Evangelicals are one step closer to the ultimate prize: ending abortion in America
Texas is the result of a decades-long effort to undermine the women’s equality movement in the name of saving the US from God’s judgment
A Pro-Trump supporter prays holding a cross at a protest against the electoral college vote count.
Photograph: Ken Cedeno/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock
Fri 3 Sep 2021
Matthew Avery Sutton
Thanks to the supreme court’s refusal to act on a new Texas law, American evangelicals are now one step closer to achieving a goal they have pursued for generations: the end of legal abortion in the United States. They believe that stopping abortion is central to keeping the United States a holy and righteous nation, staving off the judgments of God, and surviving the coming apocalypse.
Abortion has not always been controversial among American Protestants. Since colonial times, most Protestants in the United States saw abortion as a legitimate form of birth control. They did not make a clear distinction between terminating a pregnancy and preventing one. Those who believed that contraception was an appropriate practice often had few qualms about abortion when the procedure was performed before “quickening” (the time when a woman begins to feel the fetus move).
How does someone in Texas get an abortion now and what’s next?
This began to change in the early 20th century with the birth of the fundamentalist movement. The most famous evangelist of the era, Billy Sunday, told an audience made up entirely of women that it was their obligation to stop “the murder of unborn babies” or else they – not men – would cause the “damnation of America”. The Texas evangelist John Rice, best known for his 1941 anti-woman pamphlet Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Female Preachers, also called abortion murder.
Other fundamentalists linked abortion with promiscuous sex. They claimed that the push for abortion access was intended to make “free love” more common. A few evangelicals, however, believed that ending a pregnancy might be more humane than subjecting a child to the wrath of God that was certain to fall soon upon the Earth.
Many Black evangelicals in the pre-Roe era, in contrast to their white counterparts, believed that racism, nativism and Jim Crow were the sins most likely to provoke God’s anger. They usually did not share white evangelicals’ obsession with defining gender roles and policing women’s bodies.
In the early cold war era, white evangelicals championed a new model of the family that glorified the breadwinner dad, stay-at-home mom and two children, all living in the suburbs. They saw smoking, booze and the specter of communism, not abortion, as the most immediate threats.
When the women’s movement began challenging the nuclear model family, evangelicals went on the attack. Feminism, they believed, represented women’s defiance of their God-given role.
Feminists in the 1960s made expanding abortion access one of their top priorities, pushing evangelicals to question anew the morality of abortion. After all, if feminists were for choice, God must be against it. Although the Bible was silent on abortion, some evangelicals determined that they would not be.
The supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision divided the United States’ religious communities. Catholics who accepted the church’s anti-birth control stance felt troubled by the ruling, while Jews and Protestants, including evangelicals, had mixed responses.
Within a few years, however, the abortion controversy moved to the center of cultural debate. Catholics and evangelicals began working together to pressure political candidates and to amend the constitution to invalidate Roe. The most radical Catholics and evangelicals launched vigilante groups such as Operation Rescue that attacked clinics and terrorized abortion providers.
A majority of evangelicals today, like their fundamentalist predecessors, read their Bibles as a code book that foretells the immediate future. What they see in the sacred text is the end of history, and exactly how it will unfold. They believe that what the Bible describes as a horrific, global war is near, which will culminate in the battle of Armageddon.
This theology cultivates in believers a sense of urgency and certainty and a vision of the world defined in absolute terms. They believe that they are engaged in a zero-sum game of good-versus-evil. Anticipation of the end of time gives evangelicals motivation to act – to preach, to evangelize and to wage culture war.
They see themselves as a faithful remnant surrounded on all sides by the devil’s minions. Like players in a soccer game with the clock about to expire, they have much to do and very little time in which to do it.
The men who launched the Religious Right understood this. They made opposition to feminism and abortion one of their key tenets. Minister Jerry Falwell claimed that the United States had turned against God and that the only way the nation could be spared from his wrath was if the American people returned the nation to its supposed Christian foundations. The “national sin” of abortion, he harangued, was going to force God to destroy the United States just as he had flooded the world in Noah’s day.
Billy Graham joined the chorus. He denounced what he called the “abortion holocaust” and, like Falwell, he deplored the women’s movement.
Polling shows that white evangelicals have followed their lead. Evangelicals hold some of the strongest anti-abortion views in the nation, and their opposition to abortion has remained steadfast. What we see playing out in Texas is the fruit of a multi-generational effort to undermine the women’s equality movement in the name of saving the United States from God’s judgment.
But judgment is indeed probably coming to evangelicals for their actions. Just not the kind of judgment they are expecting. Americans are not going to stand by for long while evangelicals try to impose their morals on the nation.
Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism and most recently Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War. He is the chair of the history department and the Berry distinguished professor of liberal arts at Washington State University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of WSU
Thanks to the supreme court’s refusal to act on a new Texas law, American evangelicals are now one step closer to achieving a goal they have pursued for generations: the end of legal abortion in the United States. They believe that stopping abortion is central to keeping the United States a holy and righteous nation, staving off the judgments of God, and surviving the coming apocalypse.
Abortion has not always been controversial among American Protestants. Since colonial times, most Protestants in the United States saw abortion as a legitimate form of birth control. They did not make a clear distinction between terminating a pregnancy and preventing one. Those who believed that contraception was an appropriate practice often had few qualms about abortion when the procedure was performed before “quickening” (the time when a woman begins to feel the fetus move).
How does someone in Texas get an abortion now and what’s next?
This began to change in the early 20th century with the birth of the fundamentalist movement. The most famous evangelist of the era, Billy Sunday, told an audience made up entirely of women that it was their obligation to stop “the murder of unborn babies” or else they – not men – would cause the “damnation of America”. The Texas evangelist John Rice, best known for his 1941 anti-woman pamphlet Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Female Preachers, also called abortion murder.
Other fundamentalists linked abortion with promiscuous sex. They claimed that the push for abortion access was intended to make “free love” more common. A few evangelicals, however, believed that ending a pregnancy might be more humane than subjecting a child to the wrath of God that was certain to fall soon upon the Earth.
Many Black evangelicals in the pre-Roe era, in contrast to their white counterparts, believed that racism, nativism and Jim Crow were the sins most likely to provoke God’s anger. They usually did not share white evangelicals’ obsession with defining gender roles and policing women’s bodies.
In the early cold war era, white evangelicals championed a new model of the family that glorified the breadwinner dad, stay-at-home mom and two children, all living in the suburbs. They saw smoking, booze and the specter of communism, not abortion, as the most immediate threats.
When the women’s movement began challenging the nuclear model family, evangelicals went on the attack. Feminism, they believed, represented women’s defiance of their God-given role.
Feminists in the 1960s made expanding abortion access one of their top priorities, pushing evangelicals to question anew the morality of abortion. After all, if feminists were for choice, God must be against it. Although the Bible was silent on abortion, some evangelicals determined that they would not be.
The supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision divided the United States’ religious communities. Catholics who accepted the church’s anti-birth control stance felt troubled by the ruling, while Jews and Protestants, including evangelicals, had mixed responses.
Within a few years, however, the abortion controversy moved to the center of cultural debate. Catholics and evangelicals began working together to pressure political candidates and to amend the constitution to invalidate Roe. The most radical Catholics and evangelicals launched vigilante groups such as Operation Rescue that attacked clinics and terrorized abortion providers.
A majority of evangelicals today, like their fundamentalist predecessors, read their Bibles as a code book that foretells the immediate future. What they see in the sacred text is the end of history, and exactly how it will unfold. They believe that what the Bible describes as a horrific, global war is near, which will culminate in the battle of Armageddon.
This theology cultivates in believers a sense of urgency and certainty and a vision of the world defined in absolute terms. They believe that they are engaged in a zero-sum game of good-versus-evil. Anticipation of the end of time gives evangelicals motivation to act – to preach, to evangelize and to wage culture war.
They see themselves as a faithful remnant surrounded on all sides by the devil’s minions. Like players in a soccer game with the clock about to expire, they have much to do and very little time in which to do it.
The men who launched the Religious Right understood this. They made opposition to feminism and abortion one of their key tenets. Minister Jerry Falwell claimed that the United States had turned against God and that the only way the nation could be spared from his wrath was if the American people returned the nation to its supposed Christian foundations. The “national sin” of abortion, he harangued, was going to force God to destroy the United States just as he had flooded the world in Noah’s day.
Billy Graham joined the chorus. He denounced what he called the “abortion holocaust” and, like Falwell, he deplored the women’s movement.
Polling shows that white evangelicals have followed their lead. Evangelicals hold some of the strongest anti-abortion views in the nation, and their opposition to abortion has remained steadfast. What we see playing out in Texas is the fruit of a multi-generational effort to undermine the women’s equality movement in the name of saving the United States from God’s judgment.
But judgment is indeed probably coming to evangelicals for their actions. Just not the kind of judgment they are expecting. Americans are not going to stand by for long while evangelicals try to impose their morals on the nation.
Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism and most recently Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War. He is the chair of the history department and the Berry distinguished professor of liberal arts at Washington State University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of WSU
No comments:
Post a Comment