The complicated story of how evangelicals mobilized around restricting abortion, and one Christian women’s place in it all.
In anticipation of the Supreme Court making its landmark abortion decision this summer and very likely undoing Roe v Wade, The Times is looking at the issue from a number of perspectives. Today, we’ll tell the complicated story of how evangelicals mobilized around restricting abortion — and one women’s place in it all.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times national correspondent Jaweed Kaleem
More reading:
Read the L.A. Times’ “The Future of Abortion” series
As Supreme Court weighs abortion, Christians challenge what it means to be ‘pro-life’
The pastor thought Trump was ‘evil.’ So he quit his conservative church
BRYAN: I want you to stand if you're able , join us for our opening song," I want Jesus to walk with me."
Christy: One of the most frustrating things about the issue is there isn't really a place for people who don't feel. All the way on one side or all the way on the other side. And I find myself very much caught in between jeez
Gustavo: Christie Burkhoff grew up thinking that abortion providers were murders. She devoted herself to banning the procedure.
Christy: I was very involved in right to life. I was part of the marches.
Gustavo: That fight to Christie, to Washington DC. But what she learned there basically made her abandoned the anti-abortion cause altogether
Christy: I was starting to think, you know, oh my goodness, we might actually not be doing the thing we say we're doing. We might actually be promoting policies that are leading to abortion.
Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano.. You're listening to the times daily news from the LA times. It's Friday, April 15th, 2022. Later this year, the Supreme court will announce a decision in a case that could have seismic consequences on an issue that has divided Americans for almost 50 years. The constitutional protection for the right to abortion.
tape: We will hear argument this morning in case nineteen thirteen hundred ninety two Dobbs vs. Jackson women's health organization, general Stewart, Mr. Chief justice. And may it please the court Roe vs. Wade and planned parenthood versus Casey haunt our country. They have no basis in the constant. They have no home in our history or traditions
Gustavo: and anticipation of the Supreme court making this decision. The times is looking at the issue from a number of perspectives today. The complicated story of how evangelicals mobilize around restricting abortion and one woman's place in all of this.
Gustavo: Miley times' colleague national correspondent, Java Kaleem. He recently met up with Christie. She's a worship coordinator at a church in her hometown in Michigan Java. Welcome to the times,
Jaweed Kaleem: I guess. Davo thanks for having me glad to be here.
Gustavo: So you've actually known Kristi for a few years now. How did the two of you.
Jaweed Kaleem: Yeah, I actually met Christy Berkoff several years ago in 2020. I was in Holland, Michigan, and this was part of the 2020 election coverage we were doing. And I went there to go profile a pastor who had quit his job at his church because they were too pro-Trump for him. And as part of that reporting, uh, the pastor introduced me to his friends and the small commercial. Liberal Christians that he's come to know.
tape: I've learned that every time I'm in this room, I am moved by smart moving.
Jaweed Kaleem: And one of them was Christy. We sat in her backyard shed and got to chatting. I kept in touch with her since, but never, uh, really reported on her herself, but she was such an interesting character that I had to go.
Gustavo: So Holland, Michigan, what's it like there
Jaweed Kaleem: Holland, Michigan is such an interesting place.
Jaweed Kaleem: First of all, it's freezing. It's very cold. It's beautiful. Also woodsy. And right next to the lake, Michigan on the Western side of Michigan, small town of about 30,000 people.
Jaweed Kaleem: It's a mostly white town and majority conservative Republican town. It's Trump country, auto county. It's called
Jaweed Kaleem: there's churches everywhere. You see billboards. During the election, you would say Trump ones. And now two years later, you see right to life don't abort. Um, various things like that. Photos of babies on billboards in front of people's houses. So abortion is a really big subject there and has been for a long time.
Gustavo: So Christie's the worship coordinator of a church there and her husband, Brian, he's the pastor what's there.
Jaweed Kaleem: They run the United church of Christ holiday, United church of Christ.
BRYAN: Well, good morning friends. Welcome to worship here at Holland UCC. It is so good to be back together. Yeah. And
Jaweed Kaleem: they began this church. Actually. They have their first meeting, I believe the weekend after Donald Trump won
tape: wherever you are tuning in from.
Jaweed Kaleem: And so this church has been kind of very political from the beginning.
tape: We are a community of. Peace and affirmation where everyone is welcomed to the table. We believe that no matter the shade of your skin, how you identify, who you love, or where you are on your journey, you are a beloved child of God,
Jaweed Kaleem: the March and women's rights marches. They March and LGBTQ pride events. They're one of the few very openly gay affirming churches in the area. They accept and promote the role of women in church. I live in west Hollywood. You'd find it everywhere. But in Holland, Michigan, you know, these are things that really can make you lose your family and friends
tape: free to take a moment and stay in.
tape: If you're able and offer a word of peace or a hello to someone who's near you.
Gustavo: yeah. United church of Christ. It's usually a more liberal Christian denomination. So how does Christy and Brian's congregation in particular feel about.
Jaweed Kaleem: The UCC as it's called they're, like you said, very liberal, you know, you'll find conservative congregations to end this denomination, but overall they're pretty liberal on abortion. She describes most likely the entire congregation. You wouldn't find them. A March for life or an anti-abortion event.
Christy: I'm not sure there's anyone who says we just need to make it illegal. There may be a few who would like it to be illegal and to a certain point. Only if it's paired with policies that are compassionate towards these women and towards these children when they're born, if they're born,
Jaweed Kaleem: but they have mixed views like anybody you would encounter, they're not all on the same page.
Christy: Some people are, you know, Nope. I am absolutely portrays a hundred percent.
Jaweed Kaleem: There's people from this congregation who have had a book. Or considered them. There's people who know family who have had abortions and there's people who take that stance of, you know, personally I'm against it, but I, I would never want it to be outlawed that it needs to be legal and healthy and available.
Christy: So we're kind of all over the board.
Gustavo: But even that diversity of thought on the abortion issue, that's not what Christy grew up with.
Jaweed Kaleem: Not at all. The story of Chrissy Berkoff is really. Pretty standard story of somebody who grew up in Western, Michigan in Holland.
Jaweed Kaleem: And so Christy grew up in the Christian reform church, which is a denomination that settled it and developed Holland. They came from the Netherlands. That's why it's called Holland. Everything is Dutch around there.
Jaweed Kaleem: The tradition and the Christian reformed church is typically that, you know, abortion is just not an option here.
Christy: We considered this murder. So if a woman had an abortion, we called her a murderer doctors who did abortions, they're murderers. They have no respect for life. There really wasn't room for exception, there wasn't room for nuance or any consideration of the context.
Jaweed Kaleem: So that gives you a sense of how strict the line is on abortion in the.
Christy: So it was, it was pretty brutal.
Jaweed Kaleem: She describes Holland as a place of rules and uniformity.
Christy: People were very friendly here to each other. Maybe a little suspicious of people who didn't look like us. People who didn't think like us, people who didn't believe like us or worship like us,
Jaweed Kaleem: if you're not in with the, what others believe you're out, you know, you're an outcast and she wasn't, uh,
Gustavo: Coming up after the break. What Christy learned when she took the abortion fight from Michigan to Washington?
Gustavo: Um, java before the break, we were talking about Kristi Berghoff's upbringing. When did she first get involved in the anti-abortion fight?
Jaweed Kaleem: Christie was involved in the anti-abortion fight from her child. From her teens, you know, as part of her Christian school, she was part of a marches and poster making in Holland as a kid against abortion in college, she was out there at abortion clinics, protesting against abortion.
Christy: I ended up studying political science and going to Washington DC because I cared so much about this issue. And I wanted to, you know, push these laws that would make it illegal because I was trying to protect the unborn.
Jaweed Kaleem: After college, she moved to DC, she worked for Pete. Hoekstra a Republican Congressman at the time her job was to work on abortion.
Christy: The team decided, Hey, you should take this issue. You should work on this issue. Become informed about this issue, respond to the emails that come in about this issue.
Jaweed Kaleem: She did let her writing. She did research all about making sure abortion is outlawed will be outlawed. So she was really in the fight against abortion for a long time.
Gustavo: So what changed her mind?
Jaweed Kaleem: It was leaving Holland, Michigan that changed her mind and going to DC. She went. To be a pro-life activist essentially. What happened when she was there was DC is politically it's mixed racially. It's diverse people from all over the country and world and all kinds of Christians they're not just conservative evangelicals or Christian reformed church people.
Jaweed Kaleem: Something else happened to Christy as well, which is she began to see how interview abortion was not just a moral or religious issue. She began to see it as a political wedge in a way.
Christy: The first time I really started thinking I'm onto something here that we're not doing what we're saying, we're doing that.
Christy: We're misleading people for political purposes. When I started hearing kind of joking conversations. Between members of Congress who were saying like, you know what, we have to keep the abortion issue alive because we got to keep the evangelical vote. The evangelicals need to be angry about this. That's how they're going to vote for us.
Christy: So hearing that kind of rhetoric and that kind of dialogue just angered me to the core.
Christy: It just became very apparent that the abortion issue was the carrot that they needed to dangle in front of the evangelical voter to keep them following them.
Jaweed Kaleem: So she kind of began to question is abortion the end all be all issue. Should it be.
Christy: And that's when I kind of started just pulling away and feeling uncomfortable with working for a Republican.
Christy: So after I worked with a Congressman, I was so confused about who I was, what I believed. I did not know what to do. I knew I wanted to learn more about Jesus and what it would look like to take his teaching seriously. So I went to. After working on Capitol hill, that's where I met my husband and we got into church planting. So starting new churches. Eventually that path took us back to Washington, DC, where we started a church. So now we've got four kids. We're living in a neighborhood that's pretty low income neighborhood. Our kids are in the public school. There's about a dozen white kids. And four of them were ours. So now I'm seeing a totally different perspective from the white middle-class Republican Christian community. I grew up in
Jaweed Kaleem: and she connected the dots between abortion and race as well.
Gustavo: Oh, wow. How so?
Jaweed Kaleem: She mentioned this one thing to me, which I actually never really thought about this, but when you see a billboard with a baby's face on it, and it's a pro-life billboard, oftentimes it's a white. She said that to me, I had something lit up in my head. I thought, oh wow. I've never realized that how racialized, even just the imagery around abortion is
Gustavo: that's a really interesting point. And it kind of gets to something that's interesting just in general, the whole political dimensions of all this, because I think most people are aware of the link between Christian evangelical political groups and the anti-abortion movement, but they might be surprised that their mobilization didn't actually start with the Roe vs. Wade.
Jaweed Kaleem: You know, when you say evangelical, usually you're talking about the Southern Baptist church and that's the biggest evangelical group in the. And historically Baptist. We're very much about the separation of church and state. That was a strong part of Baptist identity.
Jaweed Kaleem: So even Southern Baptist church in the years before Roe vs Wade, actually really statements essentially affirming the right to abortion, which is shocking to hear that. Because their possession has the complete opposite.
Jaweed Kaleem: Thanks began to change essentially as a political strategy, as a way to unify evangelicals and conservatives around one issue.
Jaweed Kaleem: Something else that happens same time was desegregation. Schools being no longer segregated or school busing happening and various scissors around civil rights and race And so there was Racist anger actually And the abortion anti-abortion costs was parallel at the same time.
Gustavo: More, after the break.
Gustavo: And we're back with LA times national course Java So Java, Kristi and her family eventually made their way back to Michigan after spending time in DC .How were they received back home? Not just by their community but by their families
Jaweed Kaleem: They both come from very conservative families, who for the most part do not agree with them Politics on abortion, on a variety of things.
Christy: It's been hard for our extended family since we moved back here. And I think it's because, like us ,they're passionate about following Jesus but we have such very different experiences in the world. Some of my family members have Lived here their whole life, they've never left. This is the world they know, this is the experience they have
Jaweed Kaleem: Christy actually lives on the same property that you grew up on. It's a big, large farm plot. When she was growing up, her dad grew flowers and sold them. Very Holland, Michigan, very Dutch-- right? And he still does that. So she lives in a separate house on that same property. And her dad still lives there Yeah . So they were welcome in some ways, but in other ways they were rejected.
Christy: I was seen as horrible. I was a horrible person. I was demonized, dehumanized, dismissed, because I didn't just fall back into place when I got back here.
Jaweed Kaleem: And there are people she went to church with, she grew up with, high school with, college with who will not talk
Christy: So it was very hard We were othered
Jaweed Kaleem: You know to take a stance like she has It's not a small thing It's not a small thing at all
Gustavo: So how does Christy identify politically now?
Jaweed Kaleem: She was a Republican for a long time. As she transitioned and her politics she become an independent.
Christy: And I definitely leaned Democrat because when I consider the values that I grew up with the things I was taught and I pair that with the perspectives I've gained in the world it leads me to vote for more Democrat candidates.
Jaweed Kaleem: She registered two years ago as a Democrats when her husband was running for Congress as a Democrat. It really was a liberating and amazing time for them but also a painful time because they received death threats They received threats online against their life and those of their four kids. So they had to leave their home and live somewhere else. And they kind of felt the worst effects of stepping out of the box in Holland, Michigan. Now she will never go to the GOP again She's made that very clear. And she just doesn't recognize the GOP anymore. She is considering becoming an independent again but she's really not in any rush. She's happy being a Democrat right now.
Gustavo: What about abortion? After spending so much time being anti-abortion activists and then sort of realizing some things, where has she landed on that issue?
Jaweed Kaleem: She takes kind of an interesting-- I wouldn't call it a middle road, is the thought really the middle.
Christy: So on the one hand, yeah, I think there's a life growing inside a woman. I think it's a separate life with its own DNA. There's something happening inside the woman. A life is being formed of life is being developed, but just being anti-abortion or wanting to put laws out there that say abortion is going to be illegal. That's not going to take care of the problem. And in most countries that hasn't had an impact.
Jaweed Kaleem: She is going to march for women's rights. She's in the March for abortion rights. She will vote for people who support abortion rights, but at the same time, she doesn't really like abortion.
Christy: At the same time. I hear my friends way on the left saying, you know, it's my body, my choice as if it's not a separate life forming inside a woman. I don't like that rhetoric either. So I struggle with it. I really struggle with it.
Jaweed Kaleem: She does think it's equivalent to killing a life, but she sees that it's necessary and a variety of cases., and not just when the mother's health is in danger and she thinks the best way to be pro-life and she doesn't really call herself pro-life either But the best way to Being pro-life, if that's how you're going to describe yourself is not to vote against abortion rights or March against
Christy: That hasn't
Christy: had an impact on the statistics very much at all So the things that do have an impact are providing contraceptives access to affordable health care access to living wages access to childcare Some of these are some of the biggest deterrent to a woman having an abortion or needing one in the first place And I don't hear Republicans advocating for those things
Gustavo: How has the abortion fight played out in Christy's home state of Michigan?
Jaweed Kaleem: Yeah you know Michigan is a typically a blue state, and mostly that's because of Detroit's, but you look everywhere else in the state, for the most part including the Western part where Holland is, it's red as red can be. Michigan has a law dating to 1931 that outlaws abortion for all reasons except for if the mother's life is in jeopardy. So it's one of those states where if Roe versus Wade is overturned or diminished in some way abortion could automatically be illegal again And there'll be a really uphill fight
Gustavo: Yea I
Gustavo: was really surprised that Michigan does still have this law but recently the democratic governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer She filed a lawsuit that challenged that 1931 line even asked the state Supreme court to look into it
tape: It has not been enforced since the Supreme court ruled on Roe vs Wade in 1973 but it could take effect if the landmark ruling is vacated
Gustavo: How much power does Whitmer have on this issue?
Jaweed Kaleem: She has some power, but not a lot. The legislature is Republican. What she's clearly doing is she's anticipating what could happen in the Supreme Court of the nation.
tape: Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, said her office would not enforce the ban unless it was ordered to by a court. I joined the governor in her sentiment of wanting to do anything and everything we can to fight Genevieve Marnin with right to life of Michigan disagrees So if Roe is overturned and the abortion decision comes back to each individual fate, Michigan will be an abortion free state, and that's what we're hoping to see in
Jaweed Kaleem: Governor Whitmer she has some budgetary power, you know there's been some efforts in the legislature to pass budgets that basically, right in pro-life causes and issues send millions of dollars toward them, and she's vetoed that and cross that out, but she's limited in what she can do.
Gustavo: Finally, there's going to be this monumental decision by the Supreme Court The summer that might determine the fate of Roe vs. Wade. Does Christy have any thoughts on how community should handle that verdict? Whatever it may be.
Jaweed Kaleem: One thing is that she's actually getting a PhD right now. And one thing she's studying is civil discourse. How people who disagree can live together and exist together in one community. So that's really a passion of hers. Also she believes and people really mobilizing to help their communities Is it people who need abortion care who will need rides to Chicago or Pennsylvania where if it's knocked down in the Supreme court it will still be available And those states or a variety of other
Christy: We need to provide access to healthcare We need to provide access to childcare and living wages for crying out loud I mean this is pretty simple basic kind of obvious stuff When you just stop and look at the landscape and hear the stories and see the faces of these women who have been struggling with this
BRYAN: What.
BRYAN: are song of response Change my heart Oh God
Jaweed Kaleem: as well as she does believe in the power of prayer She's very religious
Gustavo: thank you so much for this conversation.
Jaweed Kaleem: Thanks this...........
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode at the time daily news from the LA Next week live music returns Los Angeles continues to crack down on homeless encampments and so much more Kasha porcelain was a half on this episode and our show is produced by Shannon link Denise ghetto Kasha David Ashley Brown and angel Got it.
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