Xtian University Prof. Kristin Kobes Du Mez Wishes Christians Didn’t Get So Upset About Abortion
Kristen Kobes Du Mez is a rising star in certain more progressive circles and usually is mentioned in the one-two punch alongside Jemar Tisby and his Color of Compromise (never forget, that Tisby literally went to work for Ibram X Kendi) as books shaping the modern-day evangelical discourse. In a May 2022 interview with PBSA, the professor at Calvin University and author of “Jesus And John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith And Fractured A Nation, Du Mez, who recently came out as gay-affirming, explains that appointing Supreme Court justices overturning Roe was a “ruthless display of power” and that Christians through history didn’t always oppose abortion as strenuously as they do now.
Du Mez suggests she misses the good old days when evangelicals were far less “radicalized” than they are now. She wishes that Christians didn’t take such an immovable unshakable hard line against abortion, but rather took a more wishy-washy approach and viewed it as the “lesser of two evils” rather than the purest manifestation of demonic activity on earth.
MICHEL MARTIN: A draft copy of a Supreme Court opinion which would overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion nationwide under certain circumstances, is now at hand. There is a hyper-conservative Supreme Court majority which seems poised to do that, seems willing to do that, seems intentional about doing that. But what effect do you think it will have, more broadly, about this movement?
KRISTIN DU MEZ: Oh, it’s, if anything, in the short term, I think it will further radicalize the evangelical movement. I’m already seeing, already last night on social media, talk from evangelicals, a kind of gleeful celebration and chiding any evangelicals who raised questions about Donald Trump. “See? The ends did justify the means. We got exactly what we wanted.” And this kind of ruthless display of power, whether it’s through Trump in his person or whether it’s through Supreme Court appointments, whether it’s through subverting democratic norms, all of this pays off, because we got what we wanted. And so I see that in the short term.
The longer-term is a little bit more difficult to discern, because the truth is, many Christian women and, in fact, evangelical women do procure abortions. And throughout Christian history and throughout evangelical history, you can see that pre-Roe v. Wade and actually, late ’70s and early ’80s, there was more, um, uh, there were mixed views on abortion in conservative evangelical communities. Very few evangelicals would celebrate abortion. They certainly weren’t in the shout your abortion camp, but there was much more nuance.
And so in 1968, Christianity Today had a special issue on abortion, and the gist of it was: it’s really complicated. And it’s not a good thing, but it is sometimes a necessary thing in the case of rape, in the case of incest, in the case of, uh, for the health of the mother, even.
And the Southern Baptist Convention, up until 1976, endorsed the pro-choice platform. So there is a history of seeing abortion as a complex moral issue and sometimes the lesser of two evils.
With the politicization of abortion by the late 1970s, the rise of the Moral Majority, folks like Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich helped make abortion kind of the primary mobilizing issue for the Christian right, and so from that point on, this complicated moral territory receded.
And I certainly grew up in an evangelical culture where life began at conception, there was no debate. And pro-life is the Christian response, anti-abortion is the only acceptable view. But that kind of hard line on abortion is of relatively recent origin.
While some may argue that she’s not giving her own position, but rather sharing what already exists out there, WPC is there to put that argument to rest.
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