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Abortion and Religion: Athens, Jerusalem, or... ?


In a recent guest essay in the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse puts forward an argument which I’ve heard often among friends and neighbors debating abortion. It goes like this. The members of the Supreme Court who overturned Roe v. Wade were religiously, not judicially, motivated. It was not jurisprudence, nor the possession of ethical argument which compelled the judges to act. Rather, it is said, they were compelled by religious dogma.

Thus, the conservative justices are painted as violators of church-state separation. Afterall, why should non-believers be held to the religious beliefs of others? A similar argument can be aimed at civilians in the pro life camp.

As it happens, on the very day of the Dobbs decision, I enjoyed breakfast with a writer-friend of mine who holds this view, though from the other direction. Although they are opposed to abortion, my friend thinks it immoral to impose their personal, religiously informed views upon those who do not share them. In other words, it is out of respect for their fellow citizen that my friend supports pro choice legislation. While coming from a different ideological perspective than Greenhouse, my friend ends up in the same place.

It should be said that I am sympathetic to this view. I’ve even held it in the past. And yet, as I ate my sausage scramble, something about my friend’s argument rang hollow. It’s not as if I’ve lost faith in church-state separation. I certainly don’t want another’s religion imposed on me and I think fairness demands I extend this privilege to others. So, what then accounts for my drift in sentiment?

To understand, it may help to review a clearer version of the argument Greenhouse and my friend put forward.

1.) It’s wrong, even unamerican, to impose one’s religious views upon others.

2.) If one is a Christian, and they are antiabortion, they are likely so for religious reasons.

3.) Therefore, for a Christian to impose antiabortion legislation upon others is to be wrong, even unamerican.

As I review the above, it is with premise 2.) that I have my beef, yet not for the reasons you might think. I am not motivated by a concern for religious liberty. I am not arguing that it is the Christian’s right to legislate their belief, as some have said. Nor am I arguing that interlocutors shouldn’t assume a Christian’s motives. Rather, my problem is with the last clause of the second premise, this notion of “religious reasons.”

Arguments like Greenhouse’s have, baked in, a certain framework for understanding the nature of religious belief. And, as is true for all assumptions, this framework operates in the background, influencing the argument in secret ways. I’ve begun to question this framework and my suspicion of it, I think, accounts for my ultimate disagreement with Greenhouse’s essay.

That this assumed framework exists accounts for how my friend, a believer, could have drawn the same conclusion as Greenhouse, who is not. Both parties reason from it as a premise. This unlikely state of affairs is explained by their mutual heritage as Americans. Whether you are secular and rue it, or religious and relish it, the American mind is stamped by a protestant worldview.


As argued by historians like David Hackett Fischer and Brad S. Gregory, the modern Western world was constructed by the intellectual assumptions of Reformation-era ideas and politics, at the core of which stands the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

Sola Scriptura, Latin for Scripture Alone, is the epistemology developed by early protestant reformers in response to long held Roman Catholic reasons to believe. There are different versions of it, some more tenable than others. For instance, those in the Anabaptist stream hold (and still hold) to a Bible only theology, wherein the Bible is thought to be the only authority fit to define faith and practice.

But there exist more modest versions of the argument, like those put forward by the Presbyterians at Westminster, Thomas Cranmer, or Melanchthon. These conservative views sought to define scripture as the only infallible standard for faith and practice, making scripture a sort of tiebreaker in theological disputes.

This doctrine was pitted against the Roman Catholic view, which is more complex in its epistemology. Catholicism sees scripture and doctrine as nested within the historical commentary of the early Christian community and their tradition. The magisterium—the Pope and the rest of the bishops—are charged with the preservation and deepening of this tradition. Thus, Catholicism has a triadic structure of authority—scripture, tradition, and magisterium. It is Catholic doctrine that these three act as epistemological borders through which a Christian is to see God in the face of Christ.

The difference between these two perspectives is stark and insurmountable. As a result, the effect of protestant revisions on Catholic doctrine is hard to overstate. Sola Scriptura redrafted an ancient way of understanding belief and constructed definitions for belief we still hold today—Linda Greenhouse and my friend included.

Chief among these effects is the subjectification of belief, the turning of belief into a personal encounter. No matter what form of Sola Scriptura one may hold, the common ingredient is the importance of personal ascent. In the protestant model, revelation is something we can hold in both hands, a message in a bottle written to individual minds. While this effect was unforeseen by the original proponents of Sola Scriptura, it is unavoidable as an implication.

This is true for Sola Scriptura because scripture is set up as the one essential rule of the faith—not history, not truth as such, not the wisdom of a community or a tradition—but information, hot, steaming revelation poured straight into individual heads. Nothing but this specific mode of information transfer—scripture alone—is reliable. As much is said in the fourth Chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith. That,

the authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore, it is to be received because it is the Word of God.

It’s in this way that the reformation made belief primarily personal. No community, no authority, not even another person can stand between the Christian and the truth of scripture. Thus, the subject and their existential experience become core to modern notions of belief. And thus religion begins to emit the corrosive stench of logical circularity. By building faith upon a personal experience of God, Westminster creates a brute faith, one which is true because it is true.

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand how notions of secularism began to color our ideas of institutions, politics, and even legislation. Whereas Catholic epistemology is integrated, seeking unity between reason and faith, Protestant epistemology is segregated, striving to create clear boundary markers between the two. Catholicism searches for synthesis, seeing truth as all-of-a-piece. In a sense, to the Catholic mind, there is no hierarchy of truth. God is truth, though known in different ways via different mediums. But Protestant structures, on the other hand, compartmentalize, and order truth into hierarchies—the certain and the uncertain, the spiritual and secular.

Inevitably, these subtle dualisms begin to crop up. Words like personal become convertible with spiritual, words like public become convertible with practical. Such constructs directly influence American ideas of church-state relationships, the practicality of which is dubious given the schizophrenic history of supreme court decisions where the Establishment Clause is concerned. It’s hard to see the through line connecting decisions which, on the one hand, rule in favor of public funds financing the production of religious material, (Rosenberger v. Rector) and on the other hand, decisions which rule against public funds paying teachers at religious schools (Lemon v. Kurtzman).

In any event, this is how the protestant ideas which undergird modern notions of secular-spiritual divides, frame current debates about abortion and religion. People like Greenhouse unwittingly build into their critique of Supreme Court justices ideas of religion constructed by Reformation theology.

This is done by assuming a definition of religion which is defined by personal experience, divine election, and the arbitrary veneration of texts. Thus, ironically, religious people are suspect when they speak on public matters, their opinion liable to jump the secular-spiritual border. Greenhouse is explicit in this suspicion. She says,

Does anyone really think [the Supreme Court decision] was motivated by disapproval of the court’s reliance in Roe v. Wade on substantive due process, an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that accords meaning to the word “liberty” in the due process clause? Is there anyone who believes that if only the Constitution had included the word “abortion,” the anti-abortion movement would have failed to gain political traction?

Here we have a very protestant dualism. Greenhouse assumes that the religion of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade must be in competition with their jurisprudence. Afterall, faith is about personal conviction, unexplainable phenomena, and true only because the bible says it is.

But this only works if Sola Scriptura does too, if the arguments of the reformation hold up. Greenhouse’s argument is only interesting if her definition of religious belief is accurate. Our faith in her rises and falls with our faith in the Westminster Confession.


This is what accounts for my loss of faith in Greenhouse. I do not think it a coincidence that my sympathy for Greenhouse’s argument has dissolved along with my belief in Sola Scriptura. It’s certainly no coincidence that the conservative justices are Catholic, not protestant; that they have a different definition of religion and truth than does popular protestantized opinion. Perhaps, before we start calling them heretics, we should get straight what the faith really is.


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