At the 2022 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting last week, church messengers (delegates) attended sessions that rolled out a strategic response to the looming end of Roe. Life begins at conception, most seemed to agree, and so steps must be taken to protect the “pre-born.”

Those steps, as outlined by church leadership such as members of SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberties Commission, include caring for “abortion-vulnerable” women to help them avoid abortion and support for the expected infant. There was talk of church ministries to support these women, encouragement to other believers to adopt and take in foster children so that mothers who could not raise children have some alternative. Efforts to fund and place ultrasounds at crisis pregnancy centers were touted. There was also a truth that I’ve never heard spelled out in such a way to rooms full of conservative believers and pastors: 1 in 3 women in your churches have had an abortion.

It was all in preparation for today, when anti-abortion evangelicals would be mobilized around a new set of talking points and face the reality that an end to abortion would impact people within the church as well. Their goal is to not just make abortion illegal, but unthinkable.

With this morning’s Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade has been overturned. Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban has been upheld. States can now outlaw and criminalize the medical procedure. This is going to mean upheaval in lives throughout the country, not just in churches, but among believers and non-believers alike, thanks to decades of political organizing by a segment of believers.

What’s more, Justice Clarence Thomas, in his brief concurring with the majority opinion, indicated other important precedents could also be reconsidered: including rights to contraception, consensual same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage. These too are issues core to a segment of conservative Christians but already settled for most Americans.

What seems settled can be undone.

While Justice Samuel Alito denied other precedents could be called into question with the ruling, the three liberal justices in dissent (Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor) warned that the freedoms “involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation” are “part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions.”

For decades, white evangelical and Catholic voters have organized to assert power over just these sorts of personal, intimate decisions.

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, many white, evangelical Christians sidestepped his alleged abuses of women and his penchant for telling lies, and justified a vote for Trump with an assurance that his administration would deliver Supreme Court nominees who could overturn Roe. Over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump.

It was a pragmatic vote. For some, a trade of other principles in exchange for Roe’s defeat. And while the hypocrisy of giving a moral pass to Trump, by church leaders who for so long preached sexual purity, set quite a few believers into deconstruction and abandoning their churches, the trade has achieved its intended result.

Roe has fallen.

In many states, it is about to be nearly impossible to access a legal, safe abortion. A vast majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most circumstances. Nonwhite and poorer pregnant people will be among those most affected by abortion restrictions. An intimate health care decision has been made and motivated by a theological position held by a minority of Americans.

Ours is a time of political extremes. I live in Ohio, where despite two statewide votes and state Supreme Court decisions rejecting gerrymandered statehouse district maps, we’re once again stuck with stilted odds that leave many of us unfairly represented. It is not a coincidence that in Ohio, with a state legislature unevenly stacked, we also now have laws that ban abortion after 20 weeks, other laws that have made it very difficult for clinics to remain open at all, and with a six-week abortion ban likely on the way that does not include exceptions for rape or incest.*

The gerrymandering rewards extreme candidates who champion extreme laws. The rest of us live with them.

Many Americans have been consumed by the January 6th Congressional hearings, a careful itemization of how close the U.S. came to a political coup. And the threat of violent upheaval remains.

Even within SBC (the U.S.’s largest evangelical body), the party line — in a statement today by SBC president Bart Barber — still at least gives support to an exception for elective abortion if the life of the mother is endangered by carrying the baby to term. However, at the same annual meeting at which Barber was elected, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was asked from a messenger about a statement in which Mohler had suggested that there are circumstances in which a woman should be held complicit in the death of her unborn child. The messenger asked whether the homicide code should be applied to a mother in such a case, as all humans are “image bearers” of God from the moment of conception.

Mohler responded, that “we understand homicide is the death or killing of a human being. An unborn baby — I believe from the moment of conception until natural death — is a human being deserving of that protection.” He continued that the law can make distinctions as to responsibility and in context. It might be difficult in the case of miscarriage, but the law is capable of making needed distinctions, he said. Our law can apply to different degrees of murder, for example. “I believe that there are many cases, in which demonstrably, there is not just an abortionist who should face criminal consequences, but a woman seeking an abortion.”

SBC itself teeters on a divide where more moderate (among conservative) voices won victories this year, but the Conservative Baptist Network, a right-wing splinter group, keeps chomping, trying to pull Southern Baptists back to its Conservative Resurgence leadership — within the church and in American politics. (Mohler is not part of CBN, but flip-flopped to support Trump and has denounced “critical race theory.”)

And even the more moderating voices within SBC are already at work with a state-by-state plan to establish abortion bans nationwide. As the Ethics & Religious Liberties Commission for the SBC explains, “In the states where abortion is permitted, the pro-life movement will need to learn how to mobilize at the local level to pass ordinances, advocate for legislation, and help promote officials who stand for the dignity of the unborn.”

The national apparatus is there — it’s been influential in our politics all these years.

What’s striking is that whether it’s the folks calling for homicide charges and related consequences for people having abortions or the more moderate (among conservative) evangelicals ushering in state battles, for the majority of Americans, a total abortion ban represents an extreme policy. Maybe the degree of the extremes will matter in the end for some. But today, it is abundantly clear that majority opinion over the rights of pregnant people to bodily autonomy can be overridden.

In the broader American population, nearly one in four women have had an abortion. If the SBC numbers are correct, within their very own churches, abortion is more common than that. I cannot speculate why that is. (Perhaps they’ve run new polls.) I can say that I have spoken to plenty of women shamed over their sexuality within the church, even those who have been raped. I have interviewed deeply-believing, church-going women who had no help for raising a child and no choice in the assault that impregnated them. I know faithful women who simply were not ready to have a child. I know others who grieve still over wanted pregnancies they could not carry to term.

In all their stories there is nuance, and nuance that does not exist in soundbites at the extremes of our politics, other people’s faith. But they have come to define the decisions that shape our lives.

*Shortly after publication of this piece, a federal judge in Ohio lifted an injunction on Ohio’s “heartbeat bill,” thereby banning abortion in Ohio after six weeks (when many women still do not yet know they are pregnant). Ohio’s general assembly is expected to pass a full ban later this year and Governor Mike DeWine (R) is expected to sign it into law.