Piper constructs elaborate, squirming abstracts to avoid saying anything negative about Trump by name.

Compare it to his full-throated condemnation of Obama over the course of earlier campaigns—because the clergy Obama associated with disagreed with Piper on culture-war topics. https://twitter.com/dukekwondc/status/1319288028171386882

The point here isn't to point out hypocrisy, rather it's to note the depth to which the religious right's warping of Christian cultural engagement around reproduction and sexuality has debased the church's role and voice.

Piper can barely bring himself to *obliquely* criticize the *kind* of person lies continually, cheats workers of their wages, puts children in cages to deliberately terrorize families, abuses the vulnerable, and a host of other sins.

He can't bring himself to clearly articulate the uncomfortable truth beneath his rhetorical hedges: abortion rates have declined precipitously under pro-abortion, Democratic presidents. Restrictive anti-abortion laws have not changed that trajectory.

They have only made access to health care for people *without the money to travel* more difficult.

The story of abortion restrictions being the tip of the spear in a fight for a "pro-life" culture has always been an ugly lie, and Piper's deep discomfort in the piece is telling.

America's fusion of Christian fundamentalism and right-reactionary politics has produced a culture where extrajudicial police murders are celebrated, bloody wars are cheered, and the needless deaths of the old and infirm are shrugged off *by the self-appointed defenders of life*.

Piper's column is a welcome, if lukewarm, gesture to that conflict. But he still pulls punches. Still retreats to the safety of pious generalities his followers will find palatable. He helped build this world, and if he's lost the stomach for it, he needs to face what he's made.