Mike Collins, Abortion, and What Georgia Is Really Asking Christians
There is a moment in every political season when the mask slips. When the machinery of strategy becomes so loud it drowns out everything else — including conscience. That moment has arrived in Georgia.
Mike Collins, the Republican Senate candidate in one of the most watched races in the country, has found himself at the center of a revealing tension. Not just a political one. A moral one. Donald Trump, according to reporting, questioned whether Collins could win Georgia given his abortion stance. The concern was not theological. It was electoral. The worry was not whether Collins was right. It was whether he was winnable.
And there, in that distinction, is everything Christians need to pay attention to.
When Electability Becomes the New Morality
Politics has always had its own internal logic. Parties calculate. Strategists triangulate. Candidates are nudged toward positions that poll well, softened on positions that don't, and sometimes quietly pressured to abandon convictions that might cost them swing voters in a purple state.
This is not new. But something has shifted. The pressure is no longer coming only from the secular left. It is now coming from within the coalition that once made the protection of unborn life its defining cause. The suggestion that a candidate's pro-life conviction is a liability — floated not by opponents but by allies — marks a significant moment in American political history.
For Christians, it raises an uncomfortable question: What happens when the political home that once championed your values begins to see those values as a problem to manage?
"We must obey God rather than men." — Acts 5:29
Peter said those words before a council that had the power to imprison him. He said them because there are moments when the faithful have no other honest option. The principle does not demand that Christians be politically reckless. But it does demand that they hold something higher than the preferences of those in power — even those in power on their side.
The Unborn Are Not a Bargaining Chip
The pro-life position, properly understood, is not a policy preference. It is a confession. It confesses that human life, at every stage, bears the image of God — the imago Dei — and that this image confers worth that no court ruling, no trimester chart, and no electoral map can revoke.
Genesis 1:27 is not a political platform. It is a declaration about the nature of reality. And when Christians vote, they are not simply pulling a lever for a team. They are rendering a public judgment about what they believe to be true and good and worth protecting.
To treat the unborn as a negotiable issue — to quietly soften a candidate's position to capture more moderate voters — is not pragmatism. It is a category error. It applies market logic to a question that belongs to a different order entirely.
The children in the womb are not a constituency to be weighed against another constituency. They are human beings made in the image of God who cannot speak for themselves. The church has always been called to speak for those who cannot.
Georgia, Stakes, and the Temptation of the Winnable
Georgia is not just any state. It has become a kind of bellwether — a place where the future of the Senate, and by extension the direction of significant policy, often hangs in the balance. That weight is real. Anyone who dismisses the stakes is not paying attention.
But high stakes do not transform moral compromise into wisdom. They intensify the temptation. They make the rationalizations sound more reasonable. We need the seat. We need the majority. We can do more good from a position of power than from one of principled defeat.
Christians have heard this argument before. It has a long history. And it has a long history of producing exactly the kind of moral drift it promised to prevent.
When winning becomes the supreme value, the things you were winning for slowly become negotiable. First they are softened. Then they are deferred. Then they disappear — not because anyone decided to abandon them, but because the logic of winning quietly consumed them.
Proverbs 14:12 speaks with precision here: "There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death." Electoral calculation dressed in the language of effectiveness is not automatically wrong. But it must be tested. Hard. And when it asks you to compromise on the lives of the most vulnerable, it has failed the test.
Faithfulness Is Not the Same as Effectiveness
One of the most dangerous ideas that has entered the evangelical imagination over the past generation is the equation of faithfulness with effectiveness. The notion that God is most honored when His people are most successful — by whatever metric the surrounding culture uses to measure success.
Scripture tells a different story. The prophets were largely ineffective by electoral standards. Jeremiah preached for decades and saw virtually no political fruit. John the Baptist named the immorality of those in power and lost his head for it. The early church did not take Rome by winning office. It changed the world by holding to truth when holding to truth was costly.
This does not mean Christians should be indifferent to outcomes. Wisdom cares about consequences. But there is a line — a bright, clear line — between prudent strategy and moral surrender. And that line runs directly through the question of whether unborn human life is worth protecting even when protecting it is politically inconvenient.
What Faithfulness Actually Looks Like
So what does it look like, practically, for a Christian in Georgia — or anywhere — when the political math starts to conflict with pro-life conviction?
It looks like refusing to let the party set the ceiling of your moral imagination. It looks like holding candidates accountable not only to platforms but to the principles those platforms claimed to represent. It looks like praying with more urgency than you strategize, and strategizing only within the bounds of what you are willing to honestly defend before God.
It looks like resisting the seduction of the argument that says we can accomplish more from inside — because that argument has no natural stopping point. It will always find another compromise to justify, another position to soften, another conviction to park for later.
And it looks like remembering that the measure of the church's fidelity has never been the outcome of an election. It has been the courage with which the church held to what was true when holding to it cost something.
The Georgia Senate race will end. A winner will be declared. The news cycle will move on. But the question underneath the race — whether the value of human life is something Christians will defend even when their own political coalition finds it inconvenient — that question does not move on. It remains. It sharpens. It waits for an answer.
"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy." — Proverbs 31:8–9
The church does not hold this calling because it wins elections. It holds this calling because it is true. Because the image of God is real. Because every life — especially the most defenseless — belongs to Him.
That is the conviction Mike Collins is being asked to soften. That is the conviction Christians in Georgia, and everywhere, must decide whether to hold.
The ballot is temporary. The truth is not.