Catholic political activism is at a crossroads. For about 40 years the pro-life and pro-family movements had a home within the Republican Party, while a small minority continued to fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. 

Two Supreme Court rulings, one inventing a right to same-sex civil marriage and one repealing the invention of a right to abortion, have caused both political parties to shift to the left on the social issues on which we have historically fought. New cultural issues have emerged, some of them the results of battles previously won or lost. 

At the center of all of this is the historic re-election of Donald Trump, the first president in more than a century to win a second non-consecutive term, and Vice President-elect JD Vance, a Catholic convert knowledgeable and articulate in the new populism that has reordered the Republican Party’s priorities. 

What has changed? Where do things stand now? And what are the opportunities — and dangers — for Catholic activism and evangelization in the years ahead?

It has been almost a decade since the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which invented the legal fiction of same-sex marriage. As late as 2008, leading Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said they supported traditional marriage. As recently as 2012, leading Republicans like Mitt Romney did too. But today, no major candidate in either party runs for president on a platform of overturning Obergefell, the way Republicans ran for decades on overturning Roe v. Wade.

The campaign against Roe v. Wade, on the other hand, was ultimately successful. But sending abortion back to the democratic process turned out to be a wake-up call for the pro-life movement. 

The American electorate was more pro-abortion than many realized. Many referenda at the state level were lost. The Democratic Party’s path from “safe-legal-and-rare” rhetorical moderation to “shout-your-abortion” extremism accelerated, with Vice President Kamala Harris making a campaign stop at an abortion facility and abortions being performed at a special “mobile health clinic” set up near the site of the Democratic National Convention. 

As if that were not bad enough, the Trump-Vance campaign gutted the GOP’s historic commitment to protecting unborn human life. Trump claimed it was no longer a federal issue but criticized states whose pro-laws he found too restrictive. The pro-life plank was taken out of the party’s platform. Vance said he supported the drugs by which most abortions now occur. Trump declared himself the “father” of IVF and called for it to be publicly funded.

And yet many pro-life Catholics are jubilant that Trump defeated Harris. Understandably so. Whatever our differences with Trump 2.0, they pale in comparison to what we would have faced under a Harris administration. 

Under Catholic President Joe Biden, federal law enforcement agencies were weaponized against domestic political opponents in ways reminiscent of a Third World country. Pro-life activists felt the brunt of this after Roe’s repeal, with federal SWAT teams invading a young father’s home at the crack of dawn over an alleged incident already dismissed by local authorities, and elderly pro-lifers being given disproportionate years-long sentences for peaceful protests. 

Harris, meanwhile, had persecuted pro-life journalist David Daleiden when she was attorney general of California. As a U.S. senator she had sought to declare judicial nominees to be unfit to serve if they were members of the Knights of Columbus. Had she won, Harris’ combination of authoritarianism and anti-Catholic animus may have led to a federal crackdown against traditional believers beyond even what we have seen under Biden.

But there are more reasons to celebrate this election than just the fact that we dodged a bullet. Public policy reasons, to be sure. Trump appointees say they want to defund Planned Parenthood. Trump himself spoke with pro-life leader Lila Rose for two hours before the election, which led to her endorsement. Whatever the changes in the pro-life movement’s relationship with the Republican Party, the opportunities to make progress on the causes on which we have traditionally fought are still there.

Our opportunities, however, don’t end there. Paradoxically, the biggest opportunity of all for Catholic activists and evangelizers lies in the larger coalition Trump was able to assemble by partially throwing us overboard. 

I am talking about the “Barstool conservatives.” The phrase, coined by the Catholic writer Matthew Walther in 2021 and named after digital media company Barstool Sports, refers to young male voters whose “outlook is culturally rather than socially conservative.” They oppose “wokeness” — that is, racial and gender politics — open borders, cancel culture, soft-on-crime policies, attacks on American heritage and so forth. But they are not religious, and they are supportive of (or indifferent to) abortion, same-sex marriage, pornography and marijuana. We see this anti-woke libertarianism in public figures like Bill Maher, Bari Weiss, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan and others. 

Walther, understandably, views their growing power within the Republican Party as a bad thing. In his 2021 article, he worried that most social conservatives will “gladly make their peace” with the Barstool conservatives because social conservatives have “largely accepted” that “the great battles have been lost for good” and that “the best that can be hoped for” is “a limited accommodation” in which we are left to ourselves, clinging “to traditions that in the decades to come will appear as bizarre as those of the Pennsylvania Dutch.” 

In a Dec. 1 column for The New York Times, Walther says that his foreboding has been confirmed by the 2024 election. After all, didn’t Trump just win by running an effectively pro-choice campaign? 

Walther was prescient in identifying certain trends. But where Walther sees cause for despair in those trends, I see opportunity. For those of us who do not accept that “the great battles have been lost for good,” but only that some battles have been lost for now, there is a lot to work with here. As the political analyst Michael Barone has written:

“Trump’s majority coalition is yeastier and more demotic than the last Republican presidential majority in 2004. It has built on the Deep South majorities won by former President Ronald Reagan, has expanded former President George W. Bush’s breakthroughs in Greater Appalachia, and now, in 2024, has made its own gains among the descendants of the Ellis Island immigrants who remain in the Northeast and those who have slid down I-95 and I-85 to the South Atlantic.”

Barone’s “yeastier” coalition is Walther’s Barstool conservatives. Walther is disappointed by the ones he has spoken with in the bars of rural Michigan. My experience in the bars populated by “the descendants of the Ellis Island immigrants who remain in the Northeast” has been completely different. 

I grew up with these guys. I’ve known them all my life. They have never shared my religious convictions. Twenty years ago, they thought I was nuts for fighting against the invention of same-sex marriage. But then COVID happened. The lockdown happened. Joe Biden happened. And something changed.

Wokeness has turned them into cultural conservatives, especially on gender. No, it has not turned them into social conservatives, at least not yet. But they are questioning how we got here. In many cases, they are the ones reaching out to me. They will tell me they still support same-sex marriage and, a short time later when discussing transgenderism, they will tell me I should feel vindicated for having fought transgenderism’s antecedents. 

I think something like this is happening across the country. Or at least, that it could happen, if we gave it a push. Anti-woke libertarians have noticed that Catholics, and conservative Christians in general, were out front fighting these things all along. They are not sure yet what to make of it. But they know there is something there. They are chewing it over.

And that, to me, is why Trump’s coalition is “yeastier” than Bush’s in more ways than one. This is not just about growing a political coalition. Why should we assume, with Walther, that it is the Barstool conservatives that will influence the social conservatives? Why not the other way around? 

My sense is that there is a real opportunity for that to occur, for us to influence them. We have a new mission field for evangelization with our Barstool friends, who are far more reachable than, say, the Kamala crowd. 

This is the task that lies ahead of us. For the causes for which we fight, sure. But most of all, for the Gospel. There is a new mission field for that “New Evangelization” the Church keeps urging on us.

So stay yeasty, my friends. Your Barstool buddies want to hear from you.

 

Peter Wolfgang is the president of the Family Institute of Connecticut Action.