Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe V. Wade

Abortion and America’s Churches explores the surprising history of how American Christians think about abortion.

Many people assume that Christians have steadfastly condemned abortion throughout the United States’s history. Daniel K. Williams overthrows all assumptions about the unity, consistency, or simplicity of American Christian thought and belief in this groundbreaking new book. He demonstrates that churches in the United States have fought among themselves and with the wider culture as they developed and enforced their stance on abortion, revealing major struggles to define their often-changing positions. Far from a cynical exercise of political interest, changes and disagreements arose from serious theological considerations informed by each tradition’s approach to the faith. These theological shifts--and corresponding shifts in interreligious political alliances--led to the changing fortunes of Roe v. Wade.

By capturing the fascinating and complicated history informing each faith’s position, Abortion and America’s Churches restores much-needed context to the sharp polarization over abortion today.

Daniel K. Williams is a senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, where he teaches American history. He is the author of several books on modern American religion and politics, including The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Christianity Today.