I recently spoke with Ashland University history professor Daniel K. Williams about his new book Abortion and America's Churches from Notre Dame Press. Williams has written the religious history of abortion before, but this time he's done something different: traced how America's Christian denominations approached and then reacted to that seminal decision. As a legal historian who spent years in Catholic circles wrestling with these questions, I knew the legal side cold. But Williams’ new book shows how the religious story is the real story, the one that explains why we're still fighting about this fifty years later.
Read on (or listen) to learn more about how liberal Protestant Harry Blackmun wrote Roe v. Wade,1 why evangelicals weren't always hardliners, and what happens when your movement wins but has nothing left to fight for.
Roe as Liberal Protestant Theology
Williams doesn't bury the lede: Roe v. Wade was liberal Protestant decision dressed up in (bad) constitutional language. Harry Blackmun, a liberal Methodist, wrote an opinion that tracked with mainline Protestant thinking about abortion as a private moral decision requiring pastoral counseling and medical expertise. "The seven justices who voted in the majority believed that they were creating a framework that respected minority dissents from this position as legitimate private options for individuals," Williams explained.
The Supreme Court that decided Roe had one Catholic (exceptionally liberal William Brennan, who voted with the majority) and was otherwise Protestant. These justices saw restrictive abortion laws as "anachronistic," reflecting 19th-century thinking rather than modern moral reasoning. They were doing what most liberal Protestant denominations had already done: treating abortion as a matter of individual conscience while allowing the state to protect fetal life in later stages of pregnancy.
But liberal Protestants had overestimated how widely their views were shared. They saw the debate as being between sensible moderates (themselves) and a minority of Catholics following rigid church teaching. They missed that evangelicals were about to have their own reckoning with the issue.
Before the Battle Lines
The pre-Roe religious landscape looks nothing like today's. Then as now, Catholics had the most consistent position: life begins at conception, abortion is killing, end of story. Vatican II called abortion an "unspeakable crime." By 1969, Father James McHugh was already organizing what would become the National Right to Life Committee.
But evangelicals? This diverse grouping of believers was generally pro-life, but unsettled with regard to particulars — and the trend was not toward a hardline, life-in-all-cases position. The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 1971 supporting abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, and emotional health. Christianity Today ran a symposium in 1968 where Protestant thinkers took a number of nuanced positions. The National Association of Evangelicals allowed for various health-related exceptions.
"Most evangelicals before the early 1970s believed that abortion, at the very least, was a legitimate option in cases of rape and incest," Williams told me. They thought the Catholic position was absolutist and that the Bible didn't necessarily warrant such a hard line.2 They were trying to find middle ground.
Then Roe was decided, and everything changed.
Francis Schaeffer's War on Moral Relativism
No single person did more to radicalize evangelicals on abortion than Francis Schaeffer, a Presbyterian theologian living in Switzerland who wore knickers and talked about art. His book How Should We Then Live? (1976) gave evangelicals something they'd been missing: a grand narrative where abortion wasn't just wrong but was the canary in the civilization coal mine.
"Schaeffer argued that Roe was about more than just abortion," Williams explained. "Roe symbolized or represented a shift in values in the Supreme Court, away from a Christian set of moral absolutes to a pure moral relativism that would eventually lead to other horrors."
The book had chapters complaining about medieval Catholicism and Thomas Aquinas. Schaeffer was still deeply suspicious of Catholics. But he was happy to borrow their strong and well-reasoned arguments about abortion leading to infanticide and euthanasia. Hefty, avuncular pastor Jerry Falwell read Schaeffer, launched the Moral Majority in 1979, and worked to ensure that abortion became the defining issue for a new Christian Right.
A Mixed-Faith Marriage That Worked
By the 1990s, evangelicals and Catholics were "dating," at least in the political sense. One could argue they "made it official" with "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," published in the always-interesting First Things. The document was the brainchild of Chuck Colson (yes, the Watergate guy who went to prison and got born again) and Father Richard John Neuhaus (a Concordia Seminary-trained Lutheran minister who became a Catholic priest and founded the aforementioned First Things).
These weren't natural allies. For most of American history, many evangelicals thought the Pope was the Antichrist. But abortion changed the math. "Evangelicals began to think of Catholics as an older partner in a shared faith," Williams said. "Perhaps with some differences of theology that they couldn't entirely accept, but nevertheless as a partner that could provide insights into the Christian tradition."
Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae — a compelling pro-life document — became required reading in evangelical seminaries. The coalition worked because both sides agreed to focus on abortion while ignoring their differences on capital punishment, nuclear weapons, and whether Mary was assumed bodily into heaven.
Liberal Protestants in Sad Decline
While Catholics and evangelicals were building their coalition, liberal Protestant denominations were hemorrhaging members. The Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the ELCA — they all saw massive declines. Immigration brought new Catholics. Evangelical churches retained their young members. But mainline Protestantism just kept shrinking.
"Liberal Protestantism is in crisis today," Williams said. "They've experienced a continuous decline over the last half century in numbers, but now, over the last 15 years or so, that number has continued to drop precipitously."
Some mainline churches shifted their rhetoric from "conscience" to "reproductive justice," adopted feminist theological frameworks, and became more stridently pro-choice. But they were shouting into an increasingly empty sanctuary. The denominations that shaped Roe no longer had the cultural power to defend it.
The Morning After Dobbs
The pro-life movement spent fifty years building toward one goal: overturn Roe. They did it. Now what?
"The challenge for them has been, is there something beyond this that can unify us?" Williams said. Some states banned abortion, others expanded access, and this has essentially brought us back to the pre-Roe patchwork. Parts of the conservative Christian coalition that delivered Dobbs are now tied to broader Christian nationalist projects that poll poorly outside the base.
Williams thinks we could end up stuck with this divided arrangement, different states with different rules, agreeing to disagree. The last time America tried that with a fundamental moral issue was slavery, he pointed out. That one required a war to resolve.
Three Families, Three Americas
I mentioned to Williams how the Bush family embodied this whole transformation. Connecticut’s Prescott Bush, the senator grandfather, backed Planned Parenthood as a good liberal Protestant. His son George H.W. started out moderate on abortion but, sagging in the polls, turned hardline to lap the crowded 1988 Republican primary field. The grandson, W., was born again and spoke in evangelical language about the culture of life.
One Mayflower-descended American family, three different religion-informed approaches to abortion. If the Bushes can't hold it together, what chance does the country have?
Williams didn't offer false hope. The institutions that once moderated American religious life have collapsed. Liberal Protestantism is a shadow of itself. The evangelical-Catholic alliance won its big victory but lacks a unifying project for what comes next. We're more divided than we were decades earlier, with less common language and common things to bridge the divide.
"We're going to have to settle for an American legal structure that perhaps doesn't completely match up with our moral beliefs, whatever they may be, " Williams said. "We'll have to use persuasion, we'll have to use dialogue."
Given that the alternative involves either post-liberal authoritarianism or endless culture war, I'll take messy democracy and uncomfortable conversations. Williams’ book provides a keen overview of why the pro-life issue refuses to die. When religions disagree about when being begins, law can't fix what theology broke.
A poorly-written and reasoned decision regardless of one’s opinion on the legality of the procedure. Blackmun, an obsessive list-keeper, was a smart man but a very disorganized thinker (Flood v. Kuhn is even worse, as legal writing goes)!
Evangelicals have generally opposed abortion and supported the death penalty (there are exceptions, of course). Relative to those Roman Catholics who oppose both, this seems inconsistent as a matter of philosophy. However, for those who assign authority to the canonical text of the Bible, this makes perfect sense. The Bible addresses the death penalty, often linking it to the value of human life created in God's image, and Romans 13:4 states that governing authorities are God's servants who bear the sword to punish wrongdoers (see Martin Luther on this topic, here). That said, the Bible is not explicitly against abortion, as it does not define a fetus as a person and Exodus 21:22-25 assigns a fine rather than death for causing a miscarriage, while Numbers 5 provides a passage sometimes interpreted as justifying abortion in cases of adultery, though this interpretation is hotly debated. In any event, hardline evangelical opposition to abortion has been tied more broadly to concerns about “moral decline,” which are evergreen and will help you build quite the following on social media!
