Recap: SPL’s 2024 Trivia Night

On May 18, we hosted Secular Pro-Life’s 2nd annual trivia night outside St. Louis, Missouri. It was fantastic.

SPL’s primary mission is to advance secular arguments against abortion. But our mission includes two additional parts: make space for non-traditional (especially non-religious) pro-life people, and build interfaith coalitions (people of any faith or no faith) to work together toward the first two aims.

Our trivia night is all about making space and building bridges. It’s also, of course, a fundraising event. And this year’s trivia night scored well on all of these fronts.

We did, in fact, make money.

Thanks to the generosity of our organizational and private individual sponsors, we were able to cover the costs of the event itself (for example, rental fees, drinks and snacks, printing costs, etc) and the costs of staff hours to put the event together, allowing every seat, silent auction bid, and raffle ticket purchase to go toward funding and furthering SPL’s mission. We are very grateful to our sponsors for your support.

We strengthened our coalition.

SPL’s trivia night is a wonderful bridge building event. This year I was honored that we had in attendance representatives from major pro-life organizations, including friends and colleagues from:

• Birthright St. Charles (a pregnancy resource center)
• Choose Life Marketing
• Missouri Right to Life
• Support After Abortion
• ThriVe (another pregnancy resource center)
• Vitae Foundation

Many pro-life fundraisers are formal, somewhat serious events, frequently with strong Christian and politically conservative themes. We designed SPL’s trivia night to be none of that. It’s nonpartisan, nonsectarian, casual, lighthearted, and entertaining. Our MC creates the trivia questions to be funny and gimmicky, meant to be accessible to people who aren’t necessarily hardcore trivia buffs.

(Yes, the Periodic Table might look intidimating but it’s really just a code-cracking game. Can you figure out the words that these elemental symbols spell? My favorite was “Praseodymium Oxygen Lithium Iron”).

And it seemed to work. People were cheering and laughing out loud. A whole lot of them filled out our post event survey with remarks such as

• “MC was awesome! Lots of energy and fun!”
• “Fun evening — really really nice people”
• “MC was GREAT! Well run, and well organized.”
• “Trivia questions were fun, funny, and clever!”
• “Wonderful fun evening, very entertaining.”

SPL’s trivia night not only gets pro-life activists and pro-life “civilians” in the same place at the same time, but does so in a context where they can relax and laugh together. We’re strengthening professional relationships, yes–and also friendships.

We plugged in more “alt” pro-lifers.

There were many wonderful aspects of the evening. At one point we live auctioned a donated gift basket, and people were hilariously invested in who would win the item. We also had a big number-one-shaped balloon we moved from table to table as different teams held first place throughout the night. Our judges announced third, second, and first place after each round and then banged the SPL gavel (as I have now dubbed it). And I got to talk in front of a crowd, one of my very favorite past times.

But pretty easily my favorite part of the event was the number of SPL supporters who traveled from all over to be together. We had people drive to eastern Missouri from as far as Kansas, Ohio, and even Alabama. I finally got to meet in person some of our most crucial volunteers, as well as pro-life atheists who have come to us more recently (last 6-12 months). (The center picture in the collage at the beginning of this post is Ben, a pro-life atheist who drove 9 hours to be with us for trivia night. Made my night.)

Most importantly, before the merriment commenced, one of our supporters spoke briefly about why Secular Pro-Life means so much to her. An excerpt:

In March of 2023 I found out that I was unexpectedly pregnant and I was terrified. … But a couple months before that, Monica had given a speech at the March for Life where she said that I had value before I was born. And so did you. And so do your children. And that really stuck with me. And I knew that, however I felt, I didn’t have the right to decide that my daughter didn’t deserve to live.

Her speech was especially powerful because she was baby wearing her 5 month old daughter the entire time she spoke. You can watch the full speech here:

And when she was done, she sat at a hodge podge table with other SPL people who traveled from wide and far, and they bonded over ridiculous trivia questions, later connected on social media, and are now further drawn into SPL’s work. See? This is how we get you!

Can’t wait until next year.

For those of you who joined us in person and those of you who supported us from afar, thank you, thank you. I’m already daydreaming of how we will set up the 2025 trivia night. Hope to see you there!

If you appreciate our work and would like to help, one of the most effective ways to do so is to become a monthly donor. You can also give a one time donation here or volunteer with us here.