The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, passed a resolution on abortion that called upon Southern Baptists “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”33 No less than W. A. Criswell, pastor of the largest SBC congregation, stated after the Roe v. Wade decision that “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.”