At Louisiana State University it can be hard to distinguish between the fraternity houses and the churches. Both tend to have southern columns and big porches, and both are bustling with college kids. The priest in a cassock chatting on his phone outside eventually gave it away. I drove onto the campus on a sweaty Tuesday evening in May and soon found myself drinking tea in the free pop-up coffee shop at Christ the King Catholic Church. When I told the crew of students around me that I was there to learn about the future of the pro-life movement, they insisted I stay for dinner.

Between bites of corn (there was no vegetarian entree option for your hungry correspondent—it was Sunday sauce or nothing), I learned about the Christian camping trips they had planned for July, how they found Christ as wandering teens and the stress over choosing the right major. In the room of at least 200 students, they told me, most were anti-abortion. The church had run outings for students to pray outside the sole abortion clinic in Baton Rouge before it closed last summer; the boys at the next table over had all gone regularly and said that seeing the women lined up made them “pray better”.

Throughout the night I learned that these young people’s hopes for America are quite out of step with most people their age. Many are abstinent, and some have tried to convince their non-devout friends to throw away their birth-control pills. As I wrote about this week, they see no sense in carving out rape and incest exceptions in Louisiana’s total abortion ban. The toppling of Roe v Wade a year ago, thus letting states outlaw abortion, was a huge moral win for them—some had prayed for it night after night and saw the Supreme Court decision as evidence that God was listening. Even so, many had a hard time reconciling it with the fact that women would be harmed by not being able to get an abortion and that their friends outside the church would mourn the change. 

When I asked about their politics—whether they favoured Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump as the Republican nominee—they shrugged. Most don’t follow that sort of stuff, and none was excited about any particular candidate. Even the soft-spoken student from Alabama who dreams of devoting his life to the anti-abortion cause has little interest in the goings-on in Washington. For him it's more about bringing the people he knows closer to Jesus, abiding by scripture and deepening his bond with God. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy play no role in that.  

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