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.
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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.