Evangelicals came to their current views on abortion through a combination of ethical reasoning, biblical hermeneutics, historical research, theological reflection, and contemporary American politics. That was my argument in a recent post, which was a response to a post by Jonathan Dudley at CNN. Dudley has just published a well-researched response in The Huffington Post that deserves a response, though I'd like to raise issues that underlie this conversation.

But let me admit that Dudley did catch me committing hyperbole. The title of my response referred to his CNN post as a "fake history." It's certainly not "fake" in this respect: Evangelicals were in fact divided, and many if not most of our leaders were formally...