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For Family Policy June 1999
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The Protestant Reformation was in
significant part a protest against the perceived antinatalism
of the late Medieval Christian Church. It was a celebration of
procreation that also saw contraception and abortion as among
the most wicked of human sins, as direct affronts to the
ordinances of God. This background makes the Protestant
"sellout" on contraception in the mid 20th
Century all the more surprising, and disturbing.
As the Augustinian monk, theologian,
and "first Protestant" Martin Luther viewed his world
in the second decade of the 16th Century, he saw a
Christianity in conflict with family life and fertility. Church
tradition held that the taking of vows of chastity--as a priest,
monk, or cloistered sister--was spiritually superior to the
wedded life. In consequence, about one-third of adult European
Christians were in Holy Orders. Tied to this, Luther said, was
widespread misogyny, or a hatred of women, as reflected in a
saying attributed to St. Jerome: "If you find things going
too well, take a wife." Most certainly, the late Medieval
Church saw marriage and children as "hindrances" to
spiritual work. At the same time, Luther argued that spiritual
discipline had broken down, with vows of chastity frequently not
observed. His voice joined lay complaints about certain bishops
who kept concubines, monks who caroused in the taverns, and
priests who preyed sexually on their parishoners, without
serious rebuke.
In constructing his evangelical
family ethic, Luther placed emphasis on Genesis 1:28: "Be
fruitful and multiply." This was more than a command; he
called it "a divine ordinance [werck] which it is
not our prerogative to hinder or ignore." Indeed, Luther
saw procreation as the very essence of the human life in
Eden before the Fall. As he explained in his Lectures on
Genesis: "truly 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 brought sin into this pure, exuberant
fertility. Even so, Luther 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].
And so, Luther elevated marriage to
"the highest religious order on earth," concluding
that "we may be assured that man and woman should and must
come together in order to multiply." He stressed that it
was "not a matter of free choice…but a natural
and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a
woman and whatever is a woman must have a man." He urged
that the convents be emptied, emphasizing that "a woman is
not created to be a virgin, but to conceive and bear
children." Indeed, Luther's marital pronatalism had no
restraints: wives ought to be continually pregnant, he said,
because "this is the purpose for which they exist."
Just as important, he called men home
to serve as "housefathers" dedicated to the rearing of
Christian children. In a wonderful passage, Luther describes the
father who confesses to God "that 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 then assures him
that "when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or
performs some other mean task for his child…God, with all his
angels and creatures, is smiling…because [the father] is doing
so in Christian faith."
Luther knew that the contraceptive
mentality 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 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.
In short, Luther's fierce rejection
of contraception and abortion lay at the very heart of his
reforming zeal and his evangelical theology. His own marriage to
Katherine von Bora and their brood of children set a model for
the Protestant Christian home, one that would stand for nearly
four hundred years.
And yet, by the 1960's and 1970's,
virtually all Protestant churches--in America as in
Europe--embraced contraception and (somewhat less frequently)
abortion as compatible with Christian ethics. Pope Paul VI's
courageous opposition to these acts in the 1968 encyclical, Humanae
Vitae, won broad condemnation from Protestant leaders as
an attempt to impose "Catholic views" on the world.
Even leaders of "conservative" denominations such as
the Southern Baptist Convention would welcome as "a blow
for Christian liberty" the 1973 Roe v. Wade
decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that legalized abortion as a
free choice during the first six months (and in practice for all
nine months) of a pregnancy. Not a single significant Protestant
voice raised opposition in the 1960's and early 1970's to the
massive entry of the U.S. government into the promotion and
distribution of contraceptives, nationally and worldwide.
How had a central pillar
of the evangelical Protestant ethic been reversed so completely?
Some recent historical investigations
offer partial answers. For example, the first formal break came
within the Anglican communion, or the Church of England, with
the clergy themselves leading the way. In 1911, the
neo-Malthusian advocates of population limitation celebrated the
results of England's new census, showing that Anglican clergymen
had an average of only 2.3 children, well-below their 1874
figure of 5.2 . The Malthusians saw this as clear evidence of
deliberate family limitation. The Census results also added fuel
to the arguments of dissident clergymen that a solution to
England's poverty problems must include the birth of fewer
children. These pressures culminated at the Anglican Church's
1930 Lambeth Conference, where delegates heard an address by
birth control advocate Helena Wrighton on the advantages of
contraception for the poor. On a 193 to 67 vote, the Conference
passed 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 Christian
principles."
There was an immediate American
Protestant echo. In 1931, the Committee on Home and Marriage of
the Federal Council of Churches (an ecumenical body that
embraced Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Church of
the Brethren denominations) issued a statement defending family
limitation and urging the repeal of laws prohibiting
contraceptive education and sales.
Even a church body committed to a
defense of pure Lutheran orthodoxy--the Lutheran Church-Missouri
Synod (LCMS)--stumbled on this question. As late as 1923, the
Synod's official publication, 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." A popular 1932 volume
on pastoral theology directly paraphrased Luther in stating that
"women with many children are in middle age much more
beautiful than those who have few children."
Yet a countercurrent was gaining
force, with LCMS clergy and theologians in the dubious lead.
Similar to the Anglican experience, the average number of
children found in clerical families fell from 6.5 in 1890 to 3.7
by 1920. The overall LCMS baptism rate declined from 58 baptisms
per 1,000 members in 1885, to 37 in 1913, and 24 in 1932. In the
late 1940's, a leading LCMS professor of theology, Alfred
Rehwinckel, said that Luther had simply been wrong: the Genesis
phrase, "Be fruitful and multiply," was merely a blessing,
not a command. Rehwinckel went on to defend Margaret
Sanger with a sympathetic history of family planning. By 1964,
the Synod officially held that problems of poverty and
overpopulation should help guide thinking about family size.
Such views spread at a still more
rapid pace among the Protestant "mainline" churches.
Held near the end of the post World War II "baby
boom," when American family life for a brief period again
seemed somewhat healthy, the 1961 North American Conference on
Church and Family of the National Council of Churches (successor
to the FCC) can only be called extraordinary. Setting a radical
theme, keynote speaker J.C. Wynn of Colgate Divinity School
dismissed existing Protestant books and pronouncements on the
family and sexuality as "depressingly platitudinous"
and "comfortably dull," a regretable "works
righteousness." A second keynoter praised this conference
for its intended merger of Christianity with new insights from
the sciences, "a mighty symbol of the readiness of the
churches to ground their policy formation in objective, solid
data." Other speakers formed a veritable "Who's
Who" of sexual radicalism. Lester Kirkendall said that
America had "entered a sexual economy of abundance,"
where contraception would allow unrestrained sexual
experimentation without the burden of children. Wardell Pomeroy
of the [Kinsey] Institute of Sex Research explained how the new
science of sexology required the abandonment of all old
moral categories. Psychologist Evelyn Hooker [sic] praised the
healthily 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
"mean spirited" anti-abortion laws.
Not a single speaker spoke in the
spirit of the old Protestant pronatalist ethic. Indeed, this
ethic now stood as the chief enemy. The conference endorsed
development of a new evangelical sexual ethic, one
"relevant to our culture," sensitive to the
overpopulation crisis, and grounded in modern science.
Member denominations soon complied.
In a 1970 Report, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) rejected the
old "taboos and prohibitions" and gave its blessing to
"mass contraceptive techniques," homosexuality, and
low-cost abortion on demand. The same year, the Lutheran Church
in America fully embraced contraception and abortion as
responsible choices. And in 1977, the United Church of Christ
celebrated the terms "freedom,"
"sensuousness," and "androgyny," and
declared free access to contraception and abortion as matters of
justice.
Yet these historical episodes still
beg the question: why? The easiest answer might be to point to
the multiple "revolutions" of the last two-hundred
years--industrial, urban, scientific, and democratic--as
creating an overwhelming pressure for accomodation and change,
which no religious institution could stop.
And yet, the very existence of Humanae
Vitae gives a counter example of a religious body that
has mounted a fierce opposition to the spirit of the age. There
is no small irony in the fact that it would be the Roman Pontiff
who would lead (often painfully alone) the opposition to
contraception at the end of the 20th Century. Perhaps
the Catholic hierarchical model, reserving final decision on
matters of faith and morals to the successor of Peter, has
proved more resilient than the Protestant reliance on individual
conscience and democratic church governance?
Or perhaps Luther would simply
acknowledge that his old enemy, "that clever harlot,
Natural Reason," had come back in new guise at the Second
Millenium's end. By natural reason, he meant the wisdom of the
world, unformed and unregulated by Divine witness in Holy
Scripture. As he "quoted" this beast back in 1522:
Alas, must I rock the baby,
wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay
up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal
its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my
wife, provide for her, labor at my trade, take care of
this, and take care of that,…endure this and endure
that…? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself?
In our time, these same sentiments
might be found on the lips of "the Playboy philsopher,"
the "female eunuch," or the "sexologist" at
an NCC Christian conference. Luther well understood the nature
of human sin and the power of fallen "reason" to twist
words and science to its ends. He would be disappointed by the
near-collapse of his evangelical family and sexual ethic; but he
probably would not be surprised.
And yet there are alternate
Protestant Christian models, even in our own troubled age.
Scattered bands rooted in radical Anabaptism--including the
Hutterites and the Amish--have kept "natural reason"
and the modern world at bay by the cultivation and defense of
separatist, rural identities. Ever open to the transmission of
new life, their families are large and their marriages
relatively strong. "Fundamentalist" Christians have
also held more tightly to a positive view of fertility. A 1958
survey in the Southern Appalachians found that 81 percent of
"fundamentalists" believed birth control to be
"always" or "sometimes" wrong, compared to
only 40 percent of "nonfundamentalists." In 1980, the
Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution raising serious
questions about birth control. More recently, Protestant renewal
movements count many couples that reject contraception and
welcome the children that God sends, in His time.
It is these communities, I suggest,
which remain faithful to the authentic evangelical family and
sexual ethic, crafted in the 16th Century. The
evidence suggesting their growth at the end of the 20th
Century may be the sign of a better, more family-centric time
ahead.
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