I grew up in a devout Catholic household. When we asserted that tolerance for abortion was conducive to a “culture of death,” we didn’t just mean that as “narrative truth.” We meant it literally. We bought the theory that said crime rates had been rising since the 60s and 70s because of lax sexual mores and a disregard for the value of human life.

As I got older, and began to look at the issue more critically, I realized that theory has a lot of holes in it. I also realized that if you performed a comparative analysis of jurisdictions with and without legal abortion access, you found no significant correlation (in fact a slight negative one) between the tolerance of abortion and violent crime.

That’s just one example. We could talk about others. For example, “stand your ground” laws are supported by folks whose assumptions about human nature you might characterize as a species of “narrative truth,” but those assumptions are specific enough in this context at least to also be testable, making them also an attempt at objective truth.

My point is, much of what we might call narrative truth is translatable into testable hypothesis once you unpack all the assumptions. It’s up to people who want to see their “narrative” vindicated to do the work of unpacking their assumptions and thinking through all their implications, looking to see whether they’ve been falsified, and tweaking them or throwing them out if necessary.