Christian Feminism Today

Crazy about Abortion

by Anne Eggebroten.

This essay is the concluding section of a three-part discussion, beginning with Anne Eggebroten's review of the book Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer and continuing with Sharon Gallagher's A Personal Response to a Provocative Memoir.

How did opposition to abortion become an issue around which Christian exclusivists—committed to avoiding contact with a sinful political world—could be persuaded to join together with Catholics and other formerly shunned groups to form a political coalition that became known as “the Religious Right”?

Frank Schaeffer gives his answer to this question in Part 3 of Crazy for God, and not surprisingly, he and his father are presented as the key players: “…it was my father and I who were amongst the first to start telling American evangelicals that God wanted them involved in the political process. And it was the Roe v. Wade decision that gave Dad, Koop, and me our platform” (p. 289).

Frank's marriage (now in its 38th year) began with premarital sex and the crisis of an unplanned pregnancy, resolved by marriage and the loving support of the senior Schaeffers and the entire L'Abri community.

In 1973 when the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the United States, 21-year-old Frank's instinctive reaction was defensive: “I knew that ‘unwanted’ can become very wanted indeed” (p. 266). As a child he had pressed his ear “against a series of fat lovely bellies of my sisters, various unwed mothers (who were guests), and several L'Abri workers… listening to all those unborn babies’ hearts beating.” He also had “a natural empathy for outsiders” (including unwanted embryos and fetuses) based on his own experience with polio and dyslexia and on having close friends with cerebral palsy. “There was nothing intellectual, let alone religious, about my visceral opposition to abortion,” he writes.

Not surprisingly, he felt that what had worked for him and his girlfriend/wife should work for everyone else with an unplanned pregnancy.

In 1972 Billy Zeoli, president of Gospel Films, had visited Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland and in talking with Frank had proposed that Francis Sr. should make a documentary series to answer Kenneth Clark's BBC-produced series, Civilization, which the Schaeffers viewed as a secular humanist survey of the triumph of reason. (Francis Schaeffer had written Escape from Reason, a cultural analysis and defense of Christianity, in 1968).

Francis Sr. and his wife, Edith—“very critical of the fund-raising methods of the Billy Grahams, Billy Zeolis, and other high-powered evangelicals”—were reluctant to enter the public arena with a well-financed 13-part documentary. “His work, Dad felt, would lose its meaning if he ‘sold out’” (p. 257). But sell out he did, partly “to reach a lost generation” and partly to give his son work as director in filming of the series. When the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down on January 22, 1973, the series was already in production.

Within a year Francis and Frank were arguing over whether to mention abortion in How Should We Then Live? Frank eventually won, and the last two episodes were changed to focus on the abortion issue, “which was presented as the prime example of the erosion of the values that had once made the West great” (p. 261). When the series and book came out in 1976, its plea for political activism reached a large audience, partly because of the Schaeffers' 18-city promotional tour in the U.S. Then Dr. C. Everett Koop, a pro-life activist and Calvinist evangelical, flew to Switzerland to persuade the Schaeffers to do another series, even more politically focused, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979).

Enter Fulton J. Sheen, Roman Catholic archbishop and writer, who had also won fame earlier as a religious television personality. Having seen the abortion section of How Shall We Then Live, and having heard of the new documentary being planned, Sheen invited Frank Schaeffer to his Park Avenue apartment “to strategize on ways to advance the pro-life cause”( p. 283). Never mind that for years Francis Sr. had been denouncing Billy Graham “for compromising by inviting a Roman Catholic bishop to join him on the platform of his 1957 crusade.”

“Abortion is perceived as a Catholic issue,” purred Sheen. “I want you to help me change that. The unborn need more friends.” Sheen blessed Frank with the sign of the cross, and the Schaeffers fell in line, taking money from the Knights of Columbus for the production of Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

By November 1979, the second series was out and attracting the attention of Jack Kemp, congressman and later Secretary of HUD under Ronald Reagan. “He immediately saw the possibilities for the Republican Party,” reports Frank (p. 285). The National Right to Life Committee paid to show a 90-minute portion of the series on ABC. In 1982 Reagan nominated Koop as his Surgeon General, and Frank appeared on Christian Broadcasting's The 700 Club to raise support during Koop's confirmation hearings.

But most evangelical leaders, including Billy Graham, resisted “going political.”

“At first the evangelical media leaders, like the editors of Christianity Today, met Whatever Happened to the Human Race? with stony silence,” recalls Frank (p. 291). But the Schaeffers’ grassroots support, plus vocal opposition from Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) finally energized the evangelical subculture into forming what has come to be known as the Religious Right, centering its mission around the issue of abortion.

Another Explanation for the Emergence of the Religious Right

Randall Balmer, an evangelical and professor of American religious history at Barnard College, tells the story differently, not even mentioning the Schaeffers, in Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America —An Evangelical’s Lament (Basic Books, 2006).

His central question is, “Why did the Religious Right choose abortion as its defining issue as it consolidated its power in the 1980s? It seems an odd choice, especially for people who pride themselves on biblical literalism, given the paucity of biblical references to the issue” (p. 5). For example, why not make opposition to divorce the defining issue? He notes that choosing opposition to reproductive choice as their special issue required religious conservatives to “maneuver around the repeated New Testament denunciations of divorce.”

After interviewing major evangelical leaders and theologians, Balmer concludes that abortion was recognized as a convenient and powerful tool for effecting the goal of unifying diverse religious groups into a political coalition. “Selective literalism" became the means of persuading evangelicals that abortion was a biblical issue. “The Religious Right simply ignored or explained away Jesus' admonitions about divorce and focused instead on a political issue that had traction at the time, even though the biblical arguments were weak, and at the very least, contested” (p. 8). Likewise, biblical proscriptions against usury and Paul's warning against women praying or prophesying with their heads uncovered were ignored.

Balmer finds eight articles in Christianity Today in the 1970s against the rising rate of divorce among evangelicals, but in the 1980s “those denunciations ceased almost entirely as evangelical condemnations shifted to other, more elusive targets: abortion and, eventually, homosexuality” (p. 10). The presidency of Ronald Reagan, a divorced and remarried man, was one factor in evangelicals overlooking Scripture.

Balmer documents the construction in the 1980s of an “abortion myth,”namely, that evangelical leaders entered the political arena and mobilized as the Religious Right in direct response to Roe v. Wade (p.11). After research, Balmer concludes that only Catholic groups and Christianity Today complained about Roe in 1973. In fact, a comment in the Baptist Press praised the Roe decision, and W. A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, expressed approval of the ruling. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention had called for legislation to permit abortion “under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother” (p. 12).

By interviewing Paul Weyrich, a long-term conservative activist, and others, Balmer learned that in fact the Religious Right first coalesced around the Internal Revenue Service’s attempt “to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school's regulations forbade interracial dating”(p.14). (In fact, Bob Jones University had only recently begun even admitting African American students who had applied.) The IRS attempt to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools “represented an assault on the evangelical subculture, something that raised an alarm among many evangelical leaders, who mobilized against it” (p. 15).

In Balmer’s words, “Weyrich saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers”(p.15). Weyrich, a veteran of Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign for president, “had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion and the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution” but had failed. The revoking of the tax status of Bob Jones University seemed to promise a new opportunity.

Weyrich described to Balmer a meeting to mobilize evangelical leaders for Bob Jones University in the late 1970s, followed by a conference call to discuss strategy.

During that phone call “someone suggested that they had the makings of a broader political movement… and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, ‘How about abortion?’”

“And that,” concludes Balmer, “is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.” (p. 16).

This conference call occurred in the late 1970s, perhaps in 1979 after Whatever Happened to the Human Race had come out, certainly after How Should We Then Live? It's quite possible that the Schaeffers' films had created the climate in which evangelicals could consider adopting the abortion issue as a tool for mobilizing a coalition. Nevertheless, in the early 1980s, Weyrich still found many evangelical leaders reluctant to take up the abortion cause (p.15). Many considered Roe v. Wade as one more reason for Christians to choose isolationism, not political involvement.

Balmer reports that Clinton's election and reelection in 1992 and 1996 stalled the Religious Right: “…they could no longer count on stoking antiabortion sentiments to raise funds, so they needed another issue to energize their base…. After casting about, the Religious Right came up with a new foil, an enemy right here among us: homosexuals” (p. 24).

Again, conservative evangelical leaders could combine conviction with political opportunity, getting referenda on the ballot in key states during the 2004 election to insure a high turnout of conservative voters. In fact, “Issues surrounding homosexuality have emerged as a kind of litmus test for these evangelicals” (p. 28).

“Not only have leaders of the Religious Right betrayed scripture,” laments Balmer, “but they have shamelessly manipulated important issues—gay rights, abortion—for partisan purposes, all the while ignoring Jesus’ teaching on other matters” (p. 32).

His concluding observation: although the Republican/Religious Right coalition gained control of the House in 1995, the Presidency in 2001, and the Senate in 2003, they made no serious attempt actually to outlaw abortion, their stated goal. Of course not: right-wing members of the Republican Party need the abortion issue to live on, energizing their base and turning out voters.

Sociologist William Martin agrees with Balmer, having asked Ed Dobson of the Moral Majority, “How much of the Religious Right's social agenda has actually been accomplished since 1980?” Dobson's answer: “Very little, other than that they have become points of discussion in every election…”(With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, PBS series, Broadway Press, 1997, p. 236).

Frank Schaeffer now shares this analysis of the Religious Right’s having been manipulated to keep the Republican Party in power, and he regrets the role he played in the rise of that coalition. Nevertheless, he continues to enjoy the celebrity he and his family acquired, writing on political issues such as the war in Iraq for the Huffington Post as one of its featured bloggers (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/). Schaeffer’s views on abortion have changed with time. Though still regarding a situation that results in an abortion as a tragedy, he writes, “I no longer think that it should always be illegal” (p. 345).

How should we then live? “In a society that is willing to struggle with these balancing acts,” he writes (p. 353). “What I don’t want to live in is a culture that makes sweeping and dismissive secular or religious ‘theological’ one-size-fits-all decisions that oversimplify complex issues.”

Table of Contents

Anne Eggebroten (who also wrote the overview of Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God for Part 1 of this feature) is the editor of Abortion: My Choice, God's Grace: Christian Women Tell Their Stories (Pasadena, CA: New Paradigm, 1994). She continues to write and speak from a moderate position on the abortion issue.