Serious historians credit my father, Francis Schaeffer, along with his friend Dr. C. Everett Koop, who became Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General, with founding the evangelical wing of the pro-life movement back in the 1970s and 80s with a film series that I wrote and directed called Whatever Happened to the Human Race. My father was a famous evangelical evangelist and theologian at the time; a household word in evangelical circles. And because he jumped in on the pro-life side, it became a thing.
And that thing led to eventually the MAGA movement. And that thing led to Donald Trump being elected president because he said he would reverse Roe v. Wade. And he has. So in that sense, we won.
Well, about forty years ago, I started to change my mind and I’m on the other side of the issue now. And I am pro-choice. But that’s a different story that I’ve written and talked about. But today I want to say something very different.
And that is what amazes me is that in a sense, Dr. Koop and my father Francis Schaeffer were correct, but not in the way they meant. The danger was not legalized abortion that would lead to inhumanity, dehumanization, and a kind of Brave New World scenario. That ironically is now coming to pass, not because of Planned Parenthood or pro-choice women or feminists. It’s coming to pass because of the tech bros like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and the others who, working with Tucker Carlson, JD Vance and others, are opening a door to genetic engineering on a scale the human race has never seen and that the fascists of the 1930s in Europe could have only dreamed of.
So look at the irony here. We—Francis Schaeffer, myself and Dr. C. Everett Koop—make a film series and a book that spreads through the evangelical community like wildfire and turns the pro-life battle into a litmus test. That in turn, many years later, puts Donald Trump in the White House when 83% of evangelicals vote for Trump, and the majority of those on the basis of the fact that he was a “pro-life” candidate.
Let’s take that at face value for a moment. How ironic that he is handing power now to the tech bros through JD Vance and Tucker Carlson and others in ways that we never could have imagined possible back in the 70s and the 80s because, of course, the technology of genetic engineering— in the way these people advocate openly now to perfect the human race, recreate it in their image, get rid of embryos that don’t test for high IQs and other genetic traits they want.
In the way Elon Musk has had babies with six or seven different women, thirteen, fourteen different children, whatever. The kind of genetic tests they advocate, along with this kind of Neuralink brain-chip implant type technology, the robotics that now Tesla is working on, etc., etc., etc., drone surveillance, lack of privacy, everything going into our computers and our laptops and our smartphones. A genuine Brave New World brought to us not by Planned Parenthood or pro-choice feminists, but brought to us by Trump’s people.
That JD Vance will further empower if and when he becomes president.
Think about the irony again. We helped put in place the MAGA movement—unintentionally, by the way; we didn’t know there would be MAGA—and therefore Donald Trump because of our pro-life stand. And yet, where are the pro-life community now rising up in holy horror and fighting the real battle at hand against these genetic-engineering types who want to perfect the human race and turn it into their own image?
I thought as Christians, we believed that the human race was created in God’s image. And now Peter Thiel and the other tech bros want to recreate it in their image and perfect the human race in ways that the dictators of the 20th century could have only dreamed of. And yet I don’t hear anything being said by the pro-life movement. Where’s Amy Coney Barrett, for instance, and the Roman Catholic members of the Supreme Court girding their loins to fight this battle—against the genetic engineers of the future, financed by these untouchable zillionaires who now rule our lives?
Where are the Roman Catholic bishops on this issue?
Conversely, where are the left-wing liberals, the kind of people who used to be on the left and were pro-choice but did not believe that the human race should be millionaires’ playthings, billionaires’ playthings, reengineered in their image?
Christians and the left could unite on this—one because we believe the human race was created in God’s image, and the other because they believe in freedom and choice that will be stripped by our new masters, not because of some authoritarian or totalitarian governmental intervention, but stripped before birth, because we humans will be engineered not in the image of God, but in the image of Peter Thiel, who is being empowered by, ironically, a convert to Catholicism—what kind of Catholicism that is—called JD Vance, and Tucker Carlson also, who speak in the name of religion and demonic warfare against principalities and powers, and yet are empowering a kind of authoritarian, future totalitarianism that is ripped from the pages of science fiction. Only now it’s not science fiction.
And so I want to leave you with that thought. I’ve spent the last 45 years or so trying to undo the damage I did by helping to start the evangelical anti-abortion movement, the anti-feminist movement. And now it turns out that Dr. C. Everett Koop, who became surgeon general, and my father Francis Schaeffer were right, but they weren’t right in the way they figured. They were right in a much deeper sense.
And that is: the true dehumanization of the human race won’t be some philosophical statement of dehumanization. It won’t be abortion. It’s going to be the actual re-engineering of these perfected babies coming out of Silicon Valley and these crazy groups that think they’re more intelligent than other people, who want to upload their brains to computers and live forever—other insane people. And we’re giving them the power through JD Vance and these others who are in their pocket. JD Vance is the creature of these people.
And what they’re doing is no more a lunatic enterprise than racial cleansing of the past. Play forward their scenario and the unintended consequences will blow up in our face, and you have a true apocalypse—one that, weirdly, my dad Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop saw coming. They just saw it coming from a direction that didn’t happen.
Planned Parenthood never was the enemy. But the tech bros are.
