The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Contrary to myth, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Roe v. Wade, many secular and religious conservatives responded with delight. Here is what W. Barry Garrett, Washington bureau chief of the Baptist Press, a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote upon the announcement: “Religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”50 Garrett’s position wasn’t exceptional. The 1971 convention of the Southern Baptists endorsed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion to preserve the “emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother” as well as in cases of rape, incest, and “deformity.” The convention approved the same resolution after Roe, in 1974, calling it a “middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder,” and again in 1976.

  Even Phyllis Schlafly, a key player in the antiabortion movement, did not center her political activism on the abortion issue in the initial stages of her career. In Schlafly’s mind, “the day we invented the pro-family movement” was not the day after Roe v. Wade but April 26, 1976—the day she brought more than one thousand people to Springfield, Illinois, for a demonstration against the Equal Rights Amendment.51 As for abortion, it mattered, too, as one part of the alleged attack on family values and the dignity of women’s traditional role within it. “Since women must bear the physical consequences of the sex act, men must be required to bear the other consequences and pay in other ways,” Schlafly said. Laws and customs, she added, “decree that a man must carry his share by physical protection and financial support of his children and of the woman who bears his children, and also by a code of behavior which benefits and protects both the woman and the children.”52

  Many leading members of the Republican establishment were nevertheless thrilled with the outcome of Roe v. Wade. The first lady, Betty Ford, hailed it as a “great, great decision.”53 Conservative senator Barry Goldwater—Paul Weyrich’s beau ideal of the modern statesman—also initially hailed its passage. “I think abortion should be legalized because whether it is legal or not, women are going to have it done,” he wrote in a draft of a letter to a constituent in 1973.54 Goldwater’s wife, Peggy, was a founding member of Planned Parenthood in Arizona. When the Republican National Convention gathered in Kansas City in 1976—“nailing an anti-abortion plank onto the Republican platform,” in the words of one stunned observer55—fewer than 40 percent of the delegates opposed abortion rights.56 Public opinion polls at the time showed that a greater percentage of Republican voters were pro-choice than their Democratic counterparts.

  Up through 1979, members of both major parties, in a variety of ideological flavors, inhabited all sides of the abortion issue. Democratic opponents of abortion included Sargent Shriver, who campaigned against Maryland’s liberal abortion laws in 1992. Hubert Humphrey was also personally opposed to abortion, although he did not favor a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and Al Gore adopted antiabortion positions early in their careers and later evolved toward choice. In 1982, while serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden voted for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, although his views also dramatically shifted over time. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans such as Barbara Bush, Arlen Specter, William Weld, and Pete Wilson were unabashedly pro-choice and sought to strip antiabortion planks from the party platform.

  The closing of the Republican mind took more than a decade. A pro-choice movement persisted in the Republican Party all the way up through the early 1990s.57 Yet it grew increasingly isolated and forlorn. At the Republican National Convention in 1996, the influence of Christian conservatives had become so strong that pro-choice Republicans Weld and Wilson were “bumped from prime speaking roles.”58 Until at long last it was over, and the Republican Party became the party of Life.

  In order to achieve political unity around abortion, the leaders of the emerging Christian nationalist movement understood, it was also necessary to change the deep frame of American religion. So that is what they set about to do. The modern pro-life religion that dominates America’s conservative churches and undergirds a variety of their denominations is a political creation.

  One thing that the politico-theological leaders of the movement appeared to understand was that the greatest danger to the antiabortion party might come from liberal Christian thinkers. The Bible and 2,000 years of Christian apologetics, after all, has provided ample material to those who argue that abortion rights are compatible with Christian belief and practice. It was therefore necessary to purge theology of any position inconsistent with the idea that all the moral and religious attributes of human life are invested in the zygote at the moment of fertilization. This in turn meant making “life begins at conception” something close to a foundational doctrine—which in turn helped to bring about a convergence of the many variations on conservative forms of the Christian faith. The new dividing lines in American religious life were no longer between Protestant and Catholic, or between this sect and that, but between conservatism and liberalism—or, as the conservatives saw it, between the faithful and the godless, who came to be defined by their evident contempt for “life.”

  Francis Schaeffer was an important theological catalyst, popularizing the pro-life cause in a multitude of books and films. Other voices included the evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry, who wrote antiabortion opinion pieces for Christian media, and Harold O. J. Brown, a divinity school professor who founded a Protestant pro-life organization in 1975. Evidence of their swift success came in the response to D. Gareth Jones’s 1984 book Brave New People: Ethical Issues at the Commencement of Life.

  In his book, which was published by the respected Christian publisher InterVarsity Press, Jones lays out a case that would have seemed unremarkable in an earlier time. The embryo, he argues, has moral value but is not the equivalent of a human child. He also takes the trouble to review the long and complex history of Christian approaches to reproductive health issues. Had the book been published twenty years previously, it would likely have received mild commentary on what would have counted as a mainstream position. But in 1984, with conservative hopes for power resting increasingly on unifying the religious right around abortion, Jones’s work met with brutal denunciations. It was a “monstrous book,” the leaders of the religious right raged, and Jones was on a “bandwagon bound for hell.” For the first time in its history, InterVarsity Press felt compelled to withdraw a book from publication.

  As the pro-life view came to dominate conservative Christian theology, an alliance between conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals that could scarcely have been imagined in the America of earlier times began to take hold. Here, too, Schlafly took the lead. “Schlafly’s political genius owed to her prescient certitude that religious conservatives—Catholics, evangelicals, Mormons, and even Orthodox Jews—could abandon their longstanding separatist ways and unite on behalf of shared political goals,” writes Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. “In the 1980s, Jerry Falwell would take (and receive) credit for being the mastermind of this ecumenical conservative movement,” says Young, but “Schlafly had imagined that unthinkable prospect as early as the 1950s, long before Falwell, and begun translating it into reality with her STOP ERA organization in the 1970s.”59

  Furthering the alliance was a cohort of conservative Catholic intellectuals who would later be termed “theoconservatives.” Led by Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak, among others, several of the movement’s key figures had started off in life as 1960s radicals. Disillusioned with what they perceived as the moral nihilism of the age, they pivoted sharply to the right and coalesced as a scholarly movement and political force in the Reagan years. Conversion may have made them more zealous than native believers, and perhaps the most zealous of the bunch was Neuhaus, who had crossed over all the way from progressive Lutheranism to conservative Ca
tholicism. They were as committed as any of their evangelical brethren to rebuilding America on the basis of religious principles, and they proved instrumental in uniting conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and, at least for a time, neoconservative Jews around a political vision.

  The process of détente advanced considerably with a 1994 declaration of Catholic-evangelical solidarity, Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission.60 The collaboration strengthened further with the Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience, the 2009 culmination of a multi-decade process. Manhattan Declaration signers, who included nearly 150 leading evangelical and conservative Catholic thinkers, pastors, and prelates, all agreed on three main points: “life,” traditional marriage, and “religious liberty.” The Manhattan Declaration ushered in a robust era of “co-belligerency”—that is, a dedication to strategic cooperation.

  The new alliance might have been less successful had it not also been paired, over time, with an organizational effort dedicated to capturing America’s churches for “life.” In the early 1980s, Novak and Neuhaus joined the board of the recently formed Institute on Religion and Democracy, which was created to oppose the social justice positions and liberal theologies of mainline Protestant churches. The IRD claimed to promote church “renewal” by amplifying conservative theological positions, but its real goal, as critics put it, might better be described as “steeplejacking.”

  In their 2007 book, Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right Is Hijacking Mainstream Religion, Sheldon Culver and John Dorhauer assert the IRD used “covert methods” to wage a shadow war on mainline churches such as the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Church of Christ. “In alliance with fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, the IRD uses trained activists, skillfully developed propaganda and clandestine tactics to infiltrate and hijack—or ‘steeplejack’—mainline churches in order to force out ‘liberal leadership’ and replace it with those who share their conservative world view,” according to Culver and Dorhauer. Through the use of same-sex marriage as a wedge issue, congregations are persuaded to separate from their denomination, the authors say, and when possible to seize control of the church-owned real estate and take it out of the denomination, too.61 The IRD’s initial sources of funds included Scaife family foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and others.

  Unfortunately, as the authors report, the response to such attacks has been anemic. “There is an awareness that something nefarious is going on,” they write, “but the cost of confronting the bullies is more than the leadership is willing to pay.”62

  In her foreword to their book, the author and journalist Michelle Goldberg, whose 2006 book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism foretold the political crisis of the present moment, echoed the alarm. “It’s hard to tell this story without sounding like a conspiracy theorist—it is, after all, a tale of power-seeking reactionaries enacting a plan to infiltrate and undermine established institutions,” she pointed out. “Yet Culver and Dorhauer have carefully marshaled evidence linking fights in individual congregations to larger organizations like the Institute on Religion and Democracy.” Just as planned, Goldberg notes, “right-wing groups have formed parallel organizations inside mainline congregations all over the country, often attempting coups against more liberal church leadership.” The outcome of these struggles, she says, “will determine whether America’s historic Protestant churches remain firm voices for social justice or become mere adjuncts of the political right.”63

  Not all efforts to drag American religion to the right came from the IRD, of course. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, fell to what was in effect a coup.

  “The leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention has been taken over by ultraconservatives,” writes Leon Howell in United Methodism @ Risk: A Wake-Up Call.64 “Although not a liberal church to begin with … [i]t was taken over from the top in the 1980s. Purges, schisms, and acknowledged right-wing loyalties have followed.”65

  In conversation with me, the historian Diana Butler Bass, whose books include Standing Against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Ninetheenth-Century America, describes concurrent efforts to bring the Episcopalian church, too, under more conservative leadership. “On the national level, there were people who were troubled by what they saw as a turnaway from orthodoxy,” she says. “They abandoned the traditional policy structure of elected representatives and adopted a strategy of succession in order to have as many dioceses as possible secede and form the ‘true’ Episcopal church, and thus leave the old Episcopal church, with gay people and women leaders, in the dust.” These conflicts, Bass notes, “function as predictors, or canaries in the coal mine, about larger political movements.”

  While that action was taking place on the ground, new activist groups were reordering the relationship between American religion and politics. One was Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. By now Robertson had founded the Christian Broadcasting Network and CBN University (whose name was later changed to Regent University). In 1989, Robertson and his allies, including Ralph Reed, whom he tapped as executive director, created a nationwide grassroots political organization. A key tool was the mailing list—mined, in part, from Robertson’s failed 1988 presidential campaign.66 It soon became clear that the Christian Coalition was a vehicle intended for the control of the Republican Party. By working from the grassroots up and training pro-family candidates for public office, the group set out to reshape Republican politics. Communicating the message to voters in innovative ways, such as papering church parking lots with voter guides and penning lurid fund-raising appeals warning of “a feminist agenda … that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians,” they had an outsized influence in primaries and elections.

  Dogged by organizational challenges, including a long battle over its tax status, by the late 1990s the Christian Coalition’s star began to fade. Some religiously moderate and secular observers declared the death of the religious right, a narrative that fit comfortably within their views about progress. But they confused their own visions of history with observations of reality. As the Christian Coalition (following the Moral Majority) waned in importance, other organizations stepped up, often with the same key people in the lead.

  Ralph Reed launched the Faith & Freedom Coalition, an advocacy group organized under the auspices of the section of the tax code that supposedly limits activity expressly to promote candidates. That restriction has not prevented Ralph Reed from turning his organization into an extension of the Republican party’s political machine. At the 2019 Road to Majority Conference, Reed’s annual gathering of activists and policymakers in Washington, D.C., Reed had nothing but praise for the president. “There has never been anyone who has defended us and fought for us who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump,” he said. “He is everything he promised us he would be and more.”67 Reed declared the organization would invest $50 million dollars in get-out-the-vote efforts in 2020, with a special focus on swing states and Latino voters of faith. The effort, he said, would include five hundred paid staff and five thousand volunteers.

  Other organizations that rose to the vanguard of the Christian nationalist movement include Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom), the American Family Association, and dozens of others, many with state and local affiliates, all promoting their understanding of the correct stance on religion and policy matters. Meanwhile, smaller coalitions of movement elite, including the Council for National Policy and the Fellowship Foundation, also known as “The Family,” work to align money, resources, technology (including media and campaign operations), political leadership, and other sources of power.

  By the election of 2016, the creation of a new American religion of “life” and its merger with a single poli
tical party was plain for all to see. Every presidential candidate for the Republican nomination took a stand against abortion and disagreed only on whether rape, incest, and life-of-the-mother exceptions should be allowed. And every Christian nationalist activist hammered home the message. “There is literally no more important issue than the life of a child prior to its birth,” said Buddy Pilgrim, an activist and businessman who has been closely involved in political campaigns and legislation-focused initiatives. “That is supreme, and we cannot stand before a righteous and holy God and say, ‘I voted for a pro-abortion candidate because I liked their economic policies better.’ ”68 Christian nationalists and their allies continue to stand behind the most corrupt, divisive, and chaotic president in history because they believe that he can supply, via the courts, the abortion ban that they see as a necessary prelude to making America a righteous nation again.

  It is another crisp, winter morning, one year later, and I am back at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. The official theme of the march this year is “science.” “Pro-Life is Pro-Science,” the banners read. The unofficial theme might well have been “Girl Power.” I spot an abundance of placards reading “I am a Pro-Life Feminist,” “A Woman’s Rights Begin in the Womb,” and “Pro-Life, Pro-Woman.” And yet the whole affair feels even more like a Trump rally than last year’s event.

  This year, of the twenty-two members of Congress whose names Jeanne Mancini reads out onstage, twenty-one are Republican and none are women. But, perhaps mindful of the blowback from last year’s nearly all-white speaker’s panel, the organizers have been careful to offer more racial diversity in the lineup, bringing in antiabortion activist Alveda King and Louisiana state representative Katrina Jackson. Like last year, the crowd at the mall is largely white, with a light sprinkling of red MAGA hats. Vice President Mike Pence is there with his wife, Karen, to declare, once again, that Trump is “the most pro-life president in history.”