Hello, friends. Welcome to the Case for Life podcast, where we aim to equip you to communicate the pro-life view effectively. I am honored today to have as my special guest a long-term friend. We’ve been friends, Mark, at least pushing 40 years here, going back to the 19 nineties. I know it’s shocking to hear this, but we got to face the truth, right? Yeah. Mark Harrington is the president of Created Equal, a group that I consider to be one of the finest, if not the finest groups at getting people in the game for pro-life advocacy. Mark gets students in the game by recruiting them to be interns and later staff people. He takes the pictures of abortion on campus. He takes them out to other public areas and confronts the public at the worldview level. with pictures that establish the facts about abortion and arguments that communicate the moral logic of the pro-life view. I can’t think of a better combination in reaching the public. And Mark, you do that great. Welcome to the show. Well, that’s very kind, Scott. Great to be here. Go back a little bit and just give our viewers a little summary of how we met, where that was, roughly when it was, if we’re not too embarrassed to say how long ago it was. Well, I think it was 19 98. I was beginning with the Center for Bioethical Reform, creating an office here in the Midwest. Of course, Greg Cunningham is the founder and I owe a debt of gratitude, as you do, Scott, to Greg’s fine work and pioneering the use of abortion. Absolutely. victim photography. And so I started raising support, went to a support raising seminar that you were putting on for other pro-life activists in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And of course, we could all say the rest is history because now what, I’m still in the fight, brother. Well, you know what’s interesting? We also did something else that weekend that you didn’t mention. We took a trip down to Gettysburg to go visit the battlefield. Every pro-life advocate I’ve taken to Gettysburg is still in the game. I’m beginning to think we need to establish a Gettysburg equipping center down there or something. But I wanted to bring you on the show for 2 reasons. Number one, I think you’re very effective at reading the landscape of where the pro-life movement is today and what needs to be done to right the ship, so to speak. But also, I wanted you to come on and talk about what you’re doing in particular to mentor the next generation of pro-life advocates. Because I think a lot of pro-life groups think only of the political cycle in front of them They don’t talk about what are we doing to help others. And there’s a third thing I want to talk to you about, and that is a real controversy. In fact, I want to begin with this, if you don’t mind. There’s a real controversy in some pro-lifers’ minds about what we do with the current presidential election. We all know Donald Trump is not what he was in 2016 or 20 20even on pro-life. If you watched his right to life march, the March for Life address he gave in 2020 on that cold January morning before the crazy of covid hit. You listen to a guy and you thought, boy, he’s got pro-life principles. He really believes this stuff. He seemed to articulate his pro-life convictions very well. Well, we now know that all has been thrown under or a large percentage of it is. And there are a number of pro-lifers. In fact, I’m looking at one post here from a pro-life leader that we both know. I won’t name him, but his argument is this. that for the pro-life movement to succeed, he says, Trump must lose. If Trump does not lose, the pro-life movement is done. What might you say to pro-lifers that share that kind of sentiment? Well, like you, Scott, I’d like to have a presidential candidate who is ideologically pro-life, that it’s a core issue of his. I don’t think Donald Trump was ever that. In fact, he was pro-choice before he became pro-life. But he’s a pragmatist. He knows who his friends are. He knows how to get elected. He took the pro-life position, maybe not because he believed it deeply in twenty sixteen and twenty. But it doesn’t matter to me, to be honest with you, if he is or not, whether he’s ideological or not. He delivered. He delivered by overturning Roe v. Wade, by putting 3 justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, something the pro-life movement has been working for for 50 years. We owe him a debt of gratitude for that. The fact that he has changed his position is purely pragmatic and political. He’s reading the political winds of the season. He’s seeing that in order to get elected, he has to soften his position on abortion. You may not like it. I don’t like it. But that’s just the fact of the matter. And that’s what we’ve got to deal with this time around. And this raises an interesting question that I think you’re uniquely qualified to answer. Why is he softening his position? What does that say about the strength of the pro-life movement? Well, I think a lot of other pro-life advocates would not agree with me on this. They would say we’re winning. You hear it all the time with some of the marketing coming from some of the mainstream groups. Even now, after an O for 8 in the constitutional amendments. I can tell you this, Scott, if Ryan Day at Ohio State went O for 8, He’d be fired by now. He’d be fired if he went over for. Yeah. So honestly, we deserve to be fired. You know, some of the leadership of the pro-life movement for for failing. But we are over 8. And I don’t know if it’s just marketing. I think people want to be on the positive side of things and want to paint a rosy picture because they feel like they can’t raise money, can’t recruit unless it’s a so-called winning issue. But the truth of the matter is we’re not winning. we’re losing and we’ve been losing for decades in public opinion. We might have been winning politically. We’ve been winning elections. We’ve been winning state houses, majorities of state houses, majority of governors are Republican, they’re pro-life. We’ve been winning. We won with Donald Trump getting into the White House and we won with Roe v. Wade politically. But in public opinion, You look at the polls over and over again. We are not moving the needle when it comes to abortion. If nothing else, we’re actually losing and the numbers are going up. I don’t know if you saw the most recent Gallup poll, but 69 percent of Americans believe abortion should be should be available, should be legal for most reasons. That’s a quantum leap. since the last time they took that poll, which is just a couple of years ago. So the truth of the matter is we are losing the culture. I don’t say that because I’m just a cynic, but I want to tell the truth. That should be a rallying cry to pro-life activists around the country to get back to the business of changing hearts and minds. Well, I’m reminded of what Alan Keyes told the movement back in 1995 96. We don’t have money problems. We have moral problems. And the moral problem we have right now is the culture does not agree with pro-lifers that the unborn are members of the human family. And it does not agree with pro-lifers that moral truths are objective, real and knowable. And we’ve been skirting along as if somehow our only problem is how we sell what we’re about, that it’s a personality thing. No, it’s a worldview thing. And we’ve got to start addressing that or we lose long term. Given that worldview problem we face, how would you speak to the pro-life voter who says, I don’t want to vote for Trump? I’m not going to vote for him because he’s really no different than Kamala Harris. Is that accurate for them to say that? No, it’s not accurate. I mean, anybody that would evaluate their positions on abortion would see that there’s a stark difference between the 2 of them. You may not like Donald Trump’s view on abortion right now, but they are night and day when it comes to what they would do if they were to get in office. would likely continue to nominate to the federal judiciary pro-life and constitutional justices, period. We know that. He did it with the Supreme Court. If you want the courts to be loaded with leftists, Marxists, and pro-abortion advocates, vote for Harris. Executive orders, the administrative state, if you will, he can do a lot with that. He may not be strong on the bully pulpit, so to speak, but he’s going to be a heck of a lot better than Kamala Harris, who every time she almost speaks, the word abortion comes out and she wants to be the abortion czar. Right. So I don’t think there’s any question who’s the better candidate. Which would be fine if she were as effective as an abortion czar as she was the border czar. Exactly. But I think she’ll get the abortion one done. I’m afraid so. We know where her heart is. Because she was the first candidate, I guess sitting vice president, to visit an abortion clinic. I mean, this is a hardcore issue for her. So I don’t think there’s any question that there’s a big difference between the 2. I don’t like Donald Trump’s current position on abortion. any more than any other pro-lifer does. But it’s a binary choice. We used to say we have to vote for the lesser of 2 evils. I think this time around we need to just vote to lessen evil. That’s enough for me. Amen. That’s it right there. It’s first class arsonist versus second class fireman. And I’m going to go with the second class fireman and hope he can do better. That’s exactly right. Now, it seems to me, Mark, we’ve got 2 types of people who claim to be pro-life that are opposing Trump. We have the predictable voices from people like evangelicals for Harris, pro-life evangelicals for Biden, like we saw in 20 20. And the David French’s of the world. Yeah, exactly. And we get the David French’s of the world that and the Russell Moore’s maybe who say, hey, listen, we’re going to endorse Harris as French has done. I don’t know that Russell Moore has, but French has endorsed Harris. And here’s his argument. We have got to purify the Republican Party and get rid of all the Trumpsters. We’ve got to purify the pro-life movement and get it focused on the right principles. And my problem with that is this. He is willing to trade babies lives as poker chips in hopes that there’ll be this idealized future where everything will be perfect. Mark, that may not happen in our lifetimes or ever. In fact, I would argue politics is never about perfection. It’s always, as Lincoln reminded us, the art of the possible. And Christians always have to face this troubling tension between our ideals that we must never compromise and the political realities on the ground. And an example I like to use is if you were a member of the Continental Congress and a Christian in Would you have voted for the Declaration of Independence, even though the language was stripped from the document that condemned slavery? And if you answer yes, well, then you’ve just ruled out any kind of incremental approach being evil in principle. You recognize that there are realities on the ground we have to live with, and you have to do the greatest good, and as you put it accurately, lessen evil as much as we can, given the hand we’ve been dealt. And my contention is, Mark, our movement is not strong enough to command perfection. We’re not going to get it. In fact, it used to be in the 19 eighties and nineties. We heard, oh, there’s a silent majority out there that agrees with us. There is no silent majority. Actually, there is one. And it’s against us, not for us. If there is one at all, it’s not on our side. It’s on the other side. Yeah. With that in mind, let’s talk about Florida for a moment, because there’s a very important amendment coming up in November there, Amendment 4. Issue one in Ohio taught us some very key lessons that some pro-lifers have not learned. What are some of the lessons out of Ohio that we need to keep in mind as we approach future states that are going to have these same amendments come up? Yeah, it’s a great question. I lived through it here in Ohio. The day that Roe was overturned, we celebrated for one day. It seemed like the pro-life movement celebrated for an entire year. But the pro-abortion folks were already starting to talk about a constitutional amendment to be put on the ballot in November of 20 23. And so we organized and a coalition came together. And for the most part, we stuck together. And I decided early on, Scott, that I was going to stay within the coalition, work within it, despite the fact that I had some major disagreements with the direction it was going and with some of the messaging. And my friend, they all know this. I mean, it’s easy to say that now, but in the midst of it all, I was fighting very hard to make it about the main thing when the other side makes it about the main thing, which is abortion. Everybody knows it’s about abortion except the pro-lifers. who want to try to float these side issues, and as important as they are, whether it be parental rights or women’s health regulations and restrictions on abortion clinics, and so forth and so on. And you might be able to to, you know, move a point here, move a point there with those. But if we don’t win on the issue of abortion, what good is it? I mean, to be honest, I mean, long term, we’re going to lose if we don’t make it about the moral question of abortion. So I focused on abortion independently, created equal, made a one of many ads, but the one ad that performed the best here in Ohio amongst all the vote no ads, including the ones that the coalition put together. That ad that shows Claire Caldwell, who is a survivor of an actual late-term abortion, juxtaposed next to an empty chair representing her twin sibling who died. That ad performed the best. And we have been talking to coalitions around the country to try to change the messaging to talk about abortion. And there are some that have taken us up on this. But I have to say some of the messaging come out of states like Florida tells me that they have not learned from the past. And unfortunately, we might be repeating some of the same results. I hope that’s not the case. We’re going to fight like heck in Florida to win. But it looks like we have not learned from them from the past so far. Yes. And we have to win in Florida because there’s a sixty percent threshold there. The pro abortionists have to get 60 percent of the vote if they can pass it in a deep red state with a sixty percent threshold. It’s devastating to our side. It is. Not only to our movement. I mean, it’s devastating to our movement because it’s discouraging and disheartening and demoralizing. But it means more babies are going to die, friends. I mean, Florida will become a massive, it already is, a massive destination state from states like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, other places where there are more restrictions on abortion. People are going to be flooding the state of Florida. So that means more babies are going to die. Yeah, devastating, no doubt about it. This is why our organization, in partnership with Apologetics Inc., produced a series of short videos, very short, the longest one is two and a half minutes, designed to be shown in churches at the conclusion of a worship service. And we’re going to put links to these videos. In fact, we’re going to do a whole show on this podcast about those videos coming up. But I am so troubled that we are not talking about abortion. And this is not a new thing, Mark. You know, churches went through a phase in the late eighties, early nineties, where everything was about marketing. We made church growth about marketing. How do we reach that precious seeker that’s out there became the question. So we jazzed up our music. We’ve got fog machines instead of, of an organ and hymns. And we’ve got a bad music that, that, You know, if you care about theology, it makes you want to vomit. And we’ve got bad preaching that doesn’t get to the core of what the biblical message is, all in hopes of reaching this precious seeker that they might like us enough to bless us enough to come to church. When the biblical model is the church is about equipping believers to go do the work out in the field. Yeah. But we have flipped that equation and the pro-life movement followed suit. In the 19 nineties, we had Swope’s article, Abortion, a Failure to Communicate, which was all about how we need to stop talking about the babies and talk more about how abortion is not in a woman’s own self-interest. In other words, let’s go ahead and adopt the relativistic worldview that brought us abortion in the first place and make it all subjective. It’s awful thinking. And yet this is what we see again and again and again. And I went to a major pro-life group’s website this week. I won’t name them, but this group is a big player. And when you go to their website now, above the fold on the website, here’s what you read. Here is the message that greets you right when you go to their page. Life, the other choice. Excuse me? You’re going to make it morally equivalent, abortion and choosing life as being morally equivalent, the other choice? This is the kind of language that just kills our movement and drives me up the wall. Yeah, and we’ve gotten away with it, so to speak, for 50 years because our political side of things kind of kept things at a status quo. But that’s all changed. The hens are coming back to roost, if you will. Public opinion’s not on our side. And I tell people, if we don’t make it about the moral question of abortion, we might as well fold up our tents and go home. Because what’s the point here? Honestly. I’m working to protect unborn children in law. To get there, I understand there’s a heavy lift, and we’ve got to take the long view, generally, and that means you’ve got to work your way through culture, through the institutions, and you do that one person at a time. There’s just no easy route. And I think a lot of people are looking for an easy way to eke out the next political victory, all the while caving to culture. We’re just slowing down our decay and the rate at which we go over the cliff if we go that direction. So I’ve been sounding the alarm ever since we lost in Ohio. We’ve got to get back to the business of going out into the streets, into the culture, raising up the next generation. And that’s the only way it can be done. We are getting some interest. Like we weren’t before, I’ll say this, Scott, there are more people reevaluating tactics than ever before. And this is a good thing. I don’t want us to lose in order for people to wake up, frankly, because I know that leads to more babies being killed. But I’m happy to see that people are starting to reevaluate things. And and that’s a good thing. And we’re getting audiences where we weren’t used to getting them before. People are starting to look at what we’re doing and say, hey, what you do works. What can we do to do it here? One of the things you do that is just very laudable is you equip students. And one of the ways you do that is you have a very effective intern program. Say a little bit about what that is, what its goals and objectives are, and how people can get in touch with that. Yeah, it’s kind of a pathway. We take them on a justice ride, which is where we hire 2 or 3 busloads, charter buses, and we load it with young people. We go down to the state of Florida during spring break, And we go to the college campuses who are in session, and it’s kind of their introduction. From that, we recruit interns, generally speaking, who will spend a summer with us, not just classroom training, as we all know is very important to fill their heads with the right information, but to give them opportunity to actually use it. And the only way they use it is to be put in front of people that disagree with them. So we seek those kind of people out. Right. And that’s the kind of training that leads to the type of people that are actually going to make a difference and willing to do hard things like actually talking to people who disagree. So that our internship is both classroom training and and boots on the ground, you know, street activism, college outreach. And that’s what we’re doing to recruit the next generation to come on staff or to go out and work for other organizations or be a volunteer in their own community. So we’re very committed to the next generation of leaders. That’s the future of the movement. We’ve got to reach them. We ought to have the long view. You know, for too long, I think people have been content for, hey, let’s have a big conference at the March for Life and we’re good. And we can just tell everybody, hey, you’re the generation that’s going to end abortion and we’re good. No, we’ve got to train these students. We’ve got to get foot soldiers in the game. They’ve got to know the apologetics. They need to understand the political world. They need to understand the worldview assumptions people bring to this. And without that, we’re not going to win long term. Yeah, I agree. And again, our movement is made up of the pastoral, right, which is much of the pregnancy resource end of the movement, the service side, the political, as we’ve already spoken to. But also, what about the prophetic, the truth tellers? We need truth tellers, and unfortunately, we haven’t focused on that most recently because we’ve been satisfied with the political advances. Well, that’s no longer the case, friends. We’re going to tell the truth, and people need to know what happens to a child during an abortion and why this is something that we cannot, as a culture, accept unless we’re going to see the demise of our nation. So we’re recruiting. We’ve got a lot of people coming next summer. And we also have other opportunities for them. But if they’re interested, they just go to createdequal.org and they can sign up. It’s createdequal.org. Take note of that, everybody. I will tell you, you and Protect Life Michigan, I think, are the 2 most effective student recruitment groups out there. and really giving students the training they need. I applaud you for it. CBR is another one that’s taken people out on campus and really happy for their work, your work and what you’re doing. And thank you, Mark. You’re a beacon of light in an otherwise dark world. It’s great to be a fellow foot soldier with you and look forward to working together with you as we keep our eyes on the prize here. Amen, Scott. And let’s pray for November fifth and early voting, because this is going to be a big election, both on the presidential end of things or even in the constitutional amendments. Win or lose on November 6, we wake up, we strap our boots on and we go back to work. And that’s the work of changing hearts and minds and articulating a coherent, logical, pro-life worldview. Preach it, brother. Right on with you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, everybody, for watching today and for hearing what my friend Mark had to say. If you have not already liked us on social media, please do. And if you haven’t gotten a copy of the new edition of the Case for Life, the second edition, as I’ve shown you before, it’s over twice as thick as the old one. This is not a mere recover design. I hate it when I buy a new edition and basically I got some new artwork and just dropped 55 bucks. Not going to happen with this book, I promise you. first, it doesn’t cost 55 bucks. And secondly, it’s got a lot of new material. I encourage you to get a copy. Visit us at Scott Klusendorf dot com for that. Or you can also enroll in our pro-life apologetics course where we teach many of the principles that Mark is equipping his students with. In fact, I’d like to say that Mark steals some of my great ideas, but I steal as much from him as he does for me. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, you give me some credit. It’s a small thing, brother. It is. It’s just a small thing. It is a small thing. There it is. That’s an inside joke. We’ll go into that another time. But anyway, thank you for joining us today on The Case for Life. And we look forward to seeing you the next time we meet.