Where is the whole “life after Roe v. Wade” story headed? And while we are asking questions, shouldn’t we be saying “life after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” since that is now the defining U.S. Supreme Court decision?
Anyway, during last week’s “Crossroads” podcast (“America is splitting, says trending Atlantic essay. This is news? Actually, it's old news”), I predicted that we would be seeing more mainstream press coverage of crisis pregnancy centers — an old story hook that is, sure enough, getting lots of ink all of a sudden (see this Julia Duin post and also this one by yours truly).
I also predicted that major newsrooms would discover the abortion “abolitionists,” a small but loud flock of activists who reject all compromises in laws to restrict abortion, including exceptions for victims of rape and incest. The key: They want laws that prosecute women who have abortions, not just the people who perform abortions.
I made that prediction for two reasons, a good reason and a bad reason.
First, this is a valid story, because these activists are making noise in some crucial settings (hold that thought). However, this story also allows blue-zone newsrooms to focus lots of attention on these specific anti-abortion activists (NPR reports here and then here) whose views are outrageous to most Americans, while downplaying efforts by moderate and even centrist pro-life groups seeking more nuanced legislation, mostly in “purple” states.
This brings us to this week’s “Crossroads” episode (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focuses on a New York Times story that ran with this headline: “Abortion Abolitionists Want to Punish Women for Abortion.” This story continues some important information. Please read it. However, it also downplays (this is strange) its most important information about the abolitionists, while dedicating lots of ink to yet another independent social-media preacher who provides lots of scary quotes. Let’s start with the overture:
Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, a man with a wiry, squared-off beard and a metal cross around his neck celebrated with his team at a Brazilian steakhouse. He pulled out his phone to livestream to his followers.
“We have delivered a huge blow to the enemy and to this industry,” the man, Jeff Durbin, said. But, he explained, “our work has just really begun.”
A brief pause: Why isn’t it “the Rev. Jeff Durbin”? This raises big questions: What evangelical body or denomination ordained this man? Where did he go to seminary? Does he have ties to institutions in mainstream evangelicalism?
OK, continuing. This next part is long, but deserves close reading:
“Even the states that have trigger laws,” which ban abortion at conception without exceptions for rape or incest, did not go far enough, Mr. Durbin, a pastor in the greater Phoenix area, said. “They do not believe that the woman should ever be punished.”
Resistance to “the question of whether or not people who murder their children in the wombs are guilty,” he said, “is going to have to be something we have to overcome, because women are still going to be killing their children in the womb.”
Even as those in the anti-abortion movement celebrate their nation-changing Supreme Court victory, there are divisions over where to go next. The most extreme, like Mr. Durbin, want to pursue what they call “abortion abolition,” a move to criminalize abortion from conception as homicide, and hold women who have the procedure responsible — a position that in some states could make those women eligible for the death penalty. That position is at odds with the anti-abortion mainstream, which opposes criminalizing women and focuses on prosecuting providers. …
Abolitionists have long represented a radical fringe, minimized by prominent mainstream national groups who have focused on advancing incremental abortion restrictions.
The key words there are “radical fringe.” That’s accurate. However, abolitionists exist and they are worthy of coverage.
So who is Durbin? Yes, he has ties to small abolitionist groups in 21 states. But this next part seems to be the information that justifies him receiving about 70% of the content of a story in the world’s most influential newspaper.
His Apologia Studios YouTube channel has more than 300,000 subscribers, and he leads Apologia Church, a congregation of about 700 people.
In the world of megachurch Protestantism, that’s a medium-sized congregation. And in the world of YouTube flocks, those numbers are interesting, but not outstanding.
Why am I raising these kinds of questions?
Let’s flash back to another hot-button New York Times report. Remember this double-decker headline?
How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism
A potent mix of grievance and religious fervor has turbocharged the support among Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war
For those needing a refresher, here is the key passage in that story, focusing on the banner-waving Christians in the U.S. Capitol attack:
The blend of cultural references, and the people who brought them, made clear a phenomenon that has been brewing for years now: that the most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump have become inextricable from some parts of white evangelical power in America.
In a post addressing that Times report, I made the following observations. I would argue that they are relevant to the new Times report on the abortion abolitionists, even though this new story contains crucial improvements.
Let me be clear: No one can doubt, at this point, that QAnon and other heretical forms of pseudo-religious life (hello Q-shaman Jacob Chansley with your horns and white supremacist tattoos) have filtered through the dark WWW and into pews and some pulpits. …
Yet anyone who studies “evangelicalism” — White or otherwise — knows that we are talking about a movement based on the work of powerful denominations (this includes megachurches), parachurch groups, publishers (and authors) and major colleges, universities and seminaries.
In a serious news feature built on sweeping claims of this kind, one would expect to see some kind of evidence of concrete, factual ties to people and institutions in that world.
To build on my earlier question: Who is Durbin and how is he connected to the core power institutions of evangelical Protestantism or American Christianity, in general?
This is where the new Times story contains two crucial pieces of information that host Todd Wilken and I discussed in the podcast.
Alas, these angles are buried in the story — when they should have been its focus. First of all:
Abolitionist views have picked up support in the ultraconservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination. “We have been listening to and following the wrong leaders,” Tom Ascol, a prominent ultraconservative Southern Baptist pastor, said a week after the Supreme Court decision. Mr. Ascol came in second in the recent election for president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“The future of the anti-abortion movement will be led by those who hold to a consistent and genuinely ‘pro-life’ ethic, which is to say that since life begins at conception and fertilization, the full personhood of an unborn life must entail equal protection under the law that is afforded to all other persons in the U.S. Constitution,” he said.
“All mothers who abort their children are culpable at some level, though not necessarily equally culpable for homicide,” he said.
OK, we need to know more about the differences between this abolitionist SBC minority and Durbin’s online army, which would appear to be more radical.
Nevertheless, as I know (from online crossfire), this SBC squad is loud and, most importantly, it is affecting work inside America’s largest non-Catholic flock. That’s a news hook, friends and neighbors. This Times story needed to probe whether the abolitionists have (wait for it) captured turf inside turf inside SBC seminaries, mission boards, agencies and publications.
The bottom line: Instead of getting a few sentences, this SBC angle deserved to be THE LEDE.
In conclusion, note this other reference buried in the story:
Men, white evangelicals and Republicans are among the most likely to believe that a woman should be punished, the [Pew Research] study found.
They reflect an undercurrent of the anti-abortion movement that Donald J. Trump elevated in 2016, when he said that women who receive abortions should receive “some form of punishment” if the procedure were banned in the United States, before bipartisan outrage pushed him to recant.
Here’s the question: Who had Trump’s ear on that issue? His panel of religion advisors was packed (our Julia Duin has been all over this angle) with charismatic and Pentecostal “prophets” and other nondenominational and independent church leaders. Does the abolitionist cause have clout in those circles? Who made it into that circle?
That’s another valid news angle and, in a way, it leads straight to the Durbins of this world — if that connection is real. This is the rare case in which the Times team actually wiffed on a valid Trump angle in a story about religion and politics.
Imagine that.
Dig some more, folks. There may be a story there.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, share it with others.
FIRST IMAGE: From “No Sanctuary,” a feature at PoliticalResearch.org. This is a screenshot still from a YouTube feature entitled “The Differences Between a Pro-Life Bill and an Abolitionist Bill."