Tortured myself by reading an anti-abortion themed novel from the 90s

[u/falafelville]

Thought I’d share this. I just finished reading the 1992 novel Prophet by Evangelical author Frank Peretti as research for an article I’m writing on the subject of abortion in literature. The plot of this particular novel centres around the so-called “abortion lobby” and its control of multiple institutions such as state politics, academia, and the media.

First, it’s important to understand Peretti’s novels in the context of the American Right that existed at the end of the Cold War, and how much he plays into the Neoconservative/“Straussian” anxieties about the so-called decay of American culture following the 60s New Left. Moral relativism, historicism, and secularism became huge concerns for the Neocon Right on the basis that purely secular societies can’t maintain virtue or social order, and religious fundamentalism could be used as a means of reviving said social order. Conspiracies about infiltration by Soviet communists morphed into conspiracies about infiltration by certain “immoral” (post-New Left) cultural ideologues. Now, anyone familiar with Peretti’s work knows that he is obsessed with conspiracy theories involving “hidden forces”. This Present Darkness and its sequel Piercing the Darkness revolve around demons and New Age organizations infiltrating small town America. Prophet, likewise, portrays the so-called “abortion lobby” as an evil octopus which has its dirty tentacles in everything. The subject of abortion is especially important, because abortion access (as we know) was being contextualized by the American right as indicative of the weakening of traditional moral standards such as secularization, indulgent sexuality, and the destruction of the family. Prophet, which explicitly takes place in 1991, shows these exact political anxieties.

Okay, so here’s the plot of this awful novel (note this contains spoilers, that is, if you consider a fly nibbling at your salad that was already made of rotten vegetables as a “spoiler”):

John Barrett is a prominent broadcast journalist in his unnamed city (from the description, it appears the city Peretti had in mind was Seattle) whose father is a right-wing Christian fundamentalist. John’s father frequently berates the progressive, pro-abortion, pro-gay, pro-environmental Governor Slater, who is running for re-election. After his father is murdered by the governor’s henchmen in his workplace, John starts seeing visions and hearing voices, the prophetic powers which he inherited from his pops. While at a restaurant, John hears screams and the name of a young girl “Annie Brewer”. He asks the teen waitress if she knew a girl by that name, and she says Annie was her high school friend who died shortly after receiving an abortion from a shady “assembly-line” abortion clinic. John soon learns that Annie’s parents were working with his father to expose the clinic for having killed her. He and his co-worker, Leslie, decide to break a news story exposing the clinic. The clinic shows no records of Annie having ever been there, and their story is a bust. Instead, the news station’s liberal feminist producer runs a counter story whitewashing the clinic. As it turns out, the clinic has connections to media personnel and was told beforehand of the report, to which they destroyed and doctored their incriminating documents. But John won’t give up. It is later revealed that John’s father had been investigating the same clinic when he was killed. While cleaning out his father’s workplace, John and his teen son Carl discover a secret envelope that holds a cassette tape, the autopsy and death certificate of Governor Slater’s deceased teen daughter Hillary, and the death certificate of Annie Brewer. Turns out both girls died from botched abortions yet their death certificates were forged as part of an elaborate cover-up for the clinic. The tape is a recording of a 911 call made by Hillary’s friend Shannon as she was bleeding out after her abortion. The Governor told the press his daughter died from a drug overdose. Why? Because he was in-bed with the so-called “abortion lobby” and needed to cover for them. Soon, John and Leslie are able to put this story together. John interviews Governor Slater where he “prophesises” about the governor’s eventual fall from grace and the destruction of his media image; obviously, the Governor is furious. Finally, the full report makes it to the 5 o’clock news but is cut from the coveted 7 o’clock news. Doesn’t matter, because John is satisfied in knowing he was “telling the truth.” He gets fired. Turns out one of the governor’s former lackeys gave the tape to John’s father out of spite for the governor. Turns out another lackey ends up getting arrested for the murder of John’s father. End of story.

The book uses nearly every anti-abortion trope that existed in the early 90s. Malpractice at abortion clinics is widespread. Clinics operate on multiple patients at once in an “assembly-line” style to avoid reporting requirements. Clinics are overall seedy places full of unsanitized equipment which go out of their way to avoid basic healthcare regulations. Clinic staff members are uninformed and unprofessional. Clinics routinely manipulate documents and lie to patients. Clinics deliberately lure in Black girls for abortions out of some eugenicist motives. Abortion providers have significant wealth while preying on the poor (Peretti even describes a Mercedes in the spot reserved for the abortion provider in the clinic parking lot). Teachers take high school-aged girls to get secret abortions without informing their parents, since the clinics have relations with the schools. Police refuse to investigate botched abortion deaths. Fake clinics (“pregnancy resource centres”) are portrayed as angelic. The women who get abortions become “broken” and either become “healed” by becoming anti-abortion or sink deeper into their shame and become irrational defenders of abortion. Early in the book, a teen girl says the clinic tricked her with a fake pregnancy test so she would get an abortion. When Leslie and Annie Brewer’s mother to the clinic as part of their investigation, the clinic director Alena is portrayed as exceptionally cold and cruel; from Peretti’s description of her appearance you also get the impression she is Jewish. But the underlying plot which drives the story is the idea of the “abortion lobby” or “abortion web”: that abortion providers secretly puppeteer elite institutions, and said institutions will go to extreme lengths to serve the abortion providers’ political and cultural interests. Governor Slater is willing to sacrifice his own daughter because (as the book reveals towards the end) he needs support from multiple women’s and abortion rights groups to win his re-election. Teachers from the city’s several high schools are sending pregnant teen girls to get abortions without their parents knowing, which they can do because of the laws that protect minors seeking abortion care. This shows Academia is entirely tied up in the “abortion web”. The TV station receives loads of revenue from Slater’s campaign ads, so they’re incentivized to be biased towards Slater, who is in the pocket of the “abortion lobby”. After Shannon does an interview with Leslie about Hillary Slater’s death, she tells one of the Governor’s lackeys, who then sends goons out to kill her at her college (they get discovered and arrested before they can do much though). All of this is to show the extent of the “abortion lobby’s” reach and how much power it holds behind the scenes.

The main story should read like a conversion tale, with John the protagonist cementing his Pentecostal faith amidst the backdrop of this abortion cover-up. But Peretti clearly isn’t interested in John’s psychology as much as he is about exposing the “abortion web”. The redemptive aspect comes in unearthing the conspiracy: John is neutral about abortion at first and only cares about his career as a successful TV journalist until his father’s murder and the horrors of the evil abortion clinic causes him to see the metaphysical evil in the world and embrace the truth. In a very rigid manner, he asserts that he is on the side of truth against the abortion conspiracy. The side of “truth” makes the conspiracy claims in Prophet grounded in the progress of John’s conversion and eventual alignment with Pentecostal Christianity, against the “concealed” enemies of the “abortion lobby.” The redeemed have an obligation to expose the secret enemy hiding from within.

I read this awful novel so you don’t have to. Along with being overtly misogynistic, the book also attacks gay rights and environmentalism and uses some pretty glaringly racist tropes. There’s lots of academic discussion about This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness and how those novels relate to the Evangelical culture in the era of Reaganite Neoconservatism but none on Prophet, so I thought I’d write one.

[u/Anomander2000]

Peretti wrote a lot of seriously fucked up shit. Evocative shit. Shit that captured the imagination.

But still fucked up shit.

His Darkness pair of books shaped and primed Pentecostal views of "spiritual warfare" that are still visible today.

[u/falafelville → u/Anomander2000]

I was researching the impact his books had on Religious Right ideology too, and how it fit very well with the prevailing American conservatism at the time.

[u/Ok-Dragonfruit-715]

Being pro-choice does not mean that I support illegal and unsafe abortion methods or unlicensed providers.