The real meaning of the evangelical response to Bristol Palin

I really didn’t want to write about the news of Bristol Palin’s broken engagement, which I found saddening and disheartening.  In analyzing it, I had two main reactions.  First, that this story is basically about a teenage girl who’s done some unwise things and made some bad decisions, both of which are pretty common at that age.  (I was going to write, “that age at which we tend to think we’re much wiser and more mature than we really are”—but as far as I can tell, that describes every age.)  If you’re honest, you’d have to admit that you did some really dumb things at 17.  For my part, at that age, I didn’t do much of anything besides go to school, go home, read, and go to church on Sundays—I didn’t hardly have the opportunity to do dumb stuff—but I did.  “Teenage girl does something foolish, pays consequences” is an afterschool special or a Very Special Episode; as “news,” it’s strictly dog-bites-man.  The only thing that makes this “newsworthy” is who Bristol Palin’s mother is.Second, am I the only one who read the piece in the AP and thought, “Wow, Levi Johnston’s sister is a real witch”?  It might not be fair, but I definitely got the vibe that she was jealous of Bristol, glad that Levi dumped her (since it also read to me like he was the dumper and she was the dumpee), and gleeful at the opportunity to shred her reputation in the national media.As far as national media reaction, though, I really didn’t want to go there.  As long as it was just confirmed PDS cases like Bonnie Erbe, I could let it slide; after all, the folks at National Review dispatched her quite handily.  (For those who might not know, PDS stands for “Palin Derangement Syndrome,” the official diagnosis for anyone whose rational processes go into violent spasms any time the word “Palin” is mentioned or a moose becomes visible on the horizon; for some reason the alternative name “Palin Madness Syndrome” never caught on.)  I didn’t see the benefit in giving Ms. Erbe’s commentary the unearned dignity of being treated seriously.  Granted, the fact that she and other echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools (when in fact she explicitly supports doing so, though she does believe that sex education should encourage abstinence) deserved a response—but if I’d posted about that by itself, as I’ve been meaning to do, I could and would have done so perfectly easily without mentioning Bristol Palin.And then I ran across Jon Swift’s post, and I couldn’t let that one pass.Swift, a self-described “reasonable conservative,” asks the question, “Why is Bristol Palin different from Murphy Brown?” and comes up with the conclusion, “She is different because she is a conservative”—a conclusion which he then proceeds to argue and extend at tedious and tendentious length.His argument, to put it politely, is full of holes and rests on a number of unexamined assumptions; he gives a few examples of cases where conservative commentators had non-identical reactions to superficially similar situations and then concludes (without further evidence) that this is because of the political views of the people in question.  (Since one of his examples rests on the assumption that “Mary Cheney is a good conservative woman who will no doubt teach her children that they shouldn’t become lesbians like their mother,” this is particularly dubious.)  He then launches into what he apparently considers to be biting satire on Christian conservatives, writing,

We should have the courage of our convictions and not play the liberal game of moral equivalency. Instead of trying to explain away Bristol’s pregnancy we should be defending it, holding her up as an example of the difference between liberal teenage unwed mothers and conservative teenage unwed mothers. Because just as it is true that, as Richard Nixon once said, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” when a good Christian conservative has a child out of wedlock, that means it’s not immoral.

The truth of the matter is, even if one concedes that he’s caught Kathryn Jean Lopez and Lisa Schiffren in the hypocrisy of which he accuses them—which I do not grant, but for the sake of argument—that doesn’t prove anything.  It doesn’t prove, first, that their hypocrisy is ideological at its root, nor second, that they would be representative of most conservatives in that respect.The first is, contra Swift’s evident assumption, something which does in fact have to be proven, since political persuasion is not the only difference between, say, Bristol Palin and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, and he doesn’t bother to examine Lopez’ and Schiffren’s arguments to see what they’re actually saying—he simply summarizes their positions and moves on to the ad hominem part.  The second rests on yet another assumption on Swift’s part, that evangelical attitudes toward teen pregnancy and unwed motherhood are still as hostile as old stereotypes make them out to be—and here’s where his argument fails altogether, because that’s simply no longer the case.I’m reluctant to give props to David Frum, who looks more like a giant wooden horse every time I see his byline, but he did a much better job than Swift on this issue in an article he wrote six months ago for Canada’s National Post.  He opened his piece in a manner Swift would no doubt approve—”Whoever imagined that we would see a Republican convention rapturously applaud an unwed teen mother?”—but then went on to actually think about what that really meant, and what it really tells us:

That moment confirmed a dramatic evolution in American politics: the transformation of the pro-life movement from an unambiguously conservative force into something more complex. . . .The pro-life movement has come to terms with the sexual revolution. So long as unwed parenthood is considered disgraceful, many unwed mothers will choose abortion to escape disgrace. And so, step by step, the pro-life movement has evolved to an accepting—even welcoming—attitude toward pregnancy outside marriage.

As I wrote about Frum’s article at the time, though I think “welcoming” is an overstatement,

Frum has captured and crystallized something of which I was aware—in my own attitudes and approach to ministry, no less than in the lives of others—but which I hadn’t consciously thought about. Put simply, when pro-life concerns cross with the concern for other issues, the tie goes to the baby.

The truth is, Frum is (if you’ll excuse the pun) dead right on this subject.  Sure, time was that conservative Christians in this country stigmatized teen pregnancy and disapproved of it as hard as we could; and then folks started pointing out that we weren’t really discouraging teenagers from getting pregnant—all we were doing was driving them into the ungentle hands of the abortion industry.  Collectively, we took a look at ourselves and realized that the critics were right; and over time, we by and large decided that we could live with teenage pregnancy and teen single motherhood—just don’t kill the baby.That’s the message on which most evangelicals in America have settled, when it comes to kids like Bristol Palin:  just don’t kill the baby, and we’ll do what we can to support you and help you out.  Why else have we started crisis pregnancy centers all over the place?  We didn’t have a utopian choice here, we had the choice of two evils; we stared it dead in the face, thought about it for a while, and picked the lesser one.  This is the bargain we made, and I believe it’s done more to reduce the abortion rate in this country than any government policy, even as it’s boosted the rate of illegitimacy.  Frum quotes the statistics:

As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies born out of wedlock—now reaching almost 37%—and a striking decline in the incidence of abortions. In 1981, 29.3 abortions were carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.

Now, it seems to me likely that some of those young women wouldn’t have gotten pregnant at all if there were still the old stigma attached to unwed motherhood and illegitimacy; it also seems to me likely that for far more of them, that stigma wouldn’t have been enough to keep them from having sex, but only to send them running to the nearest abortionist to keep anyone from finding out they’d gotten pregnant.  I can’t prove that scientifically, to be sure, but that’s what my experience suggests to me, and many of my colleagues in ministry would say the same.I don’t remember exactly how many weddings I’ve done (it’s not a huge number), but I remember how many couples I’ve married who were virgins on their wedding night:  one.  Is this a good thing?  No.  Is it reality?  Yes.  Will it be changing any time soon?  No.  And if we’re going to make any headway against it, is it going to be through a return to older tactics?  Will we accomplish anything by trying to scare teens away from sex and making examples of girls who get pregnant?  No.  No, we’re not—it isn’t going to happen.Our culture is sex-saturated, we’re flooded with erotic stimuli, and there’s a powerful cultural push toward sexual activity—combined, alas, with other trends that are pushing the average marriage age later and later—and we aren’t going to be able to shovel our way out of this flood by making a negative case.  There is nothing to be gained by making a pariah and a target out of girls like Bristol Palin, and whatever you may think about evangelical Christians, we’re smart enough to see that.  We need to keep working on rolling back this tide, but we aren’t going to do it that way; we’re working on other approaches (including the abstinence-education programs Gov. Palin has been unfairly derided for supporting), but they’re going to take time.  And in the meantime, we have to live in this culture as it really is, not as we wish it were, and to do the best we can with what we have.What’s the difference between Bristol Palin and Murphy Brown?  Twenty years.  Twenty years’ bitter experience of the law of unintended consequences, that’s all.Update:  Welcome to folks coming over from The Point and C4P—I hope you take the time to have a look around.  Those of you from C4P might be particularly interested in today’s post responding specifically to Margaret Carlson.