When it comes to progressive politics in America today, any list of bad guys is sure to include not only oil executives and neo-cons but also religious leaders.  The antics of the Christian Right are as frequent a target of Jon Stewart’s satirical attacks as Dick Cheney’s hunting skills.  And with good reason-- when progressives look across the lines on issues like queer rights, ending the war in Iraq, and protecting important social programs, we are used to seeing bibles in the hands of those standing on the other side.

The irony here is that it’s only in the last generation or two that religious voices and progressive voices have grown so far apart.  Today, when we think of the link between religion and politics we think of Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, but not Martin Luther King Jr.  The first American president elected with large support from the evangelical Christian movement was not George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, but Jimmy Carter memory.  In times past, religious voices have been an important part of movements for progressive and liberal causes ranging from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage to the anti-war movement, the anti-nuke movement, and the peace in Central America movement.  We’ve lost that today and our progressive movements suffer for it.  Nowhere is this more clearly seen then in the area of reproductive justice.

Even discussing the existence of a pro-choice, pro-faith movement seems counter-intuitive.  Yet, there are a host of reasons why it is important that religious and spiritual voices be welcomed to the table of the reproductive justice movement.  First, having religious voices as part of the movement allows us to counter the very core of anti-choice propaganda.  At the heart of almost every argument made to limit access to abortion, to birth control, to even the most basic access to education about reproductive health, is a religious claim.  And at the heart of every one of those claims is a lie: that to be a religious person is to stand against choice, against contraception, against any sexual education program that offers alternatives to abstinence.  This is simply not true; the majority of Americans who identify themselves as religious also identify themselves as pro-choice, and most of the mainline religious organizations in America have declared their support for a woman’s right to choose (including the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, the United Methodist Church, and Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism, among many others).  Religious voices can refute the claim that to be pro-choice is to be anti-god, and give powerful, faith-based arguments in support of reproductive justice.

But wait, the argument goes, now that we’ve seen how bad the Christian right can be, surely we don’t want to replace it with a Christian left, or a left of any religious tradition.  The goal here is not to replace one biblical argument with another.  Instead, it is to defend a core American value-- religious liberty.  Including religious voices in the reproductive justice movement means strengthening both the argument that anti-choice, anti-sex claims represent only one religious view and that to enshrine those ideas into law is a violation of the constitutionally protected separation of church and state.

Beyond all this, there is an additional argument that has particular relevance for college students and other young people today.  Young adults in America demonstrate two overlapping and at first glance contradictory trends: (1) a suspicion of and disengagement from structures of organized religion that ranges from apathy to disdain to hostility, and (2) a growing propensity towards spirituality, understood and experienced in non-traditional ways, but no less important then the religious paths taken by their parents or grandparents. 

In a recent survey of Americans aged 16 to 30 these trends were again made clear.*  Almost one in three (28 percent) young adults consider themselves to be more spiritual than religious, while just 11 percent report that they are more religious than spiritual.  Almost one third of all members of this age identify as both spiritual and religious.  This indicates that for less than one third of young adults today, religion and spirituality go hand-in-hand.  We must also consider that almost one quarter of youth and young adults do not see themselves to be either spiritual or religious. 

These new understandings of spirituality and religion, and the role they play in shaping values and ideas of justice, offer a powerful opportunity to change the nature of the debate over reproductive justice.  A majority of participants in the survey mentioned above agreed that abortion is an issue in which one’s personal decisions should be respected, rather than an issue with clear moral right or wrong answers.

These are difficult issues to be sure, representing a host of complexity.  While I write this as a strong believer in the need for religious voices in progressive causes, particularly reproductive justice, I also write it well aware of the creeping danger that religious involvement in even the most progressive of political causes can stray into theocracy if not watched carefully.  The need to maintain the balance is a part of why this debate continues.