Evangelicals opposed abortion much earlier than you think

More and more writers—most recently Jamelle Bouie—are confidently asserting that Evangelicals were once
pro-choice, but under the influence of Religious-Right organizations like Jerry
Falwell’s Moral Majority became prolife. This
interpretation of the Evangelical position largely stems from Jonathan
Dudley’s memoir of his own journey as an evangelical in the Midwest. The
book led to a brief exchange between Dudley and Mark Galli at Christianity
Today (see here,
here,
and here). An accurate reading of history tells a different tale—one of longstanding (though not exceptionless) Evangelical opposition to abortion.

Dudley’s work is more memoir than historiography. There is little attempt to address
questions of why certain positions were held and the historical factors that
led to them or their antecedents. Intentionally or not, there is also a tendency to reduce Evangelicalism to the
realm of Dudley’s own experience. Thus Evangelicalism comes off as a Midwestern variety of white Christianity. It is a Reformed-Baptist arc that
Dudley wants his readers to see in evangelicalism because it serves the overall
narrative of a “white” Christianity that excludes women, etc. 

Dudley’s claim that Evangelicals
played little role in the establishment of anti-abortion laws in the late
nineteenth century occurs in four short paragraphs. Quotations buttress his conclusions rather than any sustained analysis. Part of the
challenge is how one defines Evangelicalism at this time. Does one classify
Horatio Robinson Storer the Congregationalist whose writings were behind the push
for anti-abortion laws as an Evangelical or not? Many Congregationalists were,
like D. L. Moody or Cyrus Scofield. Indeed the most famous was Anthony Comstock, who almost single-handedly got state legislatures to put into place obscenity
laws that remained on the books until the 1960s.

In addition, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the
largest organization of women in the nineteenth century, protested against
the sale of abortifacients and contraceptives. So did the YMCA, in which Comstock
got his start. This is because, as Francis Willard never tired of pointing
out, women’s rights and issues surrounding human sexuality were bound up
together. As a staunch Methodist who had participated in the holiness movement,
Willard joined the social purity movement in protest against reducing the age
of sexual consent for girls. She preached against a “culture of impunity” in
which men could abuse women, especially young girls, without fear.

What Dudley’s account fails to consider is the way in which
issues surrounding birth control and abortion in the late nineteenth century
were part of a larger push for social holiness. There remain organizations like
the Salvation Army (conveniently forgotten as an Evangelical institution) that
still place a fundamentally pro-life stance in the context of a push to deal
with cultural, social, and economic factors that lead women to terminate
pregnancies.

Dudley’s account leaps from the late nineteenth century to
the late 1960s without bothering to investigate the Evangelical position during
the intervening decades. What is clear is that writers like the Lutheran Radio
Hour preacher Walter Maier were not only writing against abortion, they were
writing against birth control. The same holds true for Oscar Lowry who was
teaching at Moody Bible Institute in the 1930s and ’40s. Maier summarized the
feelings of Evangelicals when he said, “many regard the coming of a child as a
social and economic calamity, an unwelcome infringement upon the activities of
husband and wife.” He attacked the mantra “fewer children, better children”
that he saw in Margaret Sanger and her allies.

The consistent Evangelical position through the 1950s across
denominational lines was that abortion was morally wrong. The question, then,
is how to account for the clear shift toward a more lax view on abortion by the
end of the 1960s. There are multiple causal factors, one of which was the birth
defects crisis that followed the authorization of thalidomide in the late 1950s
and 1960s. Thousands of babies were born with severe defects as a result of
doctors administering thalidomide during the early stages of pregnancy.

A second factor was renewed concerns about overpopulation
that had Evangelicals reconsidering their position. Finally, there was a
concerted effort to resist Catholic notions of natural law as part of
determining the Evangelical position. The result led to a more lax position on
abortion in some Evangelical organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention
and the symposium on birth control sponsored by Christianity Today in 1968.

Nevertheless, this lax view was not universally held even at the
time. Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey argued against abortion in Fabricated Man in 1970. His thought
influenced the Wesleyan wing of Evangelicalism because of the historic
connection between Methodism and the holiness movement.

During the 1970s Evangelicals debated their positions on
abortion and birth control. While this debate ended with an Evangelical
reaffirmation of a pro-life position, it was not without a problem. The
catalyst for a return to a staunchly pro-life position was Whatever Happened to the Human Race? by Francis Schaeffer and C.
Everett Koop. When one reads Koop’s and Schaeffer’s account the pro-life
position becomes embedded in a larger argument about world view and scientific
naturalism.

This represented a shift away from placing a pro-life
position in the context of sexual ethics and marriage. For the Wesleyan-holiness family of Evangelicals, a pro-life position is best understood as part
of an overall ethic about the treatment of women, human sexuality, and
marriage. In other words, it was about holiness of life. This approach to
life had much in common with the Catholic perspective and the return to
virtue ethics one can find in the writings of Arthur Holmes at Wheaton.

Dudley’s memoir simply does not take into consideration the
contextual factors or the history of Evangelical thought on abortion. Moreover,
Dudley is content to deal with the Reformed-Baptist wing of the movement while
leaving out the Lutheran and Wesleyan contributions. To say Evangelicals were latecomers to opposing abortion represents a selective reading of
history, and a false one.