The Religious Right recruited theologian Schaeffer to lend intellectual cover to antiabortion politics
Evidence
Weyrich, Falwell, and leaders of the emerging Religious Right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue among evangelicals: Francis A. Schaeffer, a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the Religious Right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s, he warned that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon from Philadelphia, C. Everett Koop, on a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 131
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘secular humanism’ frame here recycles Schaeffer’s evangelical-culture-wars vocabulary, tying the abortion push back to broader 1970s anti-secularist anxieties also present in the school battles. — connects to: Conservatives commandeered the once-diverse antiabortion movement — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 170; The Religious Right’s abortion politics predate Roe and were chosen for strategic reasons — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 222; Theologians’ claims overstated religion-politics fusion to protect their standing
Related
- The Religious Right adopted abortion only after racial segregation failed to rally voters (similarity 0.81)
- The Religious Right’s abortion politics predate Roe and were chosen for strategic reasons (similarity 0.81)
- Conservatives commandeered the once-diverse antiabortion movement (similarity 0.81)
- Abortion was adopted as a rallying issue because it could unite disparate cultural conservatives (similarity 0.81)
- Evangelicals adopted anti-abortion politics six years after Roe for political gain (similarity 0.80)
- The religious right’s founding coalition was initially indifferent to abortion. (similarity 0.80)
- Abortion was not a key evangelical voting issue before 1979. (similarity 0.80)
- The abortion myth obscures the segregationist origins of evangelical activism. (similarity 0.80)
- Conservatives seized the antiabortion movement and turned it statist (similarity 0.79)
- Confronting the abortion myth could reorient the whole evangelical agenda (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Theologians’ claims overstated religion-politics fusion to protect their standing
#expands(0.82) - The Religious Right’s abortion politics predate Roe and were chosen for strategic reasons
#corroborates(0.75) — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 222 - Conservatives commandeered the once-diverse antiabortion movement
#corroborates(0.72) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 170