The Religious Right’s most cherished and durable myth is its myth of origins. According to this well-rehearsed narrative, articulated by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and countless others, evangelical leaders were shaken out of their political complacency by the United States Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of January 22, 1973. Falwell even recounted, albeit fourteen years later, his horror at reading the news in the January 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News. “The Supreme Court had just made a decision by a seven-to-two margin that would legalize the killing of millions of unborn children,” Falwell wrote. “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.”
This myth of origins has Falwell and other evangelical leaders emerging like mollusks out of their apolitical stupor to fight the moral outrage of legalized abortion. Some even went so far as to invoke the moniker “new abolitionists” in an apparent effort to ally themselves with their antebellum evangelical predecessors who sought to eradicate the scourge of slavery.
The rhetoric about abortion being the catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right, however, collapses under scrutiny. Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” until the late 1970s. In 1968, the flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today convened a conference with another evangelical organization, Christian Medical Society, to discuss the ethics of abortion. After several days of deliberations, twenty-six evangelical theologians issued a statement acknowledging that they could not agree on any one position, that the ambiguities of the issue allowed for many different approaches. “Whether the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed,” the statement read, “but about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.” The statement cited “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as possible justifications for abortion and allowed for instances when fetal life “may have to be abandoned to maintain full and secure family life.”
Evangelicals in the late 1960s and throughout most of the 1970s by and large refused to see abortion as a defining issue, much less a matter that would summon them to the front lines of political activism. Abortion simply failed to gain traction among evangelicals, and some groups with historic ties to evangelicalism pushed for legalization. In 1970, for example, the United Methodist Church General Conference called on state legislatures to repeal laws restricting abortion, and in 1972, at a gathering Jimmy Carter addressed while governor of Georgia, the Methodists acknowledged “the sanctity of unborn human life” but also declared that “we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from unacceptable pregnancy.”