Evangelicals Originally Applauded Roe v. Wade — and Supported Racial Segregation

It is a myth that the religious right mobilized in response to the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Actually, even before the Roe decision, the delegates to the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that stated, "we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions are 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."

And after the 1973 decision, writes Randall Balmer in Thy Kingdom Come, "the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision." W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote, "Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decision." And W. A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed approval: "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."

Balmer cites proof that the religious right originally arose to defend racial discrimination at segregated schools when the IRS attempted to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because of its racially discriminatory policies. Jerry Falwell's associate Paul M. Weyrich admits, "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion." What mobilized the religious right was Jimmy Carter's intervention against segregated religious schools.

Ironically, in constructing the abortion myth, the religious right attempts to portray themselves as the "new abolitionists," linking their campaign against abortion for the "sanctity of life" to the nineteenth-century crusade against slavery. It's a lie. The religious right began by defending segregation. Abortion got tacked onto their agenda later when they needed some new demons.

In examining the religious right, Balmer, a professor of religion at Barnard College and Columbia University and a contributing editor to Christianity Today, writes, "I don't find much that  I recognize as Christian." He says that modern evangelicals have abandoned the roots of their movement in nineteenth-century social activism on the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and universal education. He argues that they have distorted their faith with misguided positions on abortion and homosexuality. "They have taken something that is lovely and redemptive and turned it into something that is ugly and retributive," he writes in Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America.