How Culture Got to the Point Where Saturday Night Live is Promoting Abortion in a Clown Outfit
This weekend, Saturday Night Live cast member Cecily Strong played a character called Goober the Clown who had an abortion when she was 23 and now talks to people about how normal abortion is in between clown jokes.
Goober explains that itâs a âroughâ subject, so she does fun clown stuff to make it more âpalatable.â In the context of her skit, saying that itâs a rough subject wasnât a tacit admission that abortion is in some way wrong; it was a condemnation of those who make it rough to talk about because they have a problem with it.
If you can stomach it, you can watch the 4 minute clip here.
Yes, the intentional killing of preborn babies has become fodder for a comedy skitâsomething literally worth clowning around about.
Every single one of us should be asking how on earth we, as a culture, have arrived at such a moment.
If weâre not asking that question, weâve become completely desensitized to evil.
In one sense, the question of how we got âhereâ is a complex one worth hundreds of pages of historical, philosophical, political, and theological history. (And if youâre looking for something of that nature, I can think of no better resource than Carl Truemanâs The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.)
But in another sense, the question is far more straightforward when you understand the nature of the secular worldview that dominates our culture.
In Chapter 8 of my upcoming book Faithfully Different: Regaining Biblical Clarity in a Secular Culture, I talk about âReaffirming Biblical Morality (Under the Pressure of Secular Virtue Signaling).â As I explain in that chapter, there are a lot of nuances to what people popularly call âvirtue signaling,â but my objective was quite simple: to take the moral statements people and institutions publicly make at face value and assume 1) they truly believe the position theyâre stating is the morally good position to have, and 2) they believe thereâs some kind of value in stating that position publicly (otherwise they wouldnât have bothered to say anything at all).
What I show is that these bare bones aspects of virtue signaling play an important role in promoting the secular moral consensus over and against a biblical view of morality.
To do that, I break down the psychological process of moral buy-in that secular culture must go through to gain acceptance of a changed moral position: awareness, normalization, then celebration.
While in the chapter I take a more detailed look at each stage, for my current purpose I just want to highlight key points for understanding the normalization part of the process. Goober the Clown clearly wanted us to all feel just how normal abortion is with her skit, and itâs important to understand just how culturally strategicâand predictableâthat is.
The focus on portraying abortion as normal and therefore good is no accident.
Why is normalization in particular so important for gaining secular moral buy-in?
As I explain in chapter 8, âTo understand why, we need to return to three of our secular worldview foundations [discussed earlier in Faithfully Different]: Feelings are the ultimate guide, happiness is the ultimate goal, and judging is the ultimate sin. On the one hand, secularism is all about the individual defining their own journey. On the other hand, if thereâs a negative prevailing societal judgment about the morality of certain choices, it can make people question the validity of their journeyâŠwhether they want that gut check or not. Yes, the secular ideal is to live in a self-contained judgment-free zone, but when the reality is that thereâs a holy God who defines morality and gives humankind an inner sense of right and wrong, there will be a battle fought with the conscience.
Through virtue signalingâpublicly proclaiming the moral good of an actionâpeople are fighting this inner battle in the public sphere.
The battle commonly takes three steps.
1. Publicly proclaim that the action leads to the holy secular grail of happiness (if it makes you happy, how could it possibly be wrong?). For those who believe that happiness is the ultimate goal, it makes a powerful statement to juxtapose a morally questionable action with the achievement of secularismâs greatest good. Abortion, for example, is commonly portrayed as the means through which a woman became free to happily pursue the life she wanted and the goals she had.
2. Proclaim it with as many people as possible to demonstrate that thereâs no shame in the action (if everyoneâs willing to tell the world theyâve done it, clearly thereâs nothing to be ashamed of). Hereâs perhaps the most important thing you can take away from this article: Given that secularism doesnât defer to an objective higher authority, the closest thing it has to a moral standard is the popular consensus. Read that again multiple timesâitâs the key to understanding a vast array of activism we see today. Increasing the number of people who share a positive moral judgment of an action is a proxy for transforming that action into a moral good for those who otherwise have no objective, external standard. Goober the Clown talks about how once a woman goes out on a limb in a social group to say sheâs had an abortion, several more will say, âMe too!â The message is clear, and it sounds like something out of a bad 1980âs commercial portraying peer pressure to do drugs: âEverybodyâs doing it, so itâs fine if you do, too.â
3. Remind everyone that life is all about self-authority anyway. Sure, youâve shown itâs possible to justify your moral choice in steps 1 and 2, but this reminds people you never really had to anyway. Goober the Clown says right up front that it should all just be part of her âclown business,â but people keep talking about it, so she has to as well.
Normalization is ultimately a process of publicly signaling to society that an action is so commonplace, itâs unnecessarily taboo. Normal is the social validation secularism needs to minimize conflict with the conscience.
Perhaps nowhere has that been so on display as in this skit. If we can show that a subject is so unnecessarily taboo that we can discuss it in a clown outfit, surely it must not be a bad thing⊠right?
Christians, donât be surprised. Secular culture will undoubtedly continue to âclown aroundâ with evil. Itâs actually quite predictable.
Itâs the modus operandi for suppressing truth in unrighteousness.
Recommended resources related to the topic:
The Case for Christian Activism (MP3 Set), (DVD Set), and (mp4 Download Set) by Frank Turek
Legislating Morality: Is it Wise? Is it Legal? Is it Possible? by Frank Turek (Book)
Defending Absolutes in a Relativistic World (Mp3) by Frank Turek
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Natasha Crain is a blogger, author, and national speaker who is passionate about equipping Christian parents to raise their kids with an understanding of how to make a case for and defend their faith in an increasingly secular world. She is the author of two apologetics books for parents: Talking with Your Kids about God (2017) and Keeping Your Kids on Godâs Side (2016). Natasha has an MBA in marketing and statistics from UCLA and a certificate in Christian apologetics from Biola University. A former marketing executive and adjunct professor, she lives in Southern California with her husband and three children.
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