Abortion became
the
evangelical issue. Everything else in our “culture wars” pales by comparison. The anger we stirred up at the grass roots was not feigned but heartfelt. And at first it was not about partisan politics. It had everything to do with genuine horror at the procedure of abortion. The reaction was emotional, humane, and sincere. It also was deliberately co-opted by the Republican Party and, at first, ignored by the Democratic Party.
Our
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
seminars
helped launch the crisis pregnancy-center movement (directly and indirectly). The centers offered a practical alternative to abortion. They also became bastions of pro-life political protest and activism.
The centers became places where ordinary Americans reached out with compassionate care to literally millions of women and babies of all races and economic conditions. (As of 2007, there were more than three thousand centers across America.) They also brought a growing number of Hispanic Pentecostals and former Democratic Party Roman Catholics into the Republican Party. And the crisis centers galvanized hitherto apolitical evangelicals into political action. The centers also brought black churches (which were often liberal on other issues) into close contact with culturally conservative white evangelicals and became places where local Republican action committees informally organized.
If things had fallen out slightly differently, the crisis centers just as easily could have been bastions of the Democratic Party, or at least nonpolitical. Abortion had been mostly a “Catholic issue,” just as Bishop Sheen had said. And at first, most evangelical leaders, following Billy Graham’s lead, weren’t interested in “going political.” When Dad asked Billy why he wasn’t taking a stand on abortion, Billy answered that he had been burned by getting too close to Nixon and was never going to poke his head over the ramparts of the “I-only-preach-thegospel” trench again. He said he didn’t want to be “political.”
Other evangelical leaders were similarly nervous when our films first came out, just as Dad had been nervous when I fought with him while urging him to add an anti-Supreme Court pro-life message to the end of our first film series.
Our second seminar tour to launch
Whatever Happened to
the Human Race?
lost almost one million dollars. (The first tour had made twice that on book sales, tapes, and film rentals.) We had raised around one and a half million to make
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
and another million to promote it through the tour. We lost the money because we had moved from the comfortable subjects of art, culture, and theology (with abortion only tacked on in the last episodes of
How Should We Then Live?)
to the uncomfortable “life issues.”
At first the evangelical media leaders, like the editors of
Christianity Today,
met
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
with stony silence. And where, several years before, we had looked out over crowds of thousands, early on in the second tour we could barely fill the first row of seats in the same venues. Then things began to change.
They changed for two reasons. First, we raised grassroots consciousness in evangelical circles. Second, the pro-choice forces were so hubristically aggressive when belittling their opponents that they alienated everyone who even mildly questioned their position. They drove people to us.
If Planned Parenthood, NOW, and NARAL had sat down to figure out the best way to energize the evangelical subculture, they couldn’t have done a better job. With their absolutist stand, they might as well have been working to help the Republicans take Congress and the White House. They branded all who even questioned
Roe
as backward women-hating rubes.
Roe
was the law! There was no need for further debate! There could be no compromise! Shut up! Go away! All that was at stake was “fetal tissue”! People who didn’t agree could just be ignored, mocked, or sued into silence. Besides, the “progressives” had history on their side. We were entering a new secular and enlightened age!
This dismissive attitude backfired. For instance, after Planned Parenthood and NOW sent people to a few of our seminar venues to challenge us, the latter part of the tour began to pull a bigger evangelical crowd in an “us against them” spirit. Our small audiences listened to Dad, Koop, and myself try to debate in-your-face (and often off-the-wall) NOW and Planned Parenthood plants sent by those pro-choice organizations to protest the fact that we even wanted to discuss “their” issue. And our audiences were also sometimes treated to an exhibition of pro-choice self-righteousness that made our fundamentalism seem nuanced. We could not have scripted it better. A screamed chant of “
My body! My choice!”
isn’t much of an argument.
Sometimes our events were picketed. Our rather quiet and timid evangelical audiences had to run a gauntlet of angry “Keep Your Hands Off My Body!” sign-waving pro-choice protesters.
Leading up to
Roe,
abortion had been pitched as a sad but inevitable solution to rare and agonizing dilemmas, like pregnancy resulting from rape and incest. But in the context of the post-
Roe
firestorm, pro-choice people seemed to also be defending abortion not only as a way to end a pregnancy but as an in-your-face triumphant political statement. They even seemed to be goading anyone who had doubts about
Roe v. Wade.
For instance, in the mid-1970s, the Washington, DC chapter of the ACLU auctioned off free abortions at a fundraising raffle held at a dance, and they made sure their action was publicized.
Even some people on the pro-choice side were shocked by the callousness of pro-choice supporters. For instance, in an article in the
Village Voice,
“Abortion Chic—The Attraction of
Wanted-Unwanted Pregnancies” (February 4, 1981), Leslie Savan, a self-described pro-choice advocate, discussed how abortion had become “subliminally chic.” She quoted women who deliberately became pregnant, without any intention of carrying their babies to term. Some of the reasons Savan listed that the women had given her for getting pregnant, then aborting, were: “A desire to know if they were fertile, especially if they had postponed pregnancy until later life. . . . To test the commitment of the man. . . . Abortion as a rite of passage.”
The debate became vicious. And Dad and I went from merely talking about providing compassionate alternatives to abortion, to actively working to drag evangelicals, often kicking and screaming, into politics. By the end of the
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
tour, we were calling for civil disobedience, the takeover of the Republican Party, and even hinting at overthrowing our “unjust pro-abortion government.”
48
I
began to write. My evangelical books—for instance, my hastily dictated
A Time for Anger
—became best sellers. Like Dad’s books, my evangelical screeds were ignored by the media. Although several decades later, author and comparative-religion historian Karen Armstrong, in
The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam
, quoted a passage from
A Time for Anger
as an example of the paranoid anti-status-quo spirit animating American fundamentalism.
Dr. Dobson, founder of the
Focus on the Family
radio program, gave away tens of thousands of copies of
A Time for Anger
as a fund-raising fulfillment. And he interviewed me twice on his (then relatively new) show.
Inspired by my father’s call for civil disobedience in his best-selling
A Christian Manifesto
(and also urged to action by
A Time for Anger
), the picketing of abortion clinics by evangelicals started on a large scale. Formerly passive evangelicals began talking about shutting the abortion clinics with a wall of protesters.
The “other side” reacted to the picketing of clinics with sledgehammer tactics, invoking so-called RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) laws, originally enacted to shut down organized crime. Pro-choice organizations
used RICO to intimidate what, until then, was a peaceful grassroots movement. And groups like the ACLU began to work to stifle the type of free-speech and civil-disobedience activities that in any other context they would have defended.
Dad’s and my books were doing the advance work for people like Ronald Reagan and helping to craft Republican victories out of our fellow travelers’ resentments. Dad and I were also beginning to advise friendly political leaders specifically on how best to woo the evangelical vote. For instance, encouraged by Dad and others, President Reagan contributed an article to a leading pro-life journal, the
Human Life Review.
The
Human Life Review
routinely included articles by Clare Boothe Luce, Prof. James Hitchcock, Dr. Jerome Lejeune, Ellen Wilson, William P. Murchison, Malcolm Muggeridge, Harold O. J. Brown, George Gilder, Nat Hentoff, and dozens of other American and European pro-life writers and intellectuals. The authors included evangelicals, Republicans and Democrats, as well as liberals, an editor at the
Village Voice,
a professor of educational psychology at Boston College, a professor of humanities at the City University of New York, the former editor of Britain’s
Punch
magazine, and a winner of the Medal of Freedom, as well as the chairman of the Department of Fundamental Genetics at the University of Paris.
The Spring 1983 issue of the
Human Life Review
carried President Reagan’s article, “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.” I pitched a slightly expanded version of it to Thomas Nelson publishers as a book.
We cranked the book out. The
Times
never reviewed it, of course, but it put a whole generation of pro-life evangelicals on notice that the Republican Party was “our” party.
When Mom and Dad talked to Presidents Ford, Reagan, or
Bush Sr., they would reiterate the pro-life position. Unlike Billy Graham, who made sure everyone knew he was the “chaplain to presidents,” Dad made sure his conversations were private. He used to often say “You can be seen to do something, or actually do it.”
Dad’s strategy seemed to work. When I wanted to turn Reagan’s article into a book, I only had to call the White House once.
49
D
ad and I were mixing with a new set of people who had not known much, if anything, about my father. If they had even heard of Dad before he came on the pro-life scene in the mid-to-late seventies, they probably hadn’t liked the sound of him. These people included Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, James Kennedy, and all the rest of the televangelists, radio hosts, and other self-appointed “Christian leaders” who were bursting on the scene in the 1970s and early ’80s.
Compared to Dad, these slick media figures were upstarts. They were “not our sort of people,” Dad often said. What people like Robertson and Falwell got from Dad was some respectability.
Dad had a unique reputation for an intellectual approach to faith. And his well-deserved reputation for frugal ethical living, for not financially profiting from his ministry, for compassion, openness, and intellectual integrity, was the opposite of the reputations of the new breed of evangelical leadership, with their perks, planes, and corner offices in gleaming new buildings and superficial glib messages. Empire builders like Robertson, Dobson, and Falwell liked rubbing up against (or quoting) my father, for the same reason that popes liked to have photos taken with Mother Teresa.
What I slowly realized was that the religious-right leaders we were helping to gain power were not “conservatives” at all, in the old sense of the word. They were anti-American religious revolutionaries.
The secular pre-
Roe v. Wade
right had been led by people like James Buckley and the old-fashioned Republican anti-socialist conservatives left over from the Hoover era, or people like Senator Barry Goldwater who stood for the separation of church and state. The “lunatic fringe” old right was represented by groups like the John Birch Society. But even their sometimes paranoid activism had been directed at secular issues such as stopping communism.
The new religious right was all about religiously motivated “morality,” which it used for nakedly political purposes. This was a throwback to an earlier and uglier time, for instance to the 1930s pro-fascist “Catholic” xenophobic hatemongers like Father Charles Coughlin and his vicious anti-Roosevelt radio programs.
Father Coughlin would have understood Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson perfectly: Begin a radio ministry, move steadily to the populist right, then identify the “enemy”—in Coughlin’s case, socialism and Roosevelt; in the new religious right’s case, the secular humanists and the Democrats. Then rip off your priest’s collar—something Coughlin literally did—and talk about politics pure and simple, maybe even form an independent party if you can’t sufficiently manipulate the levers of established power.
The leaders of the new religious right were different from the older secular right in another way. They were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse, and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we evangelicals were wrong about God only wanting to bless a
“Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly when they said that only Jesus was the answer to all our social problems? And likewise, if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did
that
mean?
Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, and others would later use their power in ways that would have made my father throw up. Dad could hardly have imagined how they would help facilitate the instantly corrupted power-crazy new generation of evangelical public figures like Ralph Reed, who took money from the casino industry while allegedly playing both sides against the middle in events related to the Abramoff Washington lobbyist scandal. And after 9/11, the public got a glimpse of the anti-American self-righteous venom that was always just under the surface of the evangelical right. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others declared that the attack on America was a punishment from God. And after the war in Iraq began, some loony group of fundamentalists started picketing the funerals of killed soldiers and screaming at bereaved fathers and mothers that God was punishing “faggot America.” What they shouted openly was what the leaders of the religious right were usually too smart to state so bluntly, but it is what they had often said in private.