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Know Your Enemy

How They Did It, Pt. 2: The Christian Right and Roe

Matt and Sam dig into the origins of the Christian right, their eventual embrace of anti-abortion politics, and how they joined forces with the GOP.
Duration
1h 28m
Broadcast on
16 Jun 2022
Audio Format
other

At long last, Matt and Sam dive into the origins of the Christian right—a complicated tale often flattened by contemporary debates. What was the history of Christian anti-abortion activism before Roe, and how soon after the landmark Supreme Court decision did conservative Christians coalesce around the abortion—and other issues—to become the political force we know today? What did it take to get Catholics and evangelicals to join forces, and what were the barriers to them coming together, especially given the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States? And how did all this help reshape the GOP into a vehicle for anti-abortion politics, given that such a scenario was not fated on the eve of Roe? Your hosts take up these questions and more, stopping in the early 1990s—when they'll pick up with the story in the third and final episode in the series.

Sources and Citations:

Randall Balmer, "The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth," Politico Magazine, May 10, 2022

Neil J. Young and Gillian Frank, "What Everyone Gets Wrong about Evangelicals and Abortion," Washington Post, May 16, 2022

Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Kristen Luker, Abortion & the Politics of Motherhood, (University of California Press, 1985)

Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, (Harvard University Press, 2015)

Ilyse Hogue and Ellie Langford, The Lie That Binds (Strong Arm Press, 2020)

Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-80 (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

Daniel K. Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, (Stanford University Press, 2013)

David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, 2005)

"Killing Abortionists: A Symposium," First Things, December 1994

 

All right, welcome listeners to episode 57 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with my great friend, Sam Adler Bell. Hello, Matt. We're going to keep this intro short because we do a fair amount of scene setting at the start of this episode, which is about the religious right in Roe versus Wade. That's right. This is the second part of what will be three episodes on this topic. So last time we did the Federal Society and the Conservative Legal Movement, today we're focusing really on the rise of the Christian right, and then the third episode we'll close the story out basically with the end of the story from the '90s to the Trump era. Yes, we did a lot of reading for this, really geeked out about it, and it's a fascinating and rich history that we don't want to spoil too much of, that we get to some housekeeping items then, Sam? Yeah. As always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent. They sponsor the podcast, and one of the things they do for us in that capacity is if you subscribe to know your own patreon.com/knowyourenemy for $10 a month, you not only get access to all of our bonus episodes, you get a free digital subscription to Descent. And of course, you can also subscribe to know your enemy on Patreon for $5 a month, and you get all of our excellent bonus episodes. And as always, we want to thank our beloved, our intrepid, editor and producer, Jesse Brennan, and Will Epstein, who provides the music for the podcast. Jesse's work really was superb in this episode, I think. Yeah. We handed him a mass material, and he found the conversation. So thank you as always to Jesse, and thank you to our listeners. Shall we get to it, Sam? Yes. Alright, here's our second episode on the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Enjoy. Alright, well, let's get to it. I'm very excited for this one. It is, as we mentioned in the introduction, the second in series of episodes on the impending overturning of Roe vs. Wade, as of this recording, Monday, June 13th, it has not been overturned yet, but we had the leaked majority opinion, supposedly, that Samuel Lito wrote. We discussed that in our last episode with our great friends from the Five to Four podcast, where we focused on the conservative legal movement, the federal society, the courts, the judiciary, that aspect of what's happening with Roe, and how the right seemingly is on the precipice of succeeding and overturning Roe. But that's not the entirety of this story. So what are we going to talk about today, Sam? This is sort of the closer the ground part of the story. We're going to be talking about the conservative grassroots, the religious right, the formation of a specifically Christian conservative movement, which coheres around the issue of abortion, but also is so essential to the ascent of abortion to the mainstream of conservative politics. And so where last time we were sort of talking more in the halls of elite judicial power, a lot more of this conversation is going to be, as I said, closer to the ground, closer to the grassroots. And really, I mean, it's interesting, we've been doing this podcast for three years. And while many, many episodes touch upon like the Christian right, the evangelical right,

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam dig into the origins of the Christian right, their eventual embrace of anti-abortion politics, and how they joined forces with the GOP.