The Racist Roots of the Anti-Abortion movement

[beatrice_otter]

I learned an AMAAZING new fact today, about the anti-abortion movement in the US.  I already knew that up through the 70s, Catholics were the only religious group in the US to be coherently anti-abortion, and even for them, it was not a huge issue.  I already knew that it was Evangelical and Fundamentalist leaders' desire for power and influence that caused their segment of Christians in America to dive head-first into politics for the first time ever, and why they changed abortion rights for something most US Protestants either supported or didn't care about, to The Most Evil Thing Ever And The Greatest Unforgiveable Sin (and oh, by the way, a great megaphone to whip up their supporters with and a great club to beat their opponents over the head with).

But what I didn't know was why they chose to go for politics as their route to power and fame, instead of the old tried-and-true Evangelical method of hosting lots of revivals and bringing people to Jesus.  I mean, there had been people trying to whip up the more conservative branches of American Christianity into political fervor to make them a voting block, and the response had always been that evangelicals focused on salvation and bringing people to Jesus, not temporal matters like politics.

So what changed?  What brought around the 180 on political engagement?  Oh, friends, it's a doozy.  Thank you to Kindreds Podcast for bringing this to my attention, it's not the main theme of their episode on abortion, but they mentioned it and it led me to investigate the details.  Politico has a great article about it.

Roe V. Wade in 1973 was a great big "meh" in Christian circles.  Catholics didn't like it, but Protestants mostly approved.  Nobody but Catholics believed life began at conception.  Or, rather, most Christians would have said that a fetus is alive, but it's not really a person until it's born and can live separate from its mother.  This is including Evangelicals and fundamentalists, by the way; the head of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time, a fundamentalist named W. A. Criswell, said exactly that on the record and nobody really cared.  And those who did care largely didn't go around making political hay over it.

Then the IRS went after Bob Jones University (Jerry Falwell's darling school) for not admitting black students.  Private schools which explicitly excluded students of color lost their tax-exempt status, and BJU tried to claim that it could discriminate because it was a religious institution.  Religious institutions are allowed to discriminate on religious grounds; so, for example, a Christian church can say they'll only hire Christians to play the organ/be custodian/whatever, and feminist Catholics can't sue the Roman Catholic church for not ordaining female priests.  But the thing is, in order for that discrimination to be legal, it has to be related to longstanding doctrine of the church.  And BJU couldn't prove that racism was a longstanding doctrine of Christianity in general or Evangelicalism in particular.  And they lost their tax exempt status in 1976.

That was a much bigger problem to White Evangelical and fundamentalist leaders in the late 1970s than abortion was.  They couched in terms of "The government is infringing on our religious freedom!" but the problem wasn't religious freedom, it was racism.  All of a sudden, they needed political clout.  And since by that point naked racism was a non-starter in securing the moral high ground (dog-whistling was fine; outright saying it was not), they couldn't use "but we don't want to integrate!" as their call to action.

And so all of a sudden, they started preaching sermons and writing articles on how evil abortion was, and how that had always been the Evangelical position (even though it hadn't been) and it was a sign of America's moral decay that it was allowed now and anybody with any morals at all (certainly any Christian) would agree with them because it was the only moral and faithful position, and how Christians had to involve themselves in politics to overturn Roe v. Wade.  And by 1979, they were firmly supporting Reagan over Carter.

If the issue were truly abortion, supporting Reagan made no sense.  Carter had worked as president to reduce the number of abortions (mostly through social programs that would eliminate some of the need for them); he was wishy-washy on the subject politically, but on a moral level, he didn't like abortion.  (Very much a centrist who thought abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.)  Reagan, on the other hand, signed the most liberal abortion bill in the country in 1967 when he was governor of California.

You know what Reagan had that Carter didn't?  Dog-whistle politics.  On the issue of race, Carter was a mid-century Democrat generally in favor of civil rights.  Reagan took Nixon's idea of dog-whistling (using coded language so you could enact racist policies without actually saying you hated Black people) to a whole new level.  Reagan was the king of finding fig-leaves so that he could enact racist policies but claiming that the negative impact on the Black community was just a side effect (or denying that it existed at all).  And he also had the kind of ethics that would allow him to reverse his position on key issues if that would get him elected.  Carter was a man of principle.  Whether you liked his principles or not, he generally stuck to them.

Reagan was racist enough for them, and would give them both what they actually wanted (ways to keep Black people out without actually saying stuff most of their parishioners would notice as racist) and what they needed as an excuse to have the political power to bargain with (explicit anti-abortion policies).

Comments

[redrikki]

Thanks for sharing this. I'd never really thought about why the religious right had a hate on for abortion. I always just assumed it was about controlling women's bodies, but this feels even more cynical.

[beatrice_otter]

No, controlling women's bodies is just a side benefit >:(

[ratcreature]

I actually knew about this, because a while ago I listened to some NPR podcast about Evangelicals in US politics. I think it was a NPR Throughline episode, that was pretty interesting and explored the history.

[beatrice_otter]

Oh, interesting! Yes, this is apparently a Thing that's been well-known in academic circles for, like, ever? But which hasn't really made it out into the general consciousness.

[ratcreature]

That podcast is pretty interesting for explaining topics in depth and giving you context. Recently to commemorate Stonewall, they had an episode about gay rights activism pre-Stonewall, that had some things I knew, but lots that I didn't.

The one on evangelicals was this ep: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/11/731664197/apocalypse-now

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you! Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone

[kass]

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

[beatrice_otter]

I know!

[zippitgood]

I am absolutely unsurprised that the whole thing has a racist origin along with everything else wrong with it.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah, it's exactly the sort of thing they'd do, it fits so well, it's not really a shock to learn.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

It's interesting considering the history of forced sterilization and other eugenics practices that went along with institutionalization.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah. They sure are consistent, aren't they?

[lizbee]

Yeah, this sounds about right. My mother has worked as a [Catholic] pro-life lobbyist most of my life, and she ... well, finds the evangelical positions troubling, even in Australia.

[beatrice_otter]

Disturbing is one word for it, yeah.

[copracat]

Man, it's just racism all the way down.

[beatrice_otter]

Whenever something is odd or puzzling or bad or strange, I find it always useful to ask "could the reason be RACISM?" Because the answer is often yes, although often buried beneath many layers.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

It is the underpinning of our founding Unoriginal Sin. It's the bad penny that keeps burning.

[ndrosen]

I’m not convinced that opposition to abortion was all about racism. When the Supreme Court made its ruling in Roe v. Wade, the Reverend Jesse Jackson denounced it; a conservative columnist named James Kirkpatrick (or was that Kilpatrick? I think Kirkpatrick) liked it, as it would reduce the birth rate among the wrong sort of people, if you get what I mean.

As a child and then teenager in the 1970s, I was against abortion, and I was an agnostic who was not fond of the religious right (nor am I greatly fond now, especially when it comes to Trump suck-ups on the religious right).

However, people and movements are complicated, and I believe that some anti-abortion Christians were and are sincerely appalled by abortion, not just using it as a tool to gain political power, still less to gratify political ambitions based on racism.

[beatrice_otter]

There is a big difference between individual Evangelicals having opinions on the subject, and the political/religious activism of the anti-abortion movement. Sure, there were a lot of Evangelicals and fundamentalists at the time who didn't like it on a moral level and some of them said so in public; but Evangelicals and fundamentalists have always been quite willing to preach on moral issues.

The difference is, that the Evangelical wing of Protestantism in the US did not differ from the larger population on perspectives to abortion throughout most of the 1970s. The standard ethical and religious teaching, that was in religious textbooks at the time and accepted by every Protestant church in America was that a fetus was not a human life, so killing it was not murder, but that because it had the potential to become a human life it should be treated with care and respect. And most people figured that pregnant people and their doctors would, by and large, do a decent job figuring out what the complexities of that meant in each case, and there was a wide range of opinions on in what sort of cases abortion was allowable vs. when it was not. All kinds of people had all kinds of opinions on the subject. In this, Evangelicals and fundamentalists were a microcosm of the greater society. White, black, racist, anti-racist, liberal, conservative, there was no religious group in America that had a unified voice on abortion in the early/mid 1970s.

More than that, however, is that while Christianity has been a force in US politics from the beginning, that force was almost always on the sort of "does this candidate go to church often enough for church-goers to vote for him" and almost never "Christians organized AS CHRISTIANS to vote as a power bloc." When Christians organized en masse it was usually on economic issues: the Catholic Worker movement, for example. And it was pretty much always the liberals and mainline denominations. Not the Evangelicals. Never the Evangelicals or fundamentalists. They had moral opinions, of course, and were often loud about them, but they did not oranize politically around those opinions. There were people going around TRYING to galvanize them into a voting bloc because they knew they could have lots of power and influence that way, and Evangelicals as a whole always turned them down. In fact, there were people who tried to use abortion as a rallying cry to turn Evangelicals political in the early 1970s and they failed. Because most Evangelicals were not interested in becoming a political power bloc.

What changed was a group of Evangelical leaders who were really racist, didn't like getting called on it by the Nixon and Carter administrations, and realized that they could use abortion as a rallying cry to get their people to tip the scales for Reagan, who was a racist (and many of whose policy decisions were up for sale to the highest bidder) and who would be much more likely to give them what they wanted.

And it worked. Well, it didn't get them abortion made illegal, and it didn't give them teh 1950s views on race again, but it DID give them a government a lot more likely to ignore complaints about racism and except bullshit excuses when they couldn't ignore it.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I'm expecting that Rev Jesse Jackson was denouncing it on the basis of what is permitted can become obligatory, in just the opining of whichever conservative columnist had wrong sort birthrate thoughts.

When abortion was illegal it still happened medically in addition to back alley. "Surely they'd make an exception." has a basis in reality while having no place in law. It sort of defines privilege, including the privilege to browbeat "for the common good".

[beatrice_otter]

Oh, even the most rabid anti-abortion protesters will make exception when it's themselves, their daughter, their wife. I've heard several different abortion providers talk about having people they recognized from regular protest come in, explain why their case was different from all the other people who wanted abortions, how it wasn't sinful/evil/murder in their case, and then go right back out to regular protests after they/their relative got the abortion they wanted.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Or their mistress.