Politics & Power Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo’s line isn’t trying to adjudicate abortion; it’s trying to map the political psychology of white evangelical America with the calm authority of an insider. The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “I think” softens the claim, a pastor’s hedge that signals conversation rather than decree. “The real place” suggests that other flashpoints - taxes, guns, secularism, LGBTQ rights - are either downstream effects or convenient rhetoric. He’s narrowing the sprawling “values voter” narrative to one moral absolute that, for many evangelicals, functions like a partisan litmus test.

The subtext is strategic and slightly chastening: if abortion is the primary obstacle, then evangelical allegiance to Republicans isn’t the full-spectrum “biblical worldview” brand it’s often marketed as. It’s a single issue with outsized gravitational pull, strong enough to reorder priorities and excuse contradictions. Campolo, long associated with progressive evangelicalism, is also implicitly telling Democrats where they lose the room. Not on faith language, not even on “family values” as a broad category, but on the one policy area that has been framed as life-and-death sin.

Context matters: from Roe onward, abortion became the organizing engine that fused evangelical identity to the GOP, especially after the late-1970s political mobilization of the Religious Right. Campolo’s intent is diagnostic - maybe even invitational. If you want to talk about evangelical-Democratic estrangement, start where the moral nerve endings are, not where campaign consultants prefer the debate to live.