Daniel K. Williams

(University of Notre Dame Press, 2025, hardback, 360 pp., $35 and e-book,

$27.99)

Reviewed by John M. Grondelski, Ph.D.

One of the constant shibboleths about the pro-life position is that it represents and is driven by sectarian dogmatic considerations impermissible in a religiously pluralistic democracy. In the days before Roe, that claim was usually fueled by or exploited residual anti-Catholicism. The portrayal of Catholics as the primary opponents of abortion “liberalization” synergized with the “papist” threat that haunted a Protestant America. In our day, the “religious” claim is different: In a secularized and increasingly unchurched society, attribution of a principle—like the sanctity of life—to Judeo-Christian roots is often enough to paint it as an impermissible, perhaps even un-constitutional, intrusion. See Anonymous Plaintiff v. Individual Members of the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana (2026).

Daniel Williams’ book is not about how religion functioned as a scarecrow for pro-abortionists. It is rather about a more interesting idea: how religion shaped legal and social attitudes towards abortion before and after Roe. As Richard Weaver is famous for saying, “ideas have consequences.” Williams argues how the religiously formed ideas of three major groups—“liberal Protestants,” Catholics, and Evangelical Protestants—had consequences for the American debate about abortion from the 1960s through the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.

Across six chapters, Williams (associate professor of history at Ohio’s Ashland University) divides the thinking of each of those groups into two periods. Abortion discussions began in the period before Roe around state legislative debates to change abortion laws. After Roe, they took place in the context of trying to cope with the more rigid restrictions of abortion as a federally imposed Constitutional “right.” The final chapter discusses the coalescence of a “conservative Christian coalition” that reversed Roe as well as its strengths and weaknesses.

The author opens with the views of “liberal Protestants” from roughly the mid-20th century through Roe in 1973. By “liberal Protestants,” Williams means what Richard John Neuhaus once called the “Protestant Mainline”—the five or six denominations that constituted the core of generic American “Protestantism” and which was treated as American “civ-il religion”: Baptists, Church of Christ variants, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians.

Once solidly grounded in the Protestant theological rallying cry of sola Scriptura—the Bible alone as the ground for Christian faith and practice—many of those same groups began to be divided in the 19th/20th centuries by liberal biblical approaches to scriptural interpretation and exegesis. That, in turn, generated the counterreaction of “fundamentalism” that arguably fueled much of the modern Evangelical movement. The divisions those liberal approaches to biblical studies caused, however, were hardly limited to the “Mainline/Evangelical” split. They are arguably responsible for the internal fractures within many of the “mainstream” denominations, especially over questions of sexual ethics. Lack of communion within the Anglican Communion, disunited United Methodists, and splits within Lutheranism all originated in large part from how “modern biblical approaches” have eroded the groups’ internal doctrinal and moral unity. Nor are the effects limited to those internal rifts; those divisions most likely also undermined their groups’ continuity with the larger Christian tradition preceding it (arguably retained by Catholics) and left them bereft of unity and shrunken in membership and especially in socio-cultural influence—the reason Neuhaus maintained that the Protestant “Mainline” became the “Old Line.” If a generic Protestantism once guided popular American culture and thought, that influence is gone.

Abortion is one example of how that Christian continuity was eroded within the Protestant “Mainline.” Because classical Protestantism was less inclined to unite philosophy and theology, reason and faith, it had less of a philosophical basis to ground fetal personhood. Lacking a strong philosophical anthropology to support its theology, it was open to losing a substance-grounded concept of the person in favor of more limited criteria, like “consciousness” or “relationality.” Couple those approaches with the mobilization of some young liberal Protestant clergy in the “clergy counseling” abortion movement (a group of clergymen who served as a clandestine network connecting women who wanted abortions with those who performed them), then co-opt the “civil rights” movement, and—voilà!—you have a liberal Protestant “consensus” inclined to accept abortion for various reasons, typically threats to maternal life or “health,” rape, incest, and/or fetal deformity.

This was not the smoke-and-mirrors indulgence of abortion later promoted in the name of Roe. It was the thinking behind Bill Clinton’s famous phrase: Abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Pre-Roe liberal Protestants did not think abortion was unproblematic, an unqualified good to “shout” about.

They generally did not even think it was neutral. The fact that they wanted women to “consult” with their pastors and doctors, rather than just make unilateral decisions, suggests that. And this weak concern was what drove good Methodist Harry Blackmun (according to Professor Williams) to ground Roe in the rationale that abortion was a matter between a woman and her doctor. Catholics, on the other hand, had articulated a concept of personhood from conception that encompassed both the born and unborn. They could adduce Scriptural arguments but, at the time of Roe, framed their arguments using natural law, a non-sectarian category capable of grounding a civil rights argument to protect unborn human life and binding on all persons irrespective of creed. That focus was especially prominent in the first years after Roe, e.g., in the push for a Human Life Amendment.

Williams subsequently traces the bifurcation of Catholic approaches to the abortion issue. If one takes seriously the claim that abortion is a civil rights issue about a human being’s right to life, that claim has precedence over others: Being protected from extinction trumps being protected from poverty. The bishops, claims Williams, largely pursued that prioritization during the first post-Roe presidential campaign in 1976.

But by the late 1970s, abortion had become an ever more partisan divider, with the Democratic Party increasingly marginalizing its pro-life minority. Some bishops (e.g., Joseph Bernadin), uncomfortable with the political re-alignment away from the contemporary Democratic-Catholic alliance that a consequential pro-life ethic entailed, began articulating ideas of a “seamless garment” or “consistent ethic of life” that reduced the ethical issue of prenatal murder to one political judgment among many (e.g., social welfare programs, anti-death penalty, and anti-war activism) that a voter should make. The “seamless garment” afforded cover to various Catholic Demo-crats, who could wave their “consistent life ethic” while hewing faithfully to increasingly aggressive pro-abortion policy positions. Williams traces the twists and turns of intra-ecclesial debate as pro-abortion Democrats sought national office (Geraldine Ferraro, John Kerry, Joe Biden) and Catholic bishops sparred among themselves over what the “preeminent issue” of abortion meant in terms of effective, concrete political action.

Evangelicals, Williams claims, came late to the pro-life camp. Their presence ahead of the 1980 election, arguably fired by disappointment with “born again” Jimmy Carter, permanently altered the face of the American pro-life movement. According to Williams, Evangelicals were not so much attracted by questions of the humanity of the unborn as by a conviction that overall American public morality was degenerating and that abortion was a symptom of the decay. Only later did the human rights aspect of the pro-life fight grow among Evangelicals.

The readiness of some (mostly lay) Catholics—especially in the Unit-ed States—to build what might be called a “moral ecumenism” with those Evangelicals forged the “conservative Christian coalition” that finally toppled Roe. Williams criticizes that coalition as too politically narrow: It was strong enough to bring Roe down but not to staunch efforts that reestablished Roe legislatively in several states. But let’s not lay the blame so squarely on conservative Catholics and Evangelicals. One might also attribute responsibility to “old line” liberal Protestants who, increasingly secularized, have made peace with abortion as a good that need not be rare. Blame should also be shared by “seamless” Catholics whose politics afford some politicians cover not to deliver political results that safeguarded the unborn from what Vatican II called “unspeakable crimes against God and man.”

If one takes seriously abortion as the killing of a human being, that death is a far more serious and irrevocable “dignity” offense than an underfunded social program or even aggressive illegal immigration enforcement. Dilution of Catholic pro-life efforts by debates over “seamless garment” approaches are also arguably responsible for the partisan narrowing of the pro-life coalition: By affording political cover to Catholic Democrats unwilling to stand up for unborn life, the bishops of the United States arguably helped politically eviscerate the moderate-to-liberal pro-life community that once existed. In the end, it was the efforts of lay Catholics who allied with Evangelicals—not the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—that ended Roe’s abortion-on-demand license.

Still, this book reminds us that ideas—including theological ideas—do have consequences in law, culture, and politics. A provocative book worth an engaged readership.

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Original Bio:

John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views are his own.