Earlier this month, Adam Calabrese, director of the Civics + Culture ministry at Chattanooga’s Calvary Chapel, contacted a church email list with an “urgent request.”
He said he was writing from a policy conference in Nashville, where he was briefed on recent changes to the Republican Party platform.
“To be honest,” he wrote, “I could not be more disappointed.”
Mainly, Calabrese objected to the party’s moderated stance on abortion — which it had for decades spoken against with forceful, moral conviction. But he also noted that anti-abortion advocates were excluded from the high-level discussions that shaped the document, which proposed to represent the party’s core political aspirations.