In my previous
posting, I indicated that I have started a series of articles
on the subject of “the intrinsic evil of contraception.” I opened the series with a look at the
Catholic teaching tradition on contraception. I believe
that first article posted leaves no doubt that the Catholic Church has held to a
very consistent position against the evil of contraception since day one.
This
posting explores a Protestant view of contraception since Reformation days. It
is indeed a surprising history compiled by Allan Carlson, President of The
Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois. “Children
of the Reformation” first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Touchstone.
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By Allan Carlson
It is a reckless analyst who risks reopening
sixteenth-century disputes between Roman Catholics and the Protestant
Reformers. I do so in the interest of a greater good, but my purpose is not to
say who was right or who was wrong. I would simply like to explore why the
Protestant churches maintained unity with the Catholic Church on the
contraception question for four centuries, only to abandon this unity during
the first half of the twentieth century.
I write as a historian, not an advocate. (I am a “cradle
Lutheran,” but one who believes 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.)
Orders &
Disorders
To understand the change in Protestant thought and practice,
we need to understand the Protestant vision of family and fertility,
particularly as expressed by Luther and Calvin, and how it has changed over the
last hundred years.
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 either as priests, nuns, or monks or in celibate
military and trading groups such as the Teutonic Knights.
Over the centuries, the religious orders had, through
bequests, accumulated 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. I draw
strictly on Catholic witnesses for this.
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, 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.
God Was Not Drunk
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. The first element in
Luther’s Protestant family ethic was a broad celebration not simply of marriage
but of procreation.
For Luther, God’s words in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and
multiply and fill the earth,” were more than a blessing, even more than a
command. They were, he declared in his 1521 treatise on The Estate of Marriage,“a
divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.”
Addressing the celibate Teutonic Knights, he 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.” The “true Christian,” he declared, “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.”
John Calvin put even greater emphasis on Genesis 1:28. He
argued that these words 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 them
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.
Essential Procreation
Marriage with the expectation of children 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, 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 both 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. . . . Surely at such a time the order
of nature established by God in procreation should be followed.” Onan was “that
worthless fellow” who “refused to exercise love.”
On this matter, Luther was again joined by Calvin. In his Commentary
on Genesis, he wrote that “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 few decades later, the Synod of Dordt would declare that
Onan’s act “was even as much as if he had, in a manner, pulled forth the fruit
out of the mother’s womb and destroyed it.”
Religiously Married
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, he argued in The Estate of
Marriage that a successful union 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
commonly be overshadowed by the responsibilities, duties, and attendant loss of
freedom which the married state entailed.
He 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 and called men—all men—home
to serve as Christian “housefathers.”
In The Estate of Marriage,
Luther described 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.” He responded 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.”
In the Commandment, “Honor Thy Father and Mother,” he wrote
to the Teutonic Knights, we see that “God has done marriage the honor of
putting it . . . immediately after the honor due to himself.” He concluded that
“there is no higher office, estate, condition, or work . . . than the estate of
marriage.”
The third element of Luther’s Protestant family ethic was
praise for parenting as a task and responsibility. In exalting this task, he
energized the Christian home as an autonomous social sphere. “There is no power
on earth that is nobler or greater than that of parents,” declared the Reformer
in The Estate of Marriage. 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 his 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,” he wrote in an advice book on child rearing.
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 childcare. 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, sixteenth-century “self-help” volumes for dads.
Luther’s Burden
How might we judge the success of the Protestant family
ethic? For nearly four centuries it worked reasonably well, as judged by its
understanding of the divine ordinance to be fruitful and replenish the earth.
Accordingly, the Protestant opposition to contraception
remained firm. Writing in the late eighteenth century, for example, John
Wesley, the founder of Methodism, also condemned the sin of Onan, adding, “The
thing which he did displeased the Lord.”
The nineteenth-century Reformed Pastor Johann Peter Lange,
in his Christian Dogmatics, 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 world’s Anglican
bishops recorded “with alarm the growing practice of artificial restriction of
the family.” They “earnestly call[ed] 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 labeled birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger a “she devil.” Pastor Walter
Maier, founding preacher 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 well into
the twentieth century. The weakness of the Protestant position actually lay
elsewhere: in the informal institution of the Pastor’s Family. One possible
cause of the change in Protestant teaching not often considered is the changed
family life of the clergy themselves.
In rejecting lifelong 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 child rearing, in celebrating
procreation and large families, and in condemning contraception, Luther
implicitly laid a great burden on Protestant clerics.
They had to serve as examples for their congregations, and
specifically, they had to marry and bear large families themselves. Where the
Catholic priest or the cloistered monk or nun 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, but still
brought six children into the world, and their busy home served as the
inspiration to generations of Protestant clerics.
This special role of the Pastor’s Family was rarely codified
in church doctrine, but 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.
It was a difficult expectation to satisfy, and would only
become more difficult as economic and cultural changes made providing for large
families more burdensome and having many children less and less socially
acceptable. Not surprisingly, many seem to have turned to contraception to
limit their families, and equally unsurprisingly, this affected their
articulation of the church doctrine for which they were responsible.
Declining Numbers
But again, for nearly four centuries, where it held sway,
the Protestant family ethic, exemplified in the pastor’s family, worked to
reshape the culture in family-affirming, child-rich ways.
Indeed, the large families of Anglican, Lutheran, and
Calvinist clergy became something of a problem for relatively poor rural
parishes, and something of a comic image for novelists. In Oliver Goldsmith’s
1766 book The Vicar of Wakefield,we find a country pastor with six children who
ends up (with his brood of children) in debtor’s prison, only to be rescued
from his misfortunes by a benefactor.
As late as 1874, the average Anglican clergyman in England
still had 5.2 living children. In 1911, however, just three years after the
bishops had condemned contraception, 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 contraception—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.
There was not much that Anglican leaders could say in
response. This propaganda continued for another two decades, and soon some
Anglican theologians were arguing that Britain’s poverty required the birth of
fewer children.
Pressures culminated at the 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 bishops
(representing not only England but also America, Canada, and the other former
colonies) 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.
This was the first official statement by a major church body
in favor of contraception. Thus was Christian unity on the question broken. The
decision was condemned by many religious and secular bodies, including the
editors of the Washington Post. Pope
Pius XI responded to it in his encyclical Casti
Connubii four months later.
The same stress line emerged in America. For example, in the
very conservative Lutheran Church/Missouri Synod, the average pastor in 1890
had 6.5 children. The number fell to 3.7 children in 1920, 42 percent below the
1890 number. Other churches saw a similar decline. Here, too, the Protestant
clergy had ceased to be models of a fruitful home for their congregations and
the broader culture.
During the 1930s, the Missouri Synod quietly dropped its
campaign against the Birth Control League of America. In the 1940s, 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.
Malthusian Infection
A culture infected by neo-Malthusian ideas was reshaping the
clerical family. Please note: As in England, so in America, the change in
clerical family behavior came before the change in doctrine.
Meanwhile, mainstream American Protestants embraced
contraception directly. In 1931, the Committee on Home and Marriage of the old
Federal Council of Churches 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, and the Southern Presbyterians even withdrew
their membership from the Federal Council for a decade, but they were the
minority and even their protests did not last.
In only three decades, the Lambeth Conference’s qualified
approval would turn into full celebration. At the astonishing and deeply
disturbing 1961 North American Conference on Church and Family, sponsored by
the National Council of Churches (successor to the Federal Council),
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
explained 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 “mean-spirited” anti-abortion laws.
Not a single voice in the spirit of Luther or Calvin could
be heard at this “Christian conference.” Indeed, the conferees saw the
traditional Protestant family ethic focused on exuberant marital fertility as
the problem and the act that Luther, Calvin, and others had condemned as the
obvious answer.
In a way, though, this celebration of such a diversity of
sexual practices followed the Protestant acceptance of contraception, which
followed from the defection of the Protestant clergy from the Protestant Family
Ethic. Rejecting both lifelong 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.
Typical of a less radical development was the 1981 decision
of the Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations, which
argued that although “Be fruitful” is “both a command and a mandate,” “in the
absence of Scriptural prohibition” contraception was acceptable “within a
marital union which is, as a whole, fruitful.” And if contraception is
acceptable, “we will also recognize that sterilization may under some
circumstances be an acceptable form of contraception.”
A later, additional development only increased the appeal of
contraception to the pastors of these churches. The ordination of women by a
number of Protestant groups, commonly initiated in the late 1960s and 1970s,
struck a nearly fatal blow to the informal Protestant institution of the
Pastor’s Wife.
By upending and confusing sexual differences and by granting
to women the 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.
The Evangelical Turn
It would be the eventual turn by Evangelical Protestants to
the pro-life position on abortion that would for some also reopen the
contraception question. When in 1973 the US Supreme Court, in its Roe and Doe decisions, overturned the anti-abortion laws of all fifty
states, relatively few Protestants voiced opposition. Indeed, some mainline
denominations had already endorsed liberalized abortion.
The prominent Southern Baptist Pastor W. A. Criswell openly
welcomed the decision. Representing a position many Evangelicals then took, he
claimed: “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.” Others drew
the line at some point before birth, but few rejected the decisions outright.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) itself had in 1971
urged its members to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of
abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal
deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to
the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.
However, reflecting the movement of Evangelicalism as a
whole (though not mainline Protestantism), in 2003, the SBC declared that this
and the 1974 resolution “accepted unbiblical premises of the abortion rights
movement, forfeiting the opportunity to advocate the protection of defenseless
women and children” and that “we lament and renounce statements and actions by
previous Conventions and previous denominational leadership that offered
support to the abortion culture.”
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 Francis Schaeffer mobilized Evangelicals against
abortion with books such as How Should We
Then Live?. This campaign grew through the founding of new Evangelical
organizations with pro-life orientations, including Focus on the Family, the
Family Research Council, and Concerned Women for America.
At first, this pro-life Evangelicalism avoided the issue of
contraception. However, over time, it has become ever more difficult for many
to draw an absolute line between contraception and abortion, because—whatever
theological distinctions they made between the two—the “contraceptive
mentality” embraces both, and some forms of “contraception” are in practice
abortifacients.
A Major Rethinking
“ It is clear that there is a major rethinking going on
among Evangelicals on this issue, especially among young people,” R. Albert
Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently
told the Chicago Tribune. “There is a
real push back against the contraceptive culture now.”
In his last years, Francis Schaeffer seemed to be moving
toward the historic Christian view of contraception. Since 1980, several resolutions
adopted by the Southern Baptists at their annual meeting have criticized
contraception. By the close of the twentieth century, the Family Research
Council featured special reports on “The Empty Promise of Contraception” and
“The Bipartisan Blunder of Title X,” the latter referring to the domestic
contraception program in the United States.
Conservative Calvinist publishers are producing books not
only against contraception but promoting Natural Family Planning. A movement of
Missouri Synod Lutherans is working to overturn their church’s current teaching
and return it to Luther’s, and observers report a new interest in the
traditional teaching among conservative movements in the mainline churches.
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.” He had his vasectomy reversed, and he and his wife Clara have had
seven more children.
While surely in the minority, the Trewhellas are not alone.
In so acting, they are rediscovering their distinctive theology and their
heritage, and they are accepting their special responsibility as a pastor’s
family to serve as witnesses to the original Protestant understanding of the
divine intent for marriage. 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 twentieth century.
Allan Carlson is President of The Howard Center for Family,
Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois (
www.profam.org).
