Know Your Enemy: Overturning Roe, Part Three

Know Your Enemy: Overturning Roe, Part Three

Conservative intellectuals helped bridge the gap between the religious right and the institutional Republican Party in order to end the right to abortion.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

In the third and final episode in their series on the overturning of Roe v. Wade—recorded on the day it happened—Matt and Sam pick up with 1990s, the George W. Bush administration, and eventually take listeners up to the present. They focus especially on the way conservative, mostly Christian intellectuals—many of them connected to the religious journal First Things—brought Catholics and evangelicals together to fight against abortion rights. Figures like Richard John Neuhaus, Robert P. George, and Hadley Arkes provided language and arguments in a more elite idiom, a project that deeply influenced Bush’s presidency and helped cement the anti-abortion movement’s place not just in the religious right but in the broader conservative movement and the GOP.

Sources and further reading:

Killing Abortionists: A Symposium, First Things (1994)

Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millenium, First Things (1994)

The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics, First Things (1996)

Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, Doubleday

Mary Ziegler, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, Yale University Press

Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America’s Culture Wars, Stanford University Press

Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, Eerdmans (1984)

Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, Oxford University Press (1993)

Hadley Arkes, The End of the Beginning of the End of Abortion, First Things

Matthew Sitman, Reading Left to Right, Commonweal

Tara Isabella Burton, The Biblical Story the Christian Right Uses to Defend Trump, Vox

…and don’t forget you can subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes!