Category Archives: Religion

God Help Us

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There’s a big, big difference between being a true follower of Jesus of Nazareth and calling yourself a “Christian”. Putting that aside, the percentage of Americans who say they’re Christians has been going down, while those who claim to be have become more more fervid in their political beliefs.

[According to the Pew Research Center,] since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” This accelerating trend is reshaping the U.S. religious landscape….

The Center estimates that in 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%.

Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.

Brynn Tannehill, writing for The New Republic, considers what that may mean for our politics:

As American youths leave home, they leave the faiths of their parents and never return. This is in great part because the teachings of most churches in the U.S. are fundamentally at odds with what young people believe: particularly on topics like abortion, marriage equality, birth control, and premarital sex. They simply fail to see how such out-of-touch institutions are relevant….

The most crucial factor is how Christianity has slowly become primarily a political identity for many (overwhelmingly conservative) people. Over the past 40 years, membership in nice, bland, mainline Protestantism has plummeted, from 30 percent of the public down to 10 percent. Conversely, evangelical membership (and the number of white evangelicals) boomed in the 1970s and ’80s and then slowly declined. But evangelical groups are still much larger than the mainline Protestant denominations, constituting about 23 percent of adults and up to 37 percent of Americans claiming to be “born again.” Because white evangelicals are one of the most consistently conservative groups in the country, the result is that people who identify as Christian or attend church frequently are far more likely also to identify as Republican.

Black churches have held steady for decades at about 8 percent of the population. They are still associated with social justice goals, but they can also tend toward social conservatism, which can produce tension….Latinos were traditionally part of the Catholic Church. However, traditionally white evangelical denominations have had some luck luring Latinos away with social conservatism and the false machismo projected by Republicans, which explains some of the electoral shift seen in 2020.

Just as those who attend church frequently tend to be Republican, the converse is also true: Those with no religion are far more likely to be Democrats. Data analysis by Ryan Burge shows that white evangelicals have had a stranglehold on the [Republican Party] for over two decades and form a clear majority, alongside conservative Catholics. However, by 2018, the “nones” represented a plurality (28 percent) of Democrats, whose gains have come at the expense of evangelicals, mainlines, and Catholics within the party. Today, almost half of Gen Z has no religion….

A 2017 survey of 2,002 U.S. adults age 23 to 30 who attended a Protestant church … in high school found that 66 percent had stopped attending church. Seventy percent of those cited religious, ethical, or political beliefs for dropping out. Other major reasons cited included hypocrisy, churches being judgmental, and a lack of anything in common with other people at the church.

The danger of this widening schism is not a lack of shared sense of community, or people not doing enough charitable work. The danger lies in this creating the conditions for a future that looks more like present-day Russia or Iran.

Conservative Christians have a deep sense of victimhood and fear about a secular America and are willing to end democracy to prevent it. As David Frum noted, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy.”

It has not gone unnoticed that Republicans are increasingly claiming the mantle of being Christian Nationalists. A recent poll found that although 57 percent of Republicans recognize that declaring the U.S. a “Christian nation” is unconstitutional, over 60 percent would support it….

Tannehill then cites two current instances of conservative (or reactionary) religion being combined with political power. They’re worst case scenarios for America:

First there is the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by Patriarch Kirill. He’s been one of Vladimir Putin’s most loyal allies and has been willing to put the church’s blessing on virtually anything Putin does. This includes supporting Russian actions in Ukraine in the name of stamping out the corrupting Western influence of homosexuality and protecting the Russky mir (Russian world). More recently, he has declared that dying in battle washes away all of one’s sins…. On top of the fascism, Russian Orthodox church leaders have made themselves obscenely wealthy by supporting Putin’s kleptocracy.

What we’re seeing in Iran is what happens when a sclerotic, gerontocratic, authoritarian theocracy tries to impose its will on a younger population that no longer accepts the legitimacy of the government and also rejects some of its core religious teachings. Protests erupted over 22-year-old Mahsa Amini being tortured and killed by “morality police” for wearing her hijab the “wrong” way. Women have responded by tearing off their head scarves and burning them. Men have attacked police, and riots have racked the country for weeks. The internet has been shut down, and at least 75 people have been killed so far. The Iranian regime has reportedly lost control of a predominantly Kurdish town on the border as well.

Unquote.

For millions of Americans, Christianity has become a political identity that favors the creation of a single-party, single-religion theocracy. Russia and Iran demonstrate where that can lead, either to becoming “a corrupted tool of fascism (as in Russia) or an oppressive, omnipresent force (as in Iran) against which the population can achieve change only through revolution”.

Understanding the Plague of Christian Nationalism

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The political ideology known as “Christian nationalism” has little to do with Christianity. Journalist Sarah Posner explains it for Talking Points Memo:

Christian nationalism has been all over the news lately, but it is neither a new term nor a new phenomenon in American politics. The label gained greater usage during [the former administration] because of [that president’s] mobilization of the Christian right around his strongman politics. Interest in the ideology — and the term — grew even more following the January 6 insurrection, where Christian nationalist rhetoric and symbols were on full display, sometimes violently. …Its threat to democracy has never been more vividly apparent.

Many on the Christian right have long rejected the term, but Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has embraced it, and even started selling “Proud Christian Nationalist” t-shirts. “I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I’m a proud Christian Nationalist,” she tweeted in response to criticism. “They hate America, they hate God, and they hate us [no, but we do hate you].

Although Greene made it more popular, not all Christian nationalists wear the label on their sleeve, or a t-shirt. So how can you tell who is a Christian nationalist?

The Christian Founding Mythology

Christian nationalists believe that God had a “providential hand” in America’s founding. They contend that, carrying out God’s will, the founders intended America to be a “Christian nation.” They insist, falsely, that the founding documents prove both this intent and that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” God also intended government to play a limited role in people’s lives, they assert — but to the extent government carries out its functions, it should be done from a “biblical worldview”….

The leading proponent of this revisionist history undergirding contemporary Christian nationalism is David Barton, a prolific writer and energetic speaker whose false and misleading claims about this history have been thoroughly debunked by historians and researchers. Nonetheless, his extensive writings and lectures maintain a kind of doctrinal status within the religious right. Barton first made national headlines in 2004 when the Republican National Committee hired him as a political consultant during the presidential campaign to mobilize evangelical pastors and their flocks. Today, he remains an influential fixture in Christian right circles through his extensive writings, lectures, radio show, and other programs produced by his WallBuilders organization.

The impact of the perpetuation of this ideology is clear. A recent poll by the University of Maryland found that 61 percent of Republicans support officially declaring the United States a Christian nation. That number is far higher — 78 percent — among Republicans who identify as evangelical or born-again.

Restoration and Dominionism

A corollary of the Christian nation founding myth is that if the founders were carrying out God’s will, then any erosion of America’s “Christian heritage” must be fought by patriotic Christians who seek to rescue America from ungodly forces and “restore” it to its Christian foundation. Based on claims that the Bible calls on Christians to “take dominion” over earthly institutions, Christian nationalists contend that it is the duty of Christians to run for office and seek political and judicial appointments to ensure the government crafts law and policy from a [supposed “biblical” perspective].

In nearly two decades of reporting on the Christian right, I have seen this directive manifest itself in myriad ways: activists engaging in “spiritual warfare” and vetting political candidates, evangelical pastors mobilizing “to restore America to her Judeo-Christian heritage”, candidates running for president to Christianize government, governors holding mega-prayer rallies in professional basketball stadiums — all building toward the movement attempting to foment a coup. Greene’s call for the GOP to “lean into biblical principles” showed how the decades-long quest to elect “biblical worldview” representatives continues to bear fruit, and in increasingly radical ways.

Persecution

A key element of this dominionist vision is the claim that Christians are persecuted by social, cultural, political, and legal changes that they claim have undermined the Christian nation. Much of the supposed subversion of Christian heritage and values, and the attendant claimed persecution, stems from both conspiratorial thinking about political adversaries and apocalyptic claims about their ambitions. From the Cold War to the present, perceived enemies of the Christian nation have included Communism, Marxism, socialism, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., mainline Protestantism, atheism, secular humanism, feminism, abortion rights, the “homosexual agenda,” Islam, political correctness, President Barack Obama, “gender ideology,” COVID mitigation policies, the “deep state,” critical race theory, and “wokeness.” Many of these figures, beliefs, and policies might ostensibly have little in common, but they are imagined as conspiring to form a single movement to undermine America — as Greene put it in her tweet, the “godless left.”

In practical legal and political terms, these persecution claims, litigated in the courts and in the court of public opinion by well-funded lawyers and activists, have led tocataclysmic erosions of church-state separation, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, ongoing assaults on LGBTQ rights, and the accompanying elevation of religious freedom rights — for right-wing Christians. 

Anti-Democracy

Subversions of church-state separation, and the imposition of fundamentalist religion to deprive others of their civil and constitutional rights, are in and of themselves signs of a democracy in danger. But since the 2020 election, the Christian right’s embrace of [the] stolen election lie — fueled by the belief that [the unreligious, con man president] is a savior of the Christian nation — has contributed to direct threats to the electoral process itself….

The QAnon movement, which claims that a deep state cabal of satanic pedophiles is running a secret sex trafficking ring inside the government … is not just a conspiracy theory. It is another means of energizing right-wing white Christian voters, who have been steeped in this kind of conspiracism for decades, to take extreme steps to “save” the Christian nation that (they believe) [the ex-president] has so ardently defended. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute has found that QAnon adherents “express strong Christian nationalist beliefs,” with 71 percent agreeing with the statement that “God has granted America a special role in human history,” and 55 percent saying they believe being a Christian is “at least somewhat important to being a ‘true American.’”

Finally: Is [You Know Who] A Christian Nationalist?

The Bible is just a prop for [him], and, like autocrats throughout history, he uses religion and religious leaders to consolidate the support of enraptured followers. It doesn’t really matter whether [he] himself is a Christian nationalist, since he is a salvific figure to Christian nationalists, one who can achieve their long-sought goals by crushing the “godless left” and giving them more power. One of the leading contenders to be [the former president’s] successor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is abusing his current office to engage in fascistic crackdowns on migrants, public education, and LGBTQ kids while making direct Christian nationalist appeals. In recent political speeches, DeSantis has been using a verse from Ephesians 6 (“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes”), but with a notable substitution: instead of “the devil’s,” he has said “the left’s.” The meaning is not lost on evangelical audiences, who are well familiar with the actual words of the verse….

Two Major Democracies At Risk

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Two articles in the New York Times opinion section dealt with creeping authoritarianism in the world oldest democracy and the world’s largest. First, from Thomas Edsall’s column about the oldest:

Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, noted in an email that the United States stands apart from most other developed nations in ways that may make this country especially vulnerable in the universe of democratic states to authoritarian appeals and democratic backsliding:

There are two unique American afflictions on which T___ could thrive and that are not shared by any other advanced Western … country: the legacy of slavery and racism and the presence of fundamentalist evangelicalism, magnifying racial and class divisions. There is no social organization in America that is as segregated as churches.

In this context, Kitschelt wrote,

a critical element of T____ist support is trying to establish in all of the United States a geographical generalization of what prevailed in the American South until the 1960s civil rights movement: a white evangelical oligarchy with repression — jail time, physical violence and death — inflicted on those who will not succumb to this oligarchy. It’s a form of clerofascism [i.e. clerical fascism]. A declining minority — defined in economic and religious terms — is fighting tooth and nail to assert its supremacy.

Underlying the racial motivations, in Kitschelt’s view, are

changes in political economy and family structure, strongly related also to a decline of religion and religiosity. Religions, for the most part, are ideological codifications of traditional paternalist family kinship structures. Postindustrial libertarianism and intellectualism oppose those paternalisms. This explains why right-wing populists around the world draw on religion as their ultimate ideological defense, even if their religious doctrines are seemingly different: T____(white Protestant evangelicalism and Catholic ultramontanism [which emphasizes supreme papal authority], Putin (Orthodoxy), Modi (Hinduism), Erdogan (Islam), Xi (Confucianism).

Unquote.

India is the world’s largest democracy, with four times the population of the U.S. The other Times article described its more established slide into religious fascism. This is by an Indian journalist, Debasish Roy Chowdhury:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood last month atop India’s nearly completed new Parliament building, built to mark the country’s 75 years of independence, and pulled a lever. A sprawling red curtain fell back to reveal the structure’s crowning statue. Many across India gasped.

The 21-foot-tall bronze figure — four lions seated with their backs to one another, facing outward — is of India’s revered national symbol. The beasts are normally depicted as regal and restrained, but these looked different: Their fangs bared, they seemed angry, aggressive.

Untitled

To Mr. Modi’s critics, the refashioned image atop the Parliament building— a project that was rammed through without debate or public consultation — reflects the snarling “New India” he is creating.

In his eight years in power, Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party government has profaned Indian democracy, espousing an intolerant Hindu supremacist majoritarianism over the ideals of secularism, pluralism, religious tolerance and equal citizenship upon which the country was founded after gaining independence on Aug. 15, 1947.

Drawing comparisons to Nazi Germany, the regime uses co-opted government machinery, disinformation and intimidation by partisan mobs to silence critics while dehumanizing the large Muslim minority, fanning social division and violence. Civil liberties are systematically violated.

India, the world’s largest democracy, is where the global battle between liberalism and tyranny is being lost….

Laws and rights are applied unevenly. Muslims can now be arrested for praying in public, while Hindu pilgrims are congratulated by state officials. The state celebrates the Hindu religion, while protests are orchestrated against Muslim customs like the wearing of the hijab and the call to prayer. Hindu vigilante groups attack Muslims and their businesses.

A high-ranking B.J.P. leader called Muslim refugees from Bangladesh “termites” eating away the country’s resources. Emboldened by state support, Hindu extremists now openly threaten the genocide and rape of Muslims, while the government arrests journalists who call out acts of hate. On Aug. 15, Independence Day, the government released 11 convicts serving life sentences for gang-raping a Muslim woman and murdering 14 members of her family during the 2002 Gujarat pogrom that occurred on Modi’s watch…..

At 75, after decades of institutional abuse, India’s democracy is too frail to withstand a strongman taking a sledgehammer to its weak foundations. Mr. Modi calls the Parliament building a “temple of democracy.” But the institution’s new premises in New Delhi are instead a monument to the demi-democracy he is building — a hollowed-out facade that exists to legitimize authoritarian rule.

How Forced Births Will Affect Women’s Healthcare

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From Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo:

… The Supreme Court has not only let red states flip the calendar pages back to pre-1973 America. In many ways, it’s worse than that.

Abortion has become a foundational pillar to all kinds of health care procedures. Ripping it out [reduces their availability].

America now faces a reality that will be like returning to the early ‘70s, but with half a century of medical and technological advances that health care providers in certain states can no longer use. Since Roe, abortion care became drastically safer and more efficient, and the medical procedures involved in abortion have become indelibly embedded in the wider health care landscape. They’ve become a key aspect of all kinds of other health care, from miscarriage management to cancer treatment.

Now, in states from Texas to Ohio, we’re already seeing how abortion — or procedures that can be construed as abortion — are deeply intertwined with health care more broadly, and what it means for them to be taken away.

It’s easier, and convenient for the anti-abortion movement, to imagine abortion as a siloed-off procedure, under the auspices of Planned Parenthood and only relevant to young women seeking to end their unwanted pregnancies. But for decades, that hasn’t been the case.

After Roe, Abortion Becomes Safe

After the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide, researchers and physicians could finally learn how to get better at it.

“If the procedure is illegal, you can’t do clinical studies and you can’t develop new procedures because you’re doing it secretly,” Johanna Schoen, a professor of history at Rutgers University told TPM. “Most people providing abortions were not clinicians and not able to do it in a medical setting.”

“After Roe, clinicians made it not only the safest out-patient procedure in the country, but also much safer than pregnancy and delivering a baby,” she added. “All of that has to do both with the improvement of abortion procedures and development of new ones.”

In addition to the procedure improvements, after Roe, physicians started receiving more training in how to perform abortions and manage potential complications. Mortality rates associated with abortion started to plummet. And the number of women hospitalized for abortion-related complications dropped between 1970 and 1977, with a steep dip after 1973. By 1995, fewer than 0.3 percent of abortion patients were hospitalized with complications from the procedure.

Abortion Is Now Woven Throughout Today’s Medical Landscape 

While abortion care developed apace, other related medical technologies improved too. By the late 1970s, ultrasounds were being used widely in American hospitals, helping to advance detection of fetal abnormalities.

As the technology continued to improve over the next few decades, physicians became better able to identify abnormality markers. Under Roe, in states that hadn’t impinged on the abortion right with gestational bans (many diagnoses occur in the second trimester, though advances are pushing some earlier), women could opt for an abortion once abnormalities were detected rather than carrying the pregnancy to term.

Now, after Dobbs, experts are certain that women in states with draconian abortion bans will have to go through labor and give birth to babies that cannot survive.

The development of ultrasound technology has also enabled physicians to more accurately diagnose unruptured ectopic pregnancies in a way that was not possible pre-Roe. In these pregnancies, the fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus where it cannot survive but can pose a deadly threat to the woman if it’s allowed to grow.

The improvement in mortality rates associated with ectopic pregnancies followed: a more than 70 percent decrease in deaths-to-cases from 1970 to 1978.

Already, stories are emerging about the demise of Roe throwing ectopic pregnancy care into chaos. Doctors report feeling unsure about whether abortion bans — which are often written using broad political messaging language rather than medical — include ending ectopic pregnancies, which are not viable. Various lawmakers and anti-abortion activists have proven themselves to be particularly unlearned on the subject, some suggesting that terminating ectopic pregnancies is not medically necessary, while others have offered up a supposed solution — just moving the ectopic pregnancy inside of the uterus — technology for which does not currently exist.

Another medical success story already under threat is in-vitro fertilization, or IVF. The first IVF baby was born in 1978; since then, initial single-digit success rates have blossomed to nearly 50 percent for cases where the woman is under 35 years old. One to two percent of births in the United States annually result from IVF.

Fertility clinics have already been flooded with calls by people panicked about what abortion bans mean for their procedures. During IVF, clinicians usually implant one or two embryos in the uterus and store the rest for potential future use. It’s unclear whether bans would stop people from discarding the unneeded embryos, perhaps forcing them to pay to keep them frozen forever. Genetic testing of the embryos could become illegal. And if some embryos don’t survive the implantation process — or are nonviable and discarded — clinics could potentially be liable.

Some states are already contemplating granting personhood to the embryos, which could put IVF clinics out of business and leave the people who depend on them without options.

Far-Reaching Consequences

Even cancer treatment, a seemingly far cry from reproductive care, depends on abortion to afford its patients the right to treat their illnesses without worrying about the oftentimes toxic effect those treatments have on fetuses.

Cancer occurs in about one in every 1,000 pregnancies annually, leaving the women with few options even while Roe’s protections were the law of the land. Many treatments can cause miscarriages or birth defects in the developing fetuses, especially at the beginning of the pregnancy. The CEO of the American Cancer Society said that radiation therapy is never given to pregnant patients at all.

Ending their pregnancies, for these patients, can become a matter of literal life and death — the only way for women to receive the full gamut of treatment to cure their cancer. Now, in some states, women may have to choose: lifesaving treatment that will harm the developing fetus, or leaving their cancer untreated.

Some pharmacists are already restricting patients’ access to methotrexate, a therapy for certain kinds of cancer that can induce abortions. Methotrexate is also used in treating ectopic pregnancies and, since the 1980s, soothing chronic inflammation and pain, making it a mainstay in treating diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. The Arthritis Foundation has stood up a hotline amid reports of patients struggling to obtain the drug.

Two other pills — mifepristone and misoprostol, the collective “abortion pill” approved by the Food and Drug administration for combined used through 49 days of gestation in 2000, and for longer now — are already being acutely targeted by anti-abortion lawmakers. There’s a long history of animosity towards mifepristone in particular, with the FDA baselessly categorizing it as dangerous for years.

Those medications are indispensable in treating miscarriages, which at least one in four American women will have by age 45. Even before the Dobbs ruling, women have had to rely on abortion clinics for miscarriage treatment, often because of arbitrary limitations on who can distribute mifepristone. That problem has been compounded since the ruling by sparking confusion among some hospitals about whether other aspects of miscarriage care will be misconstrued by authorities as an elective abortion.

“Management of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies are things that were not really possible when abortion was illegal,” Schoen said. “Women in the middle of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies were up shit’s creek — and people died as a result of that.”

Abortion is a medical success story. Bringing the procedure out of the shadows allowed clinicians to make it safe and humane, and to weave it into other medical treatments. Procedures that are related to, or can be construed as abortion, are now integral parts of an astoundingly wide range of medical care. All of it is under threat.

The Supreme Court is not sending large swaths of the country back to the relative ignorance of pre-Roe America. It’s sending us back in time armed with prodigious knowledge and then-undreamed-of technology that lessen women’s suffering, and uncomplicate and alleviate illnesses where pregnancy is not an option — but forbidding health care workers to use that knowledge.

Women will suffer and they will die, even while doctors have 50 years of medical advancements at their backs….

It Was Religion, Plain and Simple (and Crazy)

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It’s the official doctrine of the Catholic Church that a zygote, blastocyst, embryo or fetus is just as much a human being as you or me. It’s a crazy idea, but it shouldn’t matter to the rest of us what a church’s doctrine is as long as they leave the rest of us alone (and don’t do anything crazy to their children on religious grounds). It shouldn’t even matter to the rest of us that a lot of non-Catholics have adopted the same peculiar idea. The problem is that millions of people who accept this strange religious doctrine want the rest of us to act as if we accept it too.

I don’t know how many people who want to force pregnant women and girls to give birth are motivated by the religious idea or by the desire to control women’s and girls’ lives. Some or many are motivated by both. Linda Greenhouse, who writes about the judicial system for the New York Times, says she originally put the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in the abortion category, but then decided it was really about religion:

My own way of keeping track of a Supreme Court term is to log each of the term’s decisions on a chart labeled by category: criminal law, administrative law, speech, federalism and so on. For this past term, one of my charts was, of course, labeled “abortion,” and naturally that’s where I recorded Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization….

But the other day, going over my charts before filing them away to prepare for the next term, a realization struck me. I had put Dobbs in the wrong place. Along with the decision about the praying football coach and the one requiring Maine to subsidize parochial school tuition, Dobbs belongs under “religion”….

Justice Alito took pains to present the majority’s conclusion as the product of pure legal reasoning engaged in by judges standing majestically above the fray of Americans’ “sharply conflicting views” on the “profound moral issue” of abortion, as he put it in the opinion’s first paragraph. And yet that very framing, the assumption that the moral gravity of abortion is singular and self-evident, gives away more than members of the majority, all five of whom were raised in the Catholic Church, may have intended.

A recent essay in my local newspaper by a Congregational minister, John Nelson, was a powerful reminder that in speaking from one particular religious tradition, the court ignored other vital streams of religious thought. “Samuel Alito is as free as any person to hold forth on morals and politics,” Pastor Nelson wrote, “but his opening salvo is backed up with no reflection on the sources, claims or nuances of morality, leaving the impression that the decision was developed through moral bias rather than moral reasoning.” Describing his own response to the decision as one of “fury,” the pastor said that the justices, in their “concern for the lives of fetuses,” overlooked the “lived experience” of women. “To show no regard for a lived experience is immoral,” he wrote.

Indeed, the fetus is the indisputable star of the Dobbs opinion. That is not necessarily obvious at first reading: The opinion’s 79 pages are larded with lengthy and, according to knowledgeable historians, highly partial and substantially irrelevant accounts of the history of abortion’s criminalization. In all those pages, there is surprisingly little actual law. And women, as I have observed before, are all but missing. It is in paragraphs scattered throughout the opinion that the fetus shines.

“None of the other decisions cited by Roe” and Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey, the 1992 ruling that reaffirmed the right to abortion, “involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” Justice Alito wrote. “They are therefore inapposite.” Further on, he wrote: “The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a state’s interest in protecting prenatal life.”

This was a strange criticism of the dissenting opinion, signed jointly by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. They argued vigorously for retaining the 1992 Casey decision, which in fact, in a departure from Roe, declared that the state’s interest in fetal life was present from the moment of conception. Casey authorized the states to impose waiting periods and “informed consent” requirements that the court in the years following Roe v. Wade had deemed unconstitutional.

Justice Alito knows the Casey decision very well. As a federal appeals court judge, he had been a member of the panel that upheld most of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act in the case that became Casey. Then-Judge Alito, alone on the panel, wanted to uphold a provision of the state law that required a married woman to inform her husband of her plan to get an abortion.

In affirming the appeals court’s decision, the Supreme Court in Casey emphasized in one of the opinion’s most vivid passages the unconstitutional burden that the spousal notice requirement placed on women: “We must not blind ourselves to the fact that the significant number of women who fear for their safety and the safety of their children are likely to be deterred from procuring an abortion as surely as if the Commonwealth had outlawed abortion in all cases.” Perhaps that aspect of the Casey decision still rankled. In any event, Justice Alito’s attack on his dissenting colleagues for ignoring the state’s interest in fetal life was seriously misguided.

Of course, from his point of view, Casey didn’t go far enough because the weight the court gave to fetal life was well below 100 percent. The Casey decision was five days shy of 30 years old when the court overturned it, along with Roe v. Wade, on June 24. Given that this was their goal from the start, the justices in the Dobbs majority really had only one job: to explain why. They didn’t, and given the remaining norms of a secular society, they couldn’t.

There is another norm, too, one that has for too long restrained the rest of us from calling out the pervasive role that religion is playing on today’s Supreme Court. In recognition that it is now well past time to challenge that norm, I’ll take my own modest step and relabel Dobbs for the religion case that it is, since nothing else explains it.