There’s a lot of talk about what yesterday’s SBC bombshell report tells us about the current panic over “grooming.” I want us to remember that it was a Southern Baptist woman, Anita Bryant, who helped put these ideas in motion. /🧵 First, as background, the report details how SBC leaders kept a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors to protect the SBC rather than protect Baptists from future abuse. /2
nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/…

I did a text search of “abortion” in my book on the history of the religious right, We Gather Together. I used the word 705 times. But this might be the passage I’d point journalists to right now: “in 1973, most religious conservatives did not oppose abortion.” Religious opposition was not a given nor inherent. It was historically produced, and it varied greatly across religious groups, even conservative ones. An evangelical consensus opposing abortion, for example, took at least a decade to build.

@KevinMKruse Also, I would add that much of Southern Baptist indifference to abortion was shaped by the fact that Catholics dominated the early pro-life movement. Anti-Catholicism was a more powerful driver of Southern Baptist ideas than pro-life theology for a moment. @KevinMKruse W. A. Criswell, at time the most important SBC preacher, said this about Catholic pro-life mvmt just after Roe: "I think the Catholics have it in their heads…that they’re going to outbreed the rest of us...I just think that’s their way of survival and it’s working pretty good."

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the rise of Trump, but I think now after what we see happening at the border it is clear that the days of so-called #FamilyValues conservatism are over. /1 As Trump’s #ZeroTolerance border policy has separated 2,000 children (and counting) from their families & as the GOP does nothing about it & as the party’s white evangelical base remains indifferent – or even supportive – of children being taken from their parents… /2