Luther regarded contraception as among the most wicked of sins. So
why had nearly all Protestant denominations embraced the practice by the
1970s?
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 parishioners,
without serious rebuke.
“Be fruitful and multiply”
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."
The wickedness of contraception
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.
The great reversal -- in England
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."
In America
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.
The 1961 North American Conference on Church and Family
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 regrettable "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.
The weakness of natural reason confronting the spirit of the age
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 accommodation 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.
Resistance and change
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.
Allan Carlson,
PhD, is the founder and president of the Howard Center for Family,
Religion, and Society and currently is Distinguished Visiting Professor
of History at Hillsdale College. He is a member of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America.
Dr Carlson is the author of numerous books -- most recently Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973,
in which he examines how mid-twentieth-century evangelical leaders
eventually followed the mainstream into a quiet embrace of
contraception, complemented by a brief acceptance of abortion.
The above article was previously published in the journal Family Policy, June 1999.
