11
In his celebrated speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy declared unequivocally that he believed “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.” Kennedy went on to make it clear that he regarded the Jeffersonian wall of separation not as a flexible metaphor but as the foundation of the American system of government. He reminded his audience, composed heavily of evangelical Protestants, that Jefferson’s religious freedom act in Virginia was strongly supported by Baptists who had endured persecution both in England and in America. With a nod to the nonreligious, the candidate also expounded his vision of America as a nation “where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice.” Kennedy’s speech was widely regarded as one of the turning points of his campaign; he was addressing the fears not only of southern evangelicals, who in 1928 had rejected Al Smith because of his Catholicism, but of mainstream Protestants and Jews, who also had serious reservations about a Catholic in the White House. Norman Vincent Peale, the best-known Protestant cleric to voice his doubts, had flown in from New York for Kennedy’s speech and press conference.
Kennedy was fortunate to have been a candidate for the presidency forty-four years ago instead of today. In 2004, his forthright support for a “wall of separation” would antagonize not only the evangelicals he won over in 1960 but the hierarchy of his own church. Kennedy’s belief in an America where “no church or church school” would be eligible for tax support has been rejected by nearly all Republicans and a fair number of Democrats, fearful of being left behind as the faith-based bandwagon rolls on. As for the Catholic Church, the authoritarian Pope John Paul II has created problems for American Catholic politicans who thought that “dual loyalty” issues had been laid to rest in Kennedy’s generation. In January 2003, the Vatican issued an innocuously titled “Doctrinal Note on Some Questions regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life,” but the bland packaging was misleading. The “doctrinal note” was an order to Catholic officeholders to toe the line on abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and gay marriage—even if official church teaching conflicted with the politician’s personal conscience and sense of public duty. (Senator Edward M. Kennedy, commenting on the Vatican effort to turn back the clock for American Catholic politicians, referred to his brother’s Houston declaration that “I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me.”1) In 1960, John Kennedy faced no such Vatican-provoked tempests. Catholicism was being revitalized by John XXIII, who famously declared that he had no wish to claim infallibility. During the fall campaign, the pope—who was studying English and was well aware of the anti-Catholic charges that the U.S. government would be run from the Vatican should Kennedy be elected—drily told a visiting American bishop, “Do not expect me to run a country with a language as difficult as yours.”2 It is impossible to overestimate the impact of John XXIII, and the Second Vatican Council he convened in an effort to reform his church, on American Catholics of all political and theological persuasions. One of his great admirers was Fulton Sheen, who, in spite of his theological orthodoxy, approved of the pope’s efforts to open the church to new ideas. Sheen went through a metamorphosis of his own in the sixties, when, in spite of his history of hard-line anticommunism, he became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. Indeed, the combination of John XXIII’s papacy and Kennedy’s presidency provided American Catholics with a new image of what it could mean to be both American and Catholic—a self-definition freed from the fervid anticommunism, as well as the one-note opposition to birth control, long identified with the church’s leadership.
Kennedy, in both his personal style and his political philosophy, was arguably the most secularist American president since Jefferson. (He privately remarked that one of the worst aspects of having been elected was that he would be obliged to attend mass every Sunday for the next four years.) The period that began with Kennedy’s election and ended with the legalization of abortion is frequently viewed today, especially by the religious right, as a time of rampant irreligion. Many aspects of what the novelist Philip Roth has called the “demythologizing decade” have been conflated into an image of the sixties as a time when all traditional religious values were trampled on and ridiculed. In this view, irreligion is seen as the critical force behind all the secularist sins of the decade: Supreme Court rulings on the unconstitutionality of school prayer and Bible reading; the enthusiasm with which women began to use the newly developed birth control pill; the proliferation of movies and novels (Roth’s 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint being a prime example) that would have been considered the grossest obscenity a decade or two earlier; the emergence of a second wave of feminism far more militant than the nineteenth-century women’s movement; rising drug use; a growing tolerance of divorce; and the loss of respect for authority implicit in demonstrations from university campuses to the steps of the Pentagon. Many cultural conservatives saw a direct connection between the school prayer decisions of the early sixties and the rebellious youth culture of the late sixties. To those who were horrified by the social upheavals of the decade, it seemed logical to conclude that if children had only been forced to continue praying in school in 1962, they would not have turned into the hirsute young adults running around half naked (or altogether naked) and smoking marijuana at Woodstock in 1969.
The traumas of the late sixties are etched so dramatically and indelibly in the memories of Americans who had reached the age of reason by the time of President Kennedy’s assassination that many cultural milestones between 1960 and 1963—with the exception of the Cuban missile crisis—have been largely forgotten. One of these was the 1962 Supreme Court decision Engel v. Vitale, which found a nondenominational school prayer authorized by the New York State Board of Regents to be unconstitutional. The decision made the front page of every major newspaper in the country and was the lead story on the television evening news. While education officials estimated that prayer was a routine practice in less than one-third of the nation’s schools—mainly in southern and rural areas with homogeneous student bodies—the decision created an uproar among many who had never given the slightest thought to the question of whether the deity was receiving proper credit before teachers called their classes to order.3
The regents’ prayer, drafted in 1958 after the ACLU protested the use of the Christian Lord’s Prayer in schools, read simply: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” New York school districts were not compelled to institute a daily prayer, and most did not, but they had to use the officially authorized wording if they did want students to pray. The case against the official prayer was brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which, unlike the national ACLU, took a strong separationist position on all church-state issues. Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress’s expert on church and state, backed by a number of national ACLU leaders, had strongly opposed the challenge to the regents’ prayer—in large measure because the plaintiffs were atheists. In the sixties as in the fifties, the ACLU always tried to cast its opposition to religious observance in schools as a matter of support for individual religious freedom—not as opposition to religion itself—and using atheists as plaintiffs undermined the attempt to create a proreligious, or at least a religiously neutral, image. Both the ACLU and religious leaders around the country were taken by surprise when the Court struck down the New York prayer. Justice Black, writing for the majority as he had in the Everson and McCollum cases, declared that it was “no part of the business of government to compose official prayers.”4 A year later, the Court also declared Bible reading in schools unconstitutional. (One of the Bible cases was brought by Madalyn Murray.)
Conservative Protestant and Catholic leaders reacted furiously, as did many politicians, especially from the South. One Alabama congressman saw an atheist-integrationist conspiracy in the combination of Engel with the high court’s 1954 school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education. He charged that the justices had “put Negroes in the schools and now they’ve driven God out.”5 Billy Graham called the ruling “a most dangerous trend” and “another step toward secularism in the United States.” Cardinal James Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles pronounced the decision “shocking and scandalizing to one of American blood and principles, . . . not a decision according to law, but a decision of license.” McIntyre declared that the high court was “biting the hand that feeds it . . . because all law comes from God. Yet the court presumes to deny the children of God in our schools the opportunity to speak to the Creator, the Lawmaker, the Preserver of mankind.” In his closing blast, the cardinal connected communism with a decision that “puts shame on our faces, as we are forced to emulate Mr. Khrushchev.” Jews, by contrast, reacted with almost unanimous approval of the high court’s logic. The New York Board of Rabbis declared that “recitation of prayers in the public schools, which is tantamount to the teaching of prayer, is not in conformity with the American concept of the separation of church and state.” Liberal Protestants, too, were pleased with the decision. “It protects the religious rights of minorities,” said Dean M. Kelly, director of the Department of Religious Liberty of the National Council of Churches, “and guards against the development of ‘public school religion’ which is neither Christianity nor Judaism but something less than either.”6
In response to the decision, there were many proposals in Congress for a constitutional amendment to permit school prayer and Bible reading. At the beginning of the debate, it seemed that some form of prayer amendment might well pass. Protestant fundamentalists cared intensely about school prayer, but many Americans were less informed about and more indifferent to the entire subject, especially since most multiethnic, multireligious urban schools had long since dispensed with potentially controversial religious rituals. Fearful that the fundamentalists might carry the day as a result of public ignorance, the ACLU joined with other separationist and civil libertarian groups, including numerous Jewish organizations and Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in a nationwide campaign against any prayer amendment. The National Council of Churches and all major Jewish organizations testified against such an amendment before the House Judiciary Committee, and the Catholic clergy no longer spoke with one voice. Spellman and McIntyre might pronounce themselves shocked by the court’s ruling, but Father Robert F. Drinan, who later became a member of the ACLU national advisory committee, called for “cooperative separation” on establishment-clause issues. Furthermore, the Catholic hierarchy began to recall that it had expended a good deal of energy, over the course of more than a century, on a largely successful effort to remove Protestant prayer and the reading of the King James Bible from public schools. Who could say that a school prayer amendment might not reimpose Protestant words on Catholic schoolchildren? The difference between the “Protestant” and the “Catholic” Lord’s Prayer, grounds for imprisonment or worse if you spoke the wrong words in the wrong venue in bad old pre-Enlightenment Europe, was still capable in twentieth-century America of inciting a war of words between the conservative Protestant and conservative Catholic faithful. Protestants, following the King James Version, end the prayer with, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever.” Catholics end simply with, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Protestants say, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” while Catholics say, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” That religious leaders and school boards actually spent time arguing over such differences in wording argues powerfully on behalf of the Supreme Court’s wisdom in banning all school prayer.
Little was heard at the time of Engel from the African American clergy, representing what was then and is now (according to public opinion polls) the most committed group of religious believers in the nation. Given the intensity of the battle for racial justice in the early sixties, it is hardly surprising that black ministers did not consider school prayer the preeminent moral issue of the day. To do so would have placed them on the side of Lyman Beecher, who saw Sunday postal service as a greater evil than slavery, rather than on the side of William Lloyd Garrison. (When I was a young reporter for the Washington Post, I asked a friend, a consultant on education to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whether the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had strong views on the school prayer and Bible reading decisions. My friend laughed and said King had once remarked that it would be very nice if the school day across America could begin with a reading of the Bill of Rights. “After all,” King told my friend, “we Negroes know our Bible. We don’t need to have it read to us in school.”)
Unlike the Civil War–era proposal to declare Jesus Christ the true head of the U.S. government, which politicians wisely bottled up in congressional committees, the twentieth-century prayer amendment received consideration by the full House and Senate. But the drive to sanction prayer in the Constitution never received the support of anything approaching a majority, in large measure because so many non-fundamentalist church leaders testified against it. Although the controversy receded from public view by the late sixties, it continued to fester for a large and angry minority that regarded the battle between secularism and religion as the most important issue in American life. In that respect, the split over school prayer was a precursor of the bitter division over the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision: those who approved of the decision soon began to take legalized abortion for granted, while abortion opponents turned their initial shock into a concerted campaign to undo Roe by whatever means, however long it might take.
Fundamentalist sects continued to grow throughout the sixties—even as the courts held an increasingly separationist and secularist view on relations between government and religion. The expansion of religious fundamentalism, in membership and in financial resources, took place below the media radar line. Newspapers and television were covering civil rights and antiwar demonstrations as well as the sexual revolution, but the media largely overlooked one of the most important stories of the decade—the development of a powerful fundamentalist infrastructure of religious schools and communications outlets. The huge First Baptist Church of Dallas, for example, organized a system of schools, originally designed to evade desegregation, that served as a model for conservative Baptists throughout the South. Although the desegregation angle was covered by the press, the larger religious implications were ignored—especially by the northern media. Eventually, First Baptist, led by its charismatic ultraright pastor, W. A. Criswell, created a comprehensive structure of educational institutions that would play an important role in the rightward theological and political move of the entire Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s. As a number of historians have now noted, the movement spearheaded by First Baptist “allowed the children of church members and likeminded people . . . to move from kindergarten through graduate study in school environments . . . considered theologically safe, unlike those found in the public schools and universities and in denominationally affiliated schools . . . considered [theologically] wayward, such as Southern Methodist University and Baylor University.”7 The young people who belonged to conservative evangelical churches and graduated from their schools looked up not to John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King but to Billy Graham and Strom Thurmond. Indeed, Graham was No. 2 on the 1969 list of the most admired men in America—after Richard Nixon. Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich were as much children of the sixties as their contemporaries who marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
Throughout the first half of the sixties, the moral energies of committed American liberals—whether their morality was based on religion or godless humanism in the best secularist sense—were largely invested in the civil rights struggle in the South. Since 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, the civil rights movement had held up an unforgiving mirror to the conscience of a nation. It was not, however, a mirror in which most white Americans, northern or southern, wished to see themselves. On October 21, 1963—five months after Martin Luther King delivered his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—Newsweek devoted a special issue to the response of white Americans to the civil rights movement. While the majority said they supported equal legal rights, nearly three-quarters of whites believed that Negroes were moving “too fast” in their drive for racial justice. Not surprisingly, only 3 percent of blacks agreed with that statement—a measure not only of the gap in perception between the races but of the depth of white resistance to change. Most whites outside the South were supportive in theory of the right of black Americans to eat a hamburger at a lunch counter, use a public toilet, or vote in elections without exposing themselves to insults, beatings, or murder. Nevertheless, a majority of whites strongly opposed most of the tactics civil rights demonstrators were using to bring about change. More than two-thirds said that lunch-counter sit-ins, consumer boycotts, and going to jail to fight discrimination were unjustified. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of white clung to the illusion that the civil rights movement did not have the backing of “rank and file” Negroes—a belief refuted by more than 90 percent of black Americans in the same poll.8 Like women’s suffrage, the goals of the civil rights movement of the sixties—particularly the first half of the sixties—seem so uncontroversial today that it is easy to repress the knowledge that a majority of white Americans opposed even the nonviolent demonstrations of black Americans who wanted nothing more than basic dignity.
The Christian right would like today’s public to forget exactly where religious conservatives stood on civil rights forty years ago. One of the more repellent ironies of modern religious correctness has been the attempt by fundamentalists to wrap themselves in the mantle of those men and women of faith who risked their lives to fight racism. In the sixties, right-wing fundamentalists were, almost without exception, hard-core segregationists. They attacked the twentieth-century civil rights movement as their spiritual actual ancestors had attacked the nineteenth-century abolitionist and feminist movements. What they saw was what their predecessors had seen—not a struggle for justice but a conspiracy of atheism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism.
It is inarguable that the preeminent moral leadership of the early civil rights struggle came from the black churches of the South, but only those with an interest in concealing the sorry racial record of so many white churches, North and South, have the temerity to credit religion per se for inspiring the movement. The black ministers at the forefront of the battle could never have imagined that their history would one day be twisted to promote the attempts of conservatives to breach the First Amendment’s barrier between church and state. There could be no more powerful argument against mixing religion and government than the success of independent African American churches in placing racial segregation and discrimination on a reluctant nation’s social agenda. Would black churches have been able to take the lead in the struggle had they been dependent on funds doled out for “faith-based initiatives”—either by federal officials, who were at best lukewarm supporters of civil rights, or by southern satraps, who were usually the deadly adversaries of their black citizens?9 Whites could bomb African American churches, but, thanks to the First Amendment, they could not control the activities of those institutions through anything short of murder.
By contrast, most faithful white southern churchgoers in the early civil rights era, and most of their ministers, were staunch defenders of segregation. Resistance to desegregation was particularly strong among evangelicals, whose silken ties to their brethren in the North had been severed by the Civil War. The tiny minority of white southern ministers who did speak out against racism were generally censured and abandoned by their churches—though that was hardly the worst that could happen. One of those embattled ministers, Edwin King (no relation to Martin Luther King), was arrested on May 28, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, after denouncing a violent police crackdown against sit-in demonstrators. He was bailed out by his friend Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the state NAACP, just in time to defend himself from an onslaught by his fellow clergymen at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Methodist Conference—which voted to bar the dissident minister from employment in any Methodist church in the state. Evers himself had less than two weeks to live; he was slain by a white supremacist assassin on June 12. In a dragnet in which state police scooped up many mourners who had attended Evers’s funeral, King was arrested again. While the young minister was still in jail, someone tampered with the lug nuts on his car, causing a near-fatal “accident” after King was once again released.10 Such was the support received from their religious brethren and superiors by courageous southern ministers who lived out the early Christian creed of nonviolent resistance to tyranny and injustice. In Pillar of Fire (1998), the civil rights historian Taylor Branch tells a story about King that shows exactly what sort of religion was acceptable to the enemies of racial equality. In 1961, while visiting freedom riders jailed in a notorious state prison, the minister brought copies of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s books as gifts for the prisoners. Knowing that Gandhi’s writings would not be allowed inside the jail, King had the foresight to wrap the subversive literature in Billy Graham’s book jackets.11
On civil rights, the Catholic Church in the South had a much better, though still mixed, record than southern Protestants. In 1958, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a strong statement condemning racial prejudice and discrimination, but American bishops differed greatly in their willingness to translate the principle into action. There were mavericks like Bishop Vincent S. Waters of Raleigh, North Carolina, who as early as 1953 wrote a pastoral letter declaring that “no segregation of races” would be tolerated in any church in his diocese. Furthermore, he told the Catholic faithful that if “Christ had said love our enemies, we certainly can love our friends. These [Catholics of all races] are our friends and members of our own body.” In New Orleans, the most Catholic city in the Deep South, Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel was much slower to take a stand, especially on the inflammatory issue of school desegregation. Under strong pressure from a biracial committee of pro–civil rights Catholic laity (unlike most of the South, Louisiana had a large population of black Catholics), Rummel acted to desegregate the city’s parochial schools only in 1962. Soon afterward, though, he excommunicated three prominent Catholic laymen—including Leander Perez, the notoriously racist district attorney of Plaquemines Parish, for urging Catholics to protest school desegregation by disrupting Sunday Mass.12 One can only imagine how different—how much less bloody—the civil rights struggles of the next few years might have been if equally prominent white Baptist preachers, speaking to a much larger white constituency than Catholics commanded in the South, had consistently condemned segregation from their pulpits. Most Southern rabbis were extremely cautious about speaking out against racism (though they did not endorse segregation as so many Protestant fundamentalists did). They feared drawing attention to themselves, particularly because anti-Semitic segregationists were constantly alluding to the disproportionate presence of Jews among northern white civil rights workers.
Nor was the posture of northern churches and their leaders uniformly favorable toward civil rights—especially when it came to direct action to support the movement. Not only the Christian right but many representatives of mainstream religions have retrospectively exaggerated the level of their coreligionists’ support for racial equality. Rabbi Marc Schneier, in Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Jewish Community (1999), offers an unusually honest look at what men of his faith did, and did not, do. In June 1964, the Central Congregation of American Rabbis—which included many prominent Reform Jewish supporters of the civil rights movement—was holding its annual convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Atlantic City just happens to be a relatively short plane ride from beautiful four-hundred-year-old St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest town in the nation, where some of the most violent clashes between the Klan and civil rights demonstrators were taking place during that blood-soaked “freedom summer.” On May 28, the Reverend Andrew Young had been leading a march toward St. Augustine’s one-time slave market, by then considered a picturesque tourist attraction, when he was beaten unconscious by Klansmen as local police looked on and did nothing. Under a court order not to interfere with the marchers, city officials once again stood by, on June 9, as peaceful demonstrators were bloodied by Klansmen on St. Augustine’s famous white sand beaches. At that point, King sent a telegram to the rabbinical convention asking the assembled rabbis to join him in St. Augustine. As Schneier recounts, only sixteen of several hundred rabbis responded to the call. The rabbis naturally feared for their own safety, but that, as Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf—one who stayed behind—admitted, was far from the only reason for their decision. A leading social activist who declined to go to St. Augustine, Wolf proffered a painfully candid self-analysis not long afterward:
I must ask myself what the meaning of my refusal to answer Dr. King’s call was, a refusal shared by nearly all my colleagues on this and nearly every other occasion. . . . The real reason for my refusal is more than the sum of my personal inadequacies. . . . When I said no, I meant it. No—I do not really wish to work with you! I do not wish to swim with you! I do not wish to go to jail with you! I do not wish to eat your food or be one of you!13
Before the sixties, northern whites—whether of a secularist or a religious bent—had played almost no role in the boycotts and other nonviolent demonstrations that began in Montgomery and first brought King to national prominence. But as the conscience of the nation was slowly stirred by the sight of black children being escorted into schools past jeering mobs and, later, by the bloody spectacle of demonstrators being clubbed and set upon by police dogs, more whites—and more northerners of both races—went South. The civil rights movement then became a collaboration among Americans of many religions, and of no religion, moved by the same moral imperatives. It was a coalition the nation had not seen since the abolitionist movement, when iconoclastic religious believers and freethinkers were united by the conviction that slavery was immoral, when Garrison declared his belief that membership in the human race—not membership in a church—was all that was required to recognize the evil of slavery. The new civil rights coalition included black leaders, many of them ordained clergymen, of King’s generation; representatives of the Catholic left, energized by the new spirit of reform in the church; liberal Protestants, heirs to all who had rebelled against rigid Calvinism; both observant and secular Jews; and agnostics and atheists who rejected all religion except the religion of humanity. But the white members of that dedicated coalition never spoke for middle-of-the-road white church members in the North or the South.
The extensive participation in the movement of nonreligious civil rights advocates and civil libertarians was a delicate issue for those who wished the cause of racial justice to be seen not as a radical departure from but as the embodiment of American tradition at its best. Like the image-conscious suffragists at the turn of the century, civil rights leaders had good reason not to draw attention to the importance of the nonreligious, and even the unconventionally religious, in their movement. King’s personal association with Jews, who were regarded by most segregationists as indistinguishable from atheists, gave white racists another reason to hate him. As was well known in the sixties, King’s closest white friend and personal lawyer was Stanley Levison, a nonobservant, nonbelieving Jew who was a veteran of the “Old Left” of the thirties and a defense lawyer for communists, socialists, and labor unions throughout the McCarthy era. King and Levison were such good friends that they reportedly spoke on the telephone nearly every night—and one of the topics they discussed was religion. Deeply rooted in his Baptist faith, King found it impossible to imagine that someone could be as morally committed to the betterment of humanity as Levison without believing in any god or any religion. “You believe in God, Stan,” King would tease his friend. “You just don’t know it.”14
Clerical collars, nuns’ habits, and rabbis’ yarmulkes provided some, though not much, insulation from constant charges that the “atheistic” and “communistic” volunteers had descended upon the South in order to engage in promiscuous interracial sex. On the second day of the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s Representative William Dickinson declared in a speech on the floor of the House that the marchers were nothing but “human flotsam, adventurers, beatniks, prostitutes, and similar rabble hired to march at $10 a day, free room and board, and all the sex they wanted. Free love among this group is not only condoned, it is encouraged. . . . Only the ultimate sex act with one of another color can demonstrate that they have no prejudice.”15 Julian Bond, then a spokesman for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), replied that he hoped the congressman realized “that he is accusing nuns, priests, rabbis, and other responsible citizens of misconduct.”16 What civil rights leader would wish to underscore the religious unconventionality of so many volunteers, given the omnipresent suggestions that even longtime members of the clergy were nothing but imposters? A typical comment, overheard by a reporter covering the march for the New Yorker, was made by a middle-aged white woman to an Alabama state trooper. “Look at them so-called white men,” she said, “them with their church collars that they bought for fifty cents! And them de-virginated nuns! I’m a Catholic myself, but it turns my stomach to see them!”17
The irreligion of many of the younger white volunteers was a sore point not only with white segregationsts but also with many respected elders in southern black communities. One such man was Albert Jones, an NAACP leader in Meridian, Mississippi and a friend of Michael Schwerner, a Jewish volunteer from New York who was murdered by Klansmen in the summer of 1964 along with Andrew Goodman, a fellow New Yorker, and James Chaney, a local black volunteer. Jones explained in a 1965 interview:
The church is important to Mississippi Negroes. Even as we become militant and fight for our rights, we still want to retain our religion. Some of the white ones who come in here are not reverent and religious, so they have a limited understanding of our people. I want to fight as much as anybody for Negro advancement. My windows have been shot out and blasted out. I want the ballot for Negroes, better jobs, better education, and I don’t want Negroes looked down on any more. But the church is still our mighty fortress, and I want it to stay that way.18
Religion could also be an issue between many members of the older generation of black ministers (though “old” is relative: King was only thirty-nine when he was assassinated in 1968) and the younger generation of more militant blacks like Bond and Stokely Carmichael. Many of the younger men held views on religion more in line with those of W. E. B. Du Bois—who had almost as little respect for the black church as he did for white churches—than with those of King. Du Bois, who renounced his American citizenship in 1963 and died in Ghana, had excoriated the black ministry in the early decades of the twentieth century for being “choked with pretentious, ill-trained men and in far too many cases with men dishonest and otherwise immoral.” In 1912, he called for reforms “to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.”19 It could well be argued that the leadership of the black church in the civil rights movement was the fulfillment of Du Bois’s vision, but the younger nonreligious blacks did not always display the respect for devout African American believers that King and his clerical contemporaries displayed toward those whose humanism was the sole moral basis of their commitment to civil rights.
Nonobservant Jews, motivated not by Judaism as a religion but by the secular Jewish tradition of social activism, made up the largest group among college-age whites who volunteered in the South during the dangerous summers between 1960 and 1965. Niggerwas the only epithet hurled more frequently at marchers than kike and Jew-boy. Goodman and Schwerner espoused the secular humanism that motivated so many of the young Jewish volunteers. The twenty-four-year-old Schwerner, a graduate of the Columbia University School of Social Work; his twenty-two-year-old wife, Rita, a Queens College graduate; and the twenty-year-old Goodman, still a student at Queens, had been raised by their parents on secularist Jewish social ideals. Schwerner was an atheist and a humanist who, his wife later told interviewers, believed in all men rather than in one God. His European-born grandparents were believing Jews, but his parents had moved away from traditional religious observance. At thirteen, Schwerner had decided not to have a bar mitzvah, showing considerable resolve, since even the most secular Jews at the time were generally unwilling to forgo the traditional ceremony in which a boy becomes a man in the eyes of the Jewish community. Schwerner intended to devote his life to some form of work on behalf of the poor and dispossessed; since January 1964 he and his wife had run a community center in Meridian under the auspices of the Congress of Racial Equality. “Mickey was human, intensely human,” his wife said later. “He had this wonderful conviction that every human being is essentially good—that every individual knows what is good for himself and, if given a fair chance, will eventually choose what is good.”20 Goodman was a product of the same secular Jewish tradition; like Schwerner, he declined to have a bar mitzvah. The son of parents who met as students at Cornell University and whose youthful politics in the thirties were defined by antifascism, Goodman was raised on Manhattan’s liberal Upper West Side. His mother, Carolyn, a clinical psychologist, and his father, Robert, an engineer, were nonobservant Jews who raised their three sons to believe in humanism. “That was the key word for us,” said eighty-eight-year-old Carolyn Goodman in 2003. “And it’s a positive word—not the negative that conservatives have tried to make it. To me, a good Jew is someone who believes in the equality of human beings and reaches out to those in need. That’s what Andy believed—and that’s why he went to Mississippi. Not because God told him to do it but because he believed in human beings helping other human beings.”21 Goodman had been in Mississippi just one night when he drove off toward the tiny town of Longdale with Schwerner and Chaney, on a mission to see what they could do to help black farmers whose church had just been burned down by the Klan. The three were murdered on June 21, 1964—a day after the U.S. Senate passed the landmark civil rights act outlawing discrimination in public accommodations and employment. Their bodies were entombed beneath a dam under construction in Neshoba County, and the decomposing remains were excavated forty-four days later, after an informer revealed the location to the FBI. The conspirators had only planned to murder Schwerner, who was well known to them because he had been working in Meridian since January. The killers were baffled because Goodman, unlike Schwerner, was clean-shaven. “The other Jew don’t look much like a Jew” was the verdict on Goodman’s beardlessness. In the end, he was killed because he was with Schwerner and was, after all, only “another atheist, Communist, nigger-loving Jew.”22
Nine months after the slayings in Mississippi, another murder of another civil rights worker made front-page news. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a thirty-nine-year-old Detroit wife and mother of five, was shot on a lonely stretch of highway between Selma and Montgomery. Liuzzo, a lapsed Catholic, was neither an atheist nor an agnostic, but she represented many in the movement who were motivated by humanistic rather than theistic spiritual beliefs. Many of the “spiritual humanists”—as distinct from absolutely secular humanists—were middle-aged women who had turned to religion to sustain them during a life crisis, only to find that orthodox faith no longer had answers that made sense. Liuzzo’s crisis came when one of her babies was born dead. In From Selma to Sorrow (1998), her biographer, Mary Stanton, describes a painful scene in which Liuzzo was informed that, according to Catholic doctrine, a stillborn baby could never go to heaven because it had not been baptized. Liuzzo asked her husband, “Why would a loving God do that. . . . I can’t believe it’s true.”23 In 1965, she began attending Detroit’s First Unitarian Universalist Church, a center of civil rights activism with many former freedom riders in its congregation.
After the murder, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI orchestrated a campaign to stigmatize Liuzzo as a bad mother and a mentally unstable woman of loose morals. The slanderous publicity was based on remarkably persistent social stereotypes used to label female social activists as libertines and opponents of God Himself. (An FBI informer was in the car with the men charged with actually shooting Liuzzo—reason enough for a disinformation campaign aimed at blaming the victim.) In the 1830s, when Angelina and Sarah Grimké began to speak out about the sexual degradation of black women under slavery, the sisters were constantly accused of having an unnatural interest in interracial sex—an accusation all the more potent in an era when respectable women were not supposed to be interested in sex at all. Lucretia Mott, whose personal reputation was so spotless that she could not be charged with sexual prurience, was attacked instead as a “bad woman,” “female fanatic,” and “brazen infidel” whose antislavery mission amounted to nothing less than a “sacrilegious condemnation of the Holy Bible.”24 The posthumous denigration of Liuzzo, the only woman to be murdered for her participation in the civil rights movement, took a similar tack, employing far more vulgar and graphic terms than those available to nineteenth-century gentlemen.
“Acquittal is certain,” predicted Matt Murphy, the attorney representing the Klansmen charged with Liuzzo’s killing. “All I need to use is the fact that Mrs. Liuzzo was in the car with a nigger man and she wore no underpants.”25 Liuzzo had been accompanied by a nineteen-year-old local black volunteer, and they were heading for Montgomery to pick up tired marchers and drive them back to Selma. By 1965, the image of female civil rights workers sans underpants had become a cliché throughout the South. A toxicologist’s report showed no evidence that Liuzzo had recently engaged in sexual intercourse—a finding that the self-styled “Klonsel” Murphy repeatedly challenged. At the trial, Murphy also took aim at Liuzzo’s religious beliefs. “Mrs. Liuzzo was up there singing, ‘we will overcome, we will overcome, we will overcome,’” he ranted. “What in God’s name were they trying to overcome? God himself? . . . Integration breaks every moral law God wrote. Noah’s son was Ham [and he] committed adultery and his sons were the Hamites and God banished them and they went to Africa and the only thing they ever built was grass huts. No white woman can ever marry a descendant of Ham.”26 Liuzzo’s status as a mother of five was used not to gain sympathy for her but to impeach her character; national opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans—women as well as men, northerners as well as southerners—felt that no mother had a right to leave her children, even for a few days, to work for a social cause. That Liuzzo had not expected to be murdered was beside the point in the view of a public that still believed a woman’s place was in the home. The participation in the civil rights movement of many white women of Liuzzo’s generation—and even more women in their twenties—elicited vicious epithets that proved to be a precursor of later right-wing attacks on the reborn feminist movement. Black female volunteers were thought to be sleeping with white male volunteers, but that was more acceptable to southern segregationists than the ravishing of white women by the descendants of Ham. Betty Friedan, in her 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique, drew a telling connection between contemporary attacks on civil rights workers and nineteenth-century attacks on advocates of women’s suffrage. Her analysis would prove just as true in relation to the twentieth-century women who participated in both the civil rights and the feminist movements:
The myth that these women [nineteenth-century feminists] were “unnatural monsters” was based on the belief that to destroy the God-given subservience of women would destroy the home and make slaves of men. Such myths arise in every kind of revolution that advances a new portion of the family of man to equality. The image of the feminists as inhuman, fiery man-eaters, whether expressed as an offense against God or in the modern terms of sexual perversion, is not unlike the stereotype of the Negro as a primitive animal or the union organizer as an anarchist.27
Liuzzo, a coal miner’s daughter and a high school graduate who had only recently begun attending college, had read The Feminine Mystique. Although the killings of Goodman and Schwerner prompted the usual segregationist complaints that outside agitators had no business intruding on the southern way of life, there was no suggestion that the two had unmanned themselves by their actions. Liuzzo, by contrast, was attacked not only as a northern busybody but, as Friedan might have predicted, as an unnatural woman who had stepped out of her God-ordained place in society. In the view of hard-core segregationists, she deserved to die for that transgression; in the eyes of less biased Americans, she may not have deserved to die but was certainly responsible for placing herself in harm’s way. Young Rita Schwerner, waiting in Mississippi for her husband’s body to be found, had been denigrated on precisely the same grounds. She, too, had violated the traditional code for women, not by leaving her husband behind in the North but by coming to Mississippi to work with him side by side and by aggressively challenging state officials for their complicity in his death. Not to mention the fact that the couple had slept in the homes of black Mississippians—the implication being that the Schwerners had been availing themselves of the opportunity to engage in interracial sex rather than simply taking advantage of the only shelter available to northern civil rights workers. Such a woman, in the view of many white Mississippians, deserved to be widowed at a young age.28
It takes nothing away from the heroism of civil rights volunteers animated by religious ideals to point out that the movement also had many heroes animated by nonreligious humanism. One of the greatest strengths of the movement was that it had room enough, as there had been in the ranks of nineteenth-century abolitionists, for every strand of religious and nonreligious belief: the devout Christianity of a King, the individualistic and humanistic spirituality of a Liuzzo, the atheism of a Schwerner or a Goodman. In the era of its greatest successes, which included passage of the 1964 and 1965 laws attempting to undo nearly a century of Jim Crow, the civil rights movement became an overarching moral force that embraced and transcended both religion and secularism. But the laws that emerged from the civil rights struggle, though assuredly written in the blood of martyrs, were based not on the duties of humans to their gods but on the obligations of citizens to one another. The desire of the apostles of religious correctness to recast the civil rights struggle as a purely religious movement is of a piece with their insistence that the secularist framers of the Constitution really intended to found a Christian nation. The attempt of the religious right to sacralize the civil rights struggle has nothing to do with historical truth and everything to do with the time that has passed since those passionate days—time enough to engender the sentimentality that breeds forgetting.
Although the civil rights and the later antiwar movement were grounded in both religious and secularist impulses, the third great social movement originating in the sixties—the renewal of the struggle for women’s rights—was thoroughly and fundamentally secularist. Religious feminists, who have labored for years with varying degrees of success to transform Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism into faiths that respect the equality of women both as members and as spiritual leaders, will no doubt quarrel with any definition of feminism as essentially secularist. On this issue, however, the religious right is right: true belief in and commitment to the equality of women and men shakes the foundations of all religions. Religion and feminism can be reconciled only through a radical reconstruction of traditional religious practices and beliefs. By admitting women to the clergy, much of American Protestantism and Reform and Conservative Judaism have adapted to what is essentially a secularist demand—that women be treated within their religious institutions as equal moral and intellectual beings. It is reasonable to argue, as religious conservatives do, that mainstream American religion has become more secularized as a result of its accommodation to feminism—just as mainstream nineteenth-century Protestantism was secularized by its accommodation to evolutionism and eighteenth-century Protestantism by its exposure to Enlightenment thought. Whether one views the secularization of religion as good or bad is another matter. For extremist conservatives of all faiths, the status of women is a line in the sand, a measure of their unwillingness to let secular laws and new secular customs overturn centuries of religious dogma and tradition. The real enemies of fundamentalism are rationalism and the modern world, and while this observation is most frequently applied by American pundits to radical Islamist theocracies, it also applies in some measure to any religion, fundamentalist or not, that treats women as the inferiors of men.
Pope John Paul II’s absolute refusal to consider admitting women to the Catholic priesthood—although the majority of American and European Catholics strongly support the ordination of women—baffles many non-Catholics, in part because the church espouses increasingly liberal positions on matters of social and economic justice. But the pope’s resistance is based on theology, not sociology, and is perfectly comprehensible within his historical frame of reference. The church is not a democracy—yet another secularist idea—and its practices are not determined by the opinions of its communicants. For the men who run the church today, allowing women to take center stage in what faithful Catholics believe to be the literal transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of the savior—the doctrine known as transubstantiation—represents not merely a loss of male hierarchical power but the desacralization of Catholicism’s fundamental mystery. The essence of a secularist and rationalist worldview is the desacralization of mysteries and taboos that defy logic and the laws of nature, and that is why American feminism has elicited such fierce and enduring enmity from the religious right. At its core, feminism can only be understood as an attack on the sacralization of man-made customs governing relations between the sexes.
Most of the women who led the resurgence of American feminism in the late sixties were veterans of both the civil rights and the antiwar movements, and an extraordinarily large proportion were secular Jews who, like Schwerner and Goodman, identified themselves with Jewish social activism rather than with Judaism as a religion. Many Jewish feminists, fearful of the anti-Semitism that had been used historically to besmirch social reform movements with a strong Jewish presence, tried to downplay the importance of Jews in the movement. The long-standing rightist equation of Jews with atheists made the visibility of Jews as feminist theorists and tactical leaders even more problematic from a public relations standpoint. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the most recognizable feminists to mainstream Americans by the early seventies, were both Jews (actually, Steinem was Jewish only on her father’s side). On her lecture tours around the country, Steinem usually teamed up with a black speaker in a strategy designed to defuse charges that feminists were white elitists unconcerned with either black or working-class white women. The full story of African American feminism has yet to be written, but black women not only benefited from but shaped some of the most important feminist advances in education and employment. Beginning in the early seventies, which produced the first generation of prominent female attorneys and officeholders elected on their own instead of as widows of lawmakers, black political pioneers like Representatives Barbara Jordan of Texas and Shirley Chisholm of New York were powerfully supportive of feminist causes. Women’s rights never took precedence over the drive for racial justice for black feminists, but for many, especially in public life, the two causes complemented each other. There were too many similarities between the justifications for discrimination based on race and on sex for successful African American women to dismiss feminism as a white woman’s cause.
Just as the civil rights movement took up the unfinished work of emancipation, the feminist movement took up the unfinished business begun at Seneca Falls in 1848. The feminists of the sixties and seventies were a throwback not to the middle-of-the-road suffragists who took over the women’s movement at the end of the nineteenth century but to the more radical feminism of the founding mothers. Time had proved Stanton correct in her contention that the vote alone was not enough to achieve equal rights for women. Many of the issues that mattered to the new feminists, such as discrimination in employment and education, had been just as important to the early-nineteenth-century advocates for women’s equality. These bread-and-butter demands for fair treatment, which have now become as uncontroversial as suffrage, were resisted fiercely when first broached to employers at the beginning of the 1970s. A pro forma ban on sex discrimination in employment had been added to the ban on racial and religious bias in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, largely because segregationist lawmakers hoped that some of their male colleagues would find the inclusion of women so outlandish that they might vote against the whole bill. Most business leaders never dreamed that women would one day actually sue to gain access to jobs and salaries that had been reserved for men. There was no organized women’s movement to press such demands in 1964, although if more men of power had read Friedan’s feisty Feminine Mystique, some of them might have seen the handwriting on the kitchen wall. Demands for equal job opportunities and equal pay might and did irritate, even incense, those accustomed to relying on and profiting from the work of women restricted to poorly paid secretarial and “pink-collar” jobs like waitressing. However, bread-and-butter feminism was not so fundamentally threatening as to arouse the full ire of the religious right. It took the legalization of abortion, with its negation of sacral rationales for strict social control of women’s childbearing decisions, to join the battle between conservative religion and secularist feminism.
Abortion was the first issue to unify feminists who were fighting among themselves about everything from the “bourgeois” makeup of the movement’s participants to the importance of gay concerns. The latter was no trivial matter for feminism’s public image: “dyke” was the epithet of choice hurled at feminists from the first protest that attracted public notice—the picketing of the 1968 Miss America pageant by a group of New York women. “Kikes and dykes” soon followed, proving that efforts to divert attention from the Jewish presence in the movement had not been entirely successful. In a year that had seen the assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy, rioting in urban ghettos after King’s murder, and bloody clashes between police and antiwar demonstrators protesting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a challenge to the values embodied by Miss America was treated by the press more as comic relief than as a serious harbinger of any broader women’s activism. That dismissive attitude changed sooner than anyone would have predicted in a country torn by racial strife and deeply divided over the Vietnam War. The seriousness of the feminist campaign for liberalization of abortion laws was in large measure responsible for a shift in the attitude of superior amusement that the media had initially adopted toward “women’s libbers.” Abortion also served as a strong, albeit temporary, bridge between “rationalist feminists,” who focused on specific goals attainable within the structure of American society, and a profoundly irrational element, also present on the wilder fringes of the New Left, whose ideas about how to gain justice for women eventually came to encompass violence, anarchy, and hatred of men. As the feminist author Susan Brownmiller notes in her memoir In Our Time (1999), “an imaginative campaign—rash, impudent, decentralized, yet interconnected by ideas and passion—successfully altered public perception to such an extent that a ‘crime,’ as the law defined it, became a ‘woman’s constitutional right.’”29 The climax of the campaign was, of course, the Roe decision in 1973. The feminist drive to overturn restrictive abortion laws took many forms—lobbying state legislatures, helping women across the country to obtain abortions in the few states that permitted them, and educating the press about injuries and deaths resulting from more than one million illegal abortions performed each year. In the four years leading up to the Supreme Court decision—an astonishingly short time for any public education campaign to succeed—feminists, with support from a handful of courageous doctors, helped to create a widespread public awareness of an issue that had scarcely existed in the consciousness of anyone other than women who had themselves faced the desperate choices necessitated by an unwanted pregnancy. (In 1968, when I was twenty-three and first became aware of the new women’s movement, I identified myself as a feminist but had never given a moment’s thought to the subject of abortion.) In 1968, a Gallup poll found that only 15 percent of Americans favored liberalizing abortion laws; by 1972, 64 percent did.
The most important achievement of feminists who fought for the legalization of abortion—one that particularly enraged the religious right—was the stripping away of at least some of the secrecy and shame that had long surrounded the experience for women themselves. In the first issue of Ms. magazine in 1972, fifty-three women signed a declaration, addressed to the Nixon White House, under the simple headline WE HAVE HAD ABORTIONS. The prominent signers included Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara Tuchman, folksinger Judy Collins, tennis star Billie Jean King, and Steinem, editor in chief of the new magazine and a media darling. Signing the statement was an act of considerable courage for women who had careers and reputations to protect; they were admitting to an act that was still a crime in most parts of the nation and was considered a grievous sin by many of their fellow Americans. Their refusal to accept the burden of sin and shame, coupled with the belief that decisions about abortion fall within the domain of individual conscience rather than of religious dogma, laid bare the secularist underpinnings of the new feminist ideals.
The insistence that abortion was and should be a private and individual matter is a classic example of moral relativism—an honorable concept that has been poisoned by cultural conservatives and insufficiently defended by secularists. Supporters of legal abortion say, in essence, “You think abortion is wrong, and I respect that, but I think abortion is right in some circumstances—so neither of us should decide for the other.” To understand why that position is so repellent to the religious right, and why it has given rise to a powerful thirty-year movement aimed at overturning Roe, it is necessary to examine the ways in which the meaning of moral relativism, both in a philosophical sense and in terms of its influence on public policy, has been distorted. The stereotypical conservative image of relativism is that it amounts to nothing more than the notion that all morality is merely a matter of personal opinion. On a deeper level, theological and social conservatives define relativism as an “end justifies the means” ethic used to rationalize acts that should always, in any circumstance, be deemed both sinful and criminal. A murder is a murder, say the moral absolutists. The fallacy in this logic is that while all decent societies do indeed prohibit murder, they disagree on the definition of murder—and such disagreement exists even within a specific society at a specific time. Indeed, every dictionary defines murder as “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.” Unlawful. That one word turns the supposedly sacrosanct, eternal concept of murder into a thoroughly relativist notion. Whether the act is, or is not, unlawful is the heart of the matter. Is it murder to execute criminals? The Christian right says no, capital punishment is a lawful form of societal self-defense, while opponents of capital punishment say that executions are nothing more than statesanctioned murder. The law, made by men and not by God, is what makes the difference. Abortion poses precisely the same problem of definition. The Protestant right and the Catholic hierarchy say that abortion is murder because they regard even a day-old collection of cells as a human being—a person capable of being murdered. Most Jews, mainstream Protestants, liberal Catholics, and atheists do not regard abortion as murder because they do not believe that the embryo or fetus—at least not before it can survive outside the mother’s body—is a person. The battle over abortion is a quarrel not between relativists who favor murder and absolutists who oppose it but between competing definitions of whether a fetus is a person to whom the term murder can even be applied. The absolutists, speaking out of their own subjective religious beliefs, insist that their definition is the one that should serve for all. The secularist and relativist positions—and they are, for all practical purposes, identical—is that one subjective religious viewpoint cannot serve all in a democratic society.
Justice Harry Blackmun’s eloquent opinion in Roe epitomizes both secularism and relativism in its assertion that the Constitution “is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.” Blackmun, whose wife, Dottie, was in attendance on January 22, 1973, when he read an eight-page summary of his opinion, opened with a revealing statement that explicitly elaborated on the relativist nature of his thinking:
We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One’s philosophy, one’s experiences, one’s exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one’s religious training, one’s attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one’s thinking and conclusions about abortion.
Blackmun went on to state unequivocally that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”30
Grounded in the controversial assertion of a constitutional right to privacy, Roe was the product not only of the new feminist consciousness but of a half century of struggle by civil libertarians and centrist birth control crusaders. On this issue, the radical feminists and the more “bourgeois” representatives of the ACLU and Planned Parenthood were united. Harriet Pilpel, general counsel for both the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, pushed hard and successfully to make reproductive rights a part of the ACLU’s agenda; her mentor and predecessor as counsel for both groups was Morris Ernst, who had been fighting for the legalization of birth control since the thirties. In the early sixties, many within the ACLU had feared that being identified with abortion would remarginalize the organization just as the nation emerged from the fear-filled legacy of the McCarthy era. Moreover, abortion rights activists, whether they came from the legalistic civil libertarian community or from more radical feminist groups, were constantly attacked as enemies of religion—and the ACLU’s antireligious image had long been a matter of great concern to many of its board members.
In 1973, those who celebrated the Roe decision had no idea that it would become the touchstone of conservative religious and political activism for the rest of the century. As Brownmiller observes, feminists responded to the decision with “the euphoric delusion that the women’s revolution was an unstoppable success.”31 Even those less given to euphoria—including some old ACLU hands who anticipated a proliferation of state laws designed to evade the intent of Roe—had reason to believe that legal abortion, like the desegregation of public facilities, would eventually be tolerated by those who detested the practice. The delusion that the abortion battle was over was fueled by the inability of many secularists, whether atheists or adherents of a liberal faith, to comprehend the absolute conviction that animates orthodox believers. Like the soon to be revived fundamentalist campaign against evolution, the antiabortion crusade set off by Roe was seen by its Christian soldiers not as a political battle—though it was certainly that too—but as a stark confrontation between absolute good and absolute evil. Just as William Jennings Bryan had considered evolutionism inseparable from atheism, bolshevism, and perverted science and technology, the religious right saw the legalization of abortion as the culmination of everything loathsome in the social upheavals not only of the previous decade but of the previous two centuries. Belief in the divinely ordained rights of the unborn over came centuries of theological enmity between Protestant fundamentalists and the American Catholic hierarchy and bridged the gap between the economic conservatism of the Protestant right and the liberal commitment to social justice of the Catholic Church. Although American Catholic bishops favored generous government spending to aid the poor, and the Protestant right tended to see government as an accomplice of Satan, the common commitment to the battle against abortion trumped all differences.
The battle would not be short or easy, for the task that religious conservatives set for themselves was not merely the undoing of Roe but the dismantling of two centuries of safeguards written into the nation’s godless Constitution. For the past four decades, the militant religious right has mounted a tireless assault on separation of church and state—a principle deeply inculcated in though seldom reflected upon by a public that takes religious freedom for granted. For the religiously correct, it is not enough for Americans to believe, as they always have and do today, that government interference with religion is a bad thing. The public must also be persuaded that religious interference with government is a good thing—that it is not interference at all but a beneficent and harmonious manifestation of God’s blessings upon America.