Abstract
American Christians often experience tension between denominational allegiances and personal views on abortion, yet many assume these religious bodies have always occupied fixed, inevitable sides of the ethical divide. In his impeccably researched and balanced portrait, Abortion and America's Churches, Daniel Williams traces these internal debates and their imbrication with a divided American conscience. He unpacks a surprising history in which Baptist ministers, such as Howard Moody, leveraged the Social Gospel to advocate for abortion access, while other liberal Protestant churches remained ambivalent about the morality of the act—insisting that it remained a matter of personal choice (pp. 2–3). Even in the post-Dobbs landscape, Williams shows how the steadfast opposition of conservative Christians is being complicated by new rifts in long-standing alliances. As I have argued elsewhere, the influence of Christianity in shaping the political and social imagination is a matter of historical contingency rather than theological necessity (Calli Micale, ‘The Rhetoric of Disability in Reproductive Politics: A Lutheran Response’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 64 (2025), p. 81). Williams's analysis proves this point beyond a doubt.
Indeed, Williams's close reading of archival materials directly challenges the notion of theological inevitability. He demonstrates that there is no singular Christian framework—no ‘pure’ biblical or traditional mandate—that necessitates a specific landing point on the socio-political divide. Yet, contrasting recent scholarly assumptions that Christian commitments on the abortion issue are arbitrary or ‘capricious’, he compellingly argues that these views are deeply tied to faith and reason (p. xiii). Within this framework, Christian views on abortion appear as coherent products of the theological tools a tradition chooses to prioritize, the competing frameworks that gain prominence, and the individuals who guide the dialogue.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) serves as a case study for this plasticity. In the early 1970s, the SBC's commitment to social pragmatism led to resolutions supporting abortion access in cases of emotional distress, mental health, or severe poverty. However, as the ‘sanctity of life’ began to be filtered through a legalist or ‘rights-based’ framework, the focus shifted to the status of the fetus as the imago Dei and a participant in God's providential plan. Williams reveals that the current denominational alignment results from historical choices and shifting theological emphases. He argues that understanding the reasons for, and the reasonableness of, our differences provides a foundation for moving beyond partisan divides.
The first section (chs. 1–3) follows these theological debates in the decades preceding Roe v. Wade. Reaching back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Williams shows how liberal Protestants, Catholics, and evangelicals synthesized theological commitments with contemporary science, biblical interpretation, and tradition. These arguments influenced the political landscape and legal policy. For instance, the Methodist background of Justice Harry Blackmun illuminates his majority opinion in Roe, which mirrored the recommendations of Methodist minister J. Claude Evans. Writing in The Christian Century, Evans similarly advocated for the full legalization of abortion in early pregnancy alongside restrictions in later stages to ‘honor … religious pluralism’ (p. 37). In contrast, pro-life Catholics like Eunice Kennedy Shriver used arguments from genetics to defend fetal personhood. For Shriver, this scientific data aligned with a theology of God as sustainer of life, calling humanity to create the conditions for human flourishing—especially on behalf of the most vulnerable (p. 90).
In the second section (chs. 4–6), Williams details how, despite significant theological differences, pro-life Catholics and evangelicals formed influential coalitions such as the Moral Majority and Evangelicals for Social Action (p. 157). Here, the stakes of the debate escalated: ‘abortion’ was one component of a larger battle to restore an American moral foundation that many believed had slipped into relativism and deeper depravity. Concurrently, Williams highlights the tension within the Catholic position; while steadfastly pro-life, many clergy remained aligned with the political left on issues of welfare, nuclear disarmament, and the death penalty—an approach termed a ‘consistent life ethic’, which evangelicals by the mid-to-late 1980s saw as only an impediment to the pro-life campaign (p. 207). Still, the overarching, liberal vision of a consistent life ethic shaped a wide range of Catholic politicians, from Geraldine Ferraro to Joe Biden, who needed to navigate church dogma and a pro-choice constituency. Ultimately, as Catholics and evangelicals coalesced around their pro-life position, liberal protestants faced internal fractures, resulting in a significant loss of conservatives in liberal Protestant denominations that further solidified the partisan divide.
In the final chapter (chapter 7), Williams brings the reader to the contemporary moment. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe, yet the number of abortions, has reportedly increased and the cultural needle has not moved—with many finding the link between the pro-life campaign and Christian nationalism unpalatable (p. 253). Theologically, Williams identifies a profound shift: the pro-life stance has pivoted away from an evangelical emphasis on individual salvation and toward a political theology of building the ‘kingdom of God’ on earth. This framework posits that individuals are ‘most free’ when they orient their lives toward mimicking Jesus' sacrificial love for others. For those following this line of thinking, pluralistic democracy ceases to be the primary end. In other words, the final ‘intractability’ is not merely a difference of opinion about abortion, but a competition between theological frameworks regarding the very structure and order of society itself (p. 298).
For all its depth and careful attention to detail, the book spends only ten pages addressing the Black Church's responses (pp. 226–35). Williams's discussion of Civil Rights–era politics, and the concerns about the location of abortion clinics in minority neighborhoods by Fannie Lou Hamer and others, overlooks the long history of hostile relationships between professionalized medicine, law enforcement, and marginalized communities in the United States. For many Black and Indigenous Christians, opposition to abortion was often intertwined with legacies of surrogacy, forced sterilization, and eugenicist practices stretching back to enslavement. Dorothy Roberts suggests that in the mid-twentieth century forced sterilization was so prevalent that some counties subjected more than half of all Black women to sterilization without consent (Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Vintage Books, 2017).
In these contexts, turning toward faith and spirituality and fostering suspicion of medical institutions was a survival strategy against a societal system that had historically devalued the reproductive autonomy of Black and brown women. By focusing primarily on the debates in the 1970s, Williams risks flattening the experiences of those for whom the ‘sanctity of life’ was a defense against generational trauma inflicted by state-sponsored medical violence—while affirming the freedom to choose was a religious as well as a political statement. Indeed, from a Womanist ethical perspective, the freedom to choose was a religious statement of bodily autonomy and affirmation of identity that reflected God's own declaration of the individual's ‘somebodiness’. While Williams rightly points out the combined ‘opposition to abortion with support of social justice causes’ among Black Protestants, his analysis would have benefited from further historical and theological development (p. 226).
This lack of attention to ethical complexity also extends to Williams's treatment of the moral asymmetry exposed by many liberal Protestant denominations in their arguments for abortion care. Far from merely abandoning all moral reservations and adopting a less-Christian stance, contemporary, pro-choice Christians continue to argue that there is an ethical distinction between weighing the imagined future of a fetus against the concrete reality of a pregnant person's lived circumstances—health, existing children, and economic reality. From a Christian point of view, establishing the conditions for human flourishing requires considering the whole context, acknowledging that the unevenness of sin results in horrifying realities that cannot simply be categorized as ‘part of God's plan’. Thus, theological debates around divine goodness, justice, and providence need to be further addressed to make sense of the liberal Protestant position today. Rather than a loss of theological distinctiveness, liberal Protestants tend towards a robust contextual ethic that doesn’t foreclose abortion as a moral option.
Ultimately, Abortion and America's Churches is an indispensable resource for ethicists and historians seeking to understand the theological dynamics that continue to shape American religious politics around abortion. Williams provides a well-researched account that contests the myth of ‘theological inevitability’ with a much more complex reality of historical contingency and shifting institutional emphases. By documenting how traditions as diverse as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Catholic Church have navigated the issue, he offers a vital map of how Americans arrived at the current impasse. While his brevity regarding the frameworks of the Black Church and the theologies driving liberal Protestantism leaves room for further scholarly development, Williams has written a book that will serve as a resource for generations. This book does more than just recount a history; it challenges Christians to recognize the ‘reasonableness’ of their neighbors’ positions, offering a rare and necessary invitation to move beyond the shallow caricatures of the current polarized landscape toward a more nuanced dialogue on human flourishing, the meaning of justice, and the value of life. In exposing the contingencies underlying Christian moral positions, Williams invites renewed humility and dialogue across divides.