BUT, AS WITH JUSTICE GINSBURG...:

IRS actions against Christian schools enraged Jerry Falwell (he operated Lynchburg Christian School) and racially discriminatory Bob Jones University. Evangelicals sent 125,000 letters of protest to the IRS objecting to proposed regulations that would require segregation academies to admit a certain number of minority students. 

Make no mistake, this is a deeply troubling narrative. But let's keep going. It turns out that while the attack on segregation academies undeniably motivated some people, it could not transform American politics. Not even close. 

Ballmer clearly notes that outright racism could not, in fact, create a mass movement. In his words, he says that Falwell and Weyrich were "savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge."

So what was the issue that could mobilize the masses? I'll give you a hint--it wasn't defending segregation academies. It was abortion. Again, here's Ballmer:

By the late 1970s, many Americans--not just Roman Catholics--were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn't in the past. 

In short, the times were changing. Arguments that didn't work in the past were working now. Ballmer smartly points to a key film series from Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop called Whatever Happened to the Human Race? It was produced in 1979, but it circulated in Evangelical America for years afterward. I saw it in Sunday school during high school, and it made a profound impact on me.

A young conservative Christian growing up in 1980s America heard nothing about segregation academies. Indeed, when the Reagan administration ultimately led the final legal charge to strip tax exemptions from Bob Jones University--culminating in an 8-1 Supreme Court decision in 1983 holding that the Free Exercise Clause could not protect the university from IRS action against race discrimination--the decision barely raised an eyebrow. The defense of segregation academies ended not with a bang, but a whimper. The defense of life, however, roared on. 

Moreover, let's take a second look at the Baptist flip-flop on abortion. It's critical to note that the 1960s and 1970s were a time of enormous confusion, upheaval, and anguish in American Protestant Christianity. The largest denominations were liberalizing theologically at an astonishing rate--and the liberalizing leaders turned out to be dramatically out of step with the masses of men and women in the pews. 

The Protestant Mainline, once the dominant Protestant faction of Christian America, has been bleeding members since the early 1970s at a startling rate. By some measures, the rate of decline is so great that membership could reach near-zero within the next quarter-century:

But which denomination zigged conservative while its Mainline brothers zagged progressive? The Southern Baptist Convention. Books have been written about the "conservative takeover" of the SBC, but it's clear that the Roe-era SBC underwent a fundamental transformation. 

While the Mainline denominations shrank, the SBC enjoyed a period of remarkable growth--from roughly 11 million members in the mid-1960s, to a peaking above 16 million in the mid-2000s. Membership has since declined to slightly less than 15 million presently, but these numbers indicate rapid seismic shifts in American religious membership and belief. In short, a lot more was going on between 1970 and 1980 than a sudden interest in preserving southern segregation academies. Millions of Christians were leaving their traditional spiritual homes in search of new churches. At the same time, abortion was on the rise. If you think that the "spike" in legal abortions wasn't that dramatic--look at the raw numbers, from the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute:

So, no, the pro-life movement wasn't "built on a lie." It's not the mighty political oak born from a racist acorn. It's ultimately the product of the combination of seismic religious and cultural changes and patient religious and political argument. 

To make this claim about pro-life activism isn't to absolve white American Evangelicalism of any racist taint. But the sins of the past don't center around abortion. They don't even center around religious liberty (despite the defense of segregation academies in the 1970s.)  

Ultimately, the great sin of white southern Evangelicalism is that for generations its faith did not transcend and displace its culture. Instead, all too often that faith was placed in service of the very culture it should have transformed. For more than 100 years, if you were going to draw a Venn diagram of white Southern supporters of Jim Crow and white southern fundamentalists and Evangelicals, you would see an extraordinarily high degree of overlap. 

A renowned pediatric surgeon in Philadelphia, Koop, who had recently come to Christ under the preaching of Donald Grey Barnhouse at Tenth Presbyterian, treated  the Schaeffer's daughter, Priscilla, in 1948. Upon learning that they were to leave as missionaries for Switzerland in a few short months, Koop opened up about his own newfound faith, and a friendship was formed that would remain through the years.

Early on, Koop was convinced that "abortion amounted to taking a sacrosanct human life" (which explains his teaming up with Brown in 1975 to found The Christian Action Council). (6)

But on one Saturday in 1976, after spending the entire day operating successfully on three newborn babies that otherwise would have died, he sat in the hospital cafeteria with two of his colleagues and said: "You know, we have given over two hundred years of life to three individuals who together barely weighed ten pounds" to which one of his residents answered: "And while we were doing that, right next door in the university hospital they were cutting up perfect formed babies of the same size just because their mothers didn't want them."(7)

Koop says he knew then and there that, as a surgeon, he had to speak up more forcefully for the unborn. So he rose early the next morning and began to write, and by evening the next day had completed his 120-page treatise entitled The Right to Live; the Right to Die: Famous Pediatric Surgeon Speaks Out on Abortion and Mercy Killing. "I aimed the book primarily at Christian readers," he recalls, "as I sought to awaken the evangelical community to a vital moral issue they were choosing to ignore."(8)

Koop evidently kept Brown's articles close at hand as he put his own thoughts to paper. He quotes from Brown more than from any other source (other than the Bible), often whole paragraphs at a time. Koop's The Right to Live; the Right to Die would sell over 100,000 copies in the first year alone, and another 100,000 in the years that followed. 

After writing the book, Koop reconnected with the Schaeffers (father and son) to produce Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Released in 1979, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? did what no effort over the previous six years had succeeded in doing: it broke through. 

Dr. Jean Garton, reviewing Whatever Happened to the Human Race? on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Roe, remembers, "As a result, there was a dramatic change in the abortion landscape. The powerful message of both the screen and printed versions of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? educated and energized an up-till-then largely uninvolved constituency-the Evangelicals."(9)  Brown himself remembered with great appreciation the impact of Schaeffer's and Koop's joint efforts: "Shown in churches, schools, and homes around the country, [the film] so thoroughly aroused viewers that the term evangelical has come to be synonymous with anti-abortion."(10)

In the years that followed, a 'second generation' would take the helm of pro-life advocacy, and we are familiar with their names: Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and a host of others. And after their few years of potent convergence, Schaeffer, Brown, and Koop faced futures as different as their pasts. Schaeffer would die in 1982. Brown's Christian Action Council, of which he remained chairman, would shift its primary focus to founding Gospel-centered crisis pregnancy care centers with remarkable results (the organization is now known as CareNet).(11) Upon his death in 2007, Brown was remembered in Christianity Today as one whose "most prominent work was helping form and intellectually arm the pro-life movement."(12) As a reward for his pro-life efforts, Koop would be appointed by Reagan to be his Surgeon General in 1981, but pro-abortion advocates made Koop's confirmation hearings so tortuous that he emerged less interested in being a figurehead for the pro-life movement, choosing instead to make campaigns against smoking and AIDS the hallmarks of his appointment. He is widely remembered as the most famous Surgeon General in modern memory.

Perhaps it is because none of these three carried the mantle of the pro-life movement in the 1980s and 1990s that we hear relatively little of them as pro-life champions today - except recently, when the last of them has departed from us. But it is reasonable to suppose that without Brown, Schaeffer, and Koop, there may not have been a pro-life movement in the 1980s at all, nor in the years that followed

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