Fight for biblical foetal personhood in liberal-secular America: Contesting the hegemonic views on religion, science, and liberalism

This paper explores the epistemic contestations of the hegemonic views on religion, science, and liberalism in the official discourse of Personhood Alliance, the American Christian pro-life confederation. One of the main political agenda of Personhood Alliance includes their activism for constitutional amendment for biblical foetal personhood, banning abortion from the moment of conception. By qualitatively analysing the organisation's discursive materials, including press releases, action and strategy memos, and educational materials on abortion and worldviews (total paragraphs analysed n=352), this paper examines how the movement deploys flexible rhetorical arguments and repertoires to legitimise the validity of their Christian political demands to wider American society and to assign new meanings to the relationship between religion and liberal American state, theological and biomedical view on personhood and abortion, and theology and social justice movements such as feminism and civil rights movements. Our finding suggests that through rhetoric, the movement both construct and deny their movement as fundamentally Christian nationalist: on one hand, the movement does not shy away from proclaiming the US as Christian country whose laws should be in accordance with God's words, but on the other hand, it constructs their activism as a movement beyond Christianity, translating their arguments in secular-philosophical language such as American traditions and culture, social justice and such. Furthermore, this paper finds that the Christian personhood movement strategically adopts and reframes common arguments of the opposing side to their advantage: arguing that Christian anti-abortion and personhood movement is (1) based on 'real' science in contrast to pro-choice pseudo-science; (2) a 'real' women’s rights movement in contrast to the abortion industry profiting off of women's subordination; and (3) a 'real' emancipatory movement for the racially and economically marginalised in contrast to the racist Democrats and left-wing hypocrites.