My Life Is Argument

What impact does religion have on the pro-life movement in the United States? Looking at religion as churches and religion as ideas, and understanding religion in either case as an independent force which influences the mobilization of the movement, this paper demonstrates the important yet limited ways in which religion impacts pro-life activism. It then suggests a new way to conceptualize religion in the context of social movement theory. It argues that we need a focus on everyday practices as the mechanism that sustains religious faith and makes it salient and relevant in people’s lives. I apply this focus to the ways in which religion and the pro-life movement interact and find that social movement activism is permeated with religious practice. As people fight the battle over abortion, they are also enacting prayerful lives, birth and death rituals, the gathering of the faithful, expressions of faith, understandings of personal sacrifice and persecution, and the doing of God’s work on earth. Religion and the pro-life movement are not so much discrete, distinct social phenomena in which the former influences the latter, but instead are overlapping social processes that impact each other. Focusing on practices helps best understand the existing empirical data, and also suggests that social movements can be sources of broader social change beyond simply the substantive issues on which they focus.