Abortion Is the True Test of Conservatism : ‘Pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ define how people feel about God’s place in modern life.

If you were to parachute a representative of any previous century of American history into these final years of our own, he would find it odd how distracted Americans are by abortion, a simple surgery of which only a small percentage of us take advantage. Certain phrases are offered to explain the centrality of abortion. Pro-choicers talk about “a woman’s right to choose,” pro-lifers about the endangered “life of a human being.” Both of these, however, are mainly sloganeering, leaving the mystery unsolved.

Fortunately, the matter was clarified for me the other day by, of all things, a liberal Republican.

Oh, he denied that he was a liberal. He had called me because he was launching a Jewish Republican political action committee. Since I’m Jewish and work at a conservative magazine, he thought I could help him get some friendly publicity. He began by explaining that while he is interested in funding Republican politicians who support Israel, the group has other priorities: economic responsibility, entrepreneurship, welfare reform.

He kept describing the PAC as “politically conservative,” and stressed his membership in the conservative Federalist Society and his friendship at Yale with several future right-wing journalists. Yet something about his summary of the PAC’s main interests made me a suspicious. It’s one of the tricks of liberal Republican pols, seeking to woo naive conservatives, to invoke our favorite word (“conservative”) and then talk about economics a lot. To clear things up, I asked this PAC organizer what view he took of abortion. After all, the abortion issue provides a useful service: Ask someone if he’s “pro-life” and you can almost always guess what he thinks about 20 apparently unrelated issues.

The PACman on the other end of the phone became uncomfortable and started talking about economics again. He said his PAC didn’t want to get involved in any “litmus tests.” But I told him it was too late for that. Abortion is already such a test, just like the one we used to perform in high-school chemistry class: Expose litmus paper to an acid and it turns red, to a base and it turns blue.

Finally, the guy admitted that he was “pro-choice” and repeated his protest about litmus tests. I apologized for hassling him and admitted that I wasn’t sure why conservatives like me have adopted abortion as a defining issue above almost all others. He knew. “I’ll tell you why it keeps coming up,” he said. “It’s because of religion. All the people who are antiabortion are religious.”

That isn’t true, and neither is the converse, that everyone who is pro-choice is nonreligious. But I realized that my Republican acquaintance had put his liberal finger on something fundamental.

It is true that the only convincing arguments against abortion are religious ones. The nonthreatening rhetoric you sometimes hear about abortion as an act at odds with “nature” always sounds strained. Where is the imperative in nature? People do unnatural things, like smoking cigarettes and flying in airplanes, all the time. What sets abortion apart from the other political issues is that advocates on either side differ about no less weighty a question than the proper place of God in the governing of our lives.

As long as abortion has been a technological possibility, the historically monotheistic faiths have opposed it. The Pledge of Allegiance speaks of the United States as “one nation under God.” That sentiment used to be a matter of consensus, but the consensus has begun to fall apart. It was inevitable that the resulting disagreement--are we “under God” or not?--would find a way to express itself in politics. No issue poses the question in a starker fashion than does abortion.

So it keeps coming up, and that is something we should be glad about, whether we favor free access to abortion or not. With the rise of liberal religion and the associated idea that God should be an object of strictly private devotion, his commandments never “imposed” on others, there is a danger that even nonliberals will slide, unreflecting, into a philosophy at radical variance with traditional thought about God and man. That is something it makes sense to do, if ever, only with all due deliberation. If we are to slide, let’s think about it first. If on this fundamental question the America of today is to break with the America described in the Pledge of Allegiance, we had better consider very seriously what that will mean about us and our relationship to God.

Abortion is much more than a litmus test. The question it asks is whether God is sovereign over us or we over him. Forget the flat tax. Let’s talk about abortion.