What Everyone Gets Wrong About Evangelicals, Abortion

In the wake of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, a familiar narrative has emerged. The story goes like this: White evangelicals didn't care much about abortion until the late 1970s. Around that time, two prominent leaders of the soon-to-be-named "Religious Right," Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell, concluded that overtly racist politics would harm, not help, their quest for political power. They turned to abortion as a convenient wedge issue in the 1978 midterm elections to drive evangelicals to the polls and distract from the "real" motivations of the far right: stopping racial integration and preserving the tax-exempt status of segregationist Christian schools.