Southern Baptist Convention Position on Abortion
Evangelical Christians in the US are very strongly anti-abortion. However, it was not always so. As recently as 1970 the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) - the largest Protestant denomination in the US - advocated for legalising abortion.
To evangelicals of that time abortion was seen as a Catholic issue.
You can find a list of abortion-related resolutions made by the SBC from 1971 onwards here. It is clear that in 1971 they saw abortion - quite reasonably - as undesirable, but it was considered a matter for the individual to decide, not for government to decided. Indeed, prior to Roe v Wade, in 1971 the SBC actually advocated for abortion to be legal:
From the link:
So why the complete change? One thing is for sure, the Bible did not change at all in that time. What did?
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/05/the-religious-right-formed-around-support-for-segregation-not-against-abortion.html
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
A Complete Reversal
The landmark law case in the US was Roe v. Wade, in 1973, and abortion has been legal since that time. Jane Roe was the pseudonym of the woman wanting the abortion; Henry Wade the district attorney who stood for the state, prohibiting it. Roe was represented by two attorneys; one was Linda Coffee, a member of the SBC. The Baptist Press interviewed her after the successful conclusion of the trial. The decision of Roe v Wade was generally regarded as a good one by the SBC.To evangelicals of that time abortion was seen as a Catholic issue.
You can find a list of abortion-related resolutions made by the SBC from 1971 onwards here. It is clear that in 1971 they saw abortion - quite reasonably - as undesirable, but it was considered a matter for the individual to decide, not for government to decided. Indeed, prior to Roe v Wade, in 1971 the SBC actually advocated for abortion to be legal:
Be it further RESOLVED, That we call upon 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 motherIt was not until 1980 we see the first resolution to legislate against abortion, and that it should only be done to save the life of the mother:
Be it finally RESOLVED, That we favor appropriate legislation and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.The web site, Baptist Press News, documents how the SBC reversed it position over the decade - this is not something invented by the enemies of Christianity.
From the link:
"They pretty much bought into the idea that life begins when breath begins, and they just thought of [abortion] as a Catholic issue," Land, who attended New Orleans Seminary between 1969-72, said of his fellow students.That is, after all, the Biblical position; life starts at first breath.
So why the complete change? One thing is for sure, the Bible did not change at all in that time. What did?
Segregation in Schools
There is a theory that the abortion issue was ultimately a way to get back at a government that was taxing schools that excluded black pupils.https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/05/the-religious-right-formed-around-support-for-segregation-not-against-abortion.html
As Balmer shows, feelings about Roe v. Wade were mixed in the conservative Christian community in the early 1970s, with quite a few evangelical leaders agreeing with the court that abortion is a private matter. Desegregation, however, was a different issue altogether. Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians. Bob Jones University stalled and resisted admitting black students, forcing the IRS to strip its tax exempt status in 1976, an event that spurred evangelical leaders to action. Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, two conservative activists who had been seeking a way to marshal evangelicals into a Republican voting bloc, pounced.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.Is that true? I think we need to be carefully about blindly believing anything we find on the internet (other than this blog of course), but it certainly seems plausible.
More here (also by Balmer):
Bob Jones University was one target of a broader attempt by the federal government to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sought to penalize schools for failure to abide by antisegregation provisions. A court case in 1972, Green v. Connally, produced a ruling that any institution that practiced segregation was not, by definition, a charitable institution and, therefore, no longer qualified for tax-exempt standing.The IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school's regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll. The university filed suit to retain its tax-exempt status, although that suit would not reach the Supreme Court until 1983 (at which time, the Reagan administration argued in favor of Bob Jones University).
It is sadly all too plausible that segregation was a the heart of the issue, when we recall the words of Jerry Falwell, sr, at the time of the Civil Rights Movement. The last thing white Christians wanted was their children in the same schools as black kids.
During the late 1950s and for most of the 1960s, Falwell supported racial segregation. In a notorious 1965 sermon titled "Ministers and Marches," he openly criticized Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other clergymen who participated in the civil rights movement, charging them with insincerity and with being manipulated by Communists, if, indeed, they were not Communists themselves.
In 1964, the late Jerry Falwell Sr, the founder of the Moral Majority and the father of Jerry Falwell Jr, one of Trump’s most steadfast evangelical defenders, called the 1964 Civil Rights Act “a terrible violation of human and private property rights” and said it “should be considered civil wrongs rather than civil rights”.Falwell delivered one of his most notorious sermons, Ministers and Marches, in 1965 after Bloody Sunday, when state troopers, sheriff deputies and a white civilian posse beat and teargassed civil rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. “I do question the sincerity and non-violent intentions of” the Rev Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders, Falwell said, “who are known to have leftwing associations”.
There are echos of Falwell in the way evangelicals today condemn the Black Lives Matter movement, even so far as to call them communists.
According to here, Falwell did not preach against abortion until 1978.
Paul Weyrich was co-founder of Moral Marjority with Falwell. More from Bamwell:
In the course of one of the sessions, Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let's remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.
There is certainly no denying that Bob Jones University excluded black students until 1971, as even the university itself admits. Incredibly, it was only in 2000 that it ended its prohibition of interracial dating.
Segregation in education was an important issue to white Christians in the southern USA, and the evidence certainly points to it being at least part of the reason the SBC reversed its position.
Conclusion
Let me make clear that none of this connects to whether abortion is right or wrong. I am certainly not saying the pro-life movement is rooted in racism, therefore abortion is fine. What I am posting about is religion, not abortion.
What this does illustrate is that racism has been a big part of Christianity in various forms for pretty much all its existence.
It also illustrates how fluid Christian morality is. In 1970 the SBC was pro-choice, within ten years it was pro-life. How many millions of Christians changed their mind over that period? How can that be if Christians hold to a single absolute morality?
It is also, therefore, evidence of how most Christians just believe whatever they are told to believe. In 1970 they were told to think abortion should be made legal. Then ten years later the same people were told to think abortion should NOT be legal. And they did just that.
Does that matter?
Well it raises a big question with regards to their ability to discern what is true. Do they think Jesus raised from the dead because they have carefully studied the evidence? Or do they believe it because they have been told to believe it? I suspect that it is more the latter, and this issue shows how readily that could happen..
Of course, they might say that they trust their leaders to do the leg work. These would be the millionaires who make a fortune from fleecing the Christian faithful, the very antithesis of Jesus, who lived as a pauper and told his followers to do likewise. It looks to me like the leaders say what is expedient to them to support and justify their life style, regardless of religion.
Addendum (Feb/23)
I am sure some Protestants were anti-abortion before the seventies, but it is worth looking at other denominations in the US. This was not just the SBC, but something happening to most Protestants. At the start of the decade they were pro-abortion of did not care. By the end, the powers-that-be had whipped them up into an anti-abortion frenzy.
The history of that movement, however, is more complicated. White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue. They organized instead to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University.
In Balmer’s view, revoking the non-profit status of segregated private schools catalyzed evangelical Christian leaders, but even in the early 1970s defense of racial segregation was not a populist message. However, defense of the fetus could be.Republican operations began to test abortion as a vessel for the collective anxieties of evangelical Christians, and Roe as a shorthand for government intrusion into the family after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Eventually, abortion became the reason for evangelicals to deny the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, himself an evangelical Christian, a second term.
Over 1966-1972, all the same institutions released official pronouncements in support of expanding abortion access. Since this time, particularly from 1987-1992, all these institutions faced increased internal debate over the issue and shifted in conservative directions to varying degrees.
And some Protestant groups are still not anti-abortion.
The United Methodist Church provides one example of a religious group whose stand on abortion is not entirely clear. At its quadrennial convention, held in May, church delegates voted to repeal a 40-year-old resolution supporting the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and approved another resolution ending the church’s membership in a pro-abortion rights advocacy group. However, the church’s Book of Discipline (which lays out the denomination’s law and doctrine) stresses that abortion should be, in some cases, legally available....Many of the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denominations – including the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Methodists – also support abortion rights, although several of these churches temper this support with the call for some limits on when a woman can terminate her pregnancy.
Comments
Post a Comment