ROE, RELIGION, and the GROUNDSWELL OF MYSOGYNY

The rescission of Roe is fueled by ultra-conservative religion behind which loom the dark forces of misogyny. Conservative extremists seek a restoration of the authoritarian social order of the 1950s.

Linda Greenhouse had an editorial in the New York Times last Sunday about the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that rescinded Roe v. Wade and thereby overturned the federal right to an abortion. Greenhouse reported on the Court for the Times for 30 years and her opinions merit respect issuing from her extensive experience.

It is her view that the majority's opinion is not derived from constitutional analysis. It was not a technical jurisprudential concern with the implications of “liberty” in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment that swayed them. Rather, it was what appears evident to the layperson: The determinative factor was religious bias on behalf of the justices who upheld the majority vote overturning Roe. As Greenhouse put it:

“...it was the court's unacknowledged embrace of religious doctrine that has turned American women into desperate refugees fleeing their home states in pursuit of reproductive health care that a month ago was theirs by right.”

That politics and political currents have motivated this egregious Supreme Court decision is beyond doubt. She correctly notes, “...step back from today's artificial arguments about originalism and history, and consider the powerful social movement that led consecutive Republican presidents to appoint anti-abortion justices and that then drove the abortion issue through the Supreme Court's open door.”

The social movements she refers to funnel down to the massive onslaught of conservative religion that has moved the American political landscape far to the right since the 1970s. In this regard, Dobbs, as Greenhouse observes, is cut from the same cloth as the recent decisions by the Court, which permitted a football coach to publicly engage in prayer on the field and allows religious private schools in Maine to receive government funding.

In her analysis, Linda Greenhouse is confirming the thesis of my essay last month, namely that church-state issues bespeak a social and political landslide that goes far beyond the fine points of discrete religious issues. What we are seeing is the wholesale takeover of increasingly larger tranches of public space by religion. And conservative religion is a conveyor of retrograde values and issues that inform multiple aspects not only of legal rights but also social values, norms, and human relations. In short, religion is a major centerpiece and driver of culture as a whole, and it's commandeering of the public square signals a takeover of many aspects of society more generally, a very dark takeover.

There are many ironies afoot. The most pertinent in this instance is the reality that the courts, in their support of religion and the destruction of the wall of separation, are empowering religion while American society is becoming increasingly more secular. More than 23% of the population claims no religious affiliation, and for millennials the figure is well beyond 30%. Also ironic is that the religions that speak with the most powerful political voices and are clearly favored by the Courts are the illiberal ones, while American society is becoming more religiously diverse. The United States, throughout almost its entire history, could be construed as a Protestant country. Today Protestantism has slipped below half of the population, and in addition to Christian sects, including Catholicism, there is an increasing number of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. The number of atheists and agnostics has also sizably grown. America has always been a creative religion-making machine, and today religious diversity abounds, perhaps more so than in the past. In this regard, we might see the increased power and militancy of the religious right, including their harnessing of the courts, as an act of desperation that ominously further divides American society, hardens positions, and brings a nasty and contentious edge to political and public life.

If Greenhouse is correct – and, as suggested, I believe she is -that the Court's motivation in overturning Roe was influenced by the justices' personal religious convictions, then we might be confronted with a very interesting conflict in the realm of religious adjudication.

A Florida rabbi, Barry Silver, is bringing suit in his state against a bill that would outlaw abortion after 15 weeks. The Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs implicitly invokes a position recognizing “fetal personhood.” While Catholicism has long opposed abortion, alleging that the embryo is a person at the point of conception, (though this was not true in the Church's early centuries) and evangelical Protestants have made this claim the centerpiece of their “pro-life” politics (though before the 1970s many evangelical ministers supported a woman's right to abortion on church-state separation grounds) Jewish law does not recognize personhood until the fetus fully emerges from the womb. This teaching is ancient and is derived from the Talmud. If a choice needs to be made between the life of the fetus and the life, health, and well-being of the woman, Judaism favors the rights of the mother. The question of the mother's welfare can be subject to disputation, but Judaism clearly favors the interests of the woman over the fetus. In fact, if the life of the woman is in jeopardy were the child brought to term, Judaism commands that the fetus must be terminated.

Until the 1970s, the Supreme Court rested on precedents set by the Warren Court, which was committed to a strong position that separated church and state, as delineated by Jefferson and Madison, the Constitution's main architect. But through the strident activism of the Moral Majority and then the Christian Coalition, in conjunction with the Catholic Church, in the past four decades the doctrine of separation has been replaced with the judicial doctrine of “religious accommodationism.” This view alleges that the state may support the religions, inclusive of financial support, so long as it does not discriminate among the religions or prefer religious over secular institutions.

Perhaps the most salient example of such accommodation is vested in the faith-based initiative, which began in the Clinton administration but became a major government program under George W. Bush's presidency. In the past, churches could initiate non-profit service organizations, but they had to have a board of trustees independent of the church, and the hiring practices of such non-profits could not reflect religious discrimination. Moreover, services could not be used to proselytize nor could they be rendered within church sanctuaries. Furthermore, the initiative required that such services need also be provided by secular organizations that are geographically proximate to those who sought them. A required provision was that government could not discriminate among the religions providing such services.

With the charitable choice initiative these requirements were done away with, and what has eventuated was readily predictable. The faith-based initiative has been a massive government giveaway to the evangelical churches and other major religious actors, which is precisely the circumstance that the wall of separation between church and state was meant to prohibit. In other words, the wall has crumbled in the face of conservative religious power, and the United States is creating an establishment of religion in all but name.

This progressive takeover of public space by the conservative and ultra-conservative churches is a political avalanche that clearly and officially favors one religious worldview over others. It is a potent assault on the vital notion of, and right to, religious freedom. In this regard, it will be interesting and critically important to see how challenges such as those brought by Rabbi Silver challenging Dobbs will play out. In short, criminalizing abortion favors one religion and its doctrines over another and thereby denies the religious freedom of Jews. As the rabbi has correctly proclaimed, it is an act of “theological tyranny.”

I choose to ratchet down this analysis by a few tiers. The onslaught of religious power, as I stated in a previous essay, is the surface manifestation of much deeper and wider social and cultural trends. It is a massive movement that has won over the Republican party in both its Trumpist and non-Trumpist manifestations. As I see it, what lies beneath the surface is misogyny, a pervasive discomfort with the empowerment and equality of women.

All the historical religions are patriarchal, marking out separate spheres and roles for men and women respectively, and needless to say, the privileged roles are held by men. A detailed explication of the specifics of gendered roles would have to await another – very extensive – dissertation. The patriarchy of the Catholic Church, which is a medieval institution that has survived into the modern age, is broadly known. Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants view the family hierarchically. God resides at the top. The father is the head of the household and beneath him is his wife, who oversees the home and the care of the children. Therefore, the movement of women out of the home and into the workforce is not merely a threat to the explicit authority and power of the male and an affront to the male ego, it is also an upending of the divinely ordained theological order. It is a coerced imposition of secular society and can be conceded only grudgingly.

The scope of women's power has grown in the workplace, as well as in the political sphere, and has superseded the achievement of men in the educational realm. No doubt many men find this reality difficult to adapt to psychologically. It is disquieting and at various levels felt as a threat. Misogyny is an ugly and dark phenomenon that, as is tragically known, can often erupt into violence. As suggested, contempt for women finds an alliance between religion, the courts, and state legislatures in the rescission of the right to abortion. At the bottom, it is the diminution of the rights of women and their autonomy to control their reproductive choices, their sexuality, their health, and their very bodies. As such, it is an extraordinarily mean-spirited assault on the humanity of one half of our population, and on their intimate selves that could not be more far-reaching. Dark, atavistic, dangerous.

But I choose to end by burrowing down one level deeper still. I want to invoke a Grand Theory that receives little exposition... Perhaps it is too broad or fanciful to win credence, but I proffer it nonetheless.

I see the extraordinary reactions in our society – the Trumpism, its hatred and irrationality, white supremacy, contempt for immigrants, the assault on gays and minorities, the disparaging of so-called elites and expertise, the anger of older white males, the rural-urban divide, and the despair with democracy – as a long-deferred reaction against the cultural revolutions of the 1960s.

I lived through that period, and there is no doubt that within little more than a decade, American society underwent radical changes, politically, socially, and culturally, fueled greatly by younger generations, but leaving a “silent majority” in its wake. We are seeing now the unvoiced resentments of that swath of the population and their progeny that never bought into the progressive changes of that tumultuous era.

“The 60s” was a rebellion against the decade that came before it. Indeed, the 1950s was a unique decade in the twentieth century, very different from what came before and after it.

The Eisenhower years were a conservative era in which society was sustained by a quiet conservatism that was a product of a pervasive authoritarian sensibility. It was a decade in which white men, prevailingly white Christian men, very much held the unchallenged reins of power. For the most part, women did not work and were consigned to the home and economically dependent on their husbands. Black people “knew their place” and were therefore to a great extent invisible. Homosexuals were deeply closeted. It was also a time when people went to church, not so much out of religious piety but to display social probity. Americans could buy their moral virtue as “believers” in the face of the godless atheism of Soviet Communism, which was the embodiment of evil. And the post-war years were also a time of a burgeoning middle class and the elixir of upward mobility that gave legitimacy to the given social order and its values.

But as noted, the manifest calm and normalcy of the 1950s came at a price: the authoritarianism, conformity, stodginess, and oppression of patriarchs and those who suffered from institutional inequalities that loomed beneath the surface.

Within a few years, that imposed order was overturned. The Civil Rights Movement, which began in the 50s, hit its high water mark in the '60s with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The feminist movement was demanding the full equality of enfranchisement of women. The end of the decade saw the beginning of the gay rights movement. It was also a period of urban riots – Newark, Detroit, Watts – and the trauma caused by the political assassination of leadership in the highest places, the Kennedys, and Martin Luther King the most prominent.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program saw the emergence of numerous social welfare programs and the greatest distribution of wealth since the New Deal. On the ground, the counterculture radically assaulted social conventions in public and personal life. It was primarily driven by middle-class, educated youth, and no doubt offended the sensibilities of many in the traditional working class to whom such rebellion was alien.

The conservative turn initiated by Ronald Reagan sought to undo the social welfare initiatives of the '60s by valorizing business and vesting wealth in the corporate class, while explicitly declaring government as the problem. Reagan's trickle-down economics was repeatedly shown to be a farce, yet conservatives were successful in disparaging liberalism and hoodwinking the working class into believing that the interests of corporate elites were their own. Relevant to our thesis, Christian conservatives, who had become increasingly politicized, gave their allegiance to Reagan, and not long afterward President George W. Bush became the de facto head of the Christian right. Donald Trump's ascension to the presidency can be seen as the extreme metastasized culmination of the economic and political movement set in motion by Reagan in the 1980s.

Whatever one’s assessment of Joe Biden, I think it correct to conclude that he was attempting to consign Reaganism to the political graveyard. In this regard, it is a great tragedy that his Build Back Better initiative, which would have returned the Democratic Party and American society to the policies of the New Deal, has been shredded. But it is my supposition that the reemergence of activist government in the service of greater economic egalitarianism has rekindled the resentments akin to the social divisions created by the revolutions of the '60s.

In short, there exists among the white supremacists, the misogynists, the politicized “Christians,” the economically stressed residents of America's rural outbacks, and those weary of democracy, an implicit yearning to return to the white male-dominated social order of the 1950s. But this is a myth. There is no paradise and the horse is long out of the barn.

We are a pluralistic society comprised of women and men and those who differ by virtue of religion, race, ethnicity, and culture. And America grows even more diverse. These are trying times. But now more than ever, we must hold fast to a belief in the dignity and worth of all and strive to rebuild a cooperative and democratic society in which that dignity will be respected. There is no alternative.