What Kind of Life?
An Alabama Supreme Court ruling strikes at IVF and abortion rights. A new interview by the state's chief justice reveals his religious playbook.
On the same day that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children, a leader of a Christian dominionist movement released a web show episode featuring the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker.
It’s unclear when Parker and Johnny Enlow, a self-proclaimed prophet who advocates for Christian control of the “seven mountains” of society, recorded the interview. During their conversation, Parker declines to address specific cases, only speaking broadly about his belief in “returning” the government to a more religious incarnation, and indicating his support for Enlow’s ideology.
“As you emphasized in the past,” Parker tells Enlow in a Friday video first flagged by Media Matters, “we have abandoned those seven mountains, and they’ve been occupied by the opposite side.”
The Seven Mountains Mandate, of which Enlow is a leading advocate, is a theocratic conservative Christian movement that calls on followers to remake the world by seizing power in the spheres of government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment. And even without a timestamp on Parker’s interview with Enlow, the influence of theocratic thinking was clear in the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, which has had the immediate effect of pausing in vitro fertilizations in Alabama, and has long-term implications for efforts to enshrine “fetal personhood,” restrict birth control, and ban abortion.
In his concurring opinion on the ruling, Parker wrote that Alabama’s state constitution upholds a “theologically based view of the sanctity of life” and that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”
Classifying unimplanted embryos (in this case, frozen embryos stored indefinitely in a cryogenic tank) as children is not an expansive definition of life, but a cynical and narrow constriction. It’s an absurd technicality, based not in science but in a fringe interpretation of scripture, cherry-picked not for its relevance to life as we know it, but for its utility as a weapon against women’s rights.
In the hands of a deeply conservative Christian movement that disdains gender equality, this argument does worse than reduce women’s rights to those of an embryo. As Jessica Valenti writes in Abortion, Every Day, the ruling and its broader rhetoric of fetal personhood place the rights of embryos above those of women, stripping pregnant people of bodily autonomy, and limiting legal forms of birth control in the state. (If IVF is in legal jeopardy in Alabama, so are popular birth control methods like intrauterine devices, which can also prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg.)
But while the Alabama decision shares the same logic and implications as explicitly anti-abortion rulings, public response to the ruling has differed from cases that only pertain to the right to terminate a pregnancy. Abortion rights are critical to women’s health, freedom, and happiness, but abortion is often discussed—at best—as an unfortunate necessity. Pregnancy, meanwhile, is held as cause for celebration.
The Alabama ruling stands to cause untold heartbreak for families in the state who have invested their money and hopes in IVF. Without the procedure, they may be unable to conceive—and even if some doctors continue to offer IVF in compliance with the narrow outlines suggested by the court ruling, the procedure will likely become more expensive, more medically involved, and more legally challenging. The ruling is a blow against a widely understood joy: the ability to have children and raise a family, on one’s own terms.
It is not a “pro-life” ruling. For some would-be parents, it threatens to make a hoped-for life impossible; for Alabama women, it further chisels away at the available lives one might pursue. It is a ruling in the service of a narrow vision of religious power.
In his interview with Enlow, Parker described himself as part of a divinely guided legal movement.
“My heart was involved in the first wave of religious liberty defense that swept this country,” Parker said of his early career. “It’s interesting: I’ve never seen anything written about it, but all of a sudden, attorneys all across the country, with no connection whatsoever, were filing the same type cases for religious defense. And that had to be a move of the holy spirit.”
During the conversation, Enlow (a conspiracy theorist who has linked his Seven Mountains Mandate to QAnon and described Trump’s presidency as “the intervention of God”) pushed Parker to comment on Christian nationalism, which Enlow suggested was “just going back to what’s right: right principles, what the Constitution was being built on.”
Christian nationalism seeks to prioritize a hard-right Christianity in U.S. government and public life. Trump allies have recently embarked on a plan to promote Christian nationalist ideas in a second Trump administration, Politico reported this week.
Parker avoided commenting on the movement, claiming Christian nationalism is an “undefined term that’s being thrown around now to label people.” But elsewhere during the interview, he affirmed some of the ideology’s underlying principles, often referencing the Seven Mountains Mandate.
“I will say that God created government,” the Alabama chief justice said. “The fact that we have let it go into the possession of others is heartbreaking to those of us who understand, and we know it is for him.”
He closed the interview with another warning that “the other side,” has seized the seven mountains of American life, which must be retaken.
“We appreciate what you’ve [Enlow] done, is focus on what we have abandoned, what we’ve let out of our hands, and the other side has taken over, but you’re calling us back,” Parker said. “You’re giving us the overview and the vision that allows us to really contemplate what God is calling each of us to for our role in those Seven Mountains.”
“Thank you,” Enlow responded. “There’s a place for everyone. Nobody is secular. Everyone has a kingdom opportunity, a kingdom call.”
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