To the American Christian,
Your conviction may be sincere, morally serious, and held in good faith. Arguments about abortion almost never grant that. This letter does. Nothing here asks you to stop caring about unborn life. It asks a smaller question, one with a documentary answer.
How did opposing abortion become the single non-negotiable of Christian politics in America, the one issue that outranks every other teaching of your faith at the ballot box? Who arranged that ranking, when, and for what? Not for Christians in general. For you. Who taught it to you? How old were you? Can you name the sermon, or did the conviction arrive the way furniture arrives, already in the room when you got there?
The ranking is not ancient. It is younger than most of the people reading this letter. The men who built it explained themselves, on the record, more than once. Everything below is checkable, and the sources are attached. Bring them to Bible study.
What your own churches said
Start with a document that sits on the Southern Baptist Convention’s own website today. In June 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade, the messengers of the largest Protestant denomination in America voted in St. Louis to call for legislation permitting abortion in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, and likely damage to the mother’s emotional, mental, or physical health. Not a fringe caucus. The convention’s adopted position, in its own archive, right now.
The convention reaffirmed it in 1974, the year after Roe. In 1976 it took a deliberate middle course, rejecting both abortion on demand and total prohibition. The position you know today did not arrive until 1980. The full sequence is compiled at Johnston’s Archive, and Baptist Press, the SBC’s own news service, has published its own accounting of the history rather than denying it.
The men who held the earlier view were not marginal. W.A. Criswell, twice elected SBC president, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, one of the most influential fundamentalists alive, responded to Roe in 1973 by saying he had always believed a child became an individual person only after birth and separation from its mother, and that what was best for the mother and the future should be allowed. W. Barry Garrett, the Washington bureau chief of Baptist Press, wrote that the decision advanced religious liberty, human equality, and justice. Both are documented in the historian Randall Balmer’s work on the period.
This was not a Baptist eccentricity. In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism, joined the Christian Medical Society in a symposium arranged by its founding editor, Carl F. H. Henry. The statement they published that November, still in the magazine’s archive, declined to call abortion sinful and allowed for it on grounds running from the mother’s health to family welfare. In the same issue, Bruce Waltke of the staunchly conservative Dallas Theological Seminary argued from Exodus 21 that Scripture does not reckon the fetus as a soul.
Through the early seventies, evangelical leaders mostly regarded anti-abortion activism as a Catholic cause. The historians who defend the movement agree with the historians who indict it on that much.
Maybe the old consensus was wrong. Churches can err in any direction. But the claim you have been handed, that Bible-believing Christianity has always and everywhere treated abortion as the supreme political question, is contradicted by your own denominations’ paper trail, within living memory.
What the tradition held
The scriptural record is thinner and stranger than the certainty built on it.
The Bible never directly prohibits abortion. The passage closest to the subject, Exodus 21:22-25, describes men whose fighting injures a pregnant woman. If the pregnancy is lost and no further harm follows, the penalty is a fine. If further harm follows, the penalty is life for life. Whatever else that law is doing, it treats the loss of the pregnancy differently from the death of a person. That is how classical Jewish law read it, and how Waltke read it at Dallas Theological Seminary in 1968. Translators still argue over the verse, and that is the point: the foundational text is uncertain enough that conservative Protestant scholars sat on both sides of it into the 1970s.
Numbers 5 prescribes a priestly ordeal for a wife suspected of adultery, a ritual whose curse, in several major modern translations, ends her pregnancy. Genesis 2:7 has Adam become a living soul at first breath, the root of a tradition Judaism still holds. The verses quoted on the other side, the knitting together in Psalm 139 and the calling before birth in Jeremiah 1:5, are poetry and prophetic commission. They assert God’s foreknowledge and care, which no Christian disputes. Read as statutes, they prove too much: Jeremiah says God knew him before forming him in the womb. Before conception, not at it.
Be honest about the other column, because it exists. The Didache, a church manual from around the end of the first century, forbids destroying a child by abortion, and much of the early church condemned the practice. Christian discomfort with abortion is genuinely old. What is not old is the doctrine now treated as self-evident: full legal personhood from the moment of conception, overriding every competing consideration. Augustine and Aquinas both held that ensoulment came weeks after conception. For centuries, church penalties and English common law treated abortion before quickening as a lesser matter. Catholic canon law kept a formal distinction between the unformed and formed fetus until 1869. And Jewish law, reading the same Exodus passage, holds that the mother’s life takes precedence until birth, which is why Jewish plaintiffs in Kentucky and Indiana have gone to court arguing that abortion bans establish one recent Christian doctrine over their own faith.
A tradition that argued with itself for nineteen centuries about ensoulment was not a tradition organized around abortion as its central test. The ranking is the new thing. The ranking has a birthday.
The birthday
The story you were told is that the movement rose in righteous answer to Roe in 1973. The movement’s own chief engineer said otherwise.
In 1970 the IRS, following the federal courts, began denying tax exemptions to private schools that practiced racial discrimination. That meant the segregation academies that had multiplied across the South, and it meant Bob Jones University, which admitted no Black students until 1971 and banned interracial dating until the year 2000. Bob Jones lost its exemption in 1976, fought it for seven years, and lost at the Supreme Court, 8 to 1.
Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the most effective political engineer the religious right ever had, spent those years trying to weld conservative Christians into a voting bloc. By his own account, retold by Balmer from a 1990 conference both men attended, Weyrich had tried school prayer, pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion itself, and none of it moved evangelical leaders to organize. What moved them was the IRS coming for their schools. Roe did not create the movement, he told that room. The tax cases did.
But a movement whose founding grievance was the tax status of segregated academies could not march under that banner. Abortion could carry a flag. The schools could not. So the sequence ran: Jerry Falwell preached his first sermon against abortion in February 1978, five years after Roe, by Balmer’s accounting. The Moral Majority followed in 1979, Weyrich supplying the name. The same year, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop toured the film series that converted the evangelical rank and file to the cause. Schaeffer’s son Frank, who produced those films, has spent two decades, beginning with his memoir Crazy for God, describing the campaign as something he helped manufacture, and repenting of it.
Then 1980, and the tell that nobody at the time missed and everybody since has forgotten. The newly organized religious right abandoned Jimmy Carter, the born-again Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, for Ronald Reagan, the divorced Hollywood governor who in 1967 had signed one of the most permissive abortion laws in the country. The issue could be pinned on Carter and lifted off Reagan because it was not yet anyone’s ancient conviction. It was new equipment. It fit whoever the machine needed it to fit.
The honest dispute
Historians genuinely argue about how cynical this was, and you deserve the argument straight.
The historian Daniel K. Williams, in Defenders of the Unborn, has documented a real anti-abortion movement before Roe, overwhelmingly Catholic, often allied with social welfare politics. Evangelical unease was growing through the seventies as abortion numbers rose. Critics at The Gospel Coalition, drawing on that history, have argued that Weyrich inflated his own cunning and that some evangelical opposition predates 1979.
Take the friendliest version of that correction and look at what it still concedes. The 1971 resolution is real. The 1974 reaffirmation is real. Criswell and Garrett are real. The 1968 symposium is real. The six-year gap between Roe and the movement’s founding is real. Weyrich’s testimony about the tax cases is real, whatever weight you give it. You do not need the harshest reading. Under any reading, the thing you were taught, that ranking abortion above every other question is timeless and biblical and non-negotiable, fails against the movement’s own documents. Your conviction may be sincere. The schedule it arrived on belonged to a campaign, and the campaign was aimed at you.
What the bans have done
Whatever you believe about when life begins, the policy sold in its name now has a record, and it acts in your name. So look at it.
ProPublica’s Life of the Mother investigation won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service this year for documenting women who died after doctors, afraid of prosecution, delayed care that used to be routine. Amber Thurman, 28, a Georgia medical assistant with a young son, died of sepsis after a hospital waited twenty hours to perform a standard uterine evacuation. Georgia’s own maternal mortality review committee called her death preventable. The same committee said the same of Candi Miller, a Georgia mother who died at home, afraid to seek care at all. In Texas, ProPublica documented Josseli Barnica, who died of infection after waiting roughly forty hours through a doomed miscarriage, and Nevaeh Crain, 18, who died after three emergency room visits.
The aggregate numbers point the same way. ProPublica’s analysis of seven years of Texas hospital data found sepsis rose more than 50 percent among women hospitalized during second-trimester pregnancy loss after the state’s ban. A 2025 study in JAMA estimated that ban states saw infant mortality 5.6 percent above expectation, about 478 additional dead infants in the first year, with the sharpest increases among Black infants and fatal birth defects carried to term by law.
The exceptions you were promised are paper. A 2024 study in JAMA Internal Medicine estimated 64,565 rape-caused pregnancies in the fourteen total-ban states in the first eighteen months after Dobbs, while the states’ own reporting showed ten or fewer legal abortions a month in the states with rape exceptions. The authors concluded the exceptions fail survivors outright. You know the case that proved it. A ten-year-old, raped in Ohio, taken to Indiana in 2022 because Ohio’s ban had no path for her. Ohio’s attorney general publicly suggested the story had no evidence behind it, and prominent politicians called it a lie, until Gerson Fuentes was arrested, confessed, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life.
The apparatus reaches further than providers. Brittany Watts of Warren, Ohio miscarried a nonviable pregnancy at home, days after a hospital told her the fetus would not survive, and was charged with abuse of a corpse. A grand jury refused to indict her. Hers is the version with a public ending.
And the burden lands where it always lands. The Turnaway Study at the University of California, San Francisco followed about a thousand women for five years and found that women denied a wanted abortion had four times the odds of poverty and three times the odds of unemployment, stayed tethered to violent partners at higher rates, and saw worse outcomes for the children they already had. The women who received abortions showed no lasting harm to health or well-being. Guttmacher’s patient data show most women seeking abortions are already mothers, and about three quarters are poor or low-income. The CDC reports Black women die of pregnancy at 2.6 times the rate of white women. Women with money fly. The bans bind the women who cannot. Rob Schenck, who ran clinic blockades for thirty years before renouncing the movement in The New York Times in 2019, named that math as the reason he quit.
One more juxtaposition, because the same legislatures wrote both columns. Mississippi, which brought the Dobbs case, has the nation’s highest infant mortality. Seven of the ten states still refusing Medicaid expansion, per KFF’s tracker, ban abortion at or before six weeks. The states most eager to compel birth are, by their own budgets, the least willing to pay for what follows.
What actually lowers abortion
Here is the number that never makes the mailers. Abortion went up. Guttmacher counted about 1,037,000 abortions in 2023, the first full year after Dobbs, the highest figure in over a decade, and 2024 came in slightly higher. The bans did not prevent abortions. They rerouted them, toward pills and travel for women with resources, toward septic emergency rooms and compelled births for women without.
What lowers abortion is also on the record. Colorado’s family planning initiative, which from 2009 provided free long-acting contraception through clinics, cut the state’s teen birth rate by 54 percent and its teen abortion rate by 64 percent by 2016, by the state health department’s own count. No ban anywhere has numbers like that.
Now watch what the movement does with that fact. Project 2025, the governing blueprint written by the network Weyrich founded, goes after contraception programs alongside its abortion provisions, as Guttmacher and KFF have both documented against the primary text. The movement’s legal arm spent years in court so employers could drop contraceptive coverage. Its activist wing increasingly campaigns against hormonal birth control itself, as Rolling Stone has documented. A movement that wanted fewer abortions would fund the one thing with a proven record of producing fewer abortions. This movement attacks it. Behavior is a confession. The number was never the goal. The engine is the goal.
The men, the money, and the plan
None of this was anonymous. Name the builders.
The architecture came from Weyrich, from the direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, whose lists turned moral emergency into recurring revenue, and from Falwell, with Schaeffer supplying the theology of crisis. The judicial pipeline came from Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, which supplied the Supreme Court shortlist Donald Trump published in 2016 as an open trade for evangelical votes. The trade executed. Eight in ten white evangelical voters, per Pew’s exit poll analysis in 2016. About eight in ten again in 2024, per AP VoteCast. Three justices from that pipeline made the Dobbs majority, and the Mississippi law at the center of the case was drafted by Alliance Defending Freedom, as The Nation reported and as ADF celebrates on its own website.
The money is public record. In 2022 The New York Times revealed, and CNN confirmed, that the electronics magnate Barre Seid had moved his entire company into Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust. One point six billion dollars, the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in American history, structured to avoid as much as four hundred million dollars in taxes. That is the war chest of the machine that tells you abortion is why it needs your vote.
As for what the machine’s founder wanted, he said it into a microphone in Dallas in August 1980, at the rally that consummated the marriage between the religious right and the Republican Party, from the same stage where Reagan courted the assembled pastors:
“I don’t want everybody to vote. … As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
That is the founding engineer, at the founding rally, stating the operating principle. Not awakening. Turnout, managed. Yours aimed, and other people’s suppressed.
Read it once more, as one person rather than a demographic. He is pricing you. Your conviction was the inventory. Your reliability in November was the product. And a voter captured by a single issue is the cheapest voter there is, because he never has to be persuaded of anything else again, and never is.
The plans for what comes next are published. Project 2025 calls for enforcing the Comstock Act of 1873 against mailing abortion medication, a national ban with no vote of Congress, and for the FDA to withdraw approval of mifepristone. Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Dobbs invites the Court to reconsider the precedents protecting contraception, private intimacy, and same-sex marriage, by name. And in February 2024 the Alabama Supreme Court, applying the personhood doctrine the movement now advances, ruled frozen embryos are children. Fertility clinics across the state stopped treating families who were trying to have babies until the legislature passed an emergency immunity law around a doctrine the court left standing. Fifty years of promising this was only about returning the question to the states resolved, within months of winning, into pills, Comstock, personhood, and contraception. That is not a finish line. That is an engine that cannot afford to finish, because a movement that finished winning would lose its reason to collect your money and your vote. That last sentence is this letter’s own judgment. Test it against the conduct above.
The bill
You have paid for this arrangement in the one currency Jesus actually mentioned. Witness.
Pew’s latest Religious Landscape Study puts American Christianity at 62 percent of adults, down from 78 percent in 2007, with 29 percent claiming no religion at all. Among adults under thirty it is 45 percent Christian against 44 percent nothing. Correlation is not causation. But listen to the pastors. Russell Moore, once the Southern Baptists’ top ethics official, told NPR that pastors now quote the Sermon on the Mount and get confronted afterward by members asking where they got those liberal talking points. Told the words are Christ’s, the members answer that it does not work anymore. That it is weak. Moore calls it a crisis of credibility. He is right.
Count what it cost you, specifically. The candidates you swallowed whole because of one issue, while the rest of their agenda rode your vote for free. The offerings that followed the mailers out of your checkbook into that war chest. The brother you quit calling. The daughter who quit calling you. The pastor you watched get run off for preaching mercy in the wrong year. You paid in the only currencies you had: money, family, trust. Good faith is what they were mining. Yours.
The movement’s own veterans have already told you. Schenck, who helped build it, told you it would fall on poor women and spare the wealthy. Frank Schaeffer, who helped build it, calls it manufactured. And Sister Joan Chittister, the Benedictine nun, put the distinction to Bill Moyers in 2004: compelling birth while refusing responsibility for what comes after birth is not pro-life. It is pro-birth. Your own Scripture proposes the test. By their fruits.
How to tell if it was done to you
You do not need a historian to check for fingerprints. You need your own memory.
Ask when you first heard that this issue outranked every other. From scripture, read alone at the kitchen table? Or from a voter guide in the foyer, a radio voice, a mailer with an ultrasound on it, a candidate night in the fellowship hall? Ask whether your certainty arrived before or after your study. Ask whether you can remember being taught the ranking at all, or whether it was simply there one year and everyone already knew it.
Ask why questioning this one conviction felt dangerous in a way questioning others never did. You can argue predestination over pie and stay friends. This one cost people the room. Somebody built that cost on purpose, because a conviction you are not allowed to examine is a conviction somebody else gets to use.
And ask why the urgency always peaked in the October of an even-numbered year, then went quiet until the next one, like weather that only happens before elections.
If none of that matches your life, then your conviction is your own, and this letter takes nothing from it. But if it matches, sit with what that means. Men you never met decided what you would believe, scheduled its arrival, priced your reliability, and described the operation to historians afterward. That is not persuasion. That is being worked. And being worked is not a weakness in you. It is a fraud committed against you, in the vocabulary you keep for holy things.
What I am asking
Not that you celebrate abortion. Millions of Christians who will never celebrate it have already faced this record, because the record is theirs too. I am asking you to audit a package that was assembled in your name, sold back to you on a campaign schedule, before most of you were old enough to vote. Four questions will do it.
Who taught your tradition to rank this issue above every other, and in what decade? What has the policy demonstrably done, to Amber Thurman, to a ten-year-old in Ohio, to 478 infants in a year, against what it promised? Who collects the money and the leverage your single-issue vote produces, and what do their published plans spend it on next? And what would a politics that lowered abortion and kept mothers alive have to fund, and which coalition blocks every item on that list?
The Southern Baptists who voted in St. Louis in 1971 were not heretics. They were conservative churchmen reading the same Bible you read, before anyone had built a mailing list on the difference. The men who took that room for conscience away from you were not doing it for God. The one quoted above told you what he was doing it for.
If this letter fits your life, you are allowed to be angry. Anger is the sane answer to being used. Aim it where it belongs: not at your faith, which is the thing they counterfeited, and not at yourself, because the mark is never the criminal. Aim it at the men who treated the body of Christ as a mailing list. Your own Bible saw them coming, in the King James your grandmother read: through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you (2 Peter 2:3). Feigned words. Merchandise. You.
Print the 1971 resolution. Bring it to your Bible study, your small group, your men’s breakfast. Ask the room one question: when did this change, and who changed it? Then sit in the silence that follows, because that silence is where the church gets to decide, this time on purpose, what it actually believes.
— A neighbor who checked the record
Sources and scope
This letter contains no original reporting, and no person or institution named in it was contacted for comment: it analyzes the published record only, and says so here plainly. It assembles denominational records, court opinions, recorded speeches, peer-reviewed research, and named-outlet journalism, linked inline at the claim and listed again below; a few book-length works and one paywalled op-ed are named inline by author, title, and date instead, so you can still check them. Every quotation is either the single modern passage quoted directly above, from a recorded 1980 speech, one verse of the King James Bible, or a paraphrase attributed inline so you can check the original wording. Where historians dispute the story, the dispute is described in the body rather than resolved by omission. Nothing here asks the reader to abandon a conviction. It asks the reader to know where the conviction’s ranking came from, what it is being used to do, and who profits.
