This book addresses the role of rights in recent American politics, specifically the claims emanating from white, conservative Christians. Claiming that “the American rights culture has long been the domain of liberals” (p. 3), Andrew Lewis states that it is a “paradox that conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, have come to share the mantle of rights-based advocacy with liberals” (pp. 3–4). His major argument is that abortion politics catalyzed this shift by teaching evangelicals the value of rights-based arguments.
The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the argument, theoretical constructs, and methods. Chapter 2 details the history of evangelicals and pro-life politics since the 1970s. The next five chapters address substantive rights: free speech (Chap. 3), religious liberty (Chap. 4), national health care (Chap. 5), the death penalty (Chap. 6), and gay rights (Chap. 7). Chapter 8 concludes the book with an Epilogue.
Lewis employs multiple methods for the research in this book. Each of the substantive chapters includes a history of evangelical advocacy positions, with particular attention to whether the issue framing includes abortion. In order to explain the increasing importance of rights politics, the author presents both elite and mass evangelical public opinion over time (since the 1970s). The appendix contains cross-sectional statistical models of support for various rights positions and their relationship to abortion.
Several theoretical threads run throughout this book. Explaining that anti-abortion activists are a political minority and that “minority politics are often focused on rights and legal challenges” (p. 5), Lewis introduces a “learning, claiming, extension,” or LCE, framework of rights politics. This process involves rights learning among evangelical advocacy leaders; rights claiming for pro-life and religious freedom positions; and rights extension, which “has yielded greater support for rights to others, even disfavored groups” (p. 6). The relationship between elite activism and mass public opinion is also central. Additionally, the author makes a normative argument: The rights orientation among evangelicals should promote common ground in a pluralist democracy, “including deliberation and tolerance” (p. 9).
In Chapter 1, although Lewis asserts that American rights culture has been dominated by liberals, the terms liberal and conservative are not defined. The discussion of rights starts with the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, including voting rights and school desegregation. Other rights deemed “liberal” are equal pay for men and women, women’s access to birth control and abortion, “state-funded lawyers,” decriminalized gay sex, legalized gay marriage, and Muslims’ ability “to retain their beards in prison” (p. 3). The Epilogue states that “the religious freedom rights of organizations,” presumably conservative, were “bolstered” by the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision (p. 177). Given the rights focus, it is noteworthy that the conservative rights agenda that thwarted the organization of American labor for many decades is never mentioned (see James Morone, The Democratic Wish, 1998).
Abortion is the centerpiece here. The book’s observations about public opinion toward abortion, however, rely on outdated references and data. For example, the assertion, “While aggregate abortion attitudes have long fallen somewhere in the middle regarding abortion,” cites a 1992 book (reference #32, Chap. 1, p. 6). Similarly, the claim that “mass attitudes have become more polarized as of late,” uses a 2003 article with 2000 data, (reference #33, Chap. 1, p. 6). No reference is made to a 2014 survey indicating that 33% of evangelicals think that “abortion should be legal in all or most cases” (see Jeff Diamont and Becka A. Alper, “Though Still Conservative, Young Evangelicals Are More Liberal Than Their Elders on Some Issues,” FactTank, Pew Research Center, 2017). Lewis also confuses emergency contraception with medical (i.e., pharmacological) abortion (p. 8).
Also problematic or not sufficiently explained are the American demographics of religion. Chapter 1 argues that “rights have become more important as the non-religious increase” (p. 7). In fact, the demographics of religion are more nuanced than Lewis indicates. In terms of percentage of the American population, the nonreligious are slightly on the increase, relative to those who report being religious. Within those identified as religious, evangelicals have gained ground relative to mainline Protestants: “Evangelicals now constitute a clear majority of all Protestants in the U.S., with their share of the Protestant population having risen from 51% in 2007 to 55% in 2014” (see Gregory Smith, “The Changing Religious Composition of the U.S., in Alan Cooperman, ed., America’s Changing Religious Landscape, 2015, p. 25). Numerically, evangelicals have increased in recent years (p. 9), and so it may be misleading to simply argue their minority status.
Lewis demonstrates considerable skill as a narrator and storyteller, drawing from interviews, surveys, and primary church (e.g., Southern Baptist) sources. Many of the vignettes here are interesting and not well known. For example, Chapter 2 explains that when Roe v. Wade was decided, evangelicals were not uniformly anti-abortion. Evangelical clergy first joined with pro-life Catholic advocacy groups before rank-and-file adherents changed their positions (p. 21). Chapter 3 addresses free speech, beginning with an account of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre and the puzzle of why most American evangelical leaders supported the paper’s right to print what they considered offensive content (p. 31). The commitment of anti-abortion evangelicals to free speech also translated to opposing an Ohio law that prohibits false campaign ads (p. 51).
The theoretical contribution of the book is less clear than the narrative, despite the numerous descriptive charts and graphs presented in the chapters, along with statistical models in the appendix (inconvenient for readers who want to see the analysis). The LCE framework provides an organizing device, but not theoretical drivers. Early in the book, the author claims that the politics of abortion is a classic example of the theory of issue evolution and conflict expansion (p. 22). However, he never explains this theory or hypothesizes about his expectations, nor does he discuss how substantive cases were selected.
There are also methodological shortcomings. It is unclear why pooled cross-sectional statistical models, grouping multiple years of observations, were used instead of time series analysis. Moreover, the interaction terms, central to the argument about the effect of abortion on other issues, are misinterpreted. Several of the chapters use correlation analysis, but no tests of significance are reported, and so meaningful differences are impossible to ascertain.
Overall, The Rights Turn explains how Christian evangelicals have used abortion as a wedge issue to develop successful political strategies toward other issues. This approach has been largely top-down, from the leadership to rank-and-file members. Certainly, the public opinion polls show that over time, a greater proportion of evangelicals have become more supportive of free speech and gay marriage, but one cannot ascertain how much of these shifts can be attributed to secular trends in American society. Given the aforementioned methodological problems, it is not possible to quantify the contribution of pro-life politics to these changes, although Lewis is convincing in arguing their ubiquity.
The book ends with “the big picture” (p. 173): “As evangelicals have come to consider, create, and claim their own rights, they have learned to value other people’s rights to a greater degree” (p. 174). At the same time, they will continue “to oppose sexual license and abortion” (p. 174). Lewis concludes by stating that “the politics of abortion may be responsible for the future detente in the culture wars of yesteryear” (p. 175). This conclusion is not juxtaposed with the irony that given current age-specific abortion rates, one out of every four American women will have an abortion by the time she reaches menopause (Rachel Jones and Jenna Jerman, “Population Group Abortion Rates and Lifetime Incidence of Abortion: United States, 2008–2014,” American Journal of Public Health 107(12), 2018).
