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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).
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).
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Date: 2019-08-01 11:00 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-08-02 07:53 am (UTC)From: