The Rise of the Religious Rite

A Warning About the Religionization of Abortion

When the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision upended Roe v. Wade, the response from abortion “rights” advocates was immediate, well-orchestrated, and as diabolical as the mindset required to justify fetal dismemberment and destruction in the first place. It centers on the simple invocation of a homonym. The goal is to transform abortion from the civil right they perceive to have been “stolen” from them into a religious rite. Once redefined as religious, abortion can be protected as a sacred expression of the abortion seeker’s “deeply held religious beliefs.” It’s a tactic that could have been lifted right out of Screwtape’s training manual.

Exposing the Strategy

Reverend Jim Harden, the CEO of CompassCare pregnancy services, has been unmasking the methods abortion supporters have put in place since Dobbs. He maintains that they are engaged in the following four-step strategy:

1. Deregulating self-managed abortion through mail-order chemical abortion.

2. Deprioritizing enforcement of abortion restrictions.

3. Regulating the abortion industry’s only competition—pro-life medical pregnancy centers.

4. Devaluing religious liberty by conflating abortion with religious expression.¹

“If pro-abortion[ists] can fabricate a Christianity that is pro-abortion,” says Harden, they “could undermine the 1st  Amendment protections afforded pro-life physicians and pregnancy centers who refuse to perform or refer for abortion based on grounds of religious exemptions and freedom of speech.”²

The first three strategies have been in play for some time. On July 8, 2022, President Biden issued an Executive Order meant to expand access to abortion services nationwide, deregulate chemical abortion, and increase the regulation of pregnancy care centers.³ Additionally, lawmakers in several states, including Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Ohio, have directed law enforcement to look the other way when it comes to enforcing abortion law.⁴ But the most nefarious aspect of this strategy is the attempt to transform abortion into a religious rite.

Abortion Rites

The game starts with finding religious people and groups who defend abortion. Before the ink was dry on Dobbs, and while Jane’s Revenge was busy firebombing pregnancy care centers across America with impunity, the Satanic Temple filed lawsuits asserting abortion as a religious rite that calls for protection.⁵

In September, California Governor Gavin Newsom launched a billboard campaign promoting his state as an abortion travel destination. The signs included a partial quotation of Mark 12:31 in touting abortion as a way to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The campaign placed billboards in Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Oklahoma.⁶ These states were not chosen randomly. All of them have a history of being solidly pro-life.

Newsom is marketing California as an abortion “sanctuary state” through a state-government website that offers taxpayer-funded abortion services to illegal aliens and minors so they may make the “choice whether to tell your parents about it if you do get an abortion.” The site also includes the accidentally ironic assurance that “you’re welcome here in California and we’ll continue to fight like hell for you” (emphasis mine).⁷

On the heels of that project, Montana’s state legislature began considering a bill that would protect abortion if a woman sought one in accordance with her “sincerely held religious tenets.”⁸ Thankfully, the bill died a slow death in the Montana statehouse, but rabbis in Florida have challenged that state’s pro-life law on the grounds that it violates their religious liberties.⁹

Double Impact

Much like the disingenuous premises that undergirded Roe v. Wade, each of these efforts is part of a grand strategy meant to create the legal illusion of abortion as a privately held religious right. Once that is in place, any action threatening it would become criminally prosecutable. Harden’s concern is that this could not only lead to “mass criminalization” of pro-life advocacy but also stifle pro-life speech and imperil the ability of healthcare workers to refrain from participating in abortion procedures on grounds of conscience. In other words, the strategy could eventually allow abortion activists to push a falsified view of religious liberty and morph it into a cudgel to beat pro-lifers into submission.

Justice, Not Religion

Sometimes a pro-life response to the narrative of abortion as a religious right may inadvertently reinforce it. In reaction to California’s abortion marketing, one policy analyst for the Center for Human Dignity stated that “Governor Newsom’s disrespect for the sincerely held religious convictions of Bible-believing Americans is disturbing, but sadly nothing new from far-left extremists. . . .”¹⁰

In assuming that pro-life convictions stem only from religious belief, a response like this could play right into the hands of abortion advocates, as it could be seen as a subtle capitulation to the terms of their strategy. This could be tactically detrimental to the pro-life cause. No form of human sacrifice constitutes a legitimate religious rite, and no civilized society can allow a procedure that deliberately targets an innocent, living human being for destruction to be cast as a religious “right.” One shrewd response to this diabolical new strategy is to take the discussion out of the realm of religion: our Constitution protects the right to life. And that right is not a religious right; it’s a human right.

Though consistent with the biblical mandates to value and protect life, arguments against abortion need not depend on any religious idea. They can be grounded in the biological fact that life begins at conception and the philosophical argument that differences between pre-born and post-born life are ontologically indistinguishable. Of course, they must first accept that taking an innocent human life is an objective moral wrong. (Some dismiss that itself as only a religious idea.)

However, you don’t need to be religious to make that case. Anyone who doubts this can log on to Twitter and scroll through the feed of “@secularprolife” to see that, in the words of its own tagline, “You don’t have to be religious to have a problem with killing humans.”

Pro-lifers need to make their case in a way that can’t be dismissed as a personal religious opinion. But we need to do more than that. In this culture, we also need to hold our local, state, and federal representatives’ feet to the fire. We cannot allow them to just give political lip service to the pro-life position. We must also demand that they know the difference between religious liberty and the hollow forgery of it that Screwtape is trying to pass off as legitimate.

Notes
1. “Uncovered: Four-Pronged Strategy Deployed to Protect the Abortion Industry,” Compass Care (Aug. 15, 2022): https://bit.ly/3L515Vx.
2. “Pro-abortion Politicians Christianize Abortion to Criminalize Pro-lifers,” Compass Care (Jan. 17, 2023): https://bit.ly/3KkE3YT.
3. Executive Order 14076, “Protecting Access to Reproductive Healthcare Services” (July 8, 2022): https://bit.ly/40znsHE.
4. Ibid., note 1.
5. The Satanic Temple: https://bit.ly/3F4jspN.
6. Ian M. Giatti, “Newsom Billboard Campaign Cites Bible to Promote Abortion ‘Freedom’ in Bid for Reelection,” Christian Post (Sept. 20, 2022): https://bit.ly/3kWy3gb.
7. Ibid.
8. “Montana Takes Lead Abortion Industry’s Newest Strategy to Make Abortion a Religious Right,” Compass Care (Feb. 15, 2023): https://bit.ly/3FaEnYi.
9. “Jewish Rabbis Sue Florida, Claim Abortion Bans Violate Their Religious Liberty,” Compass Care (Feb. 15, 2023): https://bit.ly/3kYVi9d.
10. Ibid., note 6.