Evangelicals became anti-abortion well after Roe v. Wade decision

It’s not my desire to become the Herald-Leader’s abortion writer. There’s hardly anything I less enjoy writing about.

But after my column last week, which pointed out that a broad consensus exists in this country regarding abortion and has held surprisingly steady in over the years, someone suggested I revisit another piece I wrote some years back.

Last week’s column looked at studies showing the majority of Americans reject both of the polar positions about abortion — the adamantly anti-abortion or the adamantly pro-choice. Mainly, Americans want abortion legal but tightly restricted to cases such as rape, incest and danger to the woman’s life or health.

There are numerous contradictions to our received wisdom about the abortion debates. If you think this is a simple subject, think again.

Here’s a counterintuitive fact I mentioned in a 2015 column. In 17 of the 23 years it had then polled on the subject, the General Social Survey, which tracks American opinions, found that more men than women believed women should have access to abortion.

Why would more men support abortion? In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Razib Khan, then a doctoral student in genomics at the University of California, Davis, argued that religiosity is a more accurate predictor than gender of people’s abortion views.

Referring to the General Social Survey’s findings, Khan speculated that the reason more women oppose abortion “is that, according to most surveys, women tend to be more religious than men.” Overall, religious people lean conservative.

While the demographic group likeliest to support abortion was liberal women, the segment likeliest to oppose it was conservative women, which often meant religious women.

“The more significant difference here is not between men and women, but among women,” Khan said.

Odder still, more than a quarter of women categorized as “extremely liberal” in the General Social Survey actually opposed unconditional abortion rights—and 18.2 percent of “extremely conservative” women unequivocally favored choice.

“Our liking for black-and-white versions of reality is belied by their more shaded truths,” Khan said. “(W)e miss a substantial portion of the electorate if all we apprehend is the stylized cartoon. Nuance goes out the window when slogans about the ‘war on women’ or the ‘liberal media’ dominate public discourse.”

Which is the point I was trying to make last week: no hot-button topic can be accurately reduced to a bumper sticker.

The column I was asked to revisit shows the same thing. It was about the origins of the Religious Right in the 1970s and its unrelenting opposition to Roe v. Wade.

I’ll give a shout out here to Randall Balmer, who’s among the country’s foremost historians of evangelical Christianity.

He argues that few evangelicals were critical of legalized abortion before or immediately after the Roe decision in 1973. The initial evangelical response to Roe was supportive. Protestants considered abortion a Roman Catholic issue.

Pardon the following long quotation, which is part of Balmer’s 2014 recap of this phenomenon for Politico:

“In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing ‘individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility’ as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging ‘Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.’ The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.”

If you’re steeped in Baptist history you’ll recognize the name of W. A. Criswell, a president of the Southern Baptist Convention and longtime pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Tex. Criswell was ultraconservative.

Here’s his response to Roe, quoted by Balmer: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Outrage against abortion, then, didn’t initially push white evangelicals toward the nascent Religious Right, a founding myth now widely accepted.

Balmer says that according to Paul Weyrich, one of the Religious Right’s chief architects, the movement started in the early 1970s as a response to attempts by the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of whites-only church schools and colleges such as Bob Jones University.

Weyrich and other leaders were savvy enough to recognize that rallying evangelicals to protest in favor of racism was a non-starter.

Five or six years after Roe, however, “many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions” following the decision, Balmer writes.

Weyrich and his colleagues seized on that, believing abortion was an issue around which they could galvanize their faithful. Belatedly, ending abortion thus became their cause.

Of course, it should go without saying that rank-and-file evangelicals who oppose abortion today often do so without any knowledge of this history.

I never doubt their sincerity. Neither do I disagree that abortion raises troubling moral questions. I, too, find it disquieting.

My point is, the facts about the anti-abortion movement, like the facts about most movements, get complicated.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.