(Split into 2 posts with link in the 2nd post.)
From all indications, the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the almost 50-year precedent enshrining legal abortion as a constitutional right.
As expected, this does not sit well with supporters of Roe v. Wade (a majority of the country, according to most polls). Some are suggesting that it manifests a kind of soft theocracy—that we who are pro-life are imposing our religious views on the rest of the country. For others, the charge is not that pro-life Americans are too consumed with abortion but that abortion is just a stalking horse for the real issue: white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
The first argument goes back almost to the days of Roe itself. The idea is that most people oppose abortion because of a religious commitment. Sure, the argument goes, you might find an atheist pro-lifer here or there, but most people participating in the March for Life or working at the nearest crisis pregnancy center are Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, or sometimes Orthodox Jews. In this view, then, to oppose legal abortion is to impose that religious viewpoint on others, thus violating the religious freedom of those who don’t believe the fetus to be a person.
Of course, such allegations would be true if anyone were seeking to impose a religious dogma. That’s why I oppose, for instance, public school teachers offering a gospel invitation at the close of a class period or municipal governments declaring that the Trinity is the truth.
A religion cannot and should not be coerced. But this doesn’t mean that religious motivations shouldn’t inform what Christians—or others—care about.
I support religious freedom for everybody—Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, atheists, my fellow evangelical Christians, and so on—not only because I believe in the founding principles of this country but also because I believe, on the basis of biblical revelation, that the gospel must be received by faith, not by force.
I care about not coercing people to accept my religious doctrines. I think it’s demonstrably bad for society, but more importantly, I think it confuses the gospel and hurts the church.
All sorts of issues are bustling about all the time. And there is always the question of why someone is motivated to pay attention to some of them.
In my community, for example, the people who work with Afghan refugees to help them resettle, find work, and provide for their families may have many different motives. An evangelical Christian like me may feel that because our storyline in Christ includes being on the run from the likes of Pharaoh and Herod, we ought to care for people in similar places of vulnerability. Someone who was a refugee from Cuba a generation ago might feel a kinship and want to care for those who are hurting in the same way. An Afghanistan War veteran might care for the refugees because he saw the humanity of the Afghans suffering under Taliban rule. Another person might view Joe Biden as politically offensive and find motivation in blaming his administration for the Afghans’ suffering after the American pullout from the country.
Each of us is there with very different motives—often ones we do not share with each other. Our motivations may tell you why each of us is spurred to action, but they don’t reveal whether the action is right or wrong.
Some locales are trying to write and enact laws that criminally charge homeless people for sleeping in public parks. If a person opposes this because he realizes that he can’t mistreat homeless people when Jesus himself was homeless, is he imposing his religion on everyone else? No. He’s expressing why he’s motivated to care about another human being. While this person’s religion advises him he has responsibilities to his homeless neighbors, the notion that these homeless neighbors are human beings is not a specifically religious teaching.
The fact that the Qur’an tells Muslims to care for the poor doesn’t make a homeless shelter sharia law. The fact that the Bible tells Christians to care for “orphans and widows in their distress” doesn’t make a foster-care safety net a theocracy.
The second charge—that the pro-life issue is really about white supremacy—is plausible to many people right now because of the awful realities we’ve seen revealed in the church and the world over the past several years. I’ve written about those repeatedly.
Christian nationalism is real. It is a threat to the witness of the church, and it’s a repudiation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And yes, we’ve sometimes seen the pro-life issue used by people whose viewpoints—about women, the disabled, refugees, and the vulnerable in other ways—in no way uphold a pro-life vision with any integrity or consistency.
In his book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, historian Randall Balmer argues that the idea that Roe v. Wade mobilized evangelicals into political action is a myth. He contends that the motivating factor was, in fact, religious conservatives’ backlash against Carter Administration initiatives to remove tax exemptions from racist, all-white “segregation academies” run by church groups.
Balmer is hardly the only one to make this case. Almost 30 years ago, historian Godfrey Hodgson quoted pastor Ed Dobson, a key lieutenant of Jerry Falwell Sr., as saying, “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”
From all indications, the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the almost 50-year precedent enshrining legal abortion as a constitutional right.
As expected, this does not sit well with supporters of Roe v. Wade (a majority of the country, according to most polls). Some are suggesting that it manifests a kind of soft theocracy—that we who are pro-life are imposing our religious views on the rest of the country. For others, the charge is not that pro-life Americans are too consumed with abortion but that abortion is just a stalking horse for the real issue: white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
The first argument goes back almost to the days of Roe itself. The idea is that most people oppose abortion because of a religious commitment. Sure, the argument goes, you might find an atheist pro-lifer here or there, but most people participating in the March for Life or working at the nearest crisis pregnancy center are Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, or sometimes Orthodox Jews. In this view, then, to oppose legal abortion is to impose that religious viewpoint on others, thus violating the religious freedom of those who don’t believe the fetus to be a person.
Of course, such allegations would be true if anyone were seeking to impose a religious dogma. That’s why I oppose, for instance, public school teachers offering a gospel invitation at the close of a class period or municipal governments declaring that the Trinity is the truth.
A religion cannot and should not be coerced. But this doesn’t mean that religious motivations shouldn’t inform what Christians—or others—care about.
I support religious freedom for everybody—Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, atheists, my fellow evangelical Christians, and so on—not only because I believe in the founding principles of this country but also because I believe, on the basis of biblical revelation, that the gospel must be received by faith, not by force.
I care about not coercing people to accept my religious doctrines. I think it’s demonstrably bad for society, but more importantly, I think it confuses the gospel and hurts the church.
All sorts of issues are bustling about all the time. And there is always the question of why someone is motivated to pay attention to some of them.
In my community, for example, the people who work with Afghan refugees to help them resettle, find work, and provide for their families may have many different motives. An evangelical Christian like me may feel that because our storyline in Christ includes being on the run from the likes of Pharaoh and Herod, we ought to care for people in similar places of vulnerability. Someone who was a refugee from Cuba a generation ago might feel a kinship and want to care for those who are hurting in the same way. An Afghanistan War veteran might care for the refugees because he saw the humanity of the Afghans suffering under Taliban rule. Another person might view Joe Biden as politically offensive and find motivation in blaming his administration for the Afghans’ suffering after the American pullout from the country.
Each of us is there with very different motives—often ones we do not share with each other. Our motivations may tell you why each of us is spurred to action, but they don’t reveal whether the action is right or wrong.
Some locales are trying to write and enact laws that criminally charge homeless people for sleeping in public parks. If a person opposes this because he realizes that he can’t mistreat homeless people when Jesus himself was homeless, is he imposing his religion on everyone else? No. He’s expressing why he’s motivated to care about another human being. While this person’s religion advises him he has responsibilities to his homeless neighbors, the notion that these homeless neighbors are human beings is not a specifically religious teaching.
The fact that the Qur’an tells Muslims to care for the poor doesn’t make a homeless shelter sharia law. The fact that the Bible tells Christians to care for “orphans and widows in their distress” doesn’t make a foster-care safety net a theocracy.
The second charge—that the pro-life issue is really about white supremacy—is plausible to many people right now because of the awful realities we’ve seen revealed in the church and the world over the past several years. I’ve written about those repeatedly.
Christian nationalism is real. It is a threat to the witness of the church, and it’s a repudiation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And yes, we’ve sometimes seen the pro-life issue used by people whose viewpoints—about women, the disabled, refugees, and the vulnerable in other ways—in no way uphold a pro-life vision with any integrity or consistency.
In his book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, historian Randall Balmer argues that the idea that Roe v. Wade mobilized evangelicals into political action is a myth. He contends that the motivating factor was, in fact, religious conservatives’ backlash against Carter Administration initiatives to remove tax exemptions from racist, all-white “segregation academies” run by church groups.
Balmer is hardly the only one to make this case. Almost 30 years ago, historian Godfrey Hodgson quoted pastor Ed Dobson, a key lieutenant of Jerry Falwell Sr., as saying, “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”
