As America’s secularism becomes obvious, we who are Christians and church people need a strategy for the future. Strange to tell, such is nothing more than what should have been our strategy all along: a focus on things above, of the things of eternity, exactly that for which the Apostle Paul called in his letter to the Colossians.

With the Republican Party’s shift on abortion and the exultancy of Democrats concerning “reproductive freedom,” one thing should now be clear to American Christians: Whoever wins in November will represent to some degree a deeper, more significant victory. That victory is not merely the triumph of the sexual revolution, where the popular imagination is gripped by the idea of sex as recreation, free of any obligations or commitments. It is the victory of a deeper vision of what it means to be human—to be radically free, autonomous, and responsible for self-creation. That is one lesson we can draw from the fact that most Americans are to varying degrees in favor of abortion.

It was clear in the aftermath of the fall of Roe v. Wade that the pro-life movement had no real strategy for addressing the way forward from that point. It was caught off guard by the comprehensive nature of the backlash so that in retrospect the victory now seems a Pyrrhic one, followed by nothing but defeats and setbacks everywhere the question has been put on the ballot. American churches now face an analogous question:

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