In the long arc of Christian theology, it’s actually a minority view.
Community faith leaders gather for a prayer vigil in Washington, D.C. There is a widespread and nuanced theological debate about the beginning of life in the history of Christianity. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesBradley Onishi, a former evangelical minister, is the author of “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism - And What Comes Next,” and co-host of the “Straight White American Jesus” podcast. He teaches at the University of San Francisco.
Chief Justice Tom Parker’s opinion in the case, which draws on the Bible, Christian manifestos, theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and the Reformer John Calvin, is an openly theological document. Parker argues that since life starts at conception, humans, especially lawmakers and judges, are called to implement policies and make decisions that will protect the sanctity of human life, whether in utero or outside it.
Instead, Parker is repeating a political mantra concocted by Republican operatives in the late 20th century in a successful effort to create a conservative Catholic-Protestant voting bloc capable of taking over the GOP — and implementing their religious-political vision throughout the country. The famed evangelical theologian Norman Geisler put it in the clearest terms in the 1971 and 1975 versions of his workIt’s not Protestants, but Catholics in the United States who, as a religious community, have opposed abortion forcefully going back to the 19th century, and it is in Catholicism that we find the view that life begins at conception. Starting withYet, prior to 1869, there were varying approaches to abortion and the understanding of when life begins even within the Catholic Church.
“Family values’’ became a rallying cry for evangelicals, Catholics and other Christian conservatives who wanted to reconstruct the American social order on the basis of patriarchal, heterosexual and monogamous marriages. “If America is to return to original greatness,” stated, one of the most prominent leaders of the Religious Right, “we must ... support the traditional monogamous family as the only acceptable form.
When it came to respectability politics, what the leaders of the Religious Right understood is that reducing abortion to murder by claiming that life begins at conception would provide them with an almost unassailable high ground in debates not just about reproductive rights, but also women’s independence, family structures and the stability of the American social order.
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