There's a straight line from US racial segregation to the anti-abortion movement
Randall Balmer
Leaders of the religious right would have us believe that Roe v Wade mobilized apolitical Christians. The real story is very different
Wed 8 Sep 2021 06.15 EDT
The supreme court’s refusal to block Texas’s restrictive new abortion law suggests that the end to country-wide legal abortion might be at hand. For white evangelicals, the rank and file of the anti-abortion movement who have worked tirelessly to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, this represents the culmination of efforts that date back to – well, about 1980.
Although leaders of the religious right would have us believe that the Roe decision was the catalyst for their political mobilization in the 1970s, that claim does not withstand historical scrutiny. What prompted evangelical interest in politics, in fact, was a defense of racial segregation.
Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” through most of the 1970s, and there is little in the history of evangelicalism to suggest that abortion would become a point of interest. Even James Dobson, who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged after the Roe decision that the Bible was silent on the matter and that it was plausible for an evangelical to hold that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being”.
I first began researching the origins of the religious right after a meeting at a Washington hotel conference room in November 1990. The gathering marked the ten-year anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency and, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, I was invited to this closed-door celebration. There I encountered a veritable who’s-who of the religious right, including (among others), Ralph Reed of Christian Coalition; Donald Wildmon from the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Ed Dobson, one of Jerry Falwell’s acolytes at Moral Majority; Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail mogul; and Paul Weyrich, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and architect of the religious right.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/08/abortion-us-religious-right-racial-segregation
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