If you haven’t heard it by now, next Thursday is the 25th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Don’t bother writing that down; you’ll hear plenty about it before the week is up.
For a quarter of a century abortion has been America’s loudest and fiercest moral debate, due in large part to the religious principles at stake. And as the anniversary approaches, it is the nation’s religious leaders who want to make sure you don’t forget about abortion.
The list includes, as you would expect, the country’s Roman Catholic bishops. Archbishop Francis George of Chicago will lead a pro-life conference this weekend in Rosemont, then travel to Washington, D.C., where he will join his fellow bishops in a memorial mass on Thursday and a march to the U.S. Supreme Court Building on Friday.
On the other side of the debate, Planned Parenthood has organized a committee of Protestant ministers and Reform and Conservative rabbis who favor abortion rights. They are calling for a week of “religious observances that focus on choice and family planning.”
And there will be some voices that are not quite so familiar to many Americans. The Orthodox Church of America, which separated from the Russian Orthodox Church around the time of Roe vs. Wade, opposes abortion. And while Orthodox Christians in this country have not made much of a splash in national politics in the past, the OCA is trying to make itself heard outside its sanctuaries on this issue.
In 1996 Metropolitan Theodosius, the OCA’s national leader, called for prayer and repentance to address abortion. This month Bishop Job, of the OCA Diocese of Chicago and the Midwest, declared this Sunday “Sanctity of Life Sunday,” and many OCA churches in and around Chicago are holding public programs and prayer services next week, as they now do annually in the church.
Meanwhile, if you run in religious circles or pay attention to virtually any media, religious or secular, you hear–sometimes with great hosannahs–about a religious revival going on in America. Yet independent surveys and information gathered by religious organizations show that Americans went to church or synagogue or mosque or temple in roughly the same numbers in 1997 as they did in 1996, and in 1976 and in 1956. There’s no reason to think that will change much in 1998.
So what kind of revival is this? It is, most obviously, a phenomenon of the media. Newspapers, magazines and television cover religion more, and more seriously, than any time in recent history. New religious books appear in on the shelves faster than you can say “Gutenberg,” and they fly off those shelves nearly as fast. Much as I would like to tell you that the media are privy to some otherworldly revelation, I think their new attention to religion has more to do with printing and broadcasting what interests people, what moves them to make them plunk down a few coins, or at least plunk down on the couch for a couple of minutes.
But beyond the media, religion is permeating public conversation in America in ways it has not for most of this century. It shows up in a million men, give or take a few hundred thousand, sprawled out in prayer on the National Mall. It shows up every time professional football players huddle in prayer at the end of a game–a practice that has become so pervasive that television decided to stop showing it altogether, for fear that football fans would somehow resent it, or worse, become distracted from the ads surrounding the show.
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And it shows up in politics and governing, from public school curriculum to campaign finance reform. Bringing religion into politics is no guarantee of victory, as any abortion opponent can tell you. But the language of faith, used frankly and publicly, may have a more subtle and more profound effect over the course of time.
“We are conditioned to use and understand the language in certain ways,” Bishop Job says, a change that has taken place over decades, perhaps centuries, and ultimately shapes our understanding of the realities language describes. So when Job issues a public statement filled with words like “repentance,” “transformation” and “a morality of prayer,” he knows that he will not change the political tide any time soon. Many people won’t understand him at all.
That’s all right, he says, because even if Roe vs. Wade were overturned tomorrow, the dangers he sees in abortion–damage to the unborn, society and women faced with “an incredibly difficult decision”–would not end. “The change will not come about simply by legislation,” Job insists. “It has to be a real expression of repentance, the broken and contrite heart David speaks of in the psalms.”
If some day that kind of talk is not only understood, but once again embedded in the way most people approach their lives, that would mark a religious revival so radical that it would make the debate over Roe vs. Wade, so stale after 25 years, sound brand new.