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It is a reckless speaker who reopens Sixteenth Century disputes
between Roman Catholics and the Protestant reformers. All the same, I have
agreed to do so tonight, in the interest of a greater good. I want to
underscore that in accepting this talk, my purpose is not to say who was right
or who was wrong, then or now. I am here as an historian, not an advocate.
(Although, on a personal note, I will say at the outset that I come to you as a
“cradle Lutheran” and also that I believe Martin Luther was wrong about what he
called the impossibility of lifelong celibacy; I have come to know too many
faithful Catholic priests to accept that.)
However, back to the main point: in order to
understand why the Protestant churches maintained unity with the Catholic church
on the birth control question for four centuries, only to abandon this
unity during the first half of the 20th Century, we also need to
understand the Protestant vision of family and fertility, how it differed from
the Catholic vision, and how this difference played out over the last 100
years. So, I ask the Catholics here tonight—and I am told that there are some
Catholics here—to bear with me for a while, for I am going to delve into some
Protestant theology: both the positive ideals and the dilemma that eventually
emerged.
Early Sixteenth Century Europe was an era very different from ours.
The late Medieval Church claimed about one of every four adults in celibate
orders, serving as priests, sisters, monks, or in celibate military and trading
groups such as the Teutonic Knights. Over the centuries, the religious orders
had accumulated through bequests vast landed estates, and gathered in the wealth
that came through this ownership of productive land. The trading orders held
remarkable assets in land, goods, and gold.
Many orders were nonetheless faithful to their
purposes and vows and used this wealth to tend the sick, help the poor, and lift
prayers to Heaven.
However, in others, spiritual discipline had grown lax. Indeed, sexual scandals
of a sort rocked the church of that era. To support these latter two
statements, I draw strictly on Catholic witnesses. For example, the great Dutch
theologian Desiderius Erasmus, while always loyal to Rome, complained: “Let them
prate as they will of the status of monks and virgins. Those who under the
pretext of celibacy live in [sexual] license might better be castrated….[T]here
is a horde of priests among whom chastity is rare.” Philip of Burgundy, the
Catholic Bishop of Utrecht and great uncle of the Holy Roman Emporer Charles V,
admitted that chastity was nearly impossible among clerics and monks who were
“pampered with high living and tempted by indolence.” This problem festered
until the reform-minded Council of Trent convened in 1545.
The key figure in developing a Protestant family ethic was Martin
Luther. Himself an Augustinian monk and priest, Luther also served as Professor
of Theology at the University of Wittenberg. In theological terms, Luther’s
opposition to contraception was closely tied to his rejection of celibacy.
Luther’s critics have seen him as a failed
celibate, a man unable to control his lusts. Luther blamed the doctrine of
celibacy itself. For Luther, writing in his 1521 treatise on The Estate
of Marriage, God’s words in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply and
fill the earth,” represented more than a blessing; even more than a command;
they were rather “a divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to
hinder or ignore.” Addressing the celibate Teutonic Knights, the Reformer also
emphasized Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make
him a helper who shall be with him.” Setting himself squarely against
the Papacy and the Church Councils here, Luther declared: “[w]hoever would be a
true Christian must grant that this saying of God is true, and believe that God
was not drunk when he spoke these words and instituted marriage.” Except among
those rare persons—“not more than one in a thousand” Luther said at one
point—who received true celibacy as a special gift from God, marriage and
procreation were divinely ordained. As he wrote: “For it is not a matter
of free choice or decision but a natural and necessary thing, that
whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.”
The Geneva-based reformer John Calvin put even
greater emphasis on Genesis 1:28. He argued that these words—“Be fruitful and
multiply and fill the earth”—represented the only command of God made
before The Fall that was still active after God drove Adam and Eve
out of Eden. This gave these phrases a unique power and importance.
While occasionally acknowledging in
unenthusiastic fashion St. Paul’s defense of the single life, the Reformers were
far more comfortable with the social order described in Luther’s
Exhortation to the Knights of the Teutonic Order. “We were all created
to do as our parents have done, to beget and rear children. This is a duty
which God has laid upon us, commanded, and implanted in us, as is proved by our
bodily members, our daily emotions, and the example of all mankind.” Marriage
with the expectation of children, in this view, represented the natural, normal,
and necessary form of worldly existence.
Marital fertility was also a spiritual
expression. Luther saw procreation as the very essence of the human life
in Eden before the Fall. As he wrote in his commentary on Genesis:
[T]ruly
in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than
procreation. After the proclamation of the name of God it is the most important
activity Adam and Eve in the State of innocence could carry on—as free from sin
in doing this as they were in praising God.
The fall of Adam and Eve into sin interrupted this pure, exuberant potential
fertility. Even so, the German reformer praised each conception of a new child
as an act of “wonderment…wholly beyond our understanding,” a miracle bearing the
“lovely music of nature,” a faint reminder of life before the Fall:
This
living together of husband and wife—that they occupy the same home, that they
take care of the household, that together they produce and bring up children—is
a kind of faint image and a remnant, as it were, of that blessed living together
[in Eden].
Elsewhere, Luther called procreation “a most outstanding gift” and “the greatest
work of God.”
Accordingly, as his theology mandated, Luther
sharply condemned the contraceptive mentality that was alive and well in his own
time. He noted that this “inhuman attitude, which is worse than barbarous,” was
found chiefly among the well born, “the nobility and princes.” Elsewhere, he
linked contraception and abortion to selfishness:
How
great, therefore, the wickedness of [fallen] human nature is! How many girls
there are who prevent conception and kill and expel tender fetuses, although
procreation is the work of God! Indeed, some spouses who marry and live
together…have various ends in mind, but rarely children.
Regarding the sin of Onan, as recorded in Genesis and involving the
form of contraception now known as “withdrawal,” Luther wrote: “Onan must have
been a most malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. This is a most disgraceful
sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity,
yes, a Sodomitic sin…that worthless fellow refused to exercise love.”
On this matter, Luther was again joined by Calvin who, in the
strongest possible terms, equated the sin of Onan with abortion, adding: “The
voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a
monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may
fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of
the [human] race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring.”
A second element in Luther’s Protestant family
ethic was his concept of a divine call to the vocations of husbandry and
housewifery. Emphasizing human frailty, Luther argued that a successful marriage
was exceedingly difficult to attain if ungrounded in religious faith. In
such cases, the delights of marriage—“that husband and wife cherish one another,
become one, serve one another”—would be commonly overshadowed by the
responsibilities, duties, and attendant loss of freedom which the married state
entailed.
Luther believed that happiness in marriage
depended on recognition that the married estate, with its attendant
responsibilities, was “pleasing to God and precious in his sight.” Indeed, he
argued that God called women—all women—to be Christian wives and mothers.
Similarly, God called men—all men—home to serve as Christian “housefathers.” In
one passage, Luther describes the father who confesses to God: “I am not worthy
to rock the little babe or wash its diapers, or to be entrusted with the care of
the child and its mother.” Luther assures him that “when a father goes ahead
and washes diapers…for his child, God, with all his angels and creatures, is
smiling, because he is doing so in Christian faith.” Luther says that in the
Commandment, “Honor Thy Father and Mother,” we see that “God has done marriage
the honor of putting it…immediately after the honor due to himself.” The
Reformer concludes that “…there is no higher office, estate, condition, or
work…than the estate of marriage.”
The third element of the Protestant family ethic involved praise for
parenting as a task and responsibility. In so doing, Luther energized the
Christian home as an autonomous social sphere. “There is no power on earth that
is nobler or greater than that of parents,” stated the Reformer. He added:
“Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their
children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel.” One of
Luther’s colleagues, Justus Menius, explained the task of parenting in more
detail:
The
diligent rearing of children is the greatest service to the world, both in
spiritual and temporal affairs, both for the present life and for posterity.
Just as one turns young calves into strong cows and oxen, rears young colts to
be brave stallions, and nurtures small tender shoots into great fruit-bearing
trees, so must we bring up children to be knowing and courageous adults, who
serve both land and people and help both to prosper.
According to Harvard University historian Steven
Ozment, in his book When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe:
“Never has the art of parenting been more highly praised and parental authority
more wholeheartedly supported than in Reformation Europe.” Child rearing, in
this view, was not just “woman’s work.” In the Protestant home, father and
mother would share the duties of child rearing to an unusual degree. Luther saw
the years from birth to age six as a time when a child’s reason was “asleep.”
During these years, the mother took the dominant role in child care. But at age
seven, fathers should take the lead, with special responsibility for the moral
and practical education of children. Inspired by Luther’s message and example,
publishers turned out dozens of so-called “Housefather” books, 16th
century “self-help” volumes for dads.
How might we judge the success of the Protestant
family ethic? For nearly four centuries it worked reasonably well. Relative to
contraception, the Protestant opposition remained firm. Writing in the late 18th
Century, for example, John Wesley—the founder of Methodism—also condemned the
sin of Onan, adding: “[o]bserve, the thing which he did displeased the Lord—and
it is to be feared, thousands, especially of single persons, by this very thing,
still displease the Lord, and destroy their own souls.” The 19th
Century Reformed Pastor Johann Peter Lange described contraception as “a most
unnatural wickedness, and a grievous wrong. This sin…is [as] destructive as a
pestilence that walketh in darkness, destroying directly the body and the soul
of the young.” At their 1908 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Bishops recorded
“with alarm the growing practice of artificial restriction of the family and
earnestly call upon all Christian people to discountenance the use of all
artificial means of restriction as demoralizing to character and hostile to
national welfare.” As late as 1923, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s
official magazine The Witness accused The Birth Control Federation
of America of spattering “this country with slime” and labelled birth-control
advocate Margaret Sanger a “she devil.” Pastor Walter Maier, founding preacher
in the 1930’s of the long-running Lutheran Hour radio program,
called contraceptives “the most repugnant of modern aberrations, representing a
twentieth century renewal of pagan bankruptcy.”
On doctrine, then, Protestant leaders held
firm. The Achilles heel, the weakness of the Protestant position, actually lay
elsewhere: namely, in the informal institution of the Pastor’s Family.
In rejecting life long celibacy, in casting marriage as the highest order and
calling on earth, in elevating motherhood and homemaking, in emphasizing the
spiritual authority and practical tasks of fatherhood, in refocusing adult lives
around the tasks of childrearing, in celebrating procreation and large families,
and in condemning contraception, Luther implicitly laid a great burden on
Protestant clerics. They must serve as examples for their congregations;
specifically, they must marry and bear large families themselves. Where the
Catholic priest or the cloistered sister faced the challenge of lifelong
celibacy, the Protestant cleric faced the lifelong challenge of building a model
and fruitful home.
Luther again supplied the prototype, in his
marriage to Katharine von Bora. By the standards of the time, they married
late. Still, they brought six children into the world and their busy home
served as the inspiration to generations of Protestant clerics. This special
role of Pastor’s Family was rarely codified in church doctrine; however, the
Protestant rejection of both celibacy and contraception created a visible
expectation. Barring infertility, a faithful Protestant Pastor and his wife
would be parents to a brood of children.
And again, for nearly four centuries, so it
was. The Protestant family ethic, where it held sway, worked to reshape the
culture in family-affirming, child rich ways. Indeed, the large families of
Anglican, Lutheran, and Calvinist clergy become something of a problem for
relatively poor rural parishes, and something of a comic image for novelists.
For example, in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 book The Vicar of Wakefield,
we find a country pastor with six children: a naive but charitable fellow who
ends up (with his brood of children) in debtors prison, only to be rescued from
his misfortunes by Sir Thornhill. And, as late as 1874, the average Anglican
clergyman still had 5.2 living children. In 1890, the average Lutheran
Church—Missouri Synod pastor had 6.5 children.
The great break in this tradition came in 1911.
In that year, the new Census of England showed that the average family size of
Anglican clergy had fallen to only 2.3 children, a stunning decline of 55
percent. The British Malthusian League—a strong advocate of birth control—had a
field day exposing what it called the hypocrisy of the priests. As the League
explained, the Church of England continued to view contraception as a sin, and
yet its clerics and bishops were obviously engaging in the practice. Apparently
only the poor and the ignorant had to obey the Church. And in practice, there
was not much that Anglican leaders could say in response. This propaganda
continued for another two decades. Perhaps as a convenient way out of their
dilemma, some Anglican theologians bought into the argument that Britain’s
poverty problems required the birth of fewer children. Pressures culminated at
the Anglican Church’s 1930 Lambeth Conference, where Bishops heard an address by
birth-control advocate Helena Wrighton, on the advantages of contraception for
the poor. On a vote of 193 to 67, the Anglican bishops approved a resolution
stating that:
In
those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or
avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding
complete abstinence, other methods may be used, provided that this is done in
the light of the same Christian principles.
So was Christian unity on
the contraception question broken.
The same stress line emerged in America. For example, in the very
conservative Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, the family size of clerical
families also fell, reaching 3.7 children in 1920, 42 percent below the 1890
number. Here, too, the Protestant clergy had ceased to be models of a fruitful
home for their congregations and the broader culture. Instead, a culture
infected by neo-Malthusian ideas was reshaping the clerical family. During the
1930’s, the Missouri Synod quietly dropped its campaign against the Birth
Control League of America. In the 1940’s, one of the Church’s leading
theologians, Albert Rehwinkel, concluded that Luther had simply been wrong.
God’s words in Genesis 1:28—“be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”—were
not a command; they were merely a blessing, and an optional one at that. Please
note: As in England, so in America, the change in clerical family behavior came before the change in doctrine.
Meanwhile, among the more mainstream American Protestants, the embrace
of contraception occurred in direct fashion. In 1931, the Committee on Home and
Marriage of the old Federal Council of Churches—following the Anglican
lead—issued a statement defending family limitation and arguing for the repeal
of laws prohibiting contraceptive education and sales. Some member
churches—notably the Southern Methodists and the Northern Baptists—protested the
action; the Southern Presbyterians even withdrew their membership from the
Federal Council for a decade because of this statement.
All the same, by the early 1960’s, the successor National Council of
Churches (NCC) was fully part of the sexual revolution. At the NCC’s
astonishing and deeply disturbing 1961 North American Conference on Church and
Family, population control advocate Lester Kirkendall argued that America had
“entered a sexual economy of abundance,” where contraception would allow
unrestrained sexual experimentation. Wardell Pomeroy of the Kinsey Institute
for Sex Research also addressed the NCC meeting, explaining how the new science
of sexology required the abandonment of all old moral categories. Psychologist
Evelyn Hooker celebrated the sterile lives of homosexuals. Planned Parenthood’s
Mary Calderone made the case for universal contraceptive use, while colleague
Alan Guttmacher urged the reform of America’s so-called “mean-spirited”
anti-abortion laws. Not a single voice in the spirit of Luther or Calvin could
be heard at this 1961 “Christian conference;” indeed, the conferees saw the
traditional Protestant family ethic focused on exuberant marital fertility as
the problem.
All of this logically followed the Protestant acceptance of
contraception. As I have argued, the potential Protestant weakness on birth
control lay within its formal leadership, its clergy. Rejecting both life long
celibacy and contraception, classic Protestant theology required
family-centered and child rich pastors. When those clerical leaders, in the
privacy of their bedrooms, broke faith with their tradition, when pastors and
their wives consciously limited their families, the Protestant opposition to
contraception faced a crisis.
The ordination of women by a number of Protestant groups, commonly
initiated in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, represented another surrender to the
broader culture, now under heavy feminist influence. It also struck a nearly
fatal blow to the informal Protestant institution of Pastor’s Wife. By upending
and confusing gender roles, by granting to women the same religious functions
long held exclusively by men, the ordination of women marginalized the special
works and responsibilities of clerical wives, including their task of being
model mothers with full quivers of children. Even more than before,
contraception became their answer.
When the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1973 Roe and
Doe decisions, overturned the anti-abortion laws of all fifty states,
relatively few Protestants voiced opposition. Indeed, some denominations had
already endorsed liberalized abortion. The prominent Southern Baptist Pastor
W.A. Criswell openly welcomed the decision, claiming: “I have always felt that
it was only after the child was born and had life separate from its mother that
it became an individual person.”
All the same, it would be the eventual turn by evangelical Protestants
to the pro-life position that would also reopen the contraception question. An
early sign of this shift occurred in 1975 when a young editor at
Christianity Today—Harold O.J. Brown—authored a short anti-abortion
editorial. From his home in L’Abri, Switzerland, the neo-Calvinist Frances
Schaeffer weighed in with books such as How Should We Then Live?,
which mobilized evangelicals against abortion. This campaign grew through the
founding of new evangelical organizations with pro-life orientations, including
Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, and Concerned Women for America.
At first, this pro-life evangelicalism either avoided the issue of
contraception or accepted the practice as being different than abortion.
However, over time, it has become ever more difficult to draw a line between
birth control and abortion; the “contraceptive mentality” embraces both; some
forms of “contraception” are in practice abortifacients. In his last years,
Frances Schaeffer seemed to be moving toward the historic Christian view of
contraception. Since 1980, several Resolutions adopted by the Southern Baptists
have criticized contraception. By the close of the twentieth century, the
Family Research Council—to choose another example—featured special reports on
“The Empty Promise of Contraception” and “The Bipartisan Blunder of Title X,”
the latter referring to Uncle Sam’s domestic birth control program.
In addition, more attention has turned to those Protestant groups that
have never abandoned opposition to contraception: the Hutterites; the Old Order
Amish; and other Mennonite and Anabaptist sects. While long on the margins of
American life, they are in the early 21st century among the fastest
growing religious groups in the country.
There have been other signs of Protestant rethinking on this question,
including individual pastors and their wives who have opened their lives to
bringing a full quiver of children into the world. For example, Pastor Matt
Trewhella of Mercy Seat Christian Church in Milwaukee concluded that “we have no
God-given right to manipulate God’s design for marriage by using birth control;”
after a vasectomy reversal, he and wife Clara have had seven more children.
While surely in the minority, the Trewhellas are
not alone. In so acting, they rediscover their distinctive theology and their
heritage; and they accept their special responsibility to serve as witnesses to
the original Protestant understanding of Divine intent. Importantly, they are
also rebuilding a common Christian front on the issue of contraception, one lost
in the dark days of the first half of the 20th Century.
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