Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Abortion and America’s Churches explores the surprising history of how American Christians think about abortion.
Many people assume that Christians have steadfastly condemned abortion throughout the United States’s history. Daniel K. Williams overthrows all assumptions about the unity, consistency, or simplicity of American Christian thought and belief in this groundbreaking new book. He demonstrates that churches in the United States have fought among themselves and with the wider culture as they developed and enforced their stance on abortion, revealing major struggles to define their often-changing positions. Far from a cynical exercise of political interest, changes and disagreements arose from serious theological considerations informed by each tradition’s approach to the faith. These theological shifts—and corresponding shifts in interreligious political alliances—led to the changing fortunes of Roe v. Wade.
By capturing the fascinating and complicated history informing each faith’s position, Abortion and America’s Churches restores much-needed context to the sharp polarization over abortion today.
"Like all good historical works, Abortion and America’s Churches provides invaluable context, complicating our understanding of the past in enlightening ways. . . . [It] succeeds in tackling a difficult subject with a consistently fair and even-handed approach. Between its admirable objectivity and its extensive reliance upon primary sources, the book is likely to become the standard treatment of how different Christian traditions have wrestled with abortion." —Christianity Today
"Religion did come to play a significant part in the evolution of abortion policy, a part more subtle and complex than today’s reductive abortion conversation tends to reflect. In his new book, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of ‘Roe v. Wade,’ Daniel K. Williams, a longtime student of the religious right, observes that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, signed by six Protestant justices and one liberal Catholic justice, reflected the consensus that mainstream Protestant denominations had reached on the issue." —New York Review of Books
"The book is excellent and detailed. . . . Williams’s book is a fascinating history because of the space he gives to the prolonged struggle within denominations to decide what their position on abortion would be and how they would explain it." —Word on Fire
“Abortion and America’s Churches will be a go-to source for people wanting to understand the landscape of Christianity and abortion politics in the United States.” —Andrew R. Lewis, author of The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics
"Meticulously researched and empathetic, Abortion and America's Churches fills an important gap in the history of the most divisive issue in the United States. Williams's evenhanded, detailed account is a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of the role of faith in the American debate over reproduction." —Mary Ziegler, author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession
"Abortion and America's Churches will be the definitive look at how Christians settled down on what is still unsettled." —Marvin Olasky, co-author of The Story of Abortion in America
"Daniel K. Williams provides an invaluable guide to the abortion debate as it has evolved since the 1960s, not simply in terms of national politics but also in terms of theological developments in the nation’s Christian churches. Even readers who imagine themselves well-informed will learn from this accomplished and eminently readable book." —Leslie Woodcock Tentler, author of American Catholics
"The history of the abortion debate in the United States is very much tied to the history of US Catholics and Protestant denominations and their reactions to abortion. Thank goodness we finally have an in-depth look at this history, and from a trustworthy and talented historian. Abortion and America's Churches is a gift that will be read for decades to come." —Charles C. Camosy, author of One Church
"In Abortion and America’s Churches, the historian Daniel K. Williams revolutionizes our understanding of abortion politics. . . . [S]uffice to say this the best book on abortion since Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood." —Compact
"Written in a thoroughly evenhanded manner, Williams’s academic account of the religious contours of the abortion debate explains more than it advocates. . . . More significantly, Abortion and America’s Churches reminds pastors and scholars that ending elective abortion requires not only changing laws but changing hearts as well." —The Gospel Coalition
"Daniel K. Williams’s important history of abortion politics explains how Roe v. Wade enshrined liberal Protestant assumptions in American law. . . . Williams’s history has implications beyond Roe v. Wade." —First Things
"Daniel Williams has done his readers a great service in writing Abortion and America’s Churches, and it ought to become a standard text in undergraduate and graduate syllabi. Perhaps Williams’s study might also prompt religious historians to reconsider the relative interpretive value of reading twentieth-century figures and ideas through “conservative” and “liberal” lenses." —American Catholic Studies
Daniel K. Williams is associate professor of history at Ashland University, where he teaches American history. He is the author of several books on modern American religion and politics, including The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before "Roe v. Wade." His work has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Christianity Today.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Liberal Protestants before Roe: Abortion as a Personal Moral Decision
2. Catholics before Roe: A Theology of Unborn Life
3. Evangelicals before Roe: A Moderate Conservatism on Abortion
4. Catholics and Evangelicals after Roe: The Making of a Pro-Life Alliance
5. The Rise and Fall of a Consistent Life Ethic
6. Liberal Protestants after Roe: A Theology for a Pluralistic Nation
7. The Conservative Christian Coalition That Overturned Roe
Notes
Index