With the death of C. Everett Koop, the last of these three figures went to be with the Lord. Preceding him were Francis Schaeffer and Harold O. J. Brown. Together, Brown, Schaeffer, and Koop “successfully called Evangelical leaders back from their flirtation with abortion,”….“These three men made opposition to abortion a defining characteristic of late twentieth-century Evangelicalism.”

With the news of C. Everett Koop’s death last week, we are given the occasion to return to a question raised only a few months ago by a blog post on CNN.com which provoked reactions far and wide. The question concerns exactly when and how evangelicals came to embrace the pro-life (or as it was known then, the right to life) position.

A week before the presidential election this past fall, Jonathan Dudley (author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, 2011) surprised many people with his provocative blog piece for CNN entitled: “My Take: When evangelicals were pro-choice.”[1] Citing well-known statements in 1968 by Bruce Waltke printed in Christianity Today – and referring to the Southern Baptist Convention’s express endorsement of abortion in 1971 – Dudley concludes that evangelical faith did not and thus does not entail a pro-life position (Waltke later changed his position, which Dudley fails to mention). Rather, Dudley would have us believe that the rise of the pro-life movement in evangelicalism was a late addition rooted not in core convictions, but in power politics.

In his first piece, Dudley claims it was Jerry Falwell who “spearheaded the reversal of opinion on abortion in the late 1970’s,”[2] a statement that does not bear the weight of scrutiny but conveniently served to shake the faith of wavering pro-life evangelicals days before they went to the voting booth. Several responded to Dudley, including Mark Galli at Christianity Today and Al Mohler on his blog, and Dudley quickly backtracked in a follow-up piece for The Huffington Post in which he acknowledged, though somewhat dismissively, the ‘right to life’ work of Francis Schaeffer and a group called The Christian Action Council prior to Falwell’s entrance on the political scene. However, Dudley discounts the impact of those early efforts, returning to his thesis that the evangelical church was slumbering on the abortion issue until “[i]n 1980, Falwell used his unparalleled platform to change all that.”[3]

It is true that the evangelical church was slumbering for several years after the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. But it is not true that “Falwell changed all that.” Instead, Falwell and the several other figures who took the lead of the pro-life movement in the 1980’s were standing on the shoulders of three men whose paths and voices converged for a brief period of time in the mid-to-late 1970’s, forming a powerful trio that finally awoke the evangelical church to the necessity of speaking up for the unborn.

And this past week, with the death of C. Everett Koop, the last of these three figures went to be with the Lord. Preceding him were Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) and Harold O. J. Brown (1933-2007). Together, Brown, Schaeffer, and Koop “successfully called Evangelical leaders back from their flirtation with abortion,” writes Allan Carlson, the President of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. “These three men made opposition to abortion a defining characteristic of late twentieth-century Evangelicalism.”[4]

Harold O. J. Brown

A Harvard-educated historian and theologian, Brown was working as the associate editor of Christianity Today when the Roe v. Wade ruling was announced. Harold Lindsell, then editor of Christianity Today, let Brown write the lead article in the magazine’s next issue, “Abortion and the Court” (CT, Feb. 16, 1973). In his response to Dudley last November, Galli quotes from this editorial denouncing the Roe decision and hails the piece as “one of the finer moments in CT history,” but unknown to readers is that Brown was its author.[5]

Undeterred by initial and surprising indifference among evangelicals to abortion, in 1975 Brown became the Editor of The Human Life Review, founded by James McFadden. No story of the nascence of the evangelical pro-life movement is complete without reference to the influence of this review, which early on included such illustrious contributors such as William F. Buckley and Malcolm Muggeridge (and eventually Ronald Reagan).

Dudley mentions in his second piece the founding of The Christian Action Council in 1975 (which became the leading Protestant ‘right to life’ advocacy group on Capitol Hill), but does not mention who founded it. Once again, Harold O. J. Brown was the tip of the spear. With meeting space provided by Billy Graham in Montreat, Brown met with C. Everett Koop for the initial planning meetings that led to the launch of the CAC in July, chaired by Brown. It is true that the early efforts of the CAC ran up against a brick wall of evangelical indifference (and even suspicion), but it was not from Falwell that help would arrive.

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