I came across a reference to James Risen and Judy L. Thomas’s 1998 Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War in a recent article in the Weekly Standard . It’s a riveting account of the development of anti-abortion activism and extremism. It focuses a good deal of attention on the work of Operation Rescue from the late 1980s to its fracturing in the early 1990s. Its account of the internal squabbles in Operation Rescue makes for grim reading, and the authors conclude that the move to murdering abortion doctors in the early 1990s essentially ended activism. It’s still around, of course, as witnessed by the recent killing of George Tiller in May of this year; by and large, pro-life activism has withered.

That may be a tragedy, a sign that evangelical activists have retreated into the soft safety of middle class America. There’s another way to see it: Operation Rescue launched a prophetic appeal that was ignored; the rescues made it perfectly clear that the entire system defends abortion - police, courts, the Justice Department, and not just a slight majority of the Supreme Court. Through the protests, America was confronted with its systematic evils, and yawned. That does not leave one sanguine about the future prospects of the American system.