The Imminent Demise of Roe Signals More Christian Nationalist Attacks on Secular America

The leaked draft Supreme Court opinion suggests that Roe v. Wade is about to fall. If the court overturns Roe, the impact will go far beyond abortion rights. It will also signal the dramatic expansion of religious authority into far-flung corners of American life, as conservative Christians impose their moral ideas on the general public.

Conservatives have long been explicit in their view that the right to abortion had to be countered to maintain the Christian underpinnings of American society. After the court handed down its decision in 1973, for example, Christianity Today lamented that “the American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God.” American Catholic bishops similarly spoke of the natural law that abortion violated and immediately mobilized to limit the damage.

Part of their objection to the legalization of abortion was the way the court simply assumed that the United States was a secular, civic republic. Roe marked the culmination of a 10-year interrogation of the role of religious groups within American society by the court. The justices rejected the power of religious leaders to define social and moral norms — to the utter dismay of those who saw Christian values as the bedrock of American society.

The justices first addressed religion in schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963) by disallowing school prayer and overt religious exercises. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the court weighed in on contraception by allowing birth control to be sold and advertised, disregarding the long-standing religious opposition that had led to laws forbidding it. It then tackled popular entertainment in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), permitting obscene films, books and other materials to be made and sold.

Through these cases, the court rejected the stance of Christian religious groups that said bans on obscenity were an expression of public morality. By the time the court took up the question of abortion, religious conservatives had grown outraged that their moral positions received no consideration.

In deciding Roe, the court made its commitment to secularism explicit. It had to. The question of when human life began and the exact status of a fetus were essentially religious questions. Different religious groups took divergent positions on abortion. Taking a stance within the dispute would involve the court in a religious debate, which it was loath to do because such a decision would violate the separation of church and state that it had earlier proclaimed.

So as the legal scholar Laurence H. Tribe later explained in the Harvard Law Review, the court took a step back from the issue. Rather than deciding the precise status of an unviable fetus, it asked itself the question, in Tribe’s words, “Who should make judgments of that sort?” The answer was clear, given the court’s prior rulings. The court should not decide, nor should political players at the state or federal level, nor should religious teachers. An individual woman in consultation with her doctor was the only person charged with making those judgments.