Dan Miller critiques the "culture of life" slogan within white evangelical and GOP rhetoric, arguing it narrowly defines life from conception to birth while ignoring the well-being of the born. He highlights how this selective focus correlates with opposition to Black Lives Matter, gun control, universal healthcare, and voting access, noting that Black people are three times more likely to die in pregnancy-related mortality than white people. Miller contrasts this limited view with American Catholics and Black churches, who oppose abortion yet support broader social justice, concluding the phrase often serves as a code to prioritize the unborn over critical societal needs. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Protecting Peace of Mind00:03:49
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus in the series It's in the Code.
I'm your host, Dan Miller, a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Just coming back from a week off, getting back into the swing of things, a little bit behind the eight ball, as they say, but glad to be back and recording another episode here.
I thank all of you for your support, whether you're listening, whether you help support us financially.
We can't keep going without you and the revenue that that provides.
As always, I welcome your support.
Thoughts, your insights, your suggestions, your topics at Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller SWAJ at gmail.com.
As I say, I was just gone for a week.
I'm behind on emails, even further behind than I am, but please keep them coming.
I do read them, I read them all.
I respond to the ones that I can respond to.
I value all of them.
And thank you all so much for your engagement and for keeping this series going.
It's those of you who write in with different ideas and topics that really give me a sense of what it is that people are wondering about or thinking about.
So, Thank you for that.
Please keep that coming.
As always, I'm sorry that there's just me to try to keep up with all of them.
Before diving into this week's episode, I do want to say a word about an upcoming seminar with Straight White American Jesus.
If you go to the website, Straight White American Jesus, you can find the information on this.
This is a repeat of the seminar that ran a few months ago and was incredibly popular, filled up really fast.
It is on purity culture, race, and embodiment, hosted by Sarah Moslinder.
Those of you who listen to the podcast will be familiar with Sarah and her work.
She has appeared on the podcast and helped co host when either Brad or I are off or gone on the occasional weekly roundup or other times.
It's running August to September, starting on August 18th.
It runs in the evenings at 5 o'clock Pacific if you're on the West Coast, 8 p.m. Eastern if you're on the East Coast.
The information is all there.
I just really encourage people to check this out.
Sarah's work is amazing and, in my view, still does not have the kind of awareness that it deserves.
So please do check that out and feel free to contact us if you've got.
Questions about the seminar and what'll be involved.
Really, really great stuff.
Can't emphasize it enough.
Now, as I try to get my head back in the game, so to speak, after taking this week long break, I want to look at a phrase today that's going to be familiar to a lot of people.
Affirming Culture of Life00:15:41
And it's a phrase or a concept or a series of concepts.
And we've spent some time on it in the regular podcast, the Straight White American Jesus podcast, especially if people go back and look at really some of the stuff from our first season has some stuff on this.
But it's also a phrase that a lot of you have reached out about and have expressed concern about and frustration.
And confusion and anger, and all different kinds of things.
And especially in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, this has kind of come back, I think, into the consciousness of many of us.
And I think that's what I'm seeing in the email.
So I decided to tackle it.
And it's this it's basically the idea of a so called culture of life.
As I've said, this is very familiar, a familiar phrase.
And it is a very distinctive part of religiously and culturally conservative rhetoric.
If you have ever been a part, Of a conservative white Protestant church, you know, what we typically call evangelicals, you will have heard this phrase.
If you have heard politicians, particularly conservative politicians in the GOP, many of whom also court Christian nationalists and other conservative Protestants, you will have heard this phrase.
And within a religious context, of course, we're talking about churches and other religious organizations or groups that proclaim that they want to foster a culture of life.
As part of their religious expression, that this is part of what they as Christians are about.
And the proximate cultural reference, the cultural issue that's like sort of right on the main stage here is familiar to everybody.
And it's about abortion.
To claim that one supports a culture of life is to say that one wants to bar access to abortion, they want to criminalize it, et cetera.
We know that.
And I'm not going to spend tons of time on the background of that because I think that's familiar to everybody.
Another point that's pretty obvious, but maybe overlooked by some. Is also that this is an intentionally affirmative phrase.
It's articulated in terms of what individuals or communities affirm or support rather than what they oppose.
So they will often say, they won't say, I'm opposed to abortion.
They will say, I affirm a culture of life.
Or they will certainly not say, I oppose healthcare rights.
I oppose access to healthcare.
I suppose, so excuse me, I oppose a woman's ability to make decisions about her own body or any other number of things.
That people might say, they won't oppose that.
They will say, I support life.
I'm affirmative of life.
And that phrasing, that sort of affirmative phrasing, has been hugely effective over time.
It helped build a massive following, a massive religious and political movement, a movement that has been active for decades, trying to achieve exactly what was just achieved in the Supreme Court with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So there's some basic stuff.
We get all of that.
That's all really important.
We could talk about that a lot.
But it's familiar.
And so it's not really the direction I want to go in this episode.
I also don't want to get into the sort of ethics of it or the debates about, you know, sort of when does life begin in the relation of conception or the status of the unborn as persons and so forth.
I have lots of resources on that, some episodes where we've talked about things like that.
Again, that's not really the focus here.
My interest is in wanting to decode this phrase a little bit more.
I want to go beyond the familiar surface level to look at some of, as we do in this series, the point of the series, you get past the, what's the sort of plain meaning or the surface meaning to looking at, you know, what does this language really do?
How does it really operate?
And as we get to the end of the episode, I think I also want to highlight just a couple sort of ironies of this language and the way that it's used.
So let's get started with that.
And again, if you were to go through lots of episodes that we've run in the past, you could sort of cobble some of this together.
I want to draw it together in a fuller way and make some points here that I think I haven't always made in some of those other contexts.
And so let's begin with talking about this abortion focus.
And so if you ask anybody with even a passing familiarity with this language, if you were to stop somebody on the street and you're, I don't know, you're a reporter, maybe you're a social scientist, whatever, and you say, Are you familiar with the phrase culture of life?
Many would say yes.
Or if you were to say, When you hear the phrase, or you hear somebody say, I support a culture of life, what are they talking about?
They would know that the focus is abortion immediately.
They don't have to necessarily know that it has a religious intonation to it.
They don't have to know all the debates about it.
They'll know that it's about abortion.
And this is the question I want to start with what does this focus, the kind of narrowness of it, and sort of the obviousness of it, that when somebody hears this phrase, immediately they know we are talking about abortion?
What does the obviousness of it tell us about how life is imagined by the people who affirm a culture of life?
In other words, they say, I affirm a culture of life, and you're saying, Okay, but cool.
What counts as a life?
And that's the question.
That's what I want us to look at.
When you hear the phrase culture of life, you can be pretty assured of the narrowness of the scope of the quote unquote life that's in view there.
Because it refers, when somebody says, I affirm a culture of life, It refers almost entirely to the unborn and virtually no one else.
Those who affirm the so called culture of life, who will go to the mattresses to fight against abortion access and so forth, it is vitally important to them that unborn children have to be carried to term.
But once we get to that, you're on your own, right?
Life begins at conception and it basically ends at birth.
As soon as you're born, you are thrown into a world and you are on your own.
And very frankly, those conservative Christians who use this language have almost nothing to say.
About affirming or supporting a culture of life for the already born, right?
If you're born into a good family, good for you.
A family that loves you and that supports you and has the means to take care of you and lets you develop and fulfill your potential and all of those great things, good for you.
If you have access to housing and healthcare, good for you.
If you can gain access to education or draw job training or whatever and have a financial future that's good, hey, good for you.
Great.
But if not, If your life isn't full, if your life sucks, if you live a life of suffering and privation, largely through things you don't choose or do, and just due to the circumstances into which you are born, the set of trajectory that is very difficult to get out of for the rest of your life, well, what do you do then?
Well, the conservative Christians are going to say, sorry, you're on your own.
And some of this would go back to episodes we've talked about, about what it means to be saved or to be a Christian, and basically the notion that, you know, being a Christian is all about your eternal soul.
And when you die, you'll go and live with God.
But while you're here on earth, you're on your own.
And it's this selectivity of life, this sense of life that really we're concerned with defending it till you're born.
But after that, you're on your own.
There's also a lot of gender and racial coding and class coding tied in with this.
Right.
So that's all pretty harsh.
And I can hear somebody now saying, Dan, like, I get it.
It's bad.
And they're not talking about the fullness of life and all the dimensions of life, but that's got to be an overstatement.
Right.
The stuff you're saying sounds like an overstatement.
So let me give some examples.
And let's start with, Another discourse about lives, let's talk about Black Lives Matter.
Because virtually every religious community in America that would proclaim itself a supporter of a culture of life will also oppose Black Lives Matter.
And I've talked about this before.
Those of you who listen to the podcast or this series or other series that I've done or have taken my seminar or whatever, you know that this is a thing with me.
An emphasis is that the way that religious and cultural identities work is that different sorts of positions come bundled together.
And in our country, if you're a Christian who opposes abortion on religious grounds, you also almost certainly oppose Black Lives Matter.
And one glaring exception to this is the predominantly black church.
I'm going to talk more about the black church in a few minutes.
But if you're a white evangelical in this country and you oppose abortion, you probably also oppose Black Lives Matter.
So your culture of life doesn't include Black Lives.
And how will this work?
You won't say, I don't believe in Black Lives Matter.
What they'll say is that the movement is a terrorist organization.
Or they'll say that affirming black lives matter is somehow racist.
Or they'll try to mask white insecurity and white supremacy by insisting that all lives matter.
They'll oppose any move to hold police departments accountable on the grounds that blue lives matter.
And why is all that bad?
That's all bad because it denies the overwhelming evidence that people of color, especially men and especially black men, are disproportionately at risk of dying at the hands of cops.
Unarmed black men die at the hands of cops, while cops seem to have no trouble subduing armed white men on a regular basis.
To say nothing of the broader criminal justice system and the fact that if you're a person of color and you commit the same crime, you are more likely to be charged with higher offenses than if you're white and you commit the crime.
If you and a white person are accused or convicted rather of the same crime, you're likely to receive a harsher sentence and on and on and on and on.
You have to deny all of that if you oppose the idea that Black Lives Matter.
So don't tell me, don't come at me, conservative Christians, and say, I affirm a culture of life.
I affirm life.
When in fact, there's a whole range of lives that you actively devalue through your opposition.
So there's a racial dimension baked into the so called culture of life.
It is, as I like to say, it's in the code.
But it's even worse than this, or it goes even further than this.
According to the CDC, black people who are pregnant are three times more likely than pregnant white people to die from an issue related to that pregnancy.
So, pregnancy related mortality is higher among black people and white people by a three to one margin.
So, if you support legislation that makes it impossible for somebody to receive an abortion, you are not just condemning some women and girls or birthing people of different ages to die potentially, you are guaranteeing that a higher percentage of people of color will die from birthing related mortality issues.
Than white people.
Again, the racial dimension is baked in.
You affirm the culture of life, you are devaluing some lives.
Let's get outside of reproduction, though.
Let's talk about gun violence.
The same cultural and religious conservatives that proclaim a culture of life who say that they oppose abortion because it's the murder of children, they're not nearly as concerned when the already born children are murdered.
We live in a country now where firearms are the number one cause of death for children.
Just think about that.
There's a Kaiser Family Foundation study that looks at this.
The number one cause of death for children is gun violence.
Folks, it doesn't rank higher than fifth in any other wealthy country in the world.
So, to the religious conservatives, life, the life of children, it's only the life of the unborn.
Once you're born, you're on your own.
If you come to the religious conservatives and say, let's ban weapons, let's put some gun control measures in place, let's tackle this.
We get the stuff we talked about in prior episodes, especially about living in a fallen world, about how those won't do anything and only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun and so forth.
And there's all kinds of theological and intellectual gymnastics to try to justify not curbing gun violence.
So the culture of life doesn't include the living kids, the born kids.
But let's think about some other dimensions of this so called culture of life.
Those who affirm this, who affirm the culture of life, who want to ban access to abortion, They want to force pregnant people to carry children to term, but they're opposed to supporting any programs that would help them after, even while they're born.
They're opposed to universal health care, which would also support, obviously, the lives of millions of others.
They're opposed to universal paid maternity or paternity leave.
They're opposed to universal access to pre care, excuse me, to pre K education and care.
They're opposed to public education in general.
They're opposed to a federally enforced living wage requirement that would allow people to actually care for their kids.
They're opposed to all the things that would give positive outcomes to children who are born.
To say nothing of the fact that they're also opposed to giving comprehensive sex education.
And if you want to see the numbers on what reduces abortion rates, comprehensive sex education ranks up there among the top issues that will actually reduce abortions.
They oppose all of those, but they somehow support a culture of life.
But let's go even more fully.
They oppose easy access to voting, one of the most fundamentally life affirming rights in any democracy.
They support capital punishment.
Which is one of the most flawed and inequitable elements of the American criminal justice system, and a system that we know executes people who are innocent.
And we also know, again, the race element is baked in, also disproportionately affects people of color.
And on and on and on.
We could multiply these examples kind of almost endlessly, but we're running out of time, so we're not going to do that.
But here's the point the point is that the lives that matter in the so called culture of life turn out to be pretty few in number.
It's a pretty narrow range of lives that actually matter in that culture.
And given all the inequities evident in American society and culture, let's just be honest and say that white lives are overwhelmingly the lives that matter when people talk about a so called culture of life.
So, all of that captures the phrase among most conservative white evangelicals in the U.S.
But we do need to say a word about other Christians because to understand this code and how it works, we also need to understand some other elements of American religious life.
And again, if you listen to the past couple episodes, we'll talk about some of these things as well.
One of the issues that's worth noting is that American Catholics have traditionally been more nuanced.
You will hear Catholics sometimes talk about a culture of life.
I don't think as much as white conservative Protestants, though that's my sense.
I don't have actual statistics on who uses the phrase.
But when Catholics traditionally have talked about life, and some of this is different, you get the ultra conservative Catholics who really, really align with the conservative Protestants and sound a lot more like them.
But kind of mainstream American and broader Catholic teaching is always opposed to abortion.
Even at a time while evangelicals actually supported abortion, and if you're listening, you're like, wait a minute, evangelicals supporting abortion?
That's crazy.
Go back and listen to episodes where we've talked about the abortion myth.
Read people like Randall Ballmer, who talks about the abortion myth and the fact that prior to the Roe v. Wade decision, most American evangelicals did not oppose abortion.
Okay.
Different set of episodes, different issue.
Decoding Catholic Social Justice00:06:11
Catholics have always opposed abortion, but they also oppose capital punishment.
They have also tended to be much more active in support.
Supporting justice related and society transforming issues that conservative Protestants haven't.
Things like they're more sympathetic or will tend to be to social justice reform issues, police reform issues, Black Lives Matter, other different kinds of things like this, right?
And again, if you're like, well, why is that?
Listen to the previous episode on Living in a Fallen World.
They've been much more active in Protestants and creating hospitals and adoption agencies and actually trying to care for the physical worldly needs of people.
And Protestants have done those things, but Catholics have done them more, and they've certainly done them more than conservative Protestants.
So I'm not here to defend the Catholic Church.
You know, en masse and everything about the Catholic Church.
But when it comes to a culture of life, if a Catholic person wants to say to me, well, you know, I do, I oppose abortion, but I also oppose all these other things, also affirm all of these things to help people live a better life, I'm not going to agree with them on abortion.
I'm not.
But I'm going to respect their position a lot more and I'm going to find some consistency there and some coherence that is lacking for evangelical Protestants.
Let's talk about the Black Church, historically Black Church.
And It's different.
Again, it's nuanced.
Like conservative white evangelicals, many black churches also oppose abortion.
But again, at the same time, more like the Catholics, they are also more likely to affirm social justice issues and certainly issues like or groups like Black Lives Matter and others.
They are much more likely to believe that the church should be involved in transforming the world and trying to create a more equitable and just society and so forth.
So if we're talking about the culture of life language, it's going to appear more among white conservatives and even among their African American brethren who tend to share their views on abortion, perhaps.
Really, really different views when it comes to social justice and so forth.
And finally, liberal or progressive Protestants, they will almost always, not always, but typically affirm at least some degree of abortion access.
And they also tend to affirm a broad range of social justice movements and LGBTQ rights and inclusion and stopping global warming and transforming the world in various ways and so forth.
So they also work with a much broader conception of life than religious conservatives.
And so This brings us kind of in concluding this to the irony of this or the sort of Orwellian nature of this, which is generally this.
The more a Christian community affirms life in a full blooded, broad sense, the more that that community affirms life, not just maybe the unborn, but also flesh and blood people who are living and walking among us and a just and equitable society and healing the planet and all of these other kinds of things, the more a Christian community has a robust sense of life.
The less likely they are to say that they affirm a culture of life.
And inversely, those communities that are most likely to say they affirm a culture of life are also the most likely to have a very, very narrow conception of life that basically, as I say, it begins at conception and it ends at birth.
After that, you're on your own.
The phrase has been so successfully associated with white conservatives that it has basically been reduced to a slogan for abortion access.
And that's the rhetorical move.
That, in my view, should be called out.
You say, if you're having your conversation with your Uncle Ron and he trots out the line about supporting a culture of life, say, Hey, Uncle Ron, that's cool.
What about lives that die because of lack of health care?
What about lives that die at the hands of police violence?
What about lives that die on death row that are exonerated later?
What about all the suffering that we have?
You say, Hey, you know, the same Bible that, you know, talks in your view.
About opposing abortion, also says that we're supposed to have life and have it more abundantly.
What about all these other things that would give us more abundant life that you oppose?
It's worth calling out the Uncle Rons of the world on that.
But here's what's also worth doing.
It's also worth asking if you're a liberal or progressive Protestant, or you know those who are, or maybe you spend some time in those circles, it's worth asking those folks saying, why don't you talk about a culture of life more?
Why have you ceded the ground to the religious conservatives?
Why don't you affirm all of these things you do as a robust culture of life, including the lives of children who are born in different circumstances and so forth?
Why have you ceded this ground?
So, folks, I'm looking at the time here.
We got to wind this down.
Those are the things that I see when you hear the language of the culture of life.
Number one, if you hear it, you're probably talking to a conservative white Protestant.
There are some exceptions to that.
Number two, you're probably specifically talking about abortion.
That's what's really in view.
And number three, if somebody affirms the so called culture of life, again, part of the decoding is you can be pretty sure, there are exceptions, but you can be pretty sure that you also know not just what this person thinks about abortion.
But what they think about Black Lives Matter, what they think about social justice movements, and so forth.
Once again, it's a phrase that tells us a lot beyond its kind of obvious surface meaning.
So I'm going to wind up with that.
Again, I want to thank everybody for listening, everybody who supports us financially and otherwise.
Please keep the ideas coming.
I've got a sort of a running list and more things up and coming that people send me about topics.
And again, you can reach me at Daniel Miller Swag at Gmail, Daniel Miller Swag, S W A J at gmail.com.
I would love to hear from all of you.
And again, as always, I say, please be well until we meet again in this kind of weird virtual format.