Abortion, the War on Women, and the Crusade to Save the "Unborn" (re-release)
Many evangelicals are single-issue voters when it comes to abortion. Brad and Dan discuss the historical development of this trend, and why it represents more than just a concern for the unborn. Dan goes through the history that shows evangelicals were in favor of certain types of abortion all the way into the 1970s. The abortion myth, as Randall Balmer calls, it is that abortion has been a perennial issue in this community. That is a lie.
Brad talks about how this kind of myopic focus on abortion led him out of evangelicalism because it's cover for cruelty and selfishness in a myriad of ways.
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Hey, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religion at Skidmore College, here with... Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And we're recording today, as usual, for Skidmore here in Saratoga Springs, New York.
And today we're going to be talking about cultures of life and abortion, which are, as many of you know, central to evangelical culture.
Before that, we just wanted to say thank you for your support so far.
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So, like I said, today we're going to talk about abortion and cultures of life, and this is kind of an intractable issue for evangelicals.
It's one that I think many people identify with evangelicals, and it's often a, like, central voting issue, and so we want to get into that.
Like, what's going on there?
Why is that true?
So, Dan, I'll just ask you, like, what are some of the issues involved with abortion, and how and why it is a central issue in evangelical culture?
Yeah, so we've talked before about how when the religious right sort of takes shape in the late 70s, early 80s, abortion actually wasn't the central issue.
And we've talked about things that will seem really jarring to anybody now.
The well-known evangelical ethicist Norman Geisler, for example, arguing in the first edition of his really well-known ethics book, This is in 1971 that abortion isn't murder because the fetus isn't a person or the Southern Baptist Convention defending abortion rights or professors of evangelical institutions again arguing that abortion is not murder.
But of course we know that that has shifted and now in contemporary evangelical life abortion is one of I would say the top two kind of the two sort of motivating Issues in evangelical life and politics and so forth And so that's that's sort of what we want to focus on today And you recently wrote a piece a really good piece on religion Dispatches which people can find online if they just google you and religion dispatches abortion.
They'll find the piece And you sort of talk about this I want to bounce it back to you and just share with us some of the the points that you made in that piece and Yeah, I mean, this was a big deal for me in terms of my struggle finding my way out of evangelicalism.
I remember in the Bush-John Kerry election, you know, the early aughts, going into Bush's second term.
At that point I was a youth pastor, and I was really sort of in the throes of a dark night of the soul.
I was trying to figure out If I believed in God, how I believed in God, how that would work, what it meant to still be in ministry with all these doubts.
And I had really come to the conclusion that voting for Kerry was the more Christian thing.
I thought that the platform of the Democrats in terms of social responsibility just seemed more in line with the gospel.
And whenever I mention this, To elders, they, you know, they would listen kind of patiently, nod their head and kind of like hear me out.
But there was always a trump card.
And I don't say that word lightly.
There was always a trump card, which is to say abortion.
And they would look at me and say, Brad, you know, the issues you've brought up are valid.
I hear you.
However, the person you're talking about voting for thinks abortion is permissible.
And I just want you to know that if you vote for them, you're going to have to go to bed Knowing that you voted for someone who is going to enable the murder of millions of unborn babies.
That's hard to overcome, right?
If you vote against evangelicals or Republicans or so-called pro-lifers, you're voting in favor of murdering babies.
So I remember standing, you know, like standing in the voting booth, Dan, and wanting to check, you know, the John Kerry box and not doing it, right?
Voting for George W. Bush.
I mean, that's a hard thing to admit.
I mean, I work at a liberal arts college in the Northeast, right?
It's not very popular at parties to admit that you voted for George W. Bush twice.
But I did.
And the reason I did is because as I stood in that voting booth, you know, sort of trembling, I just couldn't get over the idea that perhaps if I voted for John Kerry, I was voting for the murder of millions of babies.
And so that, however, was kind of a breaking point for me.
I just thought to myself, I'm not sure I can do this anymore.
I wonder if life and faith aren't more complicated than my elders and myself are making them out to be.
And so that was kind of a way out of evangelicalism.
And these days, It really seems to me that this focus on abortion is kind of insidious.
And I have a couple of reasons for that.
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