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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.

I am the host Dan Miller.

I am associate professor of religion and social thought at landmark college

and I am recording today from the studios of WLMC landmark college radio here in Putney Vermont.

And I am joined today by Dr. Marie Griffith.

She is the director of the John C. Danforth Center on religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis

and also the John C. Danforth distinguished professor in the humanities.

She is the editor of the center's journal religion and politics.

She has previously held distinguished positions at both Princeton and Harvard.

She is the author of numerous books the most recent of which and this is a great title is Moral Combat

how sex divided American Christians and fractured American politics.

So professor Griffith I want to say welcome to Straight White American Jesus and thank you for joining us.

Well thanks so much for having me Dan.

Great. One of the topics we've talked about a lot on this podcast is abortion.

Anybody who knows anything about American Evangelicalism knows that abortion is always a hot topic.

If people don't know anything about American Evangelicals other than this they probably know that they oppose abortion.

And you've done some really interesting work on Evangelicals and abortion and their support for abortion and how that's changed.

And recently this past summer you wrote an article in religion and politics and you sort of traced the history of this and you brought out the point

that Evangelicals once felt quite differently about abortion than they do today.

Can you start with that? Could you tell our listeners what an Evangelical in say the 50s or 60s or 70s might have claimed in order to actually defend abortion as opposed to the discourse we hear about abortion from Evangelicals now?

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