How They Did It, Pt. 3: The End of the Beginning

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 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, with figures like Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Robert P. George, and Hadley Arkes providing 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 the broader conservative movement and the GOP.

Sources:

"Killing Abortionists: A Symposium," First Things, December 1994

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

"The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things, November 1996

Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Doubleday, 2006)

Mary Ziegler, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (Yale University Press, 2021)

Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, (Stanford University Press, 2013)

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, June 24, 2022

Matthew Sitman, "Reading Left to Right" (review of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square), Commonweal, August 24, 2015

Tara Isabella Burton, "The Biblical Story the Christian Right Uses to Defend Trump," Vox, March 5, 2018