The Truth Behind the Pro-Life Movement

April 14th, 2021

A lot of people think the religious right in American politics started because of Roe v. Wade in 1973, a courtcase which legalized abortion. Many people, including some leaders of the movement, have said this is true. But many people don't know the shocking events that kickstarted an entire sub-culture that I was born into.

Let's begin with a basic truth. The idea that evangelicals suddenly became politically active because of Roe v. Wade is a myth. If you ask a Christian how a revival happened beteen the 1970s and the 1990s, they will talk about abortion and Reagan. In reality, evangelicals didn't really talk about abortion after Roe v. Wade. In fact, some evangelical groups even supported abortion rights, seeing it as a "Catholic issue" that didn't concern them. For proof of this, in 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention actually supported abortion under certain conditions. Even after Roe v. Wade, many evangelicals were fine with the decision, seeing it as a way to keep church and state separate.

So, if it wasn't abortion, what actually pushed the religious right's political activism? The answer is because of Green v. Connally, a court case from 1970. This case was about tax exemptions for segregated schools. As the old saying goes, if you want to figure out how corrupt something is, all one has to do is follow the money. But this was more than just money.

In the 1960s, many white families in the South kept their kids from public schools because of desegregation. They sent their children to private "segregation academies" instead. These schools wanted to keep their tax-exempt status, but a group of African-American parents sued to stop this.

The court ruled that these segregated schools couldn't be tax-exempt because they practiced racial discrimination. This decision upset many evangelical leaders, especially those running similar schools.

Enter Paul Weyrich, a Catholic conservative activist who saw an opportunity. He realized that evangelicals, who had mostly stayed out of politics, could become a powerful voting group if they were organized. All Weyrich needed was an issue to rally the fundamentalist Christians around, and the fight over segregated schools was perfect.

Weyrich and other leaders, like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and yes, Reagan himself, started to frame taxing the schools as a matter of religious freedom, not just racial segregation. They argued that the government was interfering with their schools' ability to operate as they saw fit.

So how did abortion as a political tool fit into all this?
By the late 1970s, Weyrich and his allies looked into and figured out how abortion could be a more effective rallying cry than segregated schools. They saw that abortion was becoming a hot-button issue in many right-wing circles, and they decided to use it to their advantage.

In 1978, anti-abortion / pro-life candidates won state elections in Minnesota and Iowa, showing that abortion could motivate voters. Weyrich and Falwell, along with a theologian named Francis Schaeffer, started to promote abortion as a key issue for evangelicals.

By the 1980s, the religious right was a significant force in politics. Christian fundamentalist Ronald Reagan defeated mainline Christian President Jimmy Carter by making abortion a litmus test for Republican votes. They claimed that Carter's refusal to support a constitutional amendment banning abortion was a deal-breaker. President Carter did have other problems, like a bad economy and the Iran Hostage Crisis, but the defection of evangelical voters crushed his chances of re-election.

Let me make this clear. The religious right's origins are rooted in the defense of racially segregated schools, not abortion. Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists saw an opportunity to rally evangelicals around abortion while covering up the funds they got to deal with the tax exempt status of the segregated schools.

This surprising history shows how political movements can be shaped by issues that might not seem obvious at first glance. The religious right's story, when seen behind the strategic maneuvers and shifting priorities of what they care about, reveal one thing: their roots. The roots of conservative Christianity, whether we're talking about Catholicism or Protestant or non-denominational Christianity, are racist roots.

The moment I discovered this in 2021, was the moment I gave up on evangelicalsim completely, and soon after, all of Christianity.