Ed Kilgore: August 2008 Archives

I did a post here a week ago raising a number of questions, theological and cultural, about the much higher tendency of white evangelicals to hold strong anti-abortion views, as compared to Catholics. 

It took a while, but I'm glad to report that Ross Douthat of The Atlantic (a second time today), and Steve Waldman and Rod Dreher here at Beliefnet, rose to the challenge with their own theories for the phenomenon. 

Two of Steve's suggestions strike me as plausible: (1) Catholics who are not in the habit of reading papal or episcopal encyclicals may actually hear less in church about abortion than evangelicals; and (2) opposing abortion is part of a "bundle" of issue-positions related to the overall conservative political positioning of evangelicals, and their alliance with the GOP. 

On this second point, I agree with Steve that the "bundle" is eroding; fewer and fewer evangelicals each day seem to accept the idea that religious fidelity requires them to oppose cap-and-trade or favor high-end tax cuts.  But some of the strains in the GOP-evangelical relationship have to do with disappointment over Republican failures to "deliver" on core moral concerns, so it's not clear to me that evangelical anti-abortion sentiment is going to decline any time soon. 

Rod Dreher took as his point of departure Ross Douthat's theory that evangelical religious commitment is simply more "intense" than that of most Catholics, leading to a greater sense of religious obligation on issues like abortion.  Rod assumes that Ross is talking about levels of church-going, with Catholics less likely to be observent. 

The problem with Rod's argument is that most of the available data shows evangelicals are much more likely than Catholics to take conservative positions on "life" issues across every level of religious observance.  Yes, weekly Mass-going Catholics are more likely than irrregularly attending evangelicals to oppose abortion and stem-cell research (or for that matter, gay marriage), but not nearly as much as weekly-attending evangelicals.  Something else is going on here beyond rates of church-going. 

Ross is on stronger ground in his post today, citing yet another Pew survey as evidence that evangelicals are far more likely to consider themselves "traditonalists" than are Catholics.  But even if you buy Pew's traditionalist/centrist/modernist typology (which I don't, fully, given the different meaning of these words for different "traditions"), the same survey shows the same, sizable gap between evangelical and Catholic "traditionalists" on abortion policy--and on a host of other issues signifying overall conservatism--that all the other surveys show. Across every measurement, white evangelicals are simply more likely to hold hard-core anti-abortion views than Catholics, and I'm not sure any of us really know why.   

One final thing: in the comments thread for my original post a philosophy professor named Francis Beckworth challenged my claim that scriptural arguments for outlawing abortion typically involve circular reasoning from prohibitions against homicide that don't really establish that abortion is homicide in the first place.  He helpfully offered a link to a scholarly article of his own from 1991.  I will concede that his article does address the underlying issue from a right-to-life point of view, but read it yourself: it's not the sort of argument that any significant number of rank-and-file evangelicals--or I suspect, even clergy--would have ever heard or understood. The fact remains that there is nothing in Scripture that offers the sort of direct, unambiguous condemnation of abortion that is available with respect to a wide variety of other behaviors, from adultery to homosexuality to divorce to greed to unjust war.  Perhaps the gap between evangelical and mainline Protestants on gays rights is attributable to the belief in biblical inerrancy common among the former category. But that doesn't seem to be the case on abortion.

I'm less certain than Mara Vanderslice that John McCain's recent pattern of decrying Barack Obama's "messianism" is a deliberate effort to label him as the Antichrist.  It's not that I consider Team McCain incapable of "dog whistle" appeals to the Christian Right; their candidate has certainly mastered those dark arts in a variety of abstract references to his hatred of "judicial activism," which to that audience means legalized abortion, gay partnership rights, and church-state separation.  But unless John Hagee spent some time whispering in McCain's ear during their brief public partnership, I wouldn't guess he or his campaign advisors possess the kind of theological dexterity necessary to paint the 666 on Obama's forehead.  But maybe Mara's right. We'll see if McCain's campaign continues using religiously-charged terms like "the anointed one" in references to their opponent. 

The more obvious problem with McCain's attacks on Obama's charisma is simple hypocrisy.  No recent presidential candidate in either party has done more to build a cult of personality around himself and his biography, from the arrogant assertion that he is uniquely a "straight-talker," to the massive investment his campaigns past and present have made in the proposition that his courage and suffering as a POW should fully qualify him for the presidency and rebut any criticism.  (Yes, I know he has a long record in Congress, but even many Republicans admit that record is something of an incoherent mess, particularly given his vast flip-flopping during the current campaign cycle). 

McCain has also been an eager participant in the self-parodying WWRD (What Would Reagan Do?) idolatry so common among conservatives. And let's don't forget (which is easy to do given subsequent events) that during the brief moment of triumphalism before, during and after the invasion of Iraq, many conservatives engaged in an orgy of messianism about George W. Bush as a towering world-historical figure who was decisively and single-handedly smiting the forces of Islamofascism by deposing Saddam Hussein (another candidate for the Antichrist job in some Christian Right precincts) and creating a pro-American revolution throughout the Middle East and beyond.     

There's been a lot of talk in the chattering classes lately about the political impact of the two major political parties' exact positioning on abortion policy among Catholic voters.  Michael Sean Winters argues in the New Republic, for example, that Kathleen Sebelius' stormy relationship with her bishop on abortion issues makes her a less likely veep asset for Obama among Catholics than co-religionist Tim Kaine (I've published a contrarian take on Winters' article at The Democratic Strategist).

But what about conservative evangelical Protestants? In June, conservative blogger Ross Douthat offered this startling assessment of Barack Obama's potential to cut deeply into this deeply Republican constituency:

"If he [Obama] moved to the center on abortion, a knowledgeable religion journalist remarked to me last week, he could win half of evangelicals under 40."

Douthat's remark pointed to one of the most well-established but under-discussed religio-political facts of life in America: white evangelical Protestants (particularly younger ones) are consistently, and by sizable margins, more likely to favor abortion restrictions than Catholics.

There are variable measurements of this phenomenon, but no real doubt about the basics.  A September 2007 Pew survey showed white evangelical Protestants agreeing that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases by a 65-31 magin; Catholics favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases by a 51-44 margin (with no appreciable difference between Hispanic and non-Hispanic Catholics).  On a related issue that helps measure the intensity of anti-abortion views, the same poll showed white evangelicals opposing embryonic stem cell research by 57-31, while white non-Hispanic Catholics favored it by 59-32. 

Moreover, the evangelical-Catholic gap on abortion looks likely to increase in the future. An April 2004 Pew survey providing generational breakdowns showed that white evangelicals under 35 favored abortion restrictions by more than a two-to-one margin (71% among those under 25), while those over 65 actually (if narrowly) opposed more restrictions.  The generational trend lines among white Catholics moved in exactly the opposite direction.   

The political implications of this split depend, of course, on why as much as whether a given religious category of voters opposes abortion.  And therein lies a great mystery.