The latter phrasing in turn references a meme which characterises progressives as worshippers of the ancient Canaanite god Moloch, implied in the Old Testament to require the sacrifice of children. To some, this isn’t merely a metaphor but a literal resurgence of demonic forces in the world. The Jewish megachurch leader Jonathan Cahn, for example, claimed in his 2022 book The Return of the Gods that as the Christian faith recedes across the West, ancient Near Eastern deities are returning to fill the space. This includes Moloch, whom Cahn links with abortion.

So it’s probably fair to say that returning American abortion access to state level has done nothing to take the heat out of the issue. But perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. Even before we get to the more divisive matter of “choice”, the capacity to bear children often intersects with poverty, violence, and abuse, to leave women in grim predicaments with no obvious solution that doesn’t involve someone paying a terrible price. Historically, where cultures have come down on who should pay that price has depended on that culture’s broader moral — which is to say, religious — outlook.

And the abortion debate is best understood as a proxy for a religious dispute on precisely this ground: a zero-sum conflict between two moral frameworks that cannot coexist, and which in both cases imply the need for legislation to override individual conscience. In other words, this is a matter where state cannot be separated from church, whatever the American founding may assert.

In the pro-life worldview, humans are understood as free, equal, deserving of dignity but constrained by our embodied nature and obligations. This implies legislation to protect natural human fertility from undue medical tinkering, and also to protect unborn humans. Within the pro-choice worldview — which is, albeit in a slightly disguised way, every bit as religious an outlook — the focus is more narrowly on individual freedom and equality. Here, assertions of constraint or obligation are rejected as oppressive, which in turn calls for legislation to protect women’s freedom to be sexually active on the same terms as men, but pregnant only when desired.

Both sides draw, in different ways, on the Christian tradition but emphasise different aspects. That each asserts a foundation in freedom and equality does not diminish this: the most bitter religious conflicts tend to emerge between irreducibly divergent branches of the same faith. And there is no way of accommodating both in the same political framework. In a dispute over the nature of the human, and individual freedom, and the welfare of women and babies, the stakes are simply too high and too emotive.

The classical liberal solution of leaving it to individual conscience is thus a non-starter. Where fundamentally spiritual disagreements over the nature of human personhood are concerned, there is no squashy “centrism” — and there is certainly no disentangling moral outlook (“church”) from policy (“state”). One side will have to win, and when they do it will be ugly.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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