Why Are Evangelicals More Anti-Abortion than Catholics?
Thursday August 7, 2008
Ed Kilgore's interesting post over at Progressive Revival about evangelicals being more pro-life than Catholics has stirred some interesting debate. Kilgore is puzzled but offers a few theories: 1) Evangelicals are "are radically alienated from contemporary American culture, and view...
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
About Steven Waldman
Subscribe
Most Popular Posts
Hot Topics:
Righteous Posts:
Best Posts That No One Read:
- Our Patriotic Holy War
- Obama's White Family and Black Church
- Science & Religion Dispatched from Cambridge
Little Known Facts:
- The Rise of Prayerism
- Deism--It's Back!
- Abortion vs. Gays: The Evangelical Age Gap
- The Spiritual Atheists
Still Cracks Me Up:
Posts That Annoy Conservatives:
Posts That Annoy Liberals:
- Thomas Jefferson: Believer in Intelligent Design?
- Obama's White House Shouldn't Vet Prayers
- Agreeing with Values Voters
- Why the Catholic Bishops Matter on Health Care
- How to Defuse the Health Care Abortion Issue
- In Defense of Bloody Aborted Fetus Photos
Posts That Annoy Everyone:
Calendar
Tag Cloud
abortion, abortion health care, abortion reduction, barack obama, Barack Obama, casting stones, Catholic, Catholics, Christian, economy, election day '08, evangelicals, Founding Faith, Founding Fathers, gay marriage, health care, Islam, Jews, Judaism, mccain, national service, news, obama, Obama, politics, prayer, pro-life, republican convention, rick warren, sarah palin
Anyone who is involved in the abortion debate on the pro-life side would dispute the contention that it is dominated by evangelicals. The modern Right to Life movement that started after Roe in 1973 was dominated by Catholics and most groups today have more Catholics than evangelicals. Some evangelical pro-life advocates today won't join Right to Life groups because they wrongly believe it is a Catholic organization rather than an ecumenical one. Most evangelicals have gotten involved in groups like crisis pregnancy centers and those tend to be more evangelical than Catholic in nature. But the whole of the pro-life movement, speaking as someone who writes daily about it to more than 250,000 people, is BOTH Catholic and evangelical and they/we work together very well I would say. That, of course, doesn't include the large number of nontraditional pro-life people -- ranging from athetists and agnostics to Democrats and libertarians.
I think this is false statement, becuase Catholic are hardcore anti abortion. Now do catholic maybe vote more then on onbe issues, maybe but abortion is murder in catholic point of view for sure.
Now do catholic maybe vote more then on onbe issues, maybe but abortion is murder in catholic point of view for sure.
And yet I know Catholics who support a woman's right to choose.
"And yet I know Catholics who support a woman's right to choose."
And that makes all the difference. It goes back to point #2 of the essay. To a large degree, when you join the evangelicals, you are signing up for the whole package - anti-gay, anti-abortion, etc. - and high policial involvement. As a rule, the evangelcals want to bring US law into conformity with Biblical law so there is a lot of activity on the part of the evangelicals within the political arena to get laws passed and judges rulings to agree with the Biblical precepts that they follow. On the other hand, Catholics tend to take a more personal approach to religion. We believe that abortion is wrong, that it is indeed murder of an innocent, and will speak out against it when the subject comes up. We also work quite diligently for adoption and finding alternatives to abortion. However, we see this as a moral issue and a matter of faith, not as much a matter of law. Most Catholics want to maintain the separation of church and state so that the government doesn't get involved with the church - and the other side of that is that we don't want the church to get involved in the government. So we aren't as active in trying to get laws passed to enforce our religious beliefs. As devout Catholics, we work toward the day when all children will be wanted and abortion is legal but extremely rare.
I spent 10 years teaching in a Catholic elementary school. I'll guess that most of the teachers I worked with were probably pro-life, but I know they were for birth control...not just the "natural" form approved of by the church. Of the teachers that had children, none had more than 3. I am very sure they hadn't stopped having sex with their husbands. However I also think they would vote for a candidate who may or may not be pro-choice, looking at the other items on a candidates platform, and not counting him/her out because of their stance on the abortion rights.
I am a Christian and personally I am against abortion, but it isn't my right to force my beliefs on people like the right wing seems quite willing to do. This seems quite contradictory to what Jesus did.
Jesus NEVER forced his beliefs on anyone, but the right wing wants to force their beliefs on everyone.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.