Where have all the grown-ups gone?

We get the leaders we deserve

Writing this morning at First Things, Carl Trueman offers a sobering assessment of the unserious times in which we live.

A Planned Parenthood mobile clinic has been offering free abortions just a few blocks from the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which concludes today. The DNC is not officially involved, but that is a minor detail, given that abortion has the status of a creedal non-negotiable in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. The clinic is simply actualizing the central plank of the Democrats’ election campaign. Its proximity to the convention is entirely appropriate—as is the presence of an eighteen-foot-tall inflatable IUD, named “Freeda Womb,” erected by the group Americans for Contraception. It is a stark reminder, along with the performances of Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention last month, of how unserious today’s American politics has become. Where, one might ask, have all the grown-ups gone?

“Where have all the grown-ups gone?” is, indeed the pressing question of the moment. Both major political parties in America lack mature, serious leadership and that is reflected, most tragically, in the abandonment of any semblance of principle with regard to the sanctity of human life. The Democrats, of course, have long been the party of abortion on demand. Even Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” position could hardly be considered moderate. A full-on embrace of the culture of death was inevitable and has now come to fruition. Meanwhile, the Republicans’ sudden softening on the issue should come as no real surprise. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has unmasked many a “pro-life” politician as merely an opportunist who was perfectly fine advocating for the end of the abortion regime in theory when it was legally impossible but has begun to equivocate now that the Supreme Court has eliminated the legal obstacle to abolishing the barbaric practice.

The lack of grown-ups in the political sphere leaves a vacuum that is being filled by the immature behavior we have seen on display at both party conventions this year. The problem, however, as Trueman diagnoses it, goes much deeper than what is seen on the surface.

But there is a deeper issue with the grandstanding of abortion that goes well beyond the problem of showcasing moronic entertainers at a political convention. The move from abortion being sold to the public as “safe, legal, and rare” to being celebrated as a necessary social good is revealing. In part it is a reaction to the overturning of Roe. But it is more than just a reaction; the celebration of abortion as something to be proud of started long before 2022. Something deeper must have taken place within our culture. And this brings me once again to the inadequacy of characterizing our modern world as “disenchanted.”

The glee with which abortion is advocated and the anger that any restrictions upon it provoke indicate that we need a different category to capture our current cultural ethos. In a disenchanted world, one could imagine abortion being seen as a necessary evil. The demands of the workplace, the economy, and society at large might make it so. In a world where rape and incest exist, sometimes the options for addressing such evil might themselves involve a degree of evil. I disagree with that logic, but it seems consistent with the regretful moral resignation that disenchantment might involve.

We all know, however, that abortion advocates invoke exceptional cases of rape and incest as a rhetorical ploy to win the public over through emotion, not argument. Otherwise, they would argue that abortions should be restricted to such cases, or that, in a world without rape and incest, abortion would no longer be necessary. But that is not the case.

Which means that something deeper than disenchantment is involved here, a point confirmed by the exultant nature of today’s abortion advocacy. The abortion debate is not driven by mere disenchantment, the notion that the baby in the womb is just a clump of cells and nothing more. It is driven by the desire for desecration—to destroy what is sacred. We live in a world where we are taught to prize our individual autonomy and to throw off anything that might curtail or impinge upon it. That makes us feel like gods.

A culture that exalts itself to godhood by celebrating the desecration of the most sacred of all creation—human life bearing the image and likeness of the one true, holy, and righteous God—is a culture that is only a step or two away from its own annihilation. Have we really become so stupid as not to see that, by exulting in the culture of death, we are signing our own death warrant?

Well, yes we have. We get the political leadership we deserve and, right now, our vapid, inane, and morally bankrupt culture deserves the vapid, inane, and morally bankrupt circuses our two major parties have become.

What is the remedy for our national and cultural ills? Trueman offers one, but with a serious caveat.

Ours is an age when so much of our culture encourages us to treat others made in God’s image as less than human. This is true, from the comparatively trivial trashing of others that is the favored idiom of those who seem to live online, to those at the DNC in Chicago this week, exulting in the slaughter of innocents. Our problem is thus much deeper than disenchantment. It is desecration. We need not re-enchantment so much as repentance. But that requires grown-ups.

A call to repentance cannot come from an immature politician. Only the church is equipped to call a rebellious people to turn from their wicked ways and seek forgiveness and pardon from the God they have so offended. But will the grown-ups among us step forward and speak the Truth into a culture so saturated with lies?

May God, in his mercy, raise up such leaders for such a time as this.