University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2014 Creating the Litmus Test: Abortion, Mainline Protestants, and the Rise of the Religious Right Sabrina Danielsen University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Danielsen, Sabrina, "Creating the Litmus Test: Abortion, Mainline Protestants, and the Rise of the Religious Right" (2014). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1251. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1251 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1251 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Creating the Litmus Test: Abortion, Mainline Protestants, and the Rise of the Religious Right Abstract Scholars and laypeople have become concerned that American religion and politics has increasingly divided between conservatives and liberals, resulting in a "culture war" that leaves little common ground on salient social issues. Drawing on archival and periodical sources and a comparative-historical research design, I seek to understand the causes and consequences of the shifting relationship between religion and politics by examining how large, moderate and mainstream Protestant institutions have struggled to maintain cohesion and prestige throughout the increasingly contentious politics of abortion. In the early-1960s, no Mainline Protestant institutions supported expanding abortion access. Over 1966-1972, all the same institutions released official onouncementspr in support of expanding abortion access. Since this time, particularly from 1987-1992, all these institutions faced increased internal debate over the issue and shifted in conservative directions to varying degrees. I find that the debate around abortion among Mainline Protestant institutions was not generally characterized by polarization around two sides but rather by much consensus, change over time, ambiguity, and often ambivalence toward the issue.