Anti-Abortion History for Religious Conservatives not Straightforward

All eyes were on Washington the past couple of weeks, riveted by the nomination process for D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

For religious conservatives in the U.S., especially evangelicals, Kavanaugh’s appointment is a big step in their long-held goal of dismantling Roe v. Wade.

That was a promise made by Donald Trump when he was running for President; if elected, he would nominate judges who would end legal abortion in that country.

His promise caused many people of faith to vote for Trump, despite his moral shortcomings.

It is not certain that Kavanaugh will rule against abortion, if the opportunity arises. But even if he doesn’t, it’s clear religious conservatives will keep up the fight.

Interestingly, it wasn’t always that way—for evangelicals, at least. (Catholics had an official history of opposition to abortion going back to the later 19^th century.)

As Jonathan Dudley noted in a blog post for CNN, this “uncompromising opposition to abortion” is not “a timeless feature of evangelical Christianity.”

According to Dudley, “the reality is that what conservative Christians now say is the Bible’s clear teaching on the matter was not a widespread interpretation until the late 20th century.”

He notes that in 1968, Christianity Today—the flagship publication for evangelicalism in the U.S.—published a special issue on contraception and abortion where leading evangelical thinkers explained that the Bible “plainly teaches that life begins at birth.”

In the lead article in that issue, Bruce Waltke, then a professor of Old Testament at the conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, wrote that “God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed . . . the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense.”

That same year Christianity Today and the Christian Medical Society sponsored a symposium that declined to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. 

Three years later, in 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming abortion should be legal not only to protect the life of the mother, but to protect her emotional health as well.

Today, Dudley notes, opinions and resolutions like those would be considered heretical by many evangelicals.

“Yet their positions were mainstream at the time, widely believed by born-again Christians to flow from the unambiguous teaching of Scripture,” he says.

So, what changed?

One of the key figures in the cause is conservative political activist Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Moral Majority with televangelist Jerry Falwell.

In an article titled “The Real Origins of the Religious Right” in Politico Magazine, Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion, writes that Weyrich was looking for a way to secure evangelical support for right wing political issues.

Back then, Balmer says, American evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena in any organized way.

“If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes,” Balmer writes.

But this “moral majority” needed a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich had been trying to find one—things like pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, and abortion.

“I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Balmer quotes Weyrich as saying.

But he was able to capitalize on growing uneasiness about abortion. 

Beginning with the 1980 Presidential election that saw Republican Ronald Reagan defeat Democrat Jimmy Carter, “leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes,” Balmer says.

(Actually, Balmer maintains that racism—opposition to desegregation of whites-only schools, including the evangelical school Bob Jones University—was the real reason for evangelicals getting involved in right wing politics. Since that wouldn’t be an acceptable strategy, abortion was selected as a safer route. But you can read that in the article and decide for yourself.)

Which brings us back to the Kavanaugh nomination, and evangelical activism around abortion, today. 

There may be many good reasons to oppose abortion. But for evangelicals in the U.S., and maybe in Canada, too, one of them isn’t that they have always been against abortion, or that they have always interpreted the Bible as supporting that cause.

To put it another way, just as the issue of abortion itself isn’t simple or straightforward, apparently neither is the history of evangelical opposition to it.

A slightly different version of this column appeared in the October 6, 2018 Winnipeg Free Press.