“Women Distrust Church on Abortion” reads the headline from the Southern Baptist LifeWay Research, announcing the results of a recent survey. This is precisely backwards. The truth is that LifeWay’s church distrusts women. They distrust women when it comes to abortion, and when it comes to almost everything else.
Their churches teach that women are untrustworthy — that they are incapable of being trusted with decisions about anything, including decisions about their own lives. Their churches teach that women are incapable of moral responsibility. This distrust of women is baked into every aspect of those churches — worship, doctrine, polity, all of it. That distrust of women is the cause, not the effect, of the anti-abortion religion that has become the paramount principle of the faith for those churches over the past generation.
The results of this new survey are not surprising. These findings are completely in line with all of the previous surveys from LifeWay and Gallup and Barna over the past several decades which have consistently shown that about a third of church-going white evangelicals believe that abortion should be legal.
That constant finding has long puzzled the Good Christian Men conducting such surveys and studying the results. How can it be that thirty-some percent of evangelical Christians are pro-choice? That seemed impossible to them because they had not personally heard anyone say such a thing. No one they knew in their churches had ever said anything to challenge the official, required presumption of opposition to legal abortion. They imagine they’ve never met a pro-choice evangelical, so they can’t imagine that even one such creature could exist, let alone that a third of all evangelicals could possibly disagree with what has become the central focus and essential belief in their religious community.
So they assumed this finding — confirmed in poll after poll, year after year — had to be in error somehow. LifeWay, in particular, has aggressively pursued various True Scotsman filters that they’ve hoped would eliminate this impossible anomaly. What if we restrict the definition of “evangelical” to only the most devout — to only those who never miss a Wednesday night prayer meeting and never skip their daily quiet time?* Others have tried to explain away this pro-choice third of evangelicals as some kind of nefarious fifth-column secretly infiltrating the pews for some secret agenda.
But what does that consistent finding really show? It shows simple arithmetic. Roughly half of evangelical Christians are women. And many of those women will have had, or will have considered having, an abortion.** Put those women together with the few others in their churches who they regard as worthy of being trusted with their stories and you easily arrive at that thirty-some percent of evangelicals who believe abortion should be legal.
What that means, of course, is this: Those who doubt it’s really true that a third of all evangelicals support the legal right to abortion are those who haven’t been listening to women in their churches. Or who have established such an aura of reflexively self-righteous moral superiority that no one would ever bother trying to talk to them in the first place.
Anyone who says, “How could a third of evangelicals be pro-choice? I’ve never met such a person” is really saying, “I’m the kind of person who has made it clear that I don’t want to hear from or to listen to anyone else, especially women.”
Because they have met such a person. They’ve met dozens of such people. They just don’t realize it. And because they’ve made it so abundantly clear that they’re incapable of listening to them, or of deeming their stories worthy of being heard, they’ve insured that they’ll never know it.
To their partial credit, LifeWay seems to have finally stumbled across this truth, begrudgingly recognizing that elevating opposition to legal abortion above the greatest commandments may have created a “culture of silence” for those in their churches who know better:
“That tells you the environment of the church,” [LifeWay vice president Scott] McConnell said. “You can’t say you’ve had an abortion, you can’t say you’re considering one — it’s completely taboo to discuss.
“But when a woman is willing to publicly acknowledge she’s had an abortion in the past, she will sometimes be approached by several other women in the church who’ve never been willing to share with anybody that they too have had an abortion. It’s incredibly freeing for them.”
Unfortunately, the only solution to such a culture of silence that McConnell can imagine is encouraging women to publicly confess their “past” abortions as sins for which they have been forgiven. If they’ll only admit, like Mike Warnke, that they used to be Satanic baby-killers, but that God has now forgiven them and washed them clean, then we can all go back to pretending like this was something that should always be illegal. Such conversion narratives could then become a tool for reinforcing the most important principle here — that women cannot be trusted, and that the force of law is required to prevent these foolish sub-humans from making decisions for themselves.
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* LifeWay’s newest survey finds that 70 percent of women who have had abortions identify as Christians, and that 43 percent of those Christian women attend church regularly, at least once a month.
And thus, as you read this, Ed Stetzer et. al. over at LifeWay will be busily seeking some way to whittle down that unacceptable, unpossible result by doing what they always do. They’ll say once a month shouldn’t count as regular church attendance. They’ll parse and split hairs in an attempt to show that perhaps those who attend every week have some lower rate. What if we only count Christian women who attend church more than twice a week and also teach Sunday school? They’ll seek some way to show that it can’t be true that Real, True Christian women could really be reflected in these findings.
That effort only serves to reaffirm their central conviction: Women are not to be trusted. This whole approach to separate women who “identify as Christian” from the far fewer who should really be counted as Real, True Christians is based on the belief that women can’t be trusted to tell the truth about their faith.
It may be, as with previous LifeWay research on divorce or attitudes toward LGBT people, that they’ll manage to dissect the data enough to show that hyper-involvement in their churches does, in fact, show some slight statistical significance. But then they’ll just wind up repeating the same fallacy that we see from so many True Scotsman studies on Catholics and divorce. Those studies show that divorced Catholics are less likely to regularly attend Mass. This is touted as evidence that regular attendance at Mass prevents divorce. The possibility that cause and effect work the other way — that the Church’s condemnation of, distrustful inability to listen to, and inhospitality toward, divorced people results in such people being less likely to attend regularly — never seems to occur to them.
** Yes, there are also plenty of evangelical Christians who have abortions for themselves, or help to arrange them for others, but who remain staunchly anti-abortion for everyone else. The self-exempting moral hypocrisy Marie Myung-OK Lee describes, or that Joyce Arthur documented years ago in “The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion,” is real, but I don’t think it’s true of most evangelical women who have had, or considered, abortion for themselves. And in any case, those self-exempting folks wouldn’t be among the third of evangelicals telling pollsters that they believe abortion should be legal.
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