Evangelical Views on Abortion Are New

There has been a rumble in the background for as long as I can remember, religious extremists opposing abortion even for people who are not members of their religion. People claiming to be Christians have been hassling women at abortion clinics for decades, waving their signs with pictures of fetuses on them, bombing clinics, shooting at doctors. They are responsible for a significant portion of American terrorism. I can't remember a time when this background noise -- which moves to the foreground for those women who need abortion services and often have to confront violent crowds -- did not exist. I assumed it has always been that way, at least since abortion became a safe medical procedure, in approximately the 1930s.

Turns out that is not the case. Slacktivist blogger Fred Clark had an informative post this week, noting that evangelicals had no big problem with abortion, not so long ago.

[In 1968] Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion. That issue included many articles that today would get their authors, editors — probably even their readers — fired from almost any evangelical institution. For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:

God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.

Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.

At some point between 1968 and 2012, the Bible began to say something different. The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal

The blogger quotes from Dudley's book. It is surprising, given the furor over abortion that we accept as part of the background noise of our society, to realize that not-so-many years ago these same people believed just the opposite. History is nothing more than memory, and memory can be influenced by events that occur between the moment of encoding and the moment of recall. This is a perfect example of that.

From Dudley:

By the mid-1980s, the evangelical right was so successful with this [anti-abortion] strategy that the popular evangelical community would no longer tolerate any alternative position. Hence, the outrage over a book titled Brave New People published by InterVarsity Press in 1984. In addition to discussing a number of new biotechnologies, including genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization, the author, an evangelical professor living in New Zealand, also devoted a chapter to abortion. His position was similar to that of most evangelicals 15 years prior. Although he did not believe the fetus was a full-fledged person from conception, he did believe that because it was a potential person, it should be treated with respect. Abortion was only permissible to protect the health and well-being of the mother, to preclude a severely deformed child, and in a few other hard cases, such as rape and incest.

Although this would have been an unremarkable book in 1970, the popular evangelical community was outraged. Evangelical magazines and popular leaders across the country decried the book and its author, and evangelicals picketed outside the publisher’s office and urged booksellers to boycott the publisher. One writer called it a “monstrous book.” … The popular response to the book — despite its endorsements from Carl F.H. Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today, and Lew Smedes, an evangelical professor of ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary — was so overwhelmingly hostile that the book became the first ever withdrawn by InterVarsity Press over the course of nearly half a century in business.

The book was republished a year later by Eerdmans Press. In a preface, the author noted, “The heresy of which I appear to be guilty is that I cannot state categorically that human/personal life commences at day one of gestation. This, it seems, is being made a basic affirmation of evangelicalism, from which there can be no deviation. … No longer is it sufficient to hold classic evangelical affirmations on the nature of biblical revelation, the person and work of Christ, or justification by faith alone. In order to be labeled an evangelical, it is now essential to hold a particular view of the status of the embryo and fetus.”

The strange thing is that evangelicals claim to believe in timeless truths embedded in ancient teachings. It comes straight from The Bible, all of it, this is what they believe and it is what Christians have always believed.

By the time of the 1988 elections, everyone in American evangelicalism was wholly opposed to legal abortion and everyone in American evangelicalism was pretending that this had always been the case.

They did not only change their believe about abortion, they also revised their belief about their belief, they revised the history of the belief. Opposition to abortion is now a litmus test for the born-again movement, where one generation ago they felt just the opposite.