Although the government has made statements that terminating a fertilized embryo before it implants in the uterus is not an abortion,” writes Bart Stupak and Democrats for Life in an
amicus brief filed in support of Hobby Lobby, “the relevant matter for claim of conscience … is
plaintiffs’ belief that a distinct human life begins at fertilization. It is no salve … to be told that the government defines abortion differently.”
There’s no doubt that this belief is sincere. But what’s fascinating is the extent to which, for conservative evangelicals,
it’s new. So new, in fact, that when Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, was a child in the 1960s, it was the minority view among American evangelical Protestants.
In his book
Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, Jonathan Dudley notes that most evangelicals held far more liberal views at the time. “God does not regard the fetus as a soul no matter how far gestation has progressed,” wrote professor Bruce Waltke of Dallas Theological Seminary in a 1968 issue of
Christianity Today on contraception and abortion, edited by Harold Lindsell, a then-famous champion of biblical “inerrancy.” His argument rested on the Hebrew Bible, “[A]ccording to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.”
This position was reaffirmed at a symposium sponsored by
Christianity Today and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, where participants agreed to disagree over the “sinfulness” of an “induced abortion,” but agreed about “the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain cir stances,” namely, rape and incest. The do ent produced by the conference, “
A Protestant Affirmation on the Control of Human Reproduction,” said, “The prevention of conception is not in itself forbidden or sinful providing the reasons for it are in harmony with the total revelation of God for married life” and that the “method of preventing pregnancy is not so much a religious as a scientific and medical question to be determined in consultation with one’s physician.”
Three years after the symposium, the conservative Southern Baptist Convention
endorsed this view, with a call for “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
By 1982, however, the SBC—along with most American evangelicals—had switched gears entirely. During that year’s convention, delegates held that “human life begins at conception” and that they would work for “appropriate” legislation or a cons utional amendment to “prohibit abortions except to save the physical life of the mother.”
What happened to cause this sea change in at udes toward fetal life and abortion among evangelicals? In short, politics, and in particular, the successful coalition-building of Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and other Christian conservatives in the wake of
Roe v. Wade. Conservative Catholics were quick to mobilize against the court’s ruling, but many Protestant evangelicals were relatively apathetic. At that point, “culture war” issues such as abortion, feminism, and sexuality weren’t on their radar (hence Jimmy Carter’s successful appeal to them in the 1976 presidential election).
It took the organizational might of Falwell and his “Moral Majority”—as well as evangelical anti-abortion figures such as Francis Schaeffer—to galvanize evangelicals around other “culture war” issues such as feminism, sexuality, and school prayer. This in turn led to alliances with largely Catholic organizations like the National Right to Life Committee.
Belief tends to follow behavior, and working in political alliance with Catholics—a significant shift from earlier periods of evangelical political activism—led conservative evangelicals to adopt “pro-life” positions on abortion.
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