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
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