The Road to the Right: Mapping Religious Factors in the Party Realignment of the 1970s Through the Lense of Abortion

Grayson Kubow is a guest writer. The opinions offered in this article do not necessarily represent the Journal’s. While the Journal is non-partisan, we strive to display a wide-range of viewpoints from the political spectrum.

In the 20th century, the New Deal coalition of Democrats dominated the political landscape and prompted Republican leaders to search for ways to regain a federal majority. Starting in the 1970s, political parties actively sought and courted the votes of specific religious groups through their stated platforms and campaign behavior. Despite the pluralism that characterized the United States, religious groups still tended to behave relatively homogeneously in the political sphere. This campaign for religious votes further accentuated religious political behavior and led to the dominant force of the Religious Right in the 1980s and beyond.

The political realignment of the 1970s was intricately connected to an electoral strategy targeting Catholics and Southern Baptists, and eventually included born-again Evangelicals. An issue that became used by Republicans to highlight their difference with Democrats was the topic of abortion. Although previously a trivial issue in national discourse, the 1970s brought abortion to the forefront of American politics, highlighting the battle for religious voters that culminated in the 1980 election and the formation of the Moral Majority. By tracing the electoral strategies of the political parties in the 1970s on the issue of abortion, the formation of the Religious Right in politics can be seen as a byproduct of Republican efforts to regain their status as a majority party. 

Despite the issue dominating debate on social policies today, abortion was an almost insignificant topic throughout most of the 20th century. In the capacity that it was a salient issue, Republicans were generally considered to be more pro-choice than their Democratic counterparts in the 1960s and prior. Before the injection of the issue into common debate, the leaders of the pro-choice movement were primarily doctors and protestant ministers.¹ Due to support from mainline Protestant ministers, the Republican Party took a somewhat progressive stance on the issue, advocating for the liberalization of state abortion laws. This policy fit within the party’s historic support of middle-class and Protestant morality and values, as well as it’s tradition of support for birth control.²

The Republican party’s position on abortion in this era is exemplified by the future social conservative Ronald Reagan signing the Therapeutic Abortion Act while governor of California in 1967, which authorized abortions by physicians until the 21st week of pregnancy in the cases of rape, incest, or in the case of endangerment to the physical or mental health of the mother.³ While not actively campaigning against the practice, Democrats were generally seen as less liberal on the issue than their counterparts. Although the general population was largely accepting of the practice, support varied by religious sect and justification; though it is currently a mainstream position to be against the practice in all forms, the vast majority of the population believed it to be necessary in certain circumstances. Public opinion surveys in the 1960s showed overwhelming support for the allowance of abortion if the health of the Mother was compromised or the child was deformed. In 1968, for example, only about 10% of white Americans disapproved of legislation allowing for abortion to preserve the health of the mother, and only 20% disapproved in the case of a deformed child.⁴

While the population saw the value of abortions in certain cases, the use of abortion as a form of population control was still wildly unpopular. In the same 1968 study, 81% of white Americans disapproved of the practice if the parents simply have all the children they want and the birth would pose no major health risks to the mother or child.⁵ This general consensus was largely consistent across religious denominations, with the notable exception of Catholics. While 7% of non-Catholic men and 8% of non-Catholic women disapproved of legislation allowing abortion to preserve the health of the mother in the late 1960s, that number skyrockets to 16% among Catholic men and 14% among Catholic Women.⁶ This same trend holds true in the case of a deformed child, with 12-14% of non-Catholics disapproving of legislation allowing abortion in such cases and 27-30% of Catholics disproving this legislation. While both Catholics and non-Catholics at this time were disapproving of legislation allowing abortion as a form of birth control, Catholics were about 12-15 percentage points more likely to disapprove.⁷ In conformation with their Catholic base, Democrats had traditionally been more against abortion liberalization than their counterparts, as Catholics had become established inside of the Democratic New Deal Coalition that dominated much of 20th century politics.⁸ With large concentrations in the Midwest, the Catholic vote was an important group making up the Democratic majority.

Meanwhile, a religious denomination instrumental in the national resurgence of the Republican Party were white Southern Baptists. The politics of American Baptists splintered in the late 1800s. The first schism was between Northern and Southern Baptists surrounding the issue of slavery, eventually leading Southerners forming their own denomination in 1845.⁹ Both branches utilized scripture in supporting their position, creating political polarization between the two regions on racial issues that would remain a century later. Another splinter that divided Baptist politics was the exodus of Black members following the Civil War and emancipation. Although always having white leadership, this exodus led to the Southern Baptist Convention being both led by and representing an increasingly whiter constituency. During the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 1960s, Southern whites, with the largest denomination being Southern Baptists, vigorously opposed social reforms like integration, opting instead for the segregation found under the Jim Crow South.¹⁰ Despite the progressive platforms unveiled by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life commission,¹¹ their status as the denomination of choice among Southern whites frustrated first over emancipation and then over integration led to conservative social policies and attitudes, specifically on the issue of race. Southern Baptists, therefore, largely supported the Democratic Party and the remnants of the Dixiecrats. 

The last denomination that would ultimately be integral to the party realignment of the 1970s were born-again Evangelicals. While the burgeoning conservative Evangelical population was primarily aligned with the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s, they were not particularly active in the political process and the Republican Party faced the challenge of galvanizing the group to the ballot box.¹² Conservative Evangelicals` lack of political participation made their denomination less politically-imperative for party leaders than other religious sects. This alignment coincided with eroding support for the Republican Party among liberal Protestants and Evangelicals,¹³ serving to increase Republican efforts to focus on the conservative branch of Evangelicals. 

The 1968 Election

The 1968 election was a watershed moment in the political realignment of the next decade. Republicans followed the example of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, which focused on persuading Southern Democrats disillusioned by the Civil Rights movement. Goldwater ran on a platform against the Civil Rights Act, calling it an intrusion on the American system of federalism, declaring the federal act a state issue. White southern Democrats became interested in this message, although likely not due to worry regarding the federalism system. While Goldwater suffered significant defeat in the general election, the seeds were planted for the coming decade chasing white Southerner’s votes. In a continued effort to redraw the coalitional maps of party support, Harry Dent, a Nixon strategist, created what became known as the ‘Southern Strategy’. This sought to win the votes of the ‘Old South’ of economic elites and racial conservatives.¹⁴

This rethinking of electoral strategy dismayed many Republicans who advocated for modesty, but was successful in winning Nixon and the Republican Party the presidency. The Republican Party won many of the Southern and rural Heartland states, save a few Southern states that the hardline segregationist and independent George Wallace carried. The massive victory by the party affirmed the potential of Nixon’s strategy and cemented it in the political playbook for decades to come. In 1969, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority, detailing a pathway to a national majority that used racial and social appeals to win over Southern and industrial Midwest voters. Harry Dent took heed of Phillips’ work and the Nixon campaign would double down on their racial appeals and also adopt a ‘Catholic Strategy’ to win over the large Catholic population in the Midwestern states with conservative social positions. The Nixon administration was now in search of a winning issue to sway Catholic voters. While abortion remained an inconsequential issue in the 1968 campaign, it emerged into the national discourse around the turn of the decade, and his team believed they had found their winning issue. While Nixon began his administration as generally supportive of abortion rights, he attempted to avoid the issue. During Nixon’s first term, a Catholic Senator from Maine, Edmund Muskie, expressed his opposition to abortion, and the administration chose to issue a statement against abortion, but leaving the issue up to the states. Impressed by Nixon’s appeasement to the Catholic pro-life stance, Catholic clerics embraced the president’s message. James T. McHugh, the director of the Family Life Division of the United States Catholic Conference declared “President Nixon has been forthright and courageous in stating this opposition to abortion on demand.”¹⁵ Based on the support, Nixon was advised to use abortion as a wedge issue to win over Catholic Democrats.

Evidence of this strategical shift can be seen in debates in the New York state legislature, in which Nixon intervened against the expansion of abortion rights. This represented a schism in the administration, as Nelson Rockefeller, the pro-choice Republican governor of New York was running Nixon’s campaign in the state.¹⁶ The strategy was increasingly effective as a response to the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Blowback against movements like the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s led Religious conservatives to push back on anything associated with these movements. As the mouthpiece of the abortion rights movement shifted, the leading proponents now consisted of feminist voices rather than the traditional voices of members of the medical profession and clergy.¹⁷ Religious conservatives were pushed away from supporting abortion liberalization as women-led organizations like the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League became leading figures in the movement, advocating not just for abortion rights in emergency situations, but abortion-on-demand as well.¹⁸ This shift in the abortion discourse pushed some who traditionally supported the right to abortion in emergency circumstances away from that position and toward the new Republican party. Fundamentalist Baptist editor John R. Rice illustrates the connection between abortion opposition and the counterculture movement in 1971:

“The people who are eager to legalize abortion . . . are usually the same crowd, the left-wing, the demonstrators, the socialists, the civil rights lawbreakers. . . . They are for the ‘new morality’ and license. The people who are strongest for abortion are not good people and they are not good citizens of America”¹⁹

The 1972 Election

As the 1972 election loomed and Nixon had culminated his ‘Catholic Strategy’, presidential candidates could not afford to ignore the abortion issue. In the Democratic Primaries of 1972, George McGovern took the lead over Hubert Humphreys. Humphreys believed that McGovern’s progressive platform could be attacked to attract Democratic Catholic voters, and began describing McGovern as too liberal on the abortion issue. Soon, his poll numbers surged and both Humphreys and Nixon recognized it as a winning issue against McGovern. McGovern ultimately won a narrow contest for the nomination, and moved his abortion stance to the right in response to the attacks, labeling it as a state issue. The Nixon team continued to use abortion as a wedge issue to isolate McGovern from the traditionally Democratic Catholic base, and the Democratic party’s image was pushed farther to the left on the issue. McGovern’s nomination, combined with the 1972 Democratic National Convention being used by pro-choice feminists as an opportunity to influence the party’s platform to the left on women’s rights issues such as abortion pushed conservative Catholics further toward the Republican party.²⁰ In Nixon’s 1972 victory he carried 57% of the white Catholic vote, compared to the smaller 33% of the Catholic vote he carried in the 1968 election,²¹ showing that the ‘Catholic Strategy’ had paid dividends and likely would for years to come.

During Nixon’s second term, the Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade in 1973 would forever alter the abortion debate. The decision protected the right of women to choose to have an abortion without excessive government intervention under the legal reasoning of the fourth amendments right to privacy. The decision caused outrage amongst religious conservatives and was a catalyst for a new wave of religious activism. Although previously it was mostly pro-choice activists driving the abortion conversation, the Roe v. Wade gave pro-life forces the energy they needed to inject their voices into the debate, and during the ensuing decades these pro-life advocated were successful in organizing grassroots movements and shifting the debate.²² After the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford took over and was farther to the left than Nixon was formerly, upsetting many religious conservatives that opposed the court’s decision. 

The 1976 Election

In Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign he faced a primary challenger from his own party in Ronald Reagan. Although the former California governor had enacted liberal abortion laws during his gubernatorial tenure, he distanced himself from past positions and came out as ardently pro-life. In attempts to differentiate his stance on abortion from Ford’s, Reagan supported federal pro-life intervention through the support of the Human Life amendment, while Ford wanted to rescind Roe v. Wade to make the issue a state issue. Similar to McGovern’s stance in 1972, Ford’s abortion agenda left much to be desired by the pro-life population. Reagan outperformed Ford among Catholics and also did well with conservative Evangelical Protestants,²³ but eventually his campaign began to flounder against the competition of an incumbent president, forcing pro-life advocates to find a new candidate to support.

Jimmy Carter became the nominee of the Democratic Party and trumpeted his religiosity as a born-again Evangelical. Carter’s status as an Evangelical energized a denomination that had historically been absent from electoral considerations. While politicians had long courted the Catholic and Jewish vote in their campaigns, Evangelicals were virtually ignored.²⁴ Born-again Evangelicals were mobilized by seeing themselves represented at a national stage, and the estimated 40 million Evangelicals at the time gravitated toward Carter’s candidacy. Abortion became a largely important issue in a presidential campaign for the first time, even prompting a New York Times article to begin: “The delicate, divisive, complex and intensely personal subject of abortion has, somehow, exploded into the first major issue of the Presidential campaign.”²⁵    

While Carter personally considered abortion to be wrong, he maintained it as a state issue, constrained by his party’s more liberal platform. Carter supported banning Medicaid funding for abortions, but he opposed any constitutional amendment against abortions, unlike Ford who favored such an amendment.²⁶ However, Carter’s soft stance on the abortion amendment, as well as coming out against federal funding for abortion won over support from pro-life voters that were still on the fence. Although neither candidate was particularly appealing to pro-life activists, Carter was able to win the support of religious groups. Gerald Ford won only 42% of Catholics, 43% of white Baptists, and had a particularly bad showing among Evangelicals.²⁷ The emphasis placed on born-again Evangelicals during the 1976 election led to Newsweek dubbing it “the year of the evangelical.”²⁸ Carter’s devotion to the concept of a separation of church and state led to a disappointing term for right-to-life advocates.

As Carter’s first term came to a close the country had rising abortion rates and increasing concerns regarding sexual promiscuity, which prompted Evangelical pastors and televangelists like Jerry Falwell to fulminate against the issue and create a national religiopolitical coalition with abortion opposition as the central component.²⁹ Falwell was a Southern Baptist minister and televangelist who founded the Moral Majority, a coalition led by fundamentalist Evangelicals as a reaction to the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s, seeking a return to “moral sanity.”³⁰ This coalition both contributed to and coincided with a unification of religious conservatives against progressive social reforms, leading to the pinnacle of the Religious Right that would ultimately help Reagan secure the presidency in 1980. 

The election of 1980 was the culmination of a religious political movement that had been growing since Nixon’s ‘Catholic Strategy’, with Reagan claiming during his campaign that “Religious America is awakening.”

The 1980 Election

The rise of the Religious Right led to a split among the Republican party, with moderates gravitating towards politicians like George H.W. Bush and the Christian Right backing Ronald Reagan. This election also marked the Republican party’s inclusion of the Human Life Amendment on their official platform, and although the amendment failed in the early 1980s it remained on the party’s platform for decades following.³¹ Though abortion represented only a small part of the changes the Religious Right were seeking, abortion had become a cultural symbol for the conservative movement that became more powerful than the leaders of the party, and even those tasked with creating and evolving the Republican Party’s platform were unable to reverse course.³²

A similar change happened among the Southern Baptist Convention in 1980. Regardless of their adherents’ voting patterns, the stated platform remained relatively progressive, with a resolution in 1971 stating “we call upon 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.”³³ In fact, even after the seismic decision of Roe v. Wade the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution “reflect[ing] a middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.”³⁴

A 1980 resolution, however, reversed course and announced its decisive opposition to abortion-on-demand and the use of tax dollars for non-therapeutic abortion. Since then, the Southern Baptist Convention has remained strictly pro-life. Survey research revealed that 60-80% of Southern Baptist pastors have supported an anti-abortion constitutional amendment between 1980 and 1996.³⁵ The election of 1980 was the culmination of a religious political movement that had been growing since Nixon’s ‘Catholic Strategy’, with Reagan claiming during his campaign that “Religious America is awakening.” The awakening that Reagan spoke of was especially clear among conservative Evangelicals.

Indoctrinated into the political debate by Carter’s presidency as a born-again evangelical, but disillusioned with the results from his term, Evangelicals turned out in force to the 1980 election for Reagan. Despite historically not being a particularly cohesive or active political group, Evangelicals voted at a higher rate than non-Evangelicals in 1980 and overwhelmingly supported Reagan.³⁶ The percentage of Evangelicals who had voted in all or most of the previous elections including 1980 was only 59.4%, whereas the percentage of non-Evangelicals was a larger 64.1%. Conversely, 8.2% of non-Evangelicals said that they only voted in some or none of the previous elections but voted in 1980, compared to the vastly greater 16.4% of Evangelicals.³⁷ The preferences of this growing voting block were significantly more conservative than their non-evangelical counterparts. Solely among the newly mobilized voters of 1980, only 8% of Evangelicals in 1980 believed abortions should never be forbidden, while 36.4% of non-evangelical first time voters agreed with that sentiment.³⁸ Additionally, 9.1% of non-evangelical newly mobilized voters believed abortion should never be permitted, whereas that number rises to 16% among newly mobilized Evangelicals.³⁹ While this is not necessarily evidence of Evangelicals’ increased turnout being due to these social issues, it does illustrate the powerful force that Evangelicals had in Reagan’s win, and the force that Reagan’s social platform likely had in persuading these Evangelicals votes.

A more likely explanation for Evangelicals’ increased turnout is from their feelings of political efficacy due to the increased media coverage they received stemming from Carter’s own identification as an evangelical. A total of 92% of newly mobilized Evangelical voters held high levels of external efficacy as opposed to the 68.9% of non-evangelical newly mobilized voters.⁴⁰ The influx of Evangelicals into both the voting booths and national political debate in the late 1970s was the formation of the Religious Right that has dominated the discourse surrounding social and cultural issues since. Today, a majority of practicing Catholics vote Republican in presidential elections, as well as over 70% of white Evangelicals. Conversely, mainline protestant support for Republican presidents has gradually declined, with only 37% identifying as Republican in 2008.⁴¹ While a lot of focus has been placed on the racial realignment of the 1970s, religion was innately tied to the political restructuring that allowed the resurgence of a Republican majority. 

The issue of abortion in American politics is an example of how the confluence of electoral strategy, grassroots activism, and ecclesiastic leadership can dramatically impact elections, as well as public opinion on a wide swath of issues. The 1970s illustrates the fragility of public opinion and voting patterns in a representative democracy like that of the United States. Despite the indoctrination of a separation between the Church and state in America, religion has profoundly impacted the preferences and voting behavior of its institutional membership, and shaped the direction and progress of American domestic policy. While the issue of abortion was not in and of itself the driving force behind the political realignment of the 1970s, it is indicative of a larger strategy and identity of the Republican party. Abortion became a wedge issue representative of much larger societal schisms that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and a symbol of moral and religious purity that beckoned religious Americans to the GOP. This symbol has intertwined the Republican Party with religious sentiment and the rise of the Religious Right in the political sphere; a development that seems unlikely to reverse in the near future. 

Endnotes

1.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.

2.  Ibid.

3.  Nancy B. Reardan, California’s 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act: Abridging a Fundamental Right to Abortion, 2 Pac. L. J. 186 (1971). https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/mlr/vol2/iss1/12

4.  Deitch, C.H. Ideology and opposition to abortion: Trends in public opinion, 1972–1980. J Fam Econ Iss6, 6–26 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01083251

5.  Ibid.

6.  Ibid.

7.  Ibid.

8.  Manza, Jeff, and Clem Brooks. “The Religious Factor in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1960–1992.” American Journal of Sociology103, no. 1 (1997): 38-81. Accessed September 14, 2020. doi:10.1086/231171.

9.  Jeansonne, Glen. “Southern Baptist Attitudes Toward Slavery, 1845-1861.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1971): 510-22. Accessed September 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40579712.

10. Jonathan Merritt, “Perspective | Why Southern Baptists Can’t Shake Their Racist Past,” The Washington Post (WP Company, April 29, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/06/14/why-southern-baptists-cant-shake-their-racist-past/.

11.  Hoffmann, John P., and Sherrie Mills Johnson. “Attitudes toward Abortion among Religious Traditions in the United States: Change or Continuity?” Sociology of Religion 66, no. 2 (2005): 161-82. Accessed September 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4153084.

12.  Manza, Jeff, and Clem Brooks. “The Religious Factor in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1960–1992.” American Journal of Sociology103, no. 1 (1997): 38-81. Accessed September 14, 2020. doi:10.1086/231171.

13.  ibid.

14.  MASON, ROBERT. “‘I Was Going to Build a New Republican Party and a New Majority’: Richard Nixon as Party Leader, 1969–73.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 463–83. doi:10.1017/S0021875805000617.

15.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.

16.  Ibid.

17.  Ibid.

18.  Ibid.

19.  Williams, Daniel K. 2010. God’s Own Party : The Making of the Christian Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

20.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.

21. “ National Exit Polls Table,” The New York Times, November 5, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/results/president/national-exit-polls.html.

22.  Hoffmann, John P., and Sherrie Mills Johnson. “Attitudes toward Abortion among Religious Traditions in the United States: Change or Continuity?” Sociology of Religion 66, no. 2 (2005): 161-82. Accessed September 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4153084.

23.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.

24.  Flowers, Ronald B. “President Jimmy Carter, Evangelicalism, Church-State Relations, and Civil Religion.” Journal of Church and State 25, no. 1 (1983): 113-32. Accessed September 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23916386.

25.  Philip Shabecoff, “Ford‐Carter Stands on Abortion Held Similar, With One Exception,” New York Times, September 21, 1976, p. 27.

26.  Freedman, Robert. “The Religious Right and the Carter Administration.” The Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (2005): 231-60. Accessed September 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4091685.

27.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.

28.  Flowers, Ronald B. “President Jimmy Carter, Evangelicalism, Church-State Relations, and Civil Religion.” Journal of Church and State 25, no. 1 (1983): 113-32. Accessed September 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23916386.

29.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.

30.  Reichley, A. James. “Religion and Political Realignment.” The Brookings Review 3, no. 1 (1984): 29-35. Accessed September 14, 2020. doi:10.2307/20079853.

31.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.

32.  Ibid.

33.  “Resolution On Abortion,” The Southern Baptist Convention (1971 Annual Meeting, June 1, 1971), https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-abortion-2/.

34.  “Resolution On Abortion And Sanctity Of Human Life,” The Southern Baptist Convention (1974 Annual Meeting, June 1, 1974), https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-abortion-and-sanctity-of-human-life/.

35.  Lewis, Andrew R. “Abortion Politics and the Decline of the Separation of Church and State: The Southern Baptist Case.” Politics and Religion 7, no. 3 (2014): 521–49. doi:10.1017/S1755048314000492.

36.  Corwin Smidt and Paul Kellstedt, “Evangelicals in the Post-Reagan Era: An Analysis of Evangelical Voters in the 1988 Presidential Election,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31, no. 3 (September 1992): pp. 330-338, https://doi.org/10.2307/1387123.

37.  Smidt, C.E. (1988), THE MOBILIZATION OF EVANGELICAL VOTERS IN 1980: AN INITIAL TEST OF SEVERAL HYPOTHESES. Southeastern Political Review, 16: 3-34. doi:10.1111/j.1747-1346.1988.tb00254.x 

38.  Ibid.

39.  Ibid.

40.  Ibid.

41.  Williams, Daniel K. “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 513–39. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.