The Radical White Christian Nationalist Movement And Abortion Politics

Samuel Perry noted about the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection in Washington, D.C. on January 6, The Capitol siege recalls past acts of Christian nationalist violence (excerpt):

[The] blending of Christian imagery with Trump flags put Christian nationalism, the often militarized fusing of Christianity and American white identity, on display during one of America’s darkest days.

As someone who has written about white nationalism during the Trump presidency, I find this somewhat unsurprising.

As scholars of religion Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry argue in their book “Taking Back America for God,” Christian nationalism is predominant in Trump support.

Perry and Whitehead describe the movement as “as ethnic and political as it is religious,” noting that it takes in assumptions of white supremacy.

Christian nationalism is not always violent, but Christian nationalist violence has been a presence during the Trump administration. More broadly it has been on the rise over the past few decades.

* * *

Violence perpetrated by Christian nationalists has manifested in two primary ways in recent decades. The first is through their involvement in militia groups; the second is seen in attacks on abortion providers.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – Wiiliam Faulkner, Requiem For a Nun.

Katherine Stewart explains, How Fringe Christian Nationalists Made Abortion a Central Political Issue (excerpt from The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart):

The most popular origin story of Christian nationalism today, shared by many critics and supporters alike, explains that the movement was born one day in 1973, when the Supreme Court unilaterally shredded Christian morality and made abortion “on demand” a constitutional right. At that instant, the story goes, the flock of believers arose in protest and threw their support to the party of “Life” now known as the Republican Party. The implication is that the movement, in its current form, finds its principal motivation in the desire to protect fetuses against the women who would refuse to carry them to term.

This story is worse than myth. It is false as history and incorrect as analysis. Christian nationalism drew its inspiration from a set of concerns that long predated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and had little to do with abortion. The movement settled on abortion as its litmus test sometime after that decision for reasons that had more to do with politics than embryos. It then set about changing the religion of many people in the country in order to serve its new political ambitions. From the beginning, the “abortion issue” has never been just about abortion. It has also been about dividing and uniting to mobilize votes for the sake of amassing political power.

* * *

I watch Megan watching Trump [at the National Mall in the annual March for Life]. It’s as if I can see the lines of power traced in her eyes. But when I ask her what she makes of the fact that Protestants by and large did not oppose abortion rights fifty years ago, and neither did many Republicans, she gives me a blank look. “Christianity is pro-life,” she says with certainty. “Republicans are the party of life.”

The annual scene on the mall, though familiar enough by now to count as reaffirmation rather than protest, serves mainly to drive home the brute fact that, for Republican politicians, abortion demagoguery is the path to power in America. Donald Trump clearly grasped that fact. Most of the people here, like most of the people catching snippets of the event on the evening news, take for granted that it is the way things have always been.

Except that it isn’t.

In the late 1970s a curious combination of religious and political activists assembled to ponder the strategy of a new political movement, sometimes by letter or phone, and sometimes in conference rooms or at a hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia. Some of the more vocal members of the group included Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell; conservative activists Ed McAteer and Paul Weyrich; Nixon appointee Howard Phillips; attorney Alan P. Dye; and Robert J. Billings, an educator and organizer who would later serve as Ronald Reagan’s liaison to the Christian right.

This was an angry group of men. “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo,” Paul Weyrich said. “We want change—we are the forces of change.” They were angry … One thing that they were not particularly angry about, at least at the start of their discussions, was the matter of abortion rights.

Weyrich was “the man perhaps with the broadest vision,” according to his fellow conservative activist Richard Viguerie. “I can think of no one who better symbolizes or is more important to the conservative movement.”

* * *

Weyrich began to identify himself in the late 1970s with a movement whose name Richard Viguerie put on the title of his 1980 manifesto: The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead. Weyrich came to be known as the “evil genius” of the movement—or sometimes “the Lenin of social conservatism”—and Viguerie, who is considered the pioneer of political direct mail, came to be known as its “funding father.”

From the beginning, the New Right sought radical change. They would establish themselves “first as the opposition, then the alternative, finally the government,” according to Conservative Caucus chair Howard Phillips. “We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them and eventually destroy them,” said Weyrich protégé Eric Heubeck, writing for the Free Congress Foundation. “We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment’s rest . . . We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime.”

Weyrich went on to call for a constitutional convention in hopes of producing a form of government more congenial to conservatism. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said at a gathering in the fall of 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

* * *

For Weyrich and his fellow political operatives, the rise of the civil rights movement presented a historic opportunity to advance their own agenda. From Reconstruction through the 1960s, southern whites had been a critical part of the Democratic Party coalition. Their support had been essential in realizing the New Deal, although it burdened the progressive legislation of the period with racist policies. When Democrats took the lead in civil rights, however, the southern white population was suddenly in play. Nixon famously committed the Republican Party to the “Southern Strategy”— that is, appealing to the southern, white, formerly Democratic popular vote through populism, racism, and nativism. This in turn created a tension with the Republican Party’s other base, the so-called Rockefeller Republicans, who consisted, on balance, of economic conservatives with largely moderate social views.

Weyrich had studied the successes of the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and now he thought he knew what the left had that the right lacked: the right needed to get religion. The left had successfully appealed to religious feelings and organizations in forming the coalition that advanced civil rights, promoted Great Society programs, and opposed the Vietnam War. Just as reformers around the turn of the century had deployed the Social Gospel on behalf of progressive causes, Martin Luther King Jr. has used his pulpit to mobilize change. If the right could access the religious vote, Weyrich reasoned, power would be in its grasp. Together with Phillips, he devoted “countless hours cultivating [televangelist] ministers like Jerry Falwell, Jim [James] Robison, and Pat Robertson, urging them to get involved in conservative politics,” according to Viguerie.

Weyrich eventually founded or played a critical role in a number of prominent groups on the right. They included the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Free Congress Foundation. Arguably the most consequential of the groups Weyrich played a role in founding was the Council for National Policy, a networking organization for social conservative activists that the New York Times once referred to as a “little-known group of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.”

Weyrich did not act alone. Other cofounders and early members of the CNP included Tim LaHaye (then head of Moral Majority), billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell. A leaked 2014 membership directory of the CNP, posted on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center, shines a spotlight on this powerful subsection of the reactionary right. The directory includes Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre; Christian right leaders such as Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, and James Dobson; and antiabortion advocates Phyllis Schlafly, Penny Nance, and Kristan Hawkins. The group also brought into the fold leaders of right-wing economic policy groups and media conglomerates; masterminds of the right-wing legal movement including Alan Sears, Jay Sekulow, and Leonard Leo; and various members of the DeVos and Prince families, including Betsy DeVos’s brother Erik Prince and her husband, Richard, who served as president twice. “The Council for National Policy went on to assemble an impressive network of media and organizations that worked to advance their cause, with a special focus on mobilizing the fundamentalist vote in key districts,” says Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

As Katherine Stewart explains in her book The Power Worshippers:

For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America’s religious nationalists aren’t just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.

Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today’s Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America’s past. It forms common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals.

The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart’s probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.

The white Christian Nationalism present at the violent insurrection in our nation’s Capitol on January 6 is also present in all 50 state Capitols in the persons of Republican state legislators serving in state legislatures. After securing a 6-3 majority on the U.S. Supreme with the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, white Christian Nationalist Republicans across the country are enacting extremist anti-abortion measures as a strategy to get one of these laws in front of the captured U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the nearly 50 year old precedent of Roe v. Wade (1973).

The Guttmacher Institute reports, The Danger Ahead: Early Indicators Show States Will Be the Main Abortion Battleground in 2021: “So far in 2021, antiabortion lawmakers have been introducing new legislation in overwhelming numbers: 384 antiabortion provisions introduced in 43 states through February. These provisions come in many types and differ in their potential impact.”

As always, Arizona’s white Christian Nationalist Republicans, on behalf of the Center for Arizona Policy, are pursuing anti-abortion measures in the Arizona legislature. (These are the same white Christian Nationalists still hoping to overturn Arizona’s election results in 2020 with their bogus Senate audit, and who gave aid and comfort to the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrectionists on January 6).

Howard Fisher reports, House panel OKs bill to imprison doctors who perform abortions because of genetic defects:

Brushing aside questions of legality and religion, a House panel voted Wednesday along party lines to imprison doctors who terminate a pregnancy solely because the fetus has a genetic defect.

SB 1457 was promoted by at least some of its supporters because it prevents women being able to get pills for chemical abortions by mail, without first seeing a doctor and having a medical examination.

Oh, it does more than that. The bill adds a “personhood” clause, section 1-219, to read:

1-219. Interpretation of laws; unborn child; definition

A. THE LAWS OF THIS STATE SHALL BE INTERPRETED AND CONSTRUED TO ACKNOWLEDGE, ON BEHALF OF AN UNBORN CHILD AT EVERY STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT, ALL RIGHTS, PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES AVAILABLE TO OTHER PERSONS, CITIZENS AND RESIDENTS OF THIS STATE, SUBJECT ONLY TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES AND DECISIONAL INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF BY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT.

[The prevention of women being able to get pills for chemical abortions by mail] actually is only a small part of the legislation that is designed to give equal rights to an “unborn child” and seek to protect it in the name of preventing discrimination. And it would do that by sending doctors to prison for at least 2½ years for performing an abortion knowing the reason the woman is terminating the pregnancy because of a genetic abnormality.

It also would give the woman’s husband or even the woman’s own parents the right to sue on behalf of the unborn child.

Don’t you mean a veto power? The Tennessee legislature introduced similar legislation that would allow a father (not just a husband) to deny an abortion without the pregnant woman’s consent. Tennessee bill would grant fathers veto power over abortion, with no exception for rape or incest. “The bill, sponsored by state Republicans Sen. Mark Pody and Rep. Jerry Sexton, would give a man who gets a woman pregnant the veto power to an abortion by petitioning a court for an injunction against the procedure.” (The bill makes no exception for rape or incest.) “This unconstitutional legislation demonstrates the condescending mindset underlying this bill: that men should control women’s bodies,” ACLU of Tennessee Executive Director Hedy Weinberg said in a statement. “Women are not chattel and this bill needs to be stopped in its tracks.”

The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill on a party-line 6-4 vote.

House Speaker Russell Bowers, R-Mesa, expressed concern about new criminal penalties. But that did not preclude him from supporting the measure.

Had he opposed it, SB 1457 would have died on a 5-5 vote.

The bill was crafted by the Center for Arizona Policy, which has been at the forefront of measures to outlaw or restrict the ability of a woman to terminate a pregnancy. It was being carried by Sen. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix.

“What we’re trying to do is protect those that are most vulnerable in the womb,” she said.

“And right now, it’s those with disabilities,” Barto continued. “They’re being singled out and targeted.”

But Rep. Melody Hernandez, D-Phoenix, said it’s not that simple. It starts, she said, with the measure adopting the “one specific religious view” into law. [The white Christian Nationalist view].

SB 1457 has verbiage to say that an “unborn child at every stage of development (has) all rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons, citizens and residents of this state.”

“It goes to the idea of when life begins,” Hernandez said. “Different religions have different ideas of when life begins and different ideas of how we should approach those discussions.”

Rep. Jacqueline Parker, R-Mesa, disagreed.

“It’s not really a religious issue,” she said. [It’s about political power.]

“It’s a scientific issue,” Parker continued. “And we should be allowed to bring up science that supports when life begins even if it’s inconvenient for certain agendas.”

Then there are the legal questions.

In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, affirmed the right of a woman to abort a child, at least before viability [24 weeks]. That has been affirmed several times, though the justices have allowed states to impose regulations, but generally only those designed to protect maternal health.

Denise Burke, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian-based law practice that opposes abortion, said four other states already have laws similar to what is in SB 1457.

She acknowledged, however, that none of these have made it to the nation’s high court. And Burke told legislators there may need to be more states that enact such laws to get the issue before the justices. [Saying the quiet part out loud, not even trying to hide their agenda.]

That bothered Rep. Diego Rodriguez, D-Phoenix.

“As an attorney and a legislator, I do not subscribe to the tactic of passing bills simply to litigate them,” he said.

CAP President Cathi Herrod pointed out that Arizona already has a similar law on the books: a 2011 statute that bans abortion based on the race or gender of the child.

That was, in fact, challenged in federal court. But the case was thrown out because a judge ruled that the organizations that sued — the National Asian Pacific Women’s Forum and American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the NAACP — had no legal right to bring the case absent evidence that any specific woman had been denied an abortion.

The law remains on the books, essentially unenforced. A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood said her organization will not perform an abortion on any woman who tells them she is seeking the procedure because of gender or race.

The measure, which had cleared the Senate earlier this month on a 16-14 party-line vote, now needs approval of the full House.

It is not really about abortion, it is about political power for a radical white Christian Nationalist movement. The white Christian Nationalist movement is a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.