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1. Despite the "science" of the "pro-life" movement being, well, not, I found opposition to abortion to be one of the hardest aspects of my Christian Right upbringing and indoctrination to shake. My experience in the #Exvangelical community suggests I'm far from alone in this.
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2. And since having an exchange with @summerbrennan yesterday about the possible efficacy (or not) of efforts to educate anti-abortion voters on the actual facts, I've been wondering why opposition to abortion is so hard to shake even when you abandon Evangelical politics.
3. Assuming that it is a general pattern, as my anecdotal experience strongly suggests. A lot of former Evangelicals turned progressive Christians, including prominent voices like @rachelheldevans, remain "pro-life," but refuse a narrow definition and reject single issue voting.
4. For context, this is the best debunking of the notions that abortion is murder and that for "pro-life" right-wing Christians it's really about "saving babies" that I've seen anywhere. @lovejoyfeminism is fantastic blog: patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyf…
4-a. @summerbrennan, you may find the article linked above effective in working with indoctrinated anti-choice religious believers who have become skeptical and questioning on other matters.
5. Meanwhile, I've become convinced that abortion serves as a defensive fetish for right-wing white Christians, allowing them to seek respectability while refusing to engage in any real introspection or change: derevth.blogspot.com/2017/01/aborti…
6. But is opposition to abortion particularly hard to shake as a general rule? And if so, why? From my own experience, I can say that having rhetoric about murdering babies pounded into your head from early childhood had a powerful impact.
7. In Christian school and church, we were told abortion was a literal holocaust and that it was our job to stop it. When these pronouncements come from religious authority figures, they can stir you deeply.
8. Later in life, you can teach people who went through this that around half of all fertilized eggs don't implant. You can teach us that Evangelicals' anti-abortion stance came late and was manufactured.
9. But even with that information, it seems it's still very difficult for it to shift the ingrained emotional response to abortion we were programmed with.
10. I'm not sure what to do with these musings. I'm worried that Roe being overturned thanks to Evangelical Trumpism is well within the realm of possibility.
11. But I guess what I come back to is this. Right-wing Christians' anti-abortion stance is an aspect of their authoritarian ethos: chrisstroop.com/2017/02/06/eri…
12. It takes more than facts to fight #ChristianAltFacts. Facts cannot change the minds of people with a deep emotional investment in a given position.
13. We remain faced with the problem that one of the two major parties in our two-party system is controlled by extremists. Largely thanks to the Christian Right: chrisstroop.com/2017/02/24/chr…
14. And the only way to stop authoritarianism is to deprive authoritarians of political power. They don't value the rule of law or democratic norms.
15. It is my hope that we can make some headway in this by elevating ex-Evangelical voices in order to change the mainstream U.S. understanding of white Evangelicals as "quirky" but benign. Conservative Evangelicals are not benign. splinternews.com/what-should-we…
16. The Christian Right represents America's single greatest threat to democracy and human rights. Ex-Evangelicals know this from the inside, from having lived it. If you can, promote #Exvangelical voices to help us change the MSM conversation on Evangelicals. #EmptyThePews
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