Book Review: Andrew R Lewis, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars
| Author | Myra Marx Ferree |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929918793556 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
book-review2019
Commissioned Book Review
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(3) NP1 –NP2
Commissioned Book Review
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian
that they saw as anything different than every
Politics: How Abortion Transformed
other loss of moral power Biblical literalists had
the Culture Wars by Andrew R Lewis.
experienced from Scopes on. But they were
Cambridge University Press, 2017. 265pp.,
recruited to the Catholic anti-abortion cause as
$30 (p/b), ISBN 9781108405607
Catholics made headway with a message that
used “individual rights” language to quell objec-
It is hard to avoid noticing the hard right turn that
US politics made in the years after Reagan’s “rev-
tions that they were aiming to force a religious
olution.” Familiar explanations point to the cen-
position on others. They invested the fetus with
trality of anti-abortion politics to the Evangelical
individual rights to be defended and used the
Right. But as many people no longer remember,
rhetoric of rights to defend their own advocacy.
when Roe v. Wade was decided there was no dif-
Evangelicals, both elites and in public opinion,
ference between the parties on the abortion issue
Lewis shows, were relatively quick to get the
at all. Catholicism was the religious base from
point, and by 1980, they had mastered a lan-
which opposition was mounted, while Protestant
guage of free speech, religious liberty, and indi-
Evangelicals were largely indifferent. Lewis takes
us back to those days, and while not explaining
vidual freedom. As Lewis says “The change for
why Evangelicals came to make this cause their
religious conservatives, then, is from a biblical
own, he describes the shift as a background for his
conservatism to a utilitarian individualism, from
analysis of the broader shifts in evangelical rheto-
communitarianism to pluralism,...
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