A Biblical Response to Cancel Culture
Abby Johnson? Joe Rogan? Mark Driscoll?
Hi! I’m Claire Swinarski and this is my newsletter on issues affecting women and the church. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:
Let’s get into it, shall we?
I only recently had the realization of just how much Abby Johnson has influenced my life.
Abby Johnson, the Texas pro-life loudmouth, with the big hair and the big ideas and the big family. It was Unplanned that a FOCUS missionary loaned me in college, and I stayed up and read it in one single night. It was the first time I had really read the perspective of abortion from a woman who’d had one. It was the first time I heard a pro-life person say women are suffering, and we need to care for them.
I then heard Abby Johnson speak at a pro-life rally, about working at Planned Parenthood, explaining their “3%” bullshit in a way that infuriated me. She helped me understand why that hot pink industry is so back-breakingly harmful.
She called herself a feminist! She was a Catholic convert!
Early on in the Catholic Feminist, when we were a podcast and I lived in the world’s teensiest apartment while my husband was in grad school and I was editing people’s resumes for fifty bucks a pop, I reached out to Abby Johnson on a total whim. She said yes to appearing on the show, and she shared it on her mega-popular Facebook page, giving us a huge boost in popularity when we were just getting started. She owed me absolutely nothing. There was ZERO benefit to her for doing this—it’s not like she was “getting her name out there” on what was at the time, a miniscule show. And let me tell you a secret: now that the Catholic Feminist isn’t miniscule, I am asked to go on teensy-tiny podcasts all the time and I rarely say yes. It’s just hard, for me to give you an hour of time with no kids in the background, and I have a million work projects at any given time, and recording in the evenings means one less night sitting on the couch reading opposite my husband. Those are precious hours and I am so, so stingy with them in a way that Abby Johnson was not.
The pro-life movement has changed in massive ways in the past five short years. I’m not sure how often people really acknowledge that. What was once a fringe idea—that of a pro-life feminist—is now extremely popular. We recently posted a letter on what the pro-life movement needs and there you will find calls for entangling the movement with other social justice causes, demands for long-term motherhood care, requests for authentic women’s health clinics. That’s the language of the pro-life movement today. Abby Johnson is not a revelation. But it would be a lie to say she wasn’t one of the mothers of this school of pro-life thought, at least in the public square.
So I was heartbroken. I was sad, you guys, just sad, when she said and did things I didn’t agree with. I was upset with the video where she said police should racially profile her son, just as much as you were. I can simultaneously believe that the medical establishment is not to be trusted while being very annoyed when non-scientists pressure others into medical decisions. I don’t like her constant affiliation with Fr. Frank Pavone, who’s said more terrible things than I have time to type here. I think when she tweets about the LGBTQ community, she gives into stereotypes and speaks without charity. I mean—she said she’s in favor of single family voting. It’s hard to even take it all seriously, at this point, instead of just feeling like she’s crossed some line into hardcore political tribalism.
And that’s all the public stuff. I’ve been involved in the wider pro-life community for about a decade now, and I’ve heard far too many stories of things done in private. Hurtful DMs and friendships broken; stories that aren’t mine to tell but stories that have left a firm feeling of hurt in my heart.
So why, so many people have asked, haven’t I deleted our episode with Abby Johnson?