Hello…the frauds and the faithful.

“The BW CRI Ohio Pulse Poll shows 58% of likely voters for the November 7 election favor passage of Issue 1, an amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would protect the right to reproductive freedom, including "access to contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one's own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion."

Issue 1 is favored by 89% of Democrats, 39% of Republicans and 51% of independents. In addition, 65% of parents, 54% of gun owners and 37% of evangelicals support Issue 1. Only 8% of respondents were undecided.”

OK, so what are we to make of this news? How should we interpret these data? Well there are a few conclusions that we can draw and these conclusions fall quite neatly into the good news and bad news categories—but I think that calling these conclusions good news and bad news a bit of a mistake, but I’ll explain why later. For now, let’s look at the good news and the bad news.

OK, so for the good news. And the good news may not sound very good…and frankly it isn’t. But here it is for whatever it’s worth. The percentages of people who support abortion have stayed essentially static since the 1970s. Gallup has a lot of longitudinal data about this issue. And their research is well worth looking into, but one of the issues that HAS changed is that the number of people who are essentially single-issue voters because of abortion has more than doubled since 1992, which is the earliest year for which they have data. Now, there is fluctuation in their numbers, but in 2023 the percentage of registered voters for whom candidates MUST share their views on abortion was 28. That’s up from 13% in 1992.

Now, given that the overall population hasn’t really shifted much in its views, this may seem like a fart in the wind. But it isn’t. The reason that it isn’t is because this means that people are coming to the realization that Abortion is, as with all laws, a moral issue. And for an increasing number of people it’s a moral issue of the highest magnitude.

But these polls demonstrate something else that is significant. It disabuses us of the lie that the good old days were really all that good. If you look at data going back to 1975, the breakdown of people who think it should be legal in some or all circumstances v people who believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances the stats fluctuate between 75/25 to about 90/10. 1975 was nearly 50 years ago. The youngest registered voters back then are 66 now. So when you look around at senior citizens, when you look at Baby Boomers a lot of us tend to think that back in their day, when they were young people were more moral. But no.

Certainly public standards of decency have declined. But who has been in charge of society since then? The notion that back when grama was a girl people had higher moral standards is frankly false on its face. Marijuana use was high among Boomers in the 1970s and it’s only grown. The Boomers were teens from ’59 to ’83 and, shock of shocks, Marijuana use went from 4% or below in 1969 to 33% in ’85 and that 33% stayed consistent until my generation, the Millennials, became teens and it rose to its current levels. But again, all the gramas and grampas out there looking around wondering “what happened to my country?!” The real question is, “what did we do?”

Looking back there are very few living Americans who can say that the genuine moral state of the nation was better when they were young than it is now. Again, public standards of decency have dropped. Absolutely. But who set the standards? Who established the norms? Who was in charge of the institutional apparatuses? Who could have raised the moral consciousness of the nation?

Now, you’re probably thinking, “My goodness, Luke, how can this be good news?”

Here’s how it’s good news. This means that despite the public indecency and general moral erosion of the past 50 years the percentage of people who think that murdering babies should be legal has essentially stayed static. However, the reality is that the actual number of abortions is going down. In fact, if you look at abortion statistics you can see that there is a huge drop in the number of abortions reported after the bulk of Boomers have aged out of their childbearing years. As a cohort, the Boomers, are the ones who had the plurality of legal abortions in US history.

Indeed the peak year for abortions was actually one of the years, and indeed, the FINAL year, when ALL Boomer women were in the child-bearing cohort of 15-44 years old. As the Boomers have aged-out of childbearing, finally aging out altogether in 2009 when those women born in ’65 turned 44. And the number of abortions continued to drop year-by-year after they have aged out.

Now, I grant that prophylaxis and abortions by morning-after pills, which is still abortion, have reduced the number of abortions being committed by younger women. But the reality is that more women are choosing not to have abortions, or if they are choosing, they are using pills in a morning-after way when the baby is less developed.

And I take this as good news. I take this as a sign that while opinions on the LAW may not be changing, more and more women are realizing that abortion is murder. They may hold the morally idiotic and incoherent position that while they would never have an abortion because it would be wrong that it’s OK for another woman to have one. Sure. Lots of women do. And that’s a problem. But it seems that in some weird way the tide is turning.

But now the bad news. If polling is prophecy Issue 1 will pass in Ohio.

Worse news. If polling is correct 37% of people who call themselves evangelicals in Ohio support abortion.

Yes.

Let me say that again incase anyone missed it.

37% of people who call themselves evangelical Christians, people who claim to be saved by Jesus Christ, washed in the blood, Bible-believers committed to sharing the gospel and social -action. 37% of those people think that abortion should be legal. For perspective 65% of Ohioans consider themselves “conservative.”

And based on recent registration data of Ohio’s approximately 8M registered voters about 950,000 are registered democrats and 840,000 are registered republicans. Both groups making up a little over 10% of the voters. 73% of Ohioans claim to be Christians and about 30% of Ohioans claim to be evangelical Christians. Which means that as a voting bloc evangelicals can swing the state any-which way.

Yet there’s moral confusion.

I’m not too concerned with the fact that 39% of republicans are projected to vote for abortion on Issue 1. I’m not surprised. And I’m not surprised because I think we’ve all seen for a long time that there are a lot of people who think of themselves as conservatives but they aren’t. They are morally bankrupt people who want lower taxes and less regulation. In other words, they’re greedy. There I said it. Now, make no mistake, there are a lot of democrats who are greedy too. But I’m not worried about them. I’m not worried about progressives. I’m worried about people who call themselves conservatives but aren’t interested in conserving anything. Because if 39% of Republicans support abortion and Ohio is supposedly made up of 65% conservatives then there is necessarily some overlap. That means that there are people out there who call themselves conservative republicans who support abortion. It means that there are people who want to conserve nothing but pennies in their pocketbooks and that’s bad.

But worse and far worse are those who claim to love Jesus and won’t let the little children come to Him! If abortion weren’t murder—and it is—and if the church hadn’t spoken clearly for 2,000 years on this issue—and it has—even if that were true Abortion would still be evil because it literally hinders the little children from coming to Jesus. There is a grotesque lack of moral clarity and a dearth of moral urgency.

Perhaps evangelicalism in our headlong rush to personalize the faith and to intellectualize it have failed and failed catastrophically to teach virtue.

Perhaps pastors with out constant pleas for personal relationships with Jesus have neglected the need for personal righteousness. Moreover, we have failed to warn our people that we will be held personally responsible in judgment for the things done in the body whether good or evil—focusing on the personal relationship with Jesus instead.

But at a certain point we must stop and ask if a person claims to have a personal relationship with Jesus; if a person claims that the perfect, holy, righteous God of the universe indwells a person guiding them into all truth—if all that is true then how can a person not only practice but promote wickedness!?

Perhaps, maybe, just maybe, instead of asking people to bow their heads and pray we ought to have been impressing upon them the need for holiness and humility. We ought to have spent at least as much time seeking to get Christians to repent as to repeat a prayer. Because from where I sit scouring the stats it would appear that evangelical pastors are excellent crowd manipulators but mediocre curers of the soul. We have pastors who can rouse a crowd to give money, but not to live virtuously. We have pastors who can build their own personal fiefdoms, but cannot build the kingdom. We have pastors who can get people to raise their hands but not raise their lives out of the sewers of sin in which we live.

In short, brothers and sisters, Ohio’s Christianity, for an awful lot of Ohioans, hasn’t been much use to them. A whole lot of Buckeyes claim to know Christ but are bound in the chains of sin and self-righteousness.

But here’s the thing. I said in the beginning that good news and bad news really are the wrong categories. Because these realities aren’t really news. Those who have watched society for a while have seen these trends a long ways off. Many have stated and warned that a rising conservatism in America did not necessarily entail a rising moral standard.

And of course it doesn’t.

For all the folks talking about how America is being red-pilled, I don’t buy it. You can take your trad-west and your trad-wives and your trad-cons and throw ‘em all together and sure, maybe we have a baseline agreement on a lot of political perspectives, but in the end, setting the clock back 50 years or 100 years won’t mean anything but that we’ll have to repeat history if that replay isn’t autotuned with a Revival!

Will Ohio vote to legalize abortion?! I don’t know! Polls say yes, but I’m going to fast and pray and preach and work the phones to try to change people’s minds before November 7. I’m going to fast and pray and preach and work the phones and I’m going to refuse to despair and I’m going to have hope because I believe God can and does do miracles, including the miracle of changing hearts.

I won’t despair. I won’t let the devil win without a fight. I won’t surrender. I will fight the good fight of the faith because I believe that God can save Ohio by saving Ohioans. I believe God can bring revival to Ohio. I believe that Christ can bring us out of darkness. Not by voting Republican or all the women wearing sundresses and having 10 kids—but through repentance from sin and faith in Christ and godly Churches who teach people to live virtuous lives.

I plead with you to join me. Fast. Pray. Work. Never, ever, ever, despair. God may do miracles yet. Run the race, fight the fight, keep the faith.