In 1974, the Southern Baptist Convention met in Dallas, and the messengers adopted a resolution on abortion. It reaffirmed a position the Convention had taken three years earlier, and here is what that position called itself, in the denomination’s own words, still posted on their own website tonight. It was, quote, “a middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder,” and it had, quote, “dealt responsibly from a Christian perspective.”

Say that out loud for a minute. The largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the one whose president that very decade was fond of telling America the Bible was true down to the last jot and tittle, stood up in convention and told itself it had found the Christian position on abortion, and it was a middle ground. It did not do this once, quietly, in some committee nobody read. It did it in 1971, and again in 1974, and again in 1976 and 1977. Four times in six years, on a floor vote, overwhelming. And the four votes do not even agree with each other, which is its own sermon: a denomination saying two things at once, out loud, in public, for six years, and saying them with votes.

The word for what happened after that is not evolution. Nobody changed their mind slowly, the way a farmer changes his mind about a variety of seed after a couple of bad years. The word for what happened is amnesia. A denomination that voted four times for a middle ground now teaches, and its people sincerely believe, that it has always opposed abortion, always, from the moment of conception, because the Bible says so. And the gap between what the record shows and what the memory claims was not filled by study. It was filled by lies.

We are going to spend some time in those lies this morning, because our scripture will not let us do anything else. The ninth commandment says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Jesus says in John, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” And in the same gospel, Jesus says of the father of lies that there is no truth in him. This is a sermon about a church that stopped telling the truth, about why the truth is worth telling even when it indicts us, and about what mercy has to do with any of it.

What they actually said

Let us start with the receipts, because this is not my opinion or a blogger’s spin. These are published resolutions, in the Convention’s own archive, adopted by the Convention’s own votes.

In 1971 the messengers affirmed the sanctity of human life, and they said plainly that this includes the fetus. Then they called on Southern Baptists to work for legislation allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of damage to the health of the mother. Health of the mother, note, body and mind both. Passed with an overwhelming vote.

In 1974 they reaffirmed it and named it a middle ground, as we heard. In 1976 they hardened against abortion on demand and, in the same resolution, affirmed the full range of medical services for the preservation of life and health, and they said it again in 1977. By 1980 the turn was complete. The Convention called abortion an abominable crime, and it started voting, every year after that, in the other direction.

And the receipts run deeper than the resolutions, because the men who said them were not liberals sneaking in the back door. In 1973, a few months after Roe came down, W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Dallas and the most famous conservative preacher in the country, said: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” And here is what a sermon about false witness owes you: Criswell later reversed, completely, and spent the rest of his life among the loudest pro-life voices in America. I am not quoting him selectively. I am quoting him the way he said it and then telling you he changed, because the change is the sermon. A man can hold a view, sincerely, and reverse it inside a decade, and the institution he led can erase the whole middle of the story.

In 1968, Christianity Today co-sponsored a conference of twenty-six evangelical theologians on abortion, and the conclusion was that abortion is morally permissible in some circumstances. The editor who signed off on it, Carl Henry, one of the architects of modern evangelicalism, wrote that a woman’s body is not the domain and property of others. And the lawyer who filed the Roe case, a Dallas attorney named Linda Coffee, was herself a Baptist. Raised in it. Member of Park Cities Baptist Church, granddaughter of a deacon. Her associate argued the case; she built it. The woman whose paperwork brought down every state abortion law sat in a Baptist pew while she did it.

You cannot read this record honestly and call it a mistake in the minutes. This was the consensus. It was the consensus among conservatives.

Why it was the consensus

So why? Why did the conservative wing of American Protestantism hold this position for a decade, and why does almost nobody alive remember it?

First, theology Baptists used to be proud of. Soul liberty. The priesthood of every believer. A two-hundred-year-old allergy to anybody who mistakes his own conscience for the Holy Spirit. Abortion, in that world, was mostly a Catholic issue, the kind of thing you stayed out of on principle. Evangelicals looked at Rome marching on the subject and said, that is not our fight.

Second, the doctrine. Evangelical theology in that era simply did not hold that a soul arrives at conception. Criswell’s line about life beginning at birth was not a slip of the tongue. It reflected a strain of Protestant thought, going back century after century, that located the person in the living, breathing creature. The rigid position did not yet have a theology under it. That theology got built, later, fast, and by people who needed it.

Third, and this is the part that deserves respect: the seventies resolutions were theological, not legalistic. They affirm the sanctity of life. They oppose abortion on demand. And then they refuse to criminalize the woman. That refusal was not cowardice. It was a reading of the gospel: you do not win a soul by putting her in prison, and the faith that reaches for the police power of the state as its first tool has already forgotten which kingdom it serves. They were wrong about some things, and right about the thing we are going to end on, which is that mercy is the Church’s native language and law is not.

Why it changed

Now the hard part. What happened between 1977 and today? There are two accounts, and I want to tell you both, because a sermon about false witness does not get to pick only the facts that help it.

The first is the account the movement tells about itself, and it is a real account. In 1979 a fight began inside the Convention, the so-called Conservative Resurgence, and the folks who fought it will tell you, truthfully, that they fought it over the Bible. Inerrancy. The seminaries. Whether the Book is true down to the last word. That fight happened, and it was mostly about the Bible, and people who were there will tell you abortion was not the engine.

The second account is about the politics that grew up alongside that fight, and here I have to slow down, because this part is contested. A Dartmouth historian named Randall Balmer has documented, in a long essay and later a book, that the organizers of the new religious right did not start with abortion. They started with segregation. In 1971 a federal court ruled that segregated private schools could not keep their tax exemptions, and fundamentalist schools all over the South organized against that. In 1975 the IRS moved against Bob Jones University over its ban on interracial dating, a fight that ran through the courts until the exemption was pulled for good in 1983. Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the new Christian politics, said out loud, in interviews recorded before anyone thought to be careful, that abortion was a later addition. He tried school prayer. He tried the draft. He tried the schools. And then, as he put it, they got a second look at abortion, and it worked. The historian documents. The participants confirm, on tape. Defenders of the movement dispute the account to this day, and you should know that. But the dates and the interviews sit where they sit: the taxes and the schools came first, the abortion banner came after, and it came after the first banner proved to be a losing one.

Once abortion became the banner, the resolutions turned, year after year, harder and harder, until the memory of the seventies was simply gone. A Convention that had affirmed a middle ground four times now believed it had never done any such thing. The resolutions were not corrected. They were erased. And here is the commandment being broken: not by an atheist, not by a secularist, but by the Church, bearing false witness against its own previous self.

The fruit of the lie

Jesus said you will know them by their fruit, and he was not talking only about individual conduct. Institutions bear fruit too, and the fruit of forty years of this is worth counting, because it tells us what the lie cost.

The first cost is the memory itself, because a body that can forget its own votes in a generation can forget anything, and the forgetting is the engine that keeps the machine running. The second is the origin story, because a movement whose founding grievance was the schools and the taxes, repackaged around abortion, has never honestly told its donors what it was for. The third is that the fight itself became the point. Decades of raising money off a reversal that finally arrived in 2022, and somehow the reversal was never enough, and the goalposts moved overnight to bans nobody told the donors about. A movement that cannot say “done” was never fighting for the thing it said it was fighting for. It was fighting.

And then there is the fruit on the ground, and this is where the small lies did their work. The medical literature has spent fifty years debunking the small ones, the ones about what abortion does to a woman’s body, the ones invented to frighten. Women now travel hundreds of miles for care their mothers’ generation could get in town. Doctors are leaving states where they trained, because the law cannot tell the difference between medicine and crime. Women have been prosecuted, and so have their providers, and in some states the women themselves for ending their own pregnancies. In Alabama in 2024, a court ruling in a case called LePage froze in vitro fertilization across the state, because a doctrine of personhood at conception cannot tell the difference between a clinic and a crime. And a generation of young people is writing off the Church, not because they hate Jesus, but because they have watched a church spend five decades as the dedicated wing of one political party and cannot hear the gospel over the fundraising.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. The Church looked at its neighbor, the woman standing in the hardest hour of her life, and it bore false witness against her. It said the cause was holy and the memory was clean. Both were lies, and the lies were the cheap part. The expensive part is what the lies bought.

The beam in our own eye

Now hold on, because if this sermon is only an indictment of the Southern Baptist Convention, it is a partisan brochure with a hymn on the end, and I will not preach that. The same commandment stands in front of every one of us, and it does not check our voter registration first.

The pro-choice side has run its own campaign of euphemism, and it has its own ledger. A generation of pro-choice rhetoric called the fetus a clump of cells, which is a scientific claim with no science in it, and a moral evasion dressed as a technicality. It refused to grieve. It treated a reality every woman in that waiting room already knew was serious as though it were only a procedure, and then it wondered why women came out of those rooms alone. And institutionally, it has its own forgetting. The movement that once campaigned on safe, legal, and rare dropped the word rare, because rarity is bad for fundraising too, and that silence on the grief is the liberal amnesia that matches the conservative one line for line. There are people who will say the word “fetus” all day long and will not, in a room full of church people, say the word “baby,” because the word is honest and the honesty costs something. The ninth commandment does not only forbid lying about the other side’s position. It forbids lying to ourselves about what we are looking at, and both camps have done that, industriously, for fifty years.

And the church generally, this church, every church, has its own ledger. We will march for the child before it is born and forget the child the day it is born. We will tell a woman carrying an unplanned pregnancy that every life is precious, and then be nowhere to be found when the baby comes and the rent comes due. Both parties have profited from this fight, the left by its refusal to say the hard word and the right by its perpetual harvest of outrage, and the people standing in the wreckage in both cases are the same people: women, and the children, and the folks in the pews who sincerely believed they were doing God’s work with all of it.

And I owe you one more truth in a sermon about truth, the one that sits under all the others. Psalm 139 says that God knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, that the days were written before one of them came to be. In Luke, when Mary greets Elizabeth, the baby leaps in the womb at the sound of her voice. Whatever the arguments and whoever keeps the receipts, what is carried in the womb is a child, known before it could be seen. That is not a slogan and it is not a talking point. It is scripture, and I will not preach a sermon that forgets it, on any side.

And some of those folks are sitting here. Some of you have given your whole heart to the pro-life cause and you believe it is holy, and this sermon is not mocking you. It is asking you to look at the record with me, that is all. And some of you are women who have had an abortion, and you have carried the weight of two campaigns on top of the weight of the memory: the campaign that said you were a murderer, and the campaign that said it was nothing at all. Both of those were lies too. The truth is that you lived through something grave and real and sad, that what you carried was a child, and that neither the stone-throwers nor the shruggers ever told you the truth about it, because the truth does not raise money for either of them.

The truth that sets free

So here is what I want you to carry out of here, and it is the part I would keep if I had to cut everything else. Truth-telling is not the enemy of mercy. It is the precondition of mercy. You cannot be forgiven for what you will not name, and you cannot grieve what you pretend did not happen, and the Church that wants to be a hospital has to stop being a place where the diagnosis is impossible to hear.

And hear what this sermon is not saying, because a room this size holds every kind of conscience and I will not have the medicine hit the wrong wound. I am not saying the folks who turned pro-life were insincere. Most of them believe, as you believe, that they are defending children, and sincerity was never the lie. The lie is the memory. I am not saying the seventies consensus was right, either; you do not fix a euphemism by voting on it from the other side. And I am not saying you have to agree with me about any of the politics. I am saying we tell the truth, all of us, first about our own house, and let the politics fall where the truth lands.

We are not saved by our correctness. None of us are. Not the folks who were right in the seventies, not the folks who have been right since, not the woman in the waiting room and not the man with the sign. We are saved by grace, and grace is what happens when the truth about a person gets said all the way down to the bottom, and love refuses to go anywhere.

And the scripture we end with has been telling the truth about itself for two thousand years. The story of the woman taken in adultery is, by the honest account of the oldest Greek copies we have, a text that traveled. It shows up in some manuscripts and not in others, and a careful scholar will tell you it was almost certainly not part of John’s first draft. And the church carried it anyway, for the plainest reason there is: it rings true. You do not have to believe the story is in its original place to believe it happened. Now look at what the accusers were doing in it. The law they quoted was real, but they were wielding it selectively, because the law they cited says a man caught in that same act dies beside her. Leviticus and Deuteronomy both say it: both parties, stoned together. Where is the man in the story? There is no man. The law was true and the accusation was false, because the ninth commandment was broken to bring the case to court. They dragged her in on half a law and called it righteousness. And Jesus, who does not dispute the law, disarms it. He writes in the dirt, and he says let the one without sin throw the first stone, and one by one they leave, oldest first, until he is alone with her. He asks her where her accusers are, and she says there are none, and he says neither do I condemn you. And then, having refused the stone, he tells her the truth: go, and do not do this again.

No stone and no euphemism. No condemnation and no pretending. That is what the Church looks like when it is telling the truth: it drops the rock and it keeps the word. The word is where the mercy lives.

So here is the work, and it is ordinary. Read the record, all of it, ours and theirs. Tell your children the whole story of the church you belong to, including the middle that got erased. Refuse the euphemism on both sides of this fight. And be the church that shows up when the pregnancy is real and the rent comes due, so the truth we preach has hands on it.

The Convention forgot its own resolutions, and the country forgot its own grief, and the pews forgot the women standing in them. The way back is not a better slogan. It is the ninth commandment, kept, starting with the record and working outward. You shall not bear false witness. Not against your neighbor, not against the other party, not against the woman in the hardest hour of her life, and not against your own history, however much it costs to read it. The truth will make you free. It is the only thing that ever has.

Amen.