In 1969, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of the U.S. evangelical movement, convened 26 evangelical theologians to discuss the issue of abortion. They could not agree upon a recommendation but did agree that abortion was not a sin. The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 1970 advocating the liberalization of laws prohibiting abortion. This was later reconfirmed in 1974, the year after the passage of Roe v. Wade.
In contrast, the Catholic church has always been adamantly and consistently opposed to abortion. Mainline protestant denominations saw this as being a predominantly Catholic issue.
In February, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College conducted a seminar entitled: “Race and the Religious Right: White Evangelicals, White Supremacy and Their Consequences.” It presented research suggesting that the defense of life within the Religious Right was a ruse to mask the real motive of white supremacy.
Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College and Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania presented their thesis, in separate publications, that opposition to abortion became a convenient issue to galvanize conservative leaning people into greater political activism on behalf of conservative causes.
Their story begins with the late Paul Weyrich, a conservative Catholic, founder of the Heritage Foundation and the person who coined the phrase “moral majority.” He had been a political operative in the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964. Long before the culture wars of today began to take shape, he believed that traditional party affiliations were beginning to shift.
Cultural conservatives, he believed, could be a powerful force within the Republican Party. He thought that prayer in schools or opposition to pornography could become rallying issues. Nothing seemed to catch fire, however, until the Supreme Court caused the Internal Revenue Service to withdraw tax-exempt status from segregated Christian schools in the 1970s.
Schools like Bob Jones University and all white, Christian schools throughout the South were immediately impacted by this decision. Evangelical leaders saw this ruling against segregated schools as an attack on the integrity and sanctity of the evangelical subculture.
According to Balmer and Butler, in 1978, safe-seat Democrats lost upset elections in New Hampshire, Iowa and Minnesota. On the weekend before the election, church parking lots were leafleted with anti-abortion literature that branded the incumbents as pro-abortion and pro-choice. Weyrich and others believed that they had found the secret sauce to unite Evangelicals and conservative Catholics.
According to Roger Norquist, a scion of the political right, the Religious Right did not get started with Roe v. Wade. It started with the withdrawal of tax-exempt status from Christian schools. “It was all self-defense.”
The Boisi Center seminar laid out a very probable case for the early connection between racism and opposition to abortion. It is clear that the pro-life and pro-choice debate has grown far beyond these pernicious roots.
What is also very clear is the fact that the issue of abortion has become the leading issue in the culture wars of today. No other issue in contemporary political discourse has produced more heat than light than this issue.
Even without the publication of a final decision, the Supreme Court building has now been fenced in and the nation is bracing itself for demonstrations both for and in opposition to what may become the law of the land by the end of June.
Science and public opinion are divided on this issue. If life begins at conception, is conception at fertilization or implantation? When does the right to life begin? Questions like these are as much philosophical and theological as they are scientific. They are complex. Indeed, all the questions surrounding the right to life in the womb, the right to make a decision about abortion, the right to life of the mother and all the rest are hugely complicated.
In principle, everyone agrees that life is sacred. We hold this position on theological, philosophical, and humanistic grounds. It is beyond the basic principle of sanctity that complexity sets in and people begin to differ. Moral principles are easy to articulate. It is in the application of the principles to real life situations that things become more challenging.
Fifty years from now, abortion may be a settled issue in law and public opinion. What this controversy should tell us now, however, is that we need to be more vigilant when it comes to allowing complex issues to become politicized and polarizing.
When this happens, complexity is lost and everything becomes a binary choice. Our world is far too multifaceted to allow the politicization of significant issues. When this happens, common sense goes out the window. We are all made poorer in the process and real progress in solving the problems of our multifarious world is stymied.
Politicization distills simplicity out of complexity and succeeds in disguising political goals under the cloaks of righteousness, autonomy and freedom. The result is a deepening of the divides within our body politic and the demonization of one side against another. None of this is good for democracy.
