Why are young evangelicals "more pro-life but anti-religious right?"

“Nobody can really tell what direction they’re going to go, the young evangelicals,” Rick Warren observed at the height of last year's election season. “They’re more pro-life than their parents but they’re anti-religious right.”

Much can be gleaned about the new generation of evangelicals from this seemingly paradoxical statement. The "pro-life" movement was the cause of causes for the religious right during its heyday in the 1980's. How, then, can an emerging generation be more committed to that cause but less committed to, if not outright hostile toward, the movement which pushed it to the forefront of evangelical engagement with politics and culture?

From a purely practical perspective, it is hardly surprising that younger evangelicals are "more pro-life than their parents." This is, in fact, indicative of a much larger trend. Public support for unrestricted abortion has been eroding for some time, as more and more persons born after 1973--the year of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision--have become voting age adults (If you don't understand why persons born after 1973 are less likely to support unrestricted abortion than persons born before 1973, you really shouldn't be reading this.). It makes perfect sense that the children of pro-life parents would be on the leading edge of this emerging trend. But how does one explain the younger evangelicals' corresponding disengagement from, or perhaps disillusionment with, the religious right?

It may not be an aberration. Rather, it may be a natural consequence of the refinement of a movement as it passes from one generation to the next. Authenticity is a paramount concern of many younger evangelicals. The oldline religious right had a tendency to reduce the faith to catchy slogans which could fit on a placard or a bumper sticker. There is something profoundly inauthentic about that. A new generation seeks substance, not mere symbolism. If there is one cause that cries out for substance, it is the sanctity of human life. When a society fails to recognize the value of every human being, born and unborn, it places itself in mortal peril. The oldliners would have found it much easier to point this out had they not so immersed themselves in the stagnant waters of pluralistic politics, where the language of faith had to be dumbed down to such inoffensive and innocuous phrases as "family values."

If the younger evangelicals are "more pro-life than their parents," perhaps it is because they are less concerned with the politics of the issue and more concerned with the consequences wrought by thirty-six years of legalized murder in a nation that is ostensibly the pinnacle of the Western ideal of civilization. If they are, likewise, "anti-religious right," perhaps it is because they have learned the difficult lesson over that same thirty-six year period that cheap political slogans and selling the soul of a movement to a political party which promises much but delivers little are, manifestly, not the means through which the Gospel of Life is most effectively advanced.