Speaker sees tie between civil rights movement, abortion battle

Published: 2008-01-08

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The civil rights movement, which reached its zenith in the 1950s and '60s, tested many Southern white Protestants, who resented the intrusion of the federal government into what they believed were state matters, according to Andrew Moore, a history professor at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. The battle for integration opened up a public dialogue about rights and civil liberties and "the role of faith in public life" on other issues, such as abortion, he said. Early on in the debate over the legalization of abortion, the Southern Baptist Convention, the South's largest denomination, actually favored a woman's right to an abortion under certain circumstances, according to Moore. However, after some Southern Baptist leaders -- the Rev. Billy Graham among them -- saw how Baptists could be marginalized in the same way Catholics had been marginalized by supporters of legal abortion who painted abortion as "a Catholic issue," Southern Baptists changed their position on abortion, promoting a pro-life agenda and modifying their long-held position on the separation of church and state, Moore said. He presented "Liberty and License: Race, Gender and Catholics in the Rise of the Religious Right" during a Jan. 4 panel discussion at the American Catholic Historical Association meeting in Washington.

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