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The Election of the Evangelical offers an unprecedented behind-the-headlines analysis of what now seems an unimaginable political moment--a time when southern white evangelicals united with African Americans and northern Catholics and Jews in support of a Democratic presidential candidate, and when cultural liberals in California and Connecticut united with Great Plains farmers in support of a Republican.

Abortion is the most divisive issue in America's culture wars, seemingly creating a clear division betweenconservative members of the Religious Right and people who align themselves with socially and politicallyliberal causes. In Defenders of the Unborn, historian Daniel K. Williams complicates the history of abortiondebates in the United States by offering a detailed, engagingly written narrative of the pro-life movement's mid-twentieth-century origins. He explains that the movement began long before Roe v. Wade, and traces its fifty-yearhistory to explain how and why abortion politics have continued to polarize the nation up to the presentday.

This article argues that an often-overlooked reason for both the early victories of the abortion liberalization movement prior to the 1970s and its subsequent failures was the ambivalent view of fetal rights held by the vast number of voters who fell outside of either the pro-life or pro-choice camps. In the mid-twentieth century, the majority of Americans began to view fetal rights and abortion in relative terms, rejecting the existing legal code's prohibition on all abortions except those necessary to save a woman's life. Most Americans continued to believe that abortion was wrong in most cases, but they also began to think that it might be justifiable in cases of medical necessity or where it seemed necessary to accomplish a larger social good. The majority of Americans began to believe, in essence, that a fetus has intrinsic value, but not an absolute right to life. Adapted from the source document.