Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
American Religious Activism in the Twentieth Century
American religious groups have been roiled by conflict since before the American Civil War. From abolition, to prohibition, to suffrage, from the social gospel movement to modernism and fundamentalism, to debates about evolution and science, American religious groups have had to choose their battles and the sides on which they would fight, or not, many times over. While the historical research on these movements and various religious groups' roles in them is rich, no researcher has systematically examined which religious groups have supported American movements for social and religious reform throughout the past century and a half and which have not. Thus, until now, the connections between early religious activism and groups' current religious identities have been sketchy at best.
Given the potential importance of this history not only for America's religious groups but for the popular imagination as well, any study that seeks to understand how American religious groups ended up divided so dramatically by birth control had to examine these precursor movements. Thus, I coded all of my religious groups by their views on more than ten other issues that could, in any way, be connected to later activism on the issue of birth control. Eight of these are investigated in this chapter. These include three secular social movements (by which I mean that the focus of the movement was the state) — abolition, temperance, and suffrage — and five issues connected to two religious movements — the social gospel movement and its organizational home of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), views of the modernist/fundamentalist divide, and connections between those views and views of evolution and science. The remaining two movements I investigated are examined in the next chapter, which examines the connections between American religious groups and the secular movements and organizations that were most directly focused on promoting contraception — the American Birth Control League and the American Eugenics Society.
While this chapter demonstrates that the religious groups that liberalized on birth control did have one strong movement similarity — they were all believers in the social gospel movement — it makes another point that is perhaps even more important: The story this chapter tells is not one that follows the neat path that many might expect. It is simply not true that the most ardent abolitionists were also the biggest advocates of prohibition, the groups with modernist religious identities, the most passionate advocates of the social gospel movement, the founders of the FCC, and, ultimately, the early promoters of birth control. While some prominent groups undoubtedly took this activist path and remained on it throughout the course of the twentieth century, others did not but ended up with similar stances on birth control by 1930. These findings suggest that other factors are more important when it comes to understanding groups' early views on birth control, and it is this point that undergirds the data presented in this chapter.
ABOLITION
American religious groups were highly visible in the fight to abolish slavery. It is thus not surprising that some scholars see the "possibility of drawing a line from antislavery, through emancipation and Reconstruction, to the social gospel," as does Molly Oshatz in Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. Such impressions are not rare. The leading historian of progressive Protestantism, Henry May, argued that "the growth and eventual triumph of the antislavery crusade stirred churchmen more than any prewar reform movement and led them into more fundamental criticism of existing society."
Given how early agitation against slavery began among American religious groups, I could not rely on groups' religious periodicals to assess their support for abolition, as almost no periodicals from the mid-nineteenth century have survived (and many denominations did not yet have one). As a result, abolition is the only issue for which I relied on secondary historical sources exclusively — thus, more information about how I coded these sources is in order.
My coding of abolition erred on the side of inclusivity, rather than exclusivity. This was a conservative decision given that May found that "churches later tended to exaggerate the part they had played in early abolition struggles." Groups were coded as abolitionists if either denominational histories or prominent histories of abolition mentioned their activism against slavery. Groups were coded as not being abolitionists if they were not mentioned in any histories of the movement and if their denominational histories also did not mention abolition activism. My results of this research are presented in table 5, which also provides my findings about groups' engagement with the two other important secular social reform movements — prohibition and suffrage — examined below.
Table 5 suggests that abolition is only weakly correlated with support for early birth control reform. Starting with the early liberalizers, it is apparent that a history of abolitionist activism cannot be either a direct or indirect cause of groups' later support for early birth control reform. While most were indeed abolitionists, there are two important exceptions. The Christian Church falls into this category. No histories of abolition mention this denomination. Likewise, no histories of abolition mention the Christian Church, even in passing. However, it is possible that the data missed an overall abolitionist sentiment on the part of the Christian Church because it was smaller and more rural. Thus, if the Christian Church were the only early liberalizer to not be coded as an abolitionist, I would be more likely to conclude that abolition may have played an important role in predicting later activism in the American religious field.
The Protestant Episcopal Church suggests otherwise, however, and further calls into question the idea that early activism on abolition sowed the seeds for support for contraception. In contrast to the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, which split into Northern and Southern wings over the issue of slavery, the Protestant Episcopal Church generally tried to keep its distance from abolitionist politics and stayed largely intact as a denomination as a result. One Southern Episcopalian group, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America, did splinter off in 1862, but it remerged with the general Protestant Episcopal Church just three years later. Despite its lack of abolitionist agitation, the Protestant Episcopal Church was a central early supporter of birth control legalization. Thus, it does not seem that abolitionist activism was an early precursor to reform.
This conclusion is further supported by other findings in table 5, which demonstrates that there were abolitionists, although not that many, among each of the other categories of stances on birth control. Thus, it does not appear that a history of abolitionist activism was necessary or sufficient to explain early support for contraception among American religious groups. Of course, there were many other relevant religious and social movements between the time of abolition activism and birth control reform, any of which could have intervened to explain the outliers I examine below.
Unlike abolition, the remainder of the movements that this chapter examines occurred at a time when American religious periodicals were accessible. Thus, the evidence I present throughout the rest of this chapter relies on the same firsthand examination of primary sources as the remainder of this book.
DATA AND METHODS FOR RESEARCH ON OTHER SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
As it did for eugenics, my coding of groups' views of American social and religious movements captures both the frequency and fervor with which they commented on a particular issue. The frequency with which an issue was discussed proved to be very informative in and of itself. For example, I found that prohibition received a great deal more attention, often as many as ten times the number of articles, than suffrage. Most groups coded as a strong advocate of prohibition published between 15 and 16 articles strongly in favor of the movement per year. In comparison, even the strongest suffragist groups published only one or two articles a year advocating giving women the right to vote. As I discuss below, this proved crucial to my conclusion that suffrage simply was not an issue that galvanized or divided the American religious field and that birth control really was the first issue connected to sex and gender to do so.
Of course, as I mention above, the coding that I use throughout this book reflects far more than just frequency of discussion. The fervor with which views were expressed was just as important to my coding of groups' views — especially for those opposed to a particular issue, who tended to discuss it less often, but in no uncertain terms, when they did so. For example, the groups opposed to prohibition only published around three articles a year on the topic — less than a quarter of the ink the advocates of prohibition spent on the issue. But their criticism of the movement was clear in the relatively smaller amount of space devoted to it. The strength of groups' views is often best communicated in the words used by the groups themselves. Therefore, in the sections that follow I also give a qualitative sense of how views varied, both from group to group and from issue to issue, as I discuss the possible relationships between those views and stances on birth control.
Finally, as with abolition, the historical literature on each of the other movements examined — both religious and secular — in this chapter is vast. However, many of the existing studies on these movements focus only on connections between a movement and a particular religious group (or groups) or leaders. As a sociologist I am concerned with whether those connections were causal, which means needing to be able to systematically assess whether such connections hold up across all similar groups — and if they do not, whether there is another plausible explanation. Thus, when making claims about any such relationship, I rely strictly on my original primary research because it is only by doing so that I can ensure the same systematic examination of data and sources across groups. I cite the historical research that supports, and sometimes refutes, my findings as they arise.
PROHIBITION
Although movements to reform America's "wet" nature began almost contemporaneously with abolition, prohibition took longer to secure and, ofcourse, was much more impermanent than the abolition of slavery. The Eighteenth Amendment, or Volstead Act, which officially prohibited the production, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, passed in 1917 and was ratified by enough states to become law the next year.
Many scholars have identified the fight for the prohibition of alcohol as a potentially significant precursor to later religious activism — in particular, the social gospel. For example, historian Paul A. Carter observed that "with the exception of the Protestant Episcopal, all the churches which had been permeated by the social gospel were also officially committed to Prohibition." Similarly, Phillips writes that the temperance movement "served ... a midwife function between the womb of the evangelical world of self-improvement and the world of societal regeneration." Historian Ferenc Morton Szasz saw glimmers of the nascent social gospel movement in the way that religious supporters of prohibition thought about the world: "The prohibition movement at this time extended beyond the desire to regulate the consumption of alcohol by the individual to include a view of the ideal social order. The advocates of prohibition saw it as the chief cure for poverty, crime, and prostitution."
However, contrary to these claims, this examination of the American religious field's beliefs about prohibition demonstrates that, in fact, even less than abolition, prohibition cannot be credited with being the foundation of the divisions between conservative and progressive religious groups today. The reason for that is quite simple — support for prohibition was too common to explain the more varied views on birth control that would become apparent only a decade later.
This wider support for prohibition is indicated clearly in table 5. It demonstrates that while almost all of the early liberalizers were strong prohibitionists (with the exception of Reform Jews), so, too, were many other denominations that did not share the early liberalizers' belief in the importance of legalizing birth control. This is because prohibition was popular among Protestants in both the North and the South, with more than half of the groups in my sample expressing so much support for the movement that I coded them as strong supporters at the time the Eighteenth Amendment was being ratified.
Perhaps the best example of groups that were strong prohibitionists but highly critical of birth control (and the other religious movements examined below) is the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1919 the Southern Baptist periodical the Christian Index noted "great rejoicing throughout the United States on January 16th, when the wires flashed the news to all parts of the country that the National Constitutional Prohibition Amendment had been ratified by the legislatures of two-thirds of the States." The article claimed the victory as "a vindication of the efforts of evangelical Christianity" and went on as follows:
The liquor traffic has been one of the most deadly enemies of the American republic throughout all the years. It has impoverished its millions, it has filled our ever-enlarging sanitariums with its victims, and sent thousands upon thousands to untimely graves. Our American people have been blind to their best and highest interests by allowing the continued existence of the liquor traffic. ... Municipalities and communities in general should co-operate most heartily in the continued effort to suppress vice, whether legalized or not. Of all people in the world, our American people ought to be sober and clean.
Support for prohibition was wide — so wide that groups generally known as conservatives who would later openly criticize birth control reform, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, strongly supported it.
Furthermore, support for moderating America's wet nature went even further than indicated by table 5. Many of the groups opposed to prohibition took great pains to explain that even though they were critical of the potential for prohibition to save the country, they remained supportive of temperance. For example, in 1919 the Evangelical Synod of North America's periodical the Evangelical Herald asserted that "with a vast number of honest and intelligent citizens we have consistently opposed intemperance, but have advocated voluntary total abstinence from intoxicating liquor rather than state-wide or national prohibition." That same year the Lutheran published an article skeptically titled "Is National Temperance a Cure for All Human Ills?" However, even this article asserted that "the weakness of mankind for strong drink has caused untold misery. Drunkenness is one of the greatest of evils, and it facilitates sin." The article went on to clarify that their concerns about prohibition lay in the fact that "human frailty is not confined to a single outlet. If one is stopped up, it seeks, and readily finds, many others."
Thus, prohibition, and its less legalistic cousin of temperance, enjoyed quite wide support within the American religious field. The support was so wide that one would be hard-pressed to argue that prohibition activism explains groups' views on birth control a decade later.
WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE
While it has been well known that abolition and prohibition enjoyed strong support from some of America's most prominent religious groups, much less ink has been spilled examining religious groups' support for the other contemporaneous secular movement of the day — the movement to give women the franchise. This is perhaps because, in contrast to the strong support for abolition among some groups and the wide support prohibition enjoyed among most American religious groups, woman suffrage gained almost no traction among American religious groups.
This is not to say that there were no differences among American religious groups' views of women's suffrage. Certainly, there were. And, of course, predictably, some of its staunchest supporters were indeed the early liberalizers on birth control. For example, the Congregationalist reported with pride:
The Congregationalist declared for woman suffrage in advance of many of its religious contemporaries. Now that it has come, it congratulates the more than twenty million women voters who next week will stand shoulder to shoulder with the men at the place of power. ... American politics ought to be cleaner, American life purer, America's influence in the world greater, because of what the women will do at the polls.
However, even those who were strong supporters of women's suffrage (relative to other denominations at the time) paid it relatively little attention. For example, the Christian Church's Herald of Gospel Liberty published twenty-five articles on prohibition in 1918 alone but only four on women's suffrage. This is similar to the coverage each issue received among all of the groups coded as strong supporters of both issues.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Birth Control Battles"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Melissa J. Wilde.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
