In 2009, journalist Bill Bishop sounded the alarm in a book titled The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart. Increasingly, Bishop observed, Americans “sorting themselves” into “alarmingly homogenous communities,” with people choosing to move in neighborhoods where they could live alongside likeminded people. According to Bishop, this has created a country that has become “so ideologically inbred that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away.”
If anything, this trend has escalated since Bishop’s book was published – although I think this “sorting” is both inevitable and necessary. In the final chapter of my recent book How We Got Here: A Guide to Our Anti-Christian Culture, I not only advocate for Christians to create “thick,” intentional communities where they can live out their values and pass them on to their children, but profile a number of them, including Moscow, Idaho; Steubenville, Ohio, and other, similar communities. If Christians want to resist the mainstream, anti-Christian culture, we must create robust subcultures.
That sorting has escalated with the fall of Roe v. Wade and the rise of the transgender movement. Twenty-six states have banned “sex change” surgeries for minors; other states, such as California, have declared themselves a “sanctuary” for gender-confused youth seeking transgender interventions, where parents can flee to obtain the “sex changes” for their children. This is ripped some families apart in horrifying ways, with the pro-transgender parent taking the gender dysphoric child across state lines to California to “transition” him or her while the other parent looks on in helpless desperation. Transgender policies are driving people’s choices of where to live.
According to CBS News, the same thing is true with abortion. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, “thousands of Americans in parts of the U.S. with strict abortion bans are deciding to leave those states, new research finds.” According to CBS:
Following the Dobbs decision, the 13 states with strict abortion bans, from Alabama to West Virginia, collectively lost a net 36,000 residents per quarter, meaning the difference between the number of people leaving the states versus those migrating in, according to the analysis from economists at Georgia Institute of Technology and The College of Wooster and published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The analysis, which is based on change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service, found that the state impact is larger among single-person households, which may suggest that younger people are moving out of abortion-banning states at a higher rate than families.
This data, of course, does not account for the steady stream of people leaving California – which champions abortion – to Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis passed and successfully defended the Heartbeat Act. Some people, at least, are willing to put up with social conservative policies in exchange for economic opportunities. But in other states, such as Alabama, this “sort” will likely end in a net loss, with CBS gloating that “employers in states with bans may face challenges in attracting and retaining workers, especially young workers… the impact is significant enough that, over a five-year period, abortion-banning states could lose almost 1% of their population.”
In short, the fall of Roe has accelerated “the Big Sort.” Some Americans simply do not want to live in a state that protects the right to life of children in the womb. Others believe these children deserve protection, even if the state potentially faces a temporary economic setback as a result. Some Americans want to live in a pro-life state; others wish to live in an abortion regime. If the research accurately depicts the trend, this means that pro-life majorities in states with pro-life protections are likely to get stronger, which will be important as abortion activists challenge those protections in direct democracy initiatives.
There are some issues – such as the destruction and mutilation of children – upon which Americans simply cannot agree to disagree.
