(Image source: Jim Watson for Getty Images)

In March 2023, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, attended a Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Subcommittee hearing on the possible removal of gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act list. Holding up images of purportedly aborted human fetuses, Boebert began: “I do want to say before my opening remarks, you know, since we’re talking about the Endangered Species Act, I’m just wondering if my colleagues on the other side would put babies on the endangered species list?”

This was not the first time that a conservative politician used anti-abortion language to dismiss endangered species protection. In 2022, Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines made similar comments in a speech claiming that Democrats wanted to provide more protection for sea turtle hatchlings than human babies. After widespread criticism of his speech on social media, Senator Daine’s press secretary told Newsweek: “If the liberal elites and far Left cared as much about unborn human babies as they do about baby sea turtles, America would be better off.” In another recent instance, a pro-life group published an op-ed comparing the Endangered Species Act to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, writing, “if only humans were treated like animals.”

While doing research for my first book on white evangelical politics in Colorado, I heard similar comparisons. Indeed, these kinds of comments were some of the only times I heard evangelicals talk about the environment. Once, a comedian at a Christian non-profit event joked: “Some things aren’t right! Ever notice that most people who support animal rights are for abortion? Hug an owl and flush a human!” Another time, the pastor of a large Colorado Springs church asked in a sermon: “Who would show more compassion for an animal? It is crazy that today we have laws protecting the horned owl, but we don’t have any protection for the unborn baby!”

Rather than one-off comments, such statements show how anti-abortion and anti-environmental politics are united through white evangelicalism. Since evangelicals adopted an anti-abortion stance between the late 1970s and early 1980s, they have sought to make it the most significant moral issue of our time. In turn, white evangelicals use abortion as a moral pivot, re-directing concern away from other problems, especially environmental ones.

The significance of this is hard to overstate in our current era of climate crisis and species collapse. We are in an era of a sixth mass extinction, an ecological experiment unsurpassed in human history. The global scientific community warns that we are nearing a tipping point leading to catastrophic climate change. Far from headlines and reports, people all over the planet are experiencing the direct effects of a warming world. Just this summer, unprecedented wildfires in Hawaii led to the highest death toll from a fire in recent U.S. history. In Canada, wildfires resulted in the evacuation of an entire town, while migrating smoke from the fires lead to temporary shut-downs of cities across the northeastern U.S. due to poor air quality. In May, State Farm Insurance, the largest home insurance company in California, announced they would no longer accept new applications for homeowners’ insurance in the state because of the risks of wildfires.

White evangelicals remain the largest demographic group in the U.S. to deny the reality of climate change. And, for over forty years, they have remained the largest voting bloc in the country, representing around one quarter of the electorate and providing the base for the Republican party. White evangelicals thus play a significant role in limiting U.S. climate policy. As in Boebert’s pivot at the Endangered Species Act Hearing, the broader white evangelical world’s focus on abortion continually directs attention away from environmental harms.

Introducing the “abortion holocaust”

Peter, a white evangelical in his late forties, leaned over the table at a diner and asked me, “Sophie, how old are you?” After I answered, he responded, “So, you are a survivor of the abortion holocaust, the biggest holocaust in human history. Since 1973 one in three babies have been murdered.” We were in the middle of an interview about his activism to get other evangelical Christians interested in opposing abortion. Over an hour and a half, Peter touched on a variety of topics: the miracle of birth, the role of IUDS as “abortificants,” the phenomenon of what pro-life activists call “post-traumatic abortion disorder,” and Bible study options for justifying anti-abortion activism. But it was his description of abortion as a new racial justice issue that stood out. For Peter, abortion is a concern on scale with some of the worst events in human history: “Because the thing about abortion is that it’s like slavery, or the holocaust, because it is about other people being killed in our society every day. People who need our help. And that’s why abortion is different than say drug addiction and why the Bible calls us to intervene.”

In my nearly one hundred interviews with white evangelicals in Colorado Springs, I asked each individual what responsibilities Christians have in politics and society. Typically, interviewees would list two issues they felt were the most important political issues for Christians to support: defending marriage and defending life. Paul, a young adult Christian who was single and often attended four or five Bible study sessions a week, gave me a characteristic answer to this question. He first responded, “I don’t want to be influenced by the world; I want to know what the Bible says, so I’m not that interested in politics. I’ve always been conservative. But, politics becomes legalistic, about judging people.” After this disclaimer he went on to say: “But, if there were amendments about keeping marriage as a man and a women or against abortion I will vote for those.”

As my interviewees affirmed, defending “marriage”—or opposing LGBTQ rights—and defending “life”—opposing abortion—were the foundation of their politics. Such responses came to feel scripted. Towards the end of my research, after seeing this play out dozens of times, it felt like I would ask the question and then push play on some pre-recorded tape, almost always hearing the same two answers.

Although today’s white evangelicals are overwhelmingly committed to eradicating abortion, this has not always been the case. Understanding this dramatic change in perspective will help us to understand how today’s debates over abortion relate to the environment.

Race, abortion, and origins of the national Christian Right

Until the late 1970s, evangelicalism was a politically diverse religion whose largest denomination—The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)— voted through 1976 to maintain a pro-choice stance. The pro-life movement at the time was largely a Catholic undertaking, one not popular with Protestants.

The first national political issue associated with evangelical Christians was not abortion, but an effort to oppose a desegregation campaign by the Carter Administration. President Carter, who had received over half of the white evangelical vote in his 1976 presidential win, ended up losing much of that support by 1980 due to his efforts to desegregate educational institutions. In 1975, the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in a widely reported case. The IRS then went on to address the hundreds of private Christian academies that had opened across the south in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling.

Under the new policy, any school that failed to desegregate their student bodies would lose its tax-exempt status. New Right leader, Richard Viguerie, recalled that this policy “galvanized the Christian Right. It was the spark that ignited the Christian Right’s involvement in real politics.” Over 126,000 letters were sent to the IRS to protest these changes, and several organizations and local groups formed across the South to oppose these efforts.

These organizations became the foundation for the Moral Majority, led by Jerry Falwell, Sr., the first national Christian Right organization. Robert Billings, Sr. who was the first executive director of the Moral Majority, said, “The Christian school issue was the one thing that turned everyone on. Moral Majority came on the heels of that.” And historian Randal Balmer notes that, “Whereas evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century sought freedom for African Americans, the Christian Right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.

Then came opposition to abortion

Jerry Falwell quickly moved on to articulating a vision for this new Christian political movement. He toured the country with “I love America!” rallies and in 1980 published a book, Listen America!, as a “blueprint” for the movement. Falwell’s manifesto includes a chapter on “The Right to Life,” but the introduction focuses on the threat of communism and what he calls a “tide of permissiveness and moral decay that is crushing in our society from every side.” Falwell writes, “God will not be mocked, for whatever an individual or a nation sows, that shall he also reap. America is not big enough to shake her fist in the face of a holy God and get away with it.”

For Falwell, “Abortionists” were a threat to a Christian order, but he initially embedded the issue within a broader political vision, involving support for capitalism, the U.S. military, heterosexual supremacy, conservative values, a Christian worldview, and male headship. From this perspective, pornography, drugs, and liberalism were problems created by secular humanism. The stakes were not just individual sin, but national safety. Falwell wrote that religious voters “cannot be silent about the sins that are destroying this nation,” utilizing language to motivate Christians to engage in a paired spiritual and political battle. His strategy was largely effective.

While Catholics had long held pro-life political positions, evangelical pro-life politics were different. Catholic pro-life theology is associated with what is called a “seamless garment” position, one that sees opposition to abortion within a broader concern for alleviating human suffering. This view can be seen in the writings of Pope Francis, who links an opposition to abortion with a broader commitment to the poor and to environmental stewardship, positions that have also inspired criticism of free market capitalism as prioritizing economic value over human life. But as Falwell articulated early on, the white evangelical pro-life position maintains strong support for U.S. nationalism and capitalism.

Abortion and deflection from environmental harms

The Christian Nationalist movement Falwell helped to create has continued to defend unfettered capitalism, and its focus on abortion has worked to oppose efforts to reign in market forces that would address environmental crises. Take for instance a campaign launched by the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) in 2011. The small pro-environment group attempted to rebrand energy reform as a pro-life issue by emphasizing the harm mercury pollution from power plants poses to fetuses.

The response from the national evangelical leadership was swift and unanimous in opposing this framing. “A Joint Statement by Pro-Life Leaders” read:

“Recently some environmentalists have portrayed certain of their causes as intrinsic to the pro-life movement. The tactic often involves appealing to a “seamless garment” of support for life, or to being “consistently pro-life” or “completely pro-life.” As leaders of the pro-life movement, we reject that portrayal as disingenuous and dangerous to our efforts to protect the lives of unborn children.

The term pro-life originated historically in the struggle to end abortion on demand and continues to be used in public discourse overwhelmingly in that sense. To ignore that is at best sloppy communication and at worst intentional deception. The life in pro-life denotes not quality of life but life itself. The term denotes opposition to a procedure that intentionally results in dead babies.”

A bevy of evangelical leaders signed this statement, including the presidents or vice presidents of Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, the American Family Association, the Susan B. Anthony List, the Family Research Council, Liberty Council Action, and American Values.

This relationship between opposing abortion and anti-environmental views is visible across the political arena. For example, politicians that rank the highest by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the largest anti-abortion group in the United States, tend to receive the lowest ratings from the League of Conservation Voters.

Abortion and centering humans on the moral stage

Opposing abortion serves many functions for white evangelicals. It helps to deflect attention away from criticisms against capitalism. Evangelical pro-life politics also work to center the human on the moral stage, limiting ethical and political responsibility and recognition of harm only to humans, not the broader ecological landscape that is currently in crisis. This view is made stronger by a dominant evangelicals belief that the earth is merely a temporary vessel before the return of Jesus when Christians will depart the earth to a distant heaven.

A conference I attended in Colorado in 2008, “The Beginning and End of the Universe,” made this view clear. The conference was held at a large convention center and hosted over 1,800 people for two days of lectures. A dinosaur and fossil display in the front hall demonstrated evidence that evolution is a lie. The keynote speaker gave a talk called, “The end of the universe.” In his lecture he critiqued environmentalists, naming Al Gore in particular, for going against God’s work in the world, labeling environmentalists as “scoffers” who are willingly ignorant in refusing the “knowledge of the flood” or a recognition of God’s wrath and ability to cause natural disasters like floods to punish people for sin.

He preached the following with clear anger in his voice, rising to a crescendo before finishing with a slow lull:

“This is a disposable planet, a disposable universe. This is only a means for God to be put on display, for how else would God reveal his wrath, anger, grace, mercy, compassion, and love? This planet is a theater through which He can put himself on full display and when He is through with this purpose He can lay it to waste. This is a disposable universe. He can then create a better one in an instant!”

The speaker reminded us, “This is uncreation folks. The atomic implosion of the universe will be faster than it was created. This is Al Gore’s worst nightmare, folks! That a new world will be created.” And here he was interrupted by raucous laughter by the audience, before he continued: “Just as God created the world with water, what was used to destroy the population? So too the atom was created.”

For evangelicals, to be pro-life on a temporary planet means to limit care of life to the human, and await the final destruction of the planet. A small group of evangelicals, like the Evangelical Environmental Network, is working to expand evangelical ethics to include care for the planet and all of its people, but their path to this goal is a rocky one.

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the U.S. based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. Her first book, The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021), is the winner of the the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group.