone else.

Move into the New Testament era. The first Christians were Jewish Christians who inherited a Jewish morality and reasoned about moral questions the way their forefathers did. So the useful question is not whether the word abortion appears in the text — it does not — but what those earliest Christians actually believed. You will also have a hard time finding a verse that says Americans are human beings, or Canadians, or the French. The absence of a proof text settles nothing.

And there is a hidden assumption buried in the objection worth dragging into the light: that whatever the Bible does not expressly condemn, it permits. Scripture nowhere forbids using your neighbor for shark bait. That is a fallacious way to argue.

What did the earliest Christians read alongside the canonical books? The Didache, among other things, which contrasts the way of life with the way of death and places abortion squarely in the way of death. The patristic writers are uniform on it — Basil, Athanasius, the rest. They were serious enough about it to call for ecclesiastical penalties for women in the church who procured abortions. Notice they were not calling for legal penalties; the discipline they had in view was the church’s. Aquinas and the medieval churchmen are clear. Come to the Reformation and Calvin calls the destruction of the unborn child a monstrous crime, precisely because of what that child is. Come to our own century and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Ethics, describes abortion as the murder of a child, robbing that child of its life and its future — not a fringe figure, and not a sentence anyone had to pull out of thin air.

Then there are the denominational statements themselves. There is a volume on my shelf that collects them, and it makes the point better than any summary: while the Southern Baptists were late, a great many bodies were speaking faithfully against abortion long before 1978. The idea that religion discovered abortion when it became expedient does not survive contact with the record.

The Question He Never Argues For

There is a second problem with the clip, and it is the more common one. The whole thing is question-begging.

Listen to the vocabulary: the right to choose, reproductive freedom, reproductive health. Every one of those appeals works only if you already assume the unborn are not human beings. Nobody talks this way about toddlers. No one defends the killing of a five-year-old by invoking privacy, or bodily autonomy, or health care. Run those appeals with a toddler in the frame and they become barbaric on contact. So the pastor is assuming precisely the thing in dispute, and he never argues for it or presents any evidence at all.

This is not unique to him. Katha Pollitt does the same thing in Pro, in a passage where she explains why it is hard to see a fertilized egg as a person: it has no brain, no blood, no organs, no limbs; it cannot think or feel or perceive or communicate; it has no character traits and no relationships; it occupies no social space; it is the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

Read that again and ask the obvious question. Why does any of that matter? Why is body size value-giving? Why does the ability to interact with your environment, or to recognize patterns, or to occupy social space, determine whether you may be intentionally killed? She does not say. She asserts that those traits confer value and moves on. She may have Pro on the cover, but that is not professional-grade argument. It is a list of ways the unborn differ from us, presented as though difference were the same thing as disqualification.

Why the Applause Should Not Surprise Us

Which brings me to what happened in Massachusetts, where the governor signed a bill stripping protections from the unborn through birth and the politicians gathered around her broke into cheers and applause. Pro-lifers watching the footage called it demonic, an aberration, beyond anything we have seen. It is demonic. But it is not an aberration, and treating it as one means missing what it tells us.

Our culture applauds abortion because it hates the imago Dei. That is the foundation the pro-life argument rests on, and the culture knows it.

Here is why the hatred is rational on its own terms — a point Carl Trueman develops at length. The moment you say human beings bear the image of their maker, you have also said human beings have intrinsic purposes they are obligated to fulfill. Design entails responsibility. And intrinsic purposes put handcuffs on the unfettered freedom to invent and reinvent ourselves however we please.

Consider where we are. This is a culture that holds gender to be determined cognitively rather than by the body — that a person may be male in biological sex and female in gender, defined strictly in the mind. Call it body-self dualism: the real you has nothing to do with your physical body and everything to do with your thoughts, your desires, your aims, your self-construction. Society will affirm that, and increasingly there are legal penalties for those who decline to.

Now the applause makes sense. People applaud abortion because they dislike the idea that human beings have intrinsic value they did not choose and cannot revise.

It also explains something that has puzzled a lot of pro-lifers: why red states — Montana, Ohio, Missouri, Kansas — vote to write abortion rights into their constitutions, where they cannot be touched. Even in conservative states, people like the idea that there are no limits on their freedom as expressive individuals. Anything that comes along to draw a border around what a human life should look like must not merely be resisted. It must be desecrated.

There is a danger in this that I am not sure the secularists have thought through. If human nature is not fixed, then neither are the natural rights that spring from it. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — those are pre-political rights that government recognizes rather than grants, and they are grounded in a nature that does not move. Cut the anchor and the rights drift with everything else.

What This Means for How We Argue

So the pastor’s clip is worth the time it takes to watch, not because it is a serious challenge but because it is a representative one. It is becoming more common to see arguments that are not arguments — presentations that do nothing to debunk the pro-life position and nothing to establish a right to abortion, but that sound like they have.

Learn to name the move. When someone swaps your argument for your alleged motives, that is the genetic fallacy, and the reply is to grant the motive and ask what it has to do with the premises. When someone reaches for choice or privacy or reproductive health, that is question-begging, and the reply is to ask what the unborn are, because every one of those appeals depends on an answer that has not been given.

And understand what we are actually up against. Our culture does not merely dislike the pro-life view. Our problem is not that we are insufficiently nice, and it is not a marketing problem. Our problem is the anthropological assumptions people bring to the debate before the debate begins. They do not like being told human beings have intrinsic purposes, because purposes entail obligations, and obligation is the one thing an expressive individualist cannot abide.

That is where we are. We are in for a long fight. Buckle up.