The Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Speech for the Panel “For Whom the Bell Tolls? The European Approach towards  Religion, State, Gender, and Health,” at the conference Europe on the Brink: Who will decide over your body? Political developments, trends and norms that affect sexual and reproductive health and rights in Europe, hosted by the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (EPF), Swedish Family Planning Association RFSU, and the Swedish All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development
April 29, 2008

Thank you for the invitation to be with you today. I’ve learned a great deal already from listening to you and I hope my reflections on the U.S. Right prove equally useful to you.
First a word about the clothes (clerical collar). In addition to being the director of Political Research Associates, a research and analysis organization that supports movements that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society and challenges movements, institutions, and ideologies that undermine human rights. I am also an Anglican priest, the Vicar of a rural congregation outside Boston, MA. And although I’m here representing PRA, a secular think tank, it has been my habit for nearly 25 years always to wear my collar when speaking about gender justice, and especially about abortion rights. I do this because most often when I speak on the subject I am speaking as a priest – reminding people that the majority of religious denominations and faith groups in the US are pro-choice and have been for decades. We’re pro-choice not in spite of our faith, but because of it. Most often when I am called to speak it is to make that point or to build the theological case for the Churches’ pro-choice position. That is not the speech I am here to give today. Nonetheless, I wear the collar to remind you, and myself, that the positions I articulate are completely consistent with my role and identity as a priest and are theologically defensible.

Let me also point out that I’m not an expert on European politics. PRA primarily focuses on the U.S. Right. So I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the issues you face here. Instead, I’ll tell you what we’ve learned in our battles in the United States and let you draw your own conclusions about what parts of that may be useful to you.
Having said that, and notwithstanding the religious focus of this panel, let me say that I believe the most important thing to note from the U.S. struggle is that this is not primarily a religious issue. This is a cultural agenda in the guise of a religious agenda. A cultural agenda – and, I would add, a right-wing political agenda using religion for political advantage.

It is noteworthy that when the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1973, declared abortion (albeit under limited circumstances) a Constitutional right, thereby legalizing it across the nation, most religious groups did not complain. Mainstream denominations and faith groups had fought for that ruling but even conservative religious groups (with the exception of the Roman Catholic Church) did not fight against it – some even spoke in favor of the ruling.
Now, however, the Religious Right has organized around anti-abortion and anti-gay movements. And they’re winning too much – legislation and regulation that allows doctors, pharmacists, or hospitals to refuse to provide services; waiting periods and other onerous restrictions; a dearth of providers … What happened? What changed?

I’ll tell you in a minute how the Religious Right became a powerful organized movement in the 70’s and why they turned to anti-abortion work to build their strength. But let’s talk first about the Right in general – the Political Right of which the Religious Right is just one component. And therein lies an important key – the Right is not a monolith but rather is a conglomeration of various sectors with sometimes complimentary, but sometimes competing, agendas.

The groundwork for today’s Right was laid in the late 1930s and 1940s. The presidency of FDR and the post-WWII years saw a deliberate, organized alliance of the Christian Right, libertarians, and large corporate interests. Moral traditionalists, anti-communists, and laissez-faire economic/business proponents banded together to create a consensus to roll back FDR’s New Deal – an early U.S. foray into social-welfare. We could do several more minutes on the interlocking fears and interests that made this coalition work but for now let’s just note that it did work and it laid the groundwork for the successes of the Right that we’re still encountering 60 years later.

And when you hear pundits proclaiming, as they have been for a couple of years now, that the US Right is dead because they’ve suffered some serious upsets in the last couple of elections, just remember – they’re built on over half a century of work and planning. A few bad years will not be enough to result in their collapse. Our battle is not yet won.
So, sixty years ago these disparate groups coalesced into a larger movement – the Political Right. How, from that movement, did we end up with the Religious Right as we know it today, and how did it come to be so focused on anti-abortion policies?

It happened in the late 1970s during the Carter administration. Carter, whose values and goals we respect and applaud, but whose strategic sense often left a bit to be desired, had the IRS (the U.S. tax agency) go after religious universities and schools that received tax support while remaining racially segregated. Various leading figures in the Political Right saw their moment. They recruited Jerry Falwell and raised him up to create a political Religious Right. The motivator was government insistence on racial desegregation of religious schools. But racism is a hard sell. While racism was, and is, rampant, it was not socially acceptable. Sexism, on the other hand, was --  and is. If you doubt that take a look at the current political race between Clinton and Obama. While there is no doubt that racism plays a huge part in much opposition to Obama, that racism is largely hidden and denied. The sexism aimed at Clinton, on the other hand, is blatant. Sexism remains socially acceptable in a way that racism is not. So rather than acknowledge this racist anti-desegregation motivation, anti-abortion became the rallying point around which to build an anti-government, socially and politically conservative movement.

So where are we today? Today’s Right remains not a monolith but a coalition of sometimes complimentary and sometimes antagonistic forces. Today’s Right in the United States comprises:

• The Religious Right – whose agenda tends to focus on opposition to gender equality, most notably, but not exclusively, reproductive and gay justice. Yet within the Religious Right there are subgroups or factions – Religious Conservatives (who include Christians, Jews, and Muslims); Christian Nationalists (who wish to insist that the United States was founded on Christian principles and remains, or ought to remain, a Christian nation with laws that reflect Christian principles); and Christian Theocrats (who wish to institute Biblical law as the law of the land –which would include stoning to death gays, adulterers, and recalcitrant children).
  
  It should be noted that these subdivision have very different styles – often offensive to one another – but a similar agenda – to create a moral state based on legal enforcement of their understanding of Scriptural morality. And, of course, one could argue – if one had more time – that in each case the point is not morality or Scripture per se but that these are merely the organizing tools of an attempt to preserve patriarchy and the power and privilege it grants.
• Then there’s the Xenophobic Right – comprising White Nationalist Movements; Patriot, or Militia Movements; Border Patrols … This tends, by the way, to be the only branch of the Right that is unapologetically racist as well as violent. Their anti-abortion rhetoric tends to be less about religious morality than about protecting gender hierarchy, keeping women in their place, and producing white babies to combat the “dilution of the race” from the influx of darker-skinned immigrants.
• Finally, there’s the Secular Right – which includes Corporate Internationalists; Business Nationalists; Economic Libertarians; National Security Militarists; and Neoconservatives. Their concerns tend to be primarily economic or imperialist (a dangerous symbiosis). They are not always concerned about social issues like gender justice, abortion, of lgbtq rights. In fact they may be (most often secretly) socially tolerant or even progressive. And, of course, Libertarians tend to be unlikely to want government interference into these areas as a matter of principle.

There is often no love lost between these elements of the Right. Their values and agenda differ and often compete. Yet they have built coalitions that work by putting aside their differences to build a power base. Because building a power base is what it’s all about. The Right is a political, not a religious, movement. It is a political movement of which the Religious Right is one part – sometimes a pro-active part, other times used as a tool by competing interests.

This is not a movement that is apt to wither of its own accord any time soon. Last week, in fact, PRA had a visiting scholar give a talk on the rise of the Hindu Right – during roughly the same period as the rise of the U.S. Right and precipitated by many of the same factors. Economic insecurity, social upheaval, fear of armed conflict, mobility and fluidity and the fear of no firm ground to stand on – these things create an environment ripe to be exploited by an organized right-wing movement that can build coalitions from shared fears and resentments. And these circumstances are, I fear, universal.

So what can be done?

We at PRA believe the U.S. Left was rendered ineffective by a tendency to see the Right as monolithic and, so, overwhelming and unassailable. Viewing it for the conglomeration of factions that it is allows us to see places where wedges can be driven to dismantle it. For example:

• There’s a tension between libertarians and the social control agenda of much of the Religious Right
• There’s the business and corporate internationalists’ need for free trade, liberal immigration, and porous borders vs. the nationalist, xenophobic, and paleoconservative desire for insularity
• Militarists and neoconservatives vs. the Churches’ peace traditions
• Business and low tax constituencies vs. economic justice evangelicals

The list goes on. All these are points where pressure can be applied to help rupture the coalition.

And the Right’s very reliance upon religion as one of its coalitional foundations is a cause for hope. For just as virtually every religious tradition has the ability to be, and has been, perverted by fundamentalist strains that have more to do with politics than with faithfulness, so they all have voices of liberation, tolerance, and freedom. In the United States these voices did not make themselves heard early enough, loudly enough, or in a sufficiently well-organized way to cut the legs from under the claims made by the Right under the name of religion.

But it is, I trust, not too late to reclaim a wide variety, a coalition, of progressive voices to challenge the Right and to refuse to give ground to intolerance, oppression, or domination no matter what masks they wear

Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Executive Director Katherine Hancock Ragsdale is an Episcopal priest and advocate who served for 17 years (8 as chair) on the national board of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. As chair, she led the Coalition through a mission, name and organizational change that doubled the size of both staff and budget. She also serves on the board of NARAL: Pro-Choice America, The White House Project, as well as the bi-national advisory board of The Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence. She has testified before the United States Congress as well as numerous state legislatures, and is a widely sought speaker on public policy issues affecting women, professional ethics, and lesbian/gay rights. She serves as Vicar of St. David’s Church in Pepperell, MA; and is the editor of Boundary Wars: Intimacy and Distance in Healing Relationships.