Southern Baptists Were Pro-Choice. Then Politics Happened.

Ask a Southern Baptist today and they’ll tell you opposition to abortion is a timeless, non-negotiable, bedrock Biblical conviction. The kind of thing the faithful have always believed, since forever. Here’s the problem: “forever” started around 1980. Before that, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, was officially on the other side. This isn’t a smear. It’s their own convention records, and they’re easily fact-checked. Which, as usual, nobody bothers to do.

The Receipts

In 1971, two years BEFORE Roe v. Wade, the SBC passed a resolution calling on Southern Baptists “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

Read that last clause again. Emotional and mental health of the mother. That’s not a narrow life-of-the-mother exception. That’s most of the way to the position they now call murder.

Then Roe came down in January 1973, and how did Baptists react? Barry Garrett, Washington bureau chief of the SBC’s own Baptist Press, wrote that the Supreme Court had “advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and justice.” The denomination’s news service praised Roe. In writing.

That is the OFFICIAL BAPTIST PRESS! Praising Roe v. Wade!

And it wasn’t just some staffer. W.A. Criswell, former SBC president and pastor of First Baptist Dallas, the flagship megachurch of the entire denomination, said after the ruling:

“I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

The most influential Southern Baptist in America just told you life begins at birth. In 1973.

The SBC reaffirmed its 1971 position in 1974, after Roe, and again in 1976. As late as 1981, an official SBC Christian Life Commission pamphlet questioned whether “Christian love and justice would be served by extremely restrictive laws.” Meanwhile, opposing abortion was considered a Catholic thing, and fundamentalist Protestants of that era didn’t exactly hold Catholics in warm regard.

This is all in my lifetime, folks!

So What Changed? Not the Bible.

The Bible said the same thing in 1985 that it said in 1971. Scripture didn’t change. Politics did.

In 1979, the “Conservative Resurgence” (their term; critics call it the fundamentalist takeover) began seizing control of the SBC’s institutions. By 1980 the convention passed its first resolution opposing abortion except to save the mother’s life, and Criswell himself flipped to the pro-life position right on schedule. A complete doctrinal reversal in under a decade, timed precisely to a political power struggle.

There’s a darker theory about the trigger, and it comes from inside the movement. Historian Randall Balmer reports that Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and an architect of the Religious Right, told him directly that the movement didn’t organize around Roe at all. Weyrich had spent years trying to mobilize evangelicals with school prayer, pornography, the ERA, and abortion, and nothing worked. What finally lit the fuse was the IRS moving against the tax-exempt status of racially segregated Christian schools like Bob Jones University. Ed Dobson, a Falwell associate, put it this way: “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion… I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

The Baptists didn’t care about abortion, they only cared about continuing their racism, and the found they could rile up the base with abortion. And once riled up they could point that hate in the right directions.

They Admit It, By the Way

You don’t have to take my word for any of this, because in 2003 the SBC passed a resolution formally repenting of its own history. It states that the 1971 and 1974 resolutions “accepted unbiblical premises of the abortion rights movement” and laments that “those then in leadership positions within the denomination endorsed and furthered the ‘pro-choice’ abortion rights agenda.”

Think about what that document is. It’s the denomination confessing, in an official resolution, that for roughly a decade its leaders and official positions supported abortion rights. The only dispute between me and the SBC is the interpretation. They say they were blind then and see clearly now. The historical record suggests something simpler: a religious institution reverse-engineered a “timeless” moral absolute to fit a political realignment, then rewrote its own memory. Divinity schools agree with me.

And claiming they now rely on “biblical premises” relating to abortion is a bold face lie. There are no passages in the Bible that refer to abortion or directly regulate, forbid, or endorse the medical procedure as it is understood today. For thousands of years the topic was silent. Jesus never once mentioned it, and claiming he left something important out would be blasphemous.

The Fifty-Year Demolition Project

Here’s what makes this more than a historical curiosity. The SBC didn’t just change its mind. Having changed its mind, it spent the next four decades methodically dismantling the ruling its own press bureau once praised.

Overturning Roe wasn’t a lucky break. It was a construction project, and the Baptists ran it. To pull it off, they partnered with their mortal enemies. Catholics, the people who had jailed, whipped, and persecuted Baptists for centuries, the denomination fundamentalists spent generations denouncing as the Whore of Babylon, suddenly became allies, because for once their goals aligned.

But let’s be clear about who mattered in that partnership. Catholics had opposed abortion for decades before Roe and after it, and accomplished exactly nothing. They stood alone against the ruling in 1973 and it didn’t move an inch. What changed everything was the Baptists showing up.

• The Baptists supplied the voting bloc, disciplined enough to make judicial appointments THE litmus test for every Republican candidate for president and Senate.
• The Baptists supplied the political pressure, election after election, for fifty years.
• The Baptists elected the presidents who made the appointments.

Catholic lawyers like Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society curated the actual list Trump picked from, and Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all came off it, all three voting to kill Roe in Dobbs.

But a list is just paper without a president to pick from it and senators to confirm from it, and the Baptists delivered both. One anonymous donation to the legal network alone was $1.6 billion. Billion, with a B! The machine had many parts. The engine was Baptist.

Fifty years. Thousands of organizations. Millions of mobilized voters told, election after election, that this was the issue that mattered more than any other. Billions of dollars in legal infrastructure, think tanks, judicial campaigns, and lobbying. All of it aimed at one target: eliminating a choice that belonged to women, half the population, and handing it to state legislatures.

What COULD They Have Done?

Now lets run a thought experiment.

Take that same machine, the same fifty years of discipline, the same billions, the same ability to swing elections and reshape courts, and point it at literally anything that helps people. Healthcare, say. America is the only wealthy country where a cancer diagnosis doubles as a bankruptcy filing, and I’ve written before about how thoroughly this system screws every single American.

A movement with the resources and patience to capture the Supreme Court could have fixed that. They proved a determined minority can rewire the country. That’s the enraging part: the machine works. They just aimed it at women instead of at anything that would have helped anyone, including their own congregations, who go bankrupt from medical bills at the same rate as the heathens.

The SBC of 1971 looked at abortion and saw a difficult moral question deserving compassion for the woman. The SBC of today looks at the same question and sees a culture war to be won at any cost. Somewhere between those two positions, a denomination traded its conscience for a scoreboard. And they didn’t even have the decency to be embarrassed about the switch. They just passed a resolution repenting of their old position and carried on as if fifty years of their own history belonged to somebody else.

That’s the real story. Not that they changed their minds. People change their minds. It’s that they weaponized the new position, spent two generations and a fortune enforcing it on everyone else, and called the whole demolition project a return to timeless values.

Timeless values don’t come with a start date. Theirs do: 1980.