Emergency Re-Release: Abortion, Religion, and Texas
A re-release of Dan’s interview with Professor R. Marie Griffith, author of Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. Dan and Prof. Griffith discuss the surprising history of evangelical positions on abortion, and how evangelical extremism has left no room for nuance in the debate.
R. Marie Griffith, the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, is currently the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and the editor of the Center’s journal, Religion & Politics. Her research focuses on American Christianity, including the changing profile of American evangelicals and ongoing conflicts over gender, sexuality, and marriage.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm I am the host, Dan Miller.
I am Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I am recording today from the studios of WLMC, Landmark College Radio, here in Putney, Vermont.
And I am joined today by Dr. Marie Griffith, She is the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St.
Louis and also the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.
She is the editor of the Center's journal, Religion and Politics.
She has previously held distinguished positions at both Princeton and Harvard.
She's the author of numerous books, the most recent of which, and this is a great title, is Moral Combat, How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics.
So, Professor Griffith, I want to say welcome to Straight White American Jesus, and thank you for joining us.
Well, thanks so much for having me, Dan.
Great.
One of the topics we've talked about a lot on this podcast is abortion.
Anybody who knows anything about American evangelicalism knows that abortion is always a hot topic.
If people don't know anything about American evangelicals other than this, they probably know that they oppose abortion.
And you've done some really interesting work on evangelicals and abortion and their support for abortion and how that's changed.
And recently, this past summer, you wrote an article in Religion and Politics, and you sort of traced the history of this, and you brought out the point that evangelicals once felt quite differently about abortion than they do today.
Can you start with that?
Could you tell our listeners what an evangelical in, say, the 50s or 60s or 70s might have claimed in order to actually defend abortion, as opposed to the discourse we hear about abortion from evangelicals now?
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, the upshot is evangelicals held a wide range of views on abortion until the late 1970s, 1980.
So, a real sea change happened in that period.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it's really hard for us to go back to that era, but, you know, there was a lot of concern in the United States, generally, with illegal abortion.
Physicians were concerned about it.
There was talk of, you know, the consequences for women in desperate circumstances who had to resort to You know, what we shorthand call back-alley abortions, injuries, self-injuries, and even death.
You know, all of those things, they've kind of fallen out of most of our memory, who didn't grow up in that era.
But for folks who did, who were alive and thinking about these things back then, there was a widespread concern about what to do.
That doesn't mean that all Americans thought abortion was good.
But they recognized that enough women found themselves in desperate circumstances that they sought them out, legally or not.
So the 1960s, there was really a lot of conversation within the churches, within physician circles, social work circles elsewhere, about what to do about this problem.
And the fascinating thing to see is that you have a number of evangelicals, groups of evangelicals, who supported some measure of liberalization of abortion laws.
So one of the statistics that a number of us have cited, not just me, but a number of historians of evangelicalism cite, is that in 1969, something like 90% of Texas Baptists Baptists in Texas, who were surveyed about this, expressed a desire for there to be some degree of liberalization of the abortion laws.
In other words, they wanted abortion to be legal, at least in certain circumstances.
Now, then, as always, people differed in, you know, what that might look like.
Are we talking about legal abortion all the way through the second trimester?
Are we talking about legal abortion only in particular cases?
There was widespread disagreement on that, as there always has been, and as there still is.
But you really do have a far greater approval of abortion, you know, having there be some abortion access in that era.
And one of the things I tell Southern Baptists are one of the great textbook examples of this.
Both for reasons of women's health, also because they were so firmly attached to notions of limited government, and didn't feel that the government should interfere in people's private medical decisions.
The vast majority of Southern Baptists, including Southern Baptist leadership, were in favor of some degree of abortion access well after Roe v. Wade, into the 1970s.
Yeah, excuse me.
It's interesting that you bring that up.
We've talked about that on this podcast before and it's just really striking because, of course, if anybody knows anything about the SPC now, which I should point out is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the largest evangelical denomination in the U.S., That's really striking And yeah, I mean they had a formal resolution.
I believe of what their 1971 convention You know allowing that and I think you point out in your article and and I've read this it's in the resolution It was actually pretty sweeping language.
There was a statement in there about you know What was sort of the the psychological health and well-being of the mother and so forth, right?
which of course can be interpreted really really broadly and so I I find this fascinating.
I come from a Southern Baptist background, once upon a time.
I've shared this with the listeners before.
And it's interesting to me, and I'd love to have your thoughts on this, that I did an undergraduate degree in a Southern Baptist college.
And MDiv in a Southern Baptist seminary.
I pastored, and not once ever did I hear this kind of, you know, doctrinal change or language of this historical shift.
And I actually suspect that most of the people teaching me probably didn't know it, right?
Randall Balmer has talked about what he calls the abortion myth, right?
This notion that abortion was this great unifying feature in the emergence of American evangelicalism around the religious right in the, you know, in that period in the 70s and 80s.
And I'm just wondering, what do you think is behind that piece of it, that kind of, almost a historical amnesia there, that, you know, in the pretty recent past, we lived in a really culturally different context when it comes to abortion and evangelicalism.
And I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about sort of why that happens, why that's so unknown within certainly evangelical churches, but I think within certainly evangelical pastors, but even at this point a lot of professors Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
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