A personal perspective.

I grew up in the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church that practiced adult baptism and featured thunderous sermons and speaking in tongues¹. Unlike many teenagers with a similar background, I never rebelled², never left the faith. Indeed, in college I avoided situations I feared might prove too great a challenge for my faith, so I took classes in English literature rather than in philosophy, to which I was more intellectually drawn.

I watched religious fads come and go. I read The Late, Great Planet Earth³ when I was in high-school and accepted it uncritically because it quoted scripture extensively and drew on current events, portraying a coming conflict between Israel and Russia as inevitable. I witnessed the Charismatic Renewal when I was in college, attending a gathering of scores of Catholic youth who met to pray and worship and sing in the Spirit. I joined a Christian band in Arizona. We performed at the coffeehouse I attended with two of my sisters who also sang. We even got a gig in Las Vegas, where we played for the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship breakfast and at a church that was converted from a saloon. At the coffeehouse we had people from all walks of life: a common-law couple who had been together for many years and had many children together, a man who was visited by UFOs until he rebuked them in Jesus’ name, three or four guys who were in building trades, and my sisters.

I saw the beginnings of the Word of Faith⁴ movement before it morphed into the Prosperity Gospel⁵. I saw various ministries implode as financial or sexual improprieties came to light. Through it all, I mostly kept my faith. To be sure, I had periods of doubt, but when I found myself lacking faith, I would talk to God about it, and he always managed to keep me from going full atheist.

During all this time, I saw the Assemblies of God become more like other mainstream Protestant denominations⁶, and I watched as abortion went from a niche concern of earnest elderly Catholic women to a political litmus test for Republican candidates. I voted Republican, and I assumed almost everyone I knew in every church I attended did the same.

One thing I never imagined happening was that a cruel, vindictive bully who openly objectified women would gain the endorsement of evangelical Christians almost without exception. Yet it happened. Somehow abortion had become the single defining political issue uniting evangelical Christians. During decades when Republican candidates paid lip service to the pro-life movement while doing almost nothing of consequence to reduce the number of abortions, many evangelicals became single-issue voters. Then a former reality TV star came along and promised to appoint pro-life judges and overturn Roe v. Wade. He was overwhelmingly supported by evangelicals despite his obvious character flaws.

I actually understand how it happened⁷.

Abortion is just about the most polarizing issue you could imagine. Most evangelical Christians start with a whole host of assumptions: that motherhood is a noble calling, that conception is the beginning of human life, that women ought not to have sex outside their own marriage, that pregnancy is an occasion of great joy despite the trepidation it also brings. These assumptions lead to placing enormous value on the life of the fetus—as great or nearly as great as the value of a baby or small child. This leads logically to regarding abortion as murder, taking the life of another human being for one’s own convenience.

Many of these assumptions are not shared by the broader culture. Women often regard career as equally important to or more important than motherhood. They regard pregnancy almost like a physical assault. After all, the fetus literally takes over⁸ the woman’s body and reshapes it for its own survival. Many women have also come to regard sex as a recreational pursuit with no necessary connection to a committed relationship or to procreation. Even those who do not agree, regard the decision as personal rather than morally absolute. For them, the moral absolute is the right to control their own body and well-being. This includes the right to not give birth to a baby they do not want.

These two positions, no matter how nuanced in practice, are essentially irreconcilable. If you believe that abortion is tantamount to murder, you can’t also believe in absolute bodily autonomy for women, and vice versa.

For a lot of evangelicals, ending abortion on demand is the defining moral issue of our time. They liken it to the Holocaust⁹. In terms of sheer numbers, more humans have died from abortion than from any other cause, almost all of them intentionally killed by their own mothers. Little wonder, then, that abortion became a litmus test for evangelical Christians. If you’re in favor of murdering innocent children, you ought not to hold any public office. Moreover, if you really take action to end abortion on demand, then evangelical Christians are willing to overlook a lot of other flaws that might otherwise disqualify you.

This was the basis for the overwhelming support of evangelical Christians for Donald Trump. But that was merely the beginning. The moral outrage on the left that a man so clearly ill-suited to be President could nevertheless be elected acted as a catalyst to solidify and entrench his support among evangelicals. Nothing hardens your own opinions like the righteous indignation of your opponents. Since 2015, evangelicals have found more and more reasons for supporting Trump. He has offered them a vision of a kind of theocracy, one they imagine used to exist in this country before the cultural shifts of the late twentieth century. To be sure, the United States used to be a more Christian nation, but the dominance of Christianity was demographic rather than political.

The men who framed our Constitution were well aware of the dangers of intertwining government and religion. They had seen it in the sectarian wars in England. That is why the Constitution contains no references to God, and its only reference to religion was to prohibit Congress making laws that would establish any. Unfortunately, there is just as much skepticism from the right as there is from the left about the wisdom of the Founders. On the right, there is widespread belief that Christian morality ought to be established by law, even though the Founders carefully avoided that. And on the left there is profound suspicion of the Constitution because it was framed by white men who deliberately excluded women and people of color. The Constitution is not perfect, but it is the supreme law of the land, and all three branches of government are bound by oaths of office to adhere to it.

For my part, I still consider myself an evangelical Christian although I have never voted for Trump and consider him a threat to our democracy. About abortion I have unresolved tensions. If I start from the fact that conception makes a tiny new human, then I conclude that abortion for any reason except to preserve the life of the mother is wrong. But if I start with a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, then I conclude that no law should compel her to have a child she does not want. I don’t think anyone but the woman herself has the responsibility to navigate that tension. I certainly cannot do it for someone else.

1. Full disclosure: I often speak in tongues during prayer and have done so since I was 18. Researchers say that glossolalia (the ten dollar term for speaking in tongues) lacks semantic structures that would make it an actual language. I don’t care. It helps me connect with God. ↩︎
2. Most of my siblings also never rebelled. This was because our parents gave us age-appropriate autonomy as we were growing up. There was never a need to rebel. ↩︎
3. This book, by author Hal Lindsey, was enormously popular among evangelical Christians in the early seventies. My sister and I gave a book report on it to our high-school English class. Our teacher was no doubt nonplussed, but she was experienced enough to let things be. ↩︎
4. The main idea behind the Word of Faith movement was that ordinary people could take God at his word and expect extraordinary miracles. When I first heard it, I wore glasses to correct severe astigmatism in one eye. I prayed for healing of my eye and as an act of faith stopped wearing my glasses. After about a week, I could see normally from both eyes. My mom took me to an eye doctor who confirmed that I no longer needed glasses. I was sixteen or seventeen. ↩︎
5. The Prosperity Gospel is one of the most pernicious heresies to invade the church in modern times. The basic premise is that God wants his people to be rich. It has led to multimillionaire ministers like Joel Osteen. It may be true that God blesses some Christians with more money than they need. I don’t know. But with Jesus as our example of what perfect obedience to God looks like, it’s hard to make a case for amassing wealth, especially when doing so causes harm to others. ↩︎
6. When I was a child in the sixties, speaking in tongues in the congregation was fairly common. It occurred several times a year. Prophecies were also common. By the late eighties, both had become quite rare in the churches I attended and were even discouraged by the pastoral staff as off-putting to unbelievers who might be in attendance. ↩︎
7. There is an excellent episode of the NPR podcast Throughline that explores the history of evangelicalism and how abortion came to be the defining issue for evangelical Christians. ↩︎
8. For a fairly benign account of this fetal invasion see this article from NPR. For a personal account from a woman who suffered depression because of her pregnancy, see this HuffPost article. ↩︎
9. In the United States there have been over 63 million elective abortions since abortion was legalized in 1973. If you regard each of those as the death of a human being, the toll is staggering. ↩︎