There has been nervousness and hand-wringing in Christian nationalist circles this week, since Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance commented in an interview that Donald Trump, if returned to the presidency, would veto a national abortion ban, and Trump himself posted that his administration “would be great for women and their reproductive rights.” The comments followed the softening of anti-abortion language in the Republican Party’s official platform.
Echoing decades’ worth of Christian nationalists who have treated opposition to abortion as a central tenet of their faith, conservative Christian radio host and political commentator Michael L. Brown called Trump’s post about reproductive rights “a deep betrayal of our values.” Nicole Hunt, of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family – one of the most prominent Christian right entities in the country – commented that her organization was “dissatisfied with any political party platform that moves away from explicitly protecting preborn babies and their mothers from the tragedy of abortion.”
Opposition to abortion is a load-bearing column of the Christian right’s political identity, and a powerful adhesive keeping millions of right-wing evangelicals glued to the Republican coalition. With the way anti-abortion activism is discussed in evangelical circles, one could be forgiven for believing that Christians have always opposed the practice, or that there is some clear Biblical prohibition on terminating a pregnancy. Opposition to abortion is discussed not as a stance informed by the Christian faith, but as a fundamental part of that faith, every bit as inspired and inseparable from it as the belief that Christ died for our sins. In the hands of America’s increasingly militant Christian nationalist movement, that conviction, that certainty that opposition to abortion is a timeless and eternal tenet of the Christian faith, has been weaponized in an ongoing attempt to strip more than 100 million American women of control over their own healthcare.
But it has not always been that way.
Anti-abortion extremism among evangelicals is the result of a distinctly modern interpretation of Christian teachings – and a perfect example of how the Christian nationalist movement has fused its faith to its politics so seamlessly that the former has been lost in the latter. Opposition to abortion is not a tenet of the Christian faith, it is an issue with which 2,000 years of Christian leaders, scholars, and believers have wrestled and debated. Those today who see it as central to their Christianity would likely be surprised to find themselves on the opposite side of the debate from St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. And those who proudly belong to hyper-conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention might be surprised to find themselves on the opposite side of the debate from their own forebears.
Unlike caring for the poor and welcoming immigrants, abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. And despite evangelical proof-texting – cobbling together various verses to demonstrate a point which is not actually in evidence in the text – Christian scriptures are far from clear on whether an unborn fetus is a full human being. In Exodus 21, for instance, the causing of a miscarriage is treated as a property crime, punishable by a fine, but the harming of the pregnant woman in the process is punishable by talionic justice (eye for an eye, life for a life, et al).
My point here is not to debate scripture; it is to highlight that there is a good reason for why Christians have believed so many different things about abortion over the last two millennia: despite what you may have heard, the Bible is simply not clear on the issue.
I’m not asking you to take me at my word on that point. St. Augustine felt much the same way. Considered a patriarch of the early church and regarded as one of the most powerful influences on early Christian doctrine, Augustine of Hippo argued that abortion was not a sin because the fetus does not have a soul (at least earlier in a pregnancy; when exactly delayed ensoulment happens was a topic of much debate among ancient scholars), reasoning that “a human soul cannot live in an unformed body.” By the time of Augustine’s writings in the 4th and 5th centuries CE, Christian leaders were already debating the issue of abortion. St. Jerome, a contemporary of Augustine, for instance, argued that “[abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs” – a sort of pre-modern opposition to late-term abortion which still did not prohibit a pregnancy from being terminated in its earlier stages.
Neither of these patriarchs would have agreed with the modern evangelical shibboleth that “life begins at conception,” because neither of them found that teaching in the Bible.
More than 800 years after Augustine and Jerome died, Thomas Aquinas – now a Saint in Catholic tradition as well – also wrestled with what to make of the Bible’s ambiguous teachings on fetuses and the morality of terminating a pregnancy. Like Augustine, Aquinas determined that the morality of abortion is about whether a fetus has a soul. And, like Jerome, Aquinas decided that this meant early-term abortions were acceptable but late-term abortions were not (for whatever reason, Aquinas also decided that a male fetus gets a soul 40 days after conception and a female fetus gets a soul 80 days after conception; sorry, ladies).
These nuanced Christian debates about abortion, born out of earnest attempts to extrapolate the Bible’s teachings to an issue it does not mention, were not confined to the early church and middle ages. Not too long ago, conservative American evangelicals were having the same conversations.
The Southern Baptist Convention is one of the largest Christian denominations in the country, and is deeply associated with evangelical political activism. In 1971, the SBC came out in support of abortion in a formal resolution. “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 mother.”
The 1971 resolution was not some radical liberal statement in support of abortion-on-demand; nor was it a radical evangelical statement that life begins at conception and all abortion must be banned as murder. It was a nuanced statement for a nuanced issue which, to the frustration of many, is never clearly addressed by their faith’s holy scripture. In other words, it was a reasonable application of faith to politics. Unlike the current right-wing evangelical position that abortion must be demanded to go away forever, the SBC’s 1971 position worked to apply the denomination’s Christian faith to the realities of the world in which it existed. As a followup resolution in 1974 put it, the 1971 statement “dealt responsibly from a Christian perspective with complexities of abortion problems in contemporary society.”
Then things changed – but not because of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which came and went without evangelicals taking much notice. In the late 1970s, clever right-wing crusaders like Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell, who were caught up in a series of battles with the IRS over tax-exempt status for de facto segregated religious schools, figured out how to harness the abortion issue as a means of activating white evangelicals for other right-wing causes. As Politico put it in 2022, “The IRS actions against racially segregated institutions, not abortion, is what mobilized evangelical activists in the 1970s…Abortion did not take hold among evangelicals until the eve of the 1980 presidential election, the result of assiduous promotion by Weyrich, Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right following the 1978 midterms.”
The maneuver worked like Falwell and Weyrich had hoped, and has continued working since the 1980 General Election, keeping white evangelicals wed to the Republican Party.
In 2021, the SBC passed a formal resolution declaring “unequivocally that abortion is murder,” citing the same Bible they had cited in their previous resolutions declaring support for the practice. The Bible did not change in the 50 years between the 1971 resolution and the 2021 resolution – the political circumstances changed, and the way SBC leaders chose to interpret the Bible changed along with them. Far from letting their faith inform their politics, they let their politics change their faith.
Evangelicals, like the practitioners of any other faith, have every right to apply their beliefs to their political behavior. Where the Christian nationalist movement in the United States – which is composed almost entirely of white evangelicals – has gone so awry is in trading its faith for its politics, then pursuing the latter with religious zeal. The movement has turned its back on the widows, orphans, strangers, and foreigners mentioned throughout the Bible for a militant commitment to an issue mentioned nowhere in it. All the while, that movement is striving to define what it means to be a Christian, and arriving at a definition which would exclude Augustine, Aquinas, and the Southern Baptists of only 50 years ago.
The Christian nationalist commitment to anti-abortion advocacy as a tenet of their faith does not mark the first time that American political zealots have attempted to co-opt Christianity to justify temporary political ends. Nor does it mark the first time that zealots wielding a politicized version of Christianity have employed the faith in an effort to deprive others of their rights. This nation’s first 90 years were defined by that phenomenon, as the Bible was used at every turn to uphold the institution of slavery.
“[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God…it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation,” a distant relative of mine shamefully declared, adequately summarizing the sentiment of pro-slavery Christians – who, at that time, had every bit as much religious conviction in the rightness of slavery as modern Christian nationalists have in the wrongness of abortion.
If a Christian today insisted that his faith requires him to support slavery, he would not only be laughed out of polite society, he would be thrown out of a great many churches. What was once widely accepted as a Christian position – that the Bible supports and even requires the institution of slavery – has now gone extinct. It was not the Bible that changed, it was the times. Now, a pro-slavery Christian would be an anachronism, an artifact from a worse time.
Someday, if we are lucky, we will feel the same way about Christians who would use their faith to strip a woman’s rights.
