The Barnes & Noble Review
The numbers don't lie: in November 2016, 81 percent of self- identified evangelical voters chose a thrice-married, self- confessed sexual assaulter over a highly experienced public servant who happened to be the first female nominee for president. This surge of support helps to explain why Donald Trump thrashed Hillary Clinton among her own demographic, white women. A similar pattern, but with a consequentially different outcome, occurred a year later in the special Alabama Senate election: Roy Moore matched Trump's percentage among white evangelicals, although high turnout among African Americans saved the day for Doug Jones, Moore's Democratic opponent.
A mere two decades ago, "values voters" were frothing at the mouth to drum Bill Clinton out of office for a consensual affair. What gives? Are they shallow cynics and hypocrites, mindless acolytes who worship the golden calf of today's Republican Party?
R. Marie Griffith probes the answers to these questions, and so much more, in Moral Combat, that rare academic work that weaves incisive research into a spellbinding tale of American piety and its restless twin, sex. The John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of God's Daughters, Griffith is a leading scholar on evangelical women and the myriad ways they shape our culture and politics. She comes by her arguments honestly -- she and I share a Southern Baptist background, a Tennessee hometown, and a university -- and spins her story with skill and grit. As with Frances FitzGerald's magisterial The Evangelicals, Griffith breathes spirit into dry history, fashioning sinew and muscle onto brittle bones.
Prior to the Nineteenth Amendment, Griffith argues, Americans had maintained a consensus on sex, with men fulfilling the roles of paterfamilias and provider while women tended hearth and home. The explosion of the suffragette movement ripped apart that consensus and spilled into personal territory, such as family planning and sexual freedom. Margaret Sanger looms large early in Moral Combat, a pioneer of civil disobedience; as Griffith notes, "Sanger's arrest helped her to make not just a moral argument for contraception but also a political argument for contraception -- or at least for the right to talk about it. With this argument, she recast contraception advocacy from something radical into an all-American pursuit, and opposition to birth control as fundamentally anti-American."
Initially, Protestants embraced contraception because Catholics rejected it, falling into ancient battle positions. But that would change. From Sanger, Griffith builds a compelling tale of sex and censoriousness, love and literature, with beautiful set pieces on the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who clenched a fist against racial hierarchy, and the writer D. H. Lawrence, who sought the spiritual in the sensual: "His 1915 novel The Rainbow was labeled obscene. It contained scenes of lesbianism, nakedness, and exuberant sex, all depicted in graphic detail . . . to Lawrence, the most dangerous critics were the censors, and he refused to concede any ground. His work was in no way smut, he argued, for it focused not on the dirtiness but the very holiness of sex." Griffith taps a wealth of stories that we've forgotten, such as the uproar over The Races of Mankind, Benedict's tract that dared to argue for equality, stirring the old ghosts among unreconstructed Southerners. A breach was coming.
Moral Combat hews to a simple argument -- those who seek plurality and change will wrestle unto death with those invested in tradition and order -- making its case with vivid anecdotes. In the postwar years, Alfred Kinsey, the "biologist-tuned-sexologist," galvanized American Christendom, earning the ire of a young Billy Graham; a prominent Catholic editor published a letter: "As for you, Dr. Kinsey, I . . . consider you as one of the most loathsome wretches ever produced in human form." With a growing acceptance of birth control, and findings such as Kinsey's, women -- including Christian women -- were beginning to acquire a new level of control over their own sexuality.
Griffith brilliantly unpacks the racial bigotries and pompous blowhards of the Civil Rights Era, when white churches clashed with congregations of color. She's particularly deft at charting the rise of the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC, the flagship of the evangelical right, capturing the insidious influence of such arch-conservatives as W. A. Criswell, pastor of Dallas's First Baptist. But even as the lines over sexual mores hardened, progressive Christians flowed into the gap. Griffith paints lush miniatures of unfamiliar but crucial figures who emerged during the struggles before and after Roe v. Wade. Howard R. Moody, the Southern Baptist turned liberal New Yorker; Frances Kissling, a blue- collar Catholic from Queens; Gene Robinson, an Episcopal priest who tried to pray away the gay only to find his voice as an advocate for LGBTQ Christians -- these figures served as counterweights to strident conservatives, further wedging apart God's children.
Mortal Combat lags as Griffith moves into well-trod territory from the '90s, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Bill Clinton and Paula Jones. It's difficult to add anything fresh here. The book picks up its pace again, though, as Griffith dissects how and why Donald Trump -- professional louchebag of "Two Corinthians" fame -- captivated evangelicals of both sexes: "Among Trump's most loyal base, men and women alike cheered his putdowns of Clinton . . . For many, Trump, the avatar of a patriarchal and largely white Christian right, was distinctly preferable to Clinton, the so-called elitist pseudo-Christian feminist who could appear to be, as one evangelical periodical made explicitly clear two months before the election, the Grim Reaper, à la her pro-choice stance on abortion."
Patriarchy, abortion, a holy war waged against elites who sneer at them. Griffith's diagnosis is dark but spot-on: Christianity has ruptured over the political weaponization of gender. Similar to class warfare and the legacy of slavery, reactionary puritanism is an enduring strand in our national DNA. We may lament the absence of our better angels, but they may be gone for good -- as Griffith knows well, plumbing in her book discords as old as the Mayflower and as young as #MeToo, with perspicacity and grace.
Hamilton Cain is the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, and a former finalist for a National Magazine Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviewer: Hamilton Cain
Publishers Weekly
★ 10/09/2017
Religion historian Griffith (American Religions) takes a sweeping look at the roots of today’s culture wars over abortion, sexual identity, and the intersection of sexuality and racial differences in this exceptional cultural history. Griffith opens not with the free-wheeling sexual revolution of the 1960s but in the ’20s with Margaret Sanger’s efforts to make contraception more widely available. Griffith goes on to use D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover as her prime example of how sensibilities around sexuality changed dramatically during the 20th century—the novel first appeared in America, abridged, in 1928, and could not be published in full until more than three decades later. With her account of the role played by prominent clergy and religious movements working to liberalize abortion law, Griffith argues that Roe v. Wade is best understood not solely as part of the women’s liberation movement but in the context of religious support for abortion rights. Likewise, her account of the theology that justified racial segregation illustrates an area where religious and cultural beliefs clash. Griffith’s remarkably comprehensive book will be of interest to scholars and lay readers alike. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Dec.)
From the Publisher
"[Griffith] shows that at every turn in the culture wars of the last century or so, religious leaders have battled to obstruct gender, sexual, and racial equality.... The juxtaposition of deep dives and aerial views makes...a propulsive read. As do the wrinkles that complicate any easy political assumptions."—Laura Kipnis, New York Review of Books
"Magisterial...Griffith's observations are eerily prescient...Moral Combat is an impressive history of a massive fault line running through American history and politics: namely, sex."—Washington Post
"Moral Combat is a vivid illustration of a principle that liberals understand well and that religious conservatives usually do not: Culture precedes politics."—Wall Street Journal
"Marie Griffith...reviews a century's worth of American cultural conflict over sexuality, fueled by a growing divide between religious subcultures. Readers will benefit from her clear presentation of the longer history and larger significance of our sexual conflicts."—Christianity Today
"Griffith has undoubtedly performed a great service in documenting the influence of these largely forgotten reformers and ecumenical bodies. Her book is deeply researched, nuanced in its portrayals of activists on both sides, and thoroughly entertaining to boot."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"The story Griffith tells is crucial.... Her contribution is part of a much-needed sex education, and like all good teachers she presents it vividly."—Linda Gordon, New Republic
"Highly informative."—The Gospel Coalition
"[An] exceptional cultural history...Griffith's remarkably comprehensive book will be of interest to scholars and lay readers alike."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Griffith offers a carefully reasoned examination of the century-long political and religious controversies over sexuality that color our national character. Given the passions engendered by these controversies on both sides—conservative and liberal—she demonstrates that comity and compromise are perennially elusive, while consensus seems to be a word in an incomprehensible language. Happily Griffith brings welcome clarity and light to what otherwise might have been impenetrable murkiness."—Booklist
"Thoughtful study of the great schism between religious conservatives and progressives about women's control over their own bodies."—Kirkus Reviews
"Takes the reader through a history of sexual politics since 1920 focusing on this ongoing struggle for women's rights, and with a special emphasis on the part religious faith has played in all of it.... Highly recommended."—Decatur Daily
"Griffith...dissects the sweeping cultural change that tweaked religious and well as secular morality in America."—Washington Times
"An in-depth history of how American Christians have divided into two warring factions...and how the impassable divide between these two groups created the 'culture wars' of today."—Book Riot
"The strength [of Moral Combat] is a coherent narrative that seeks to understand the history of legislating sex through Christianity... This book will appeal to a range of readers seeking an entry point into the historical and religious context of today's high-stakes political struggles."—Library Journal
"Moral Combat is a momentous book about the deep, irreparable divisions that the politicization of sex has inflicted on our society for the past century. Loaded with memorable characters and keen insights, Marie Griffith's elegantly written account of the culture wars' most heated flashpoint is both absorbing and sobering. And it is required reading for anyone trying to understand the fiercest political agitations of our day."—Darren Dochuk, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism
"Moral Combat ably examines the sharp intra-Christian divisions of opinion on twentieth-century flashpoints of controversy over contraception, obscenity, interracial sex, sex education, abortion, sexual harassment and same-sex marriage. By tracing these divergences to their embeddedness in differential responses to feminism and women's self-determination, Marie Griffith supplies an analysis needed to understand the conflicts and blind spots in sexual attitudes today."—Nancy F. Cott, author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation
"With grace and insight, Marie Griffith has taken on one of the most intractable and enduring issues in American life and faith: that of the role sexuality plays in our religion and in our politics. A force of division and of fascination since Eden, sex is a perennial theme in the human story, and Griffith's intelligent, sober, and illuminating book offers us new ways to think about the most ancient—yet urgent—of questions."—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Destiny and Power
"For those of us wondering how the United States got to be the way it is today—religiously, sexually, and politically—Moral Combat is essential reading. R. Marie Griffith, a distinguished historian of American religion, shows that the fierce and bitter contests among Christians in the twentieth century over good religion vs. bad religion, good sex vs. bad sex, have been and remain at the core of the most explosive issues of American public life. Women's health, African American civil rights, marriage, the cruel fantasy of white supremacy, workplace behavior, the public reputation of science, and more—God and sex are implicated in all of them. The United States is not a God-obsessed nation, as some would have it; it is a God-and-sex-obsessed nation. And the stakes are high: at the heart of this brilliant work of religious and political history is the question of the future of American democracy itself."—Robert A. Orsi, author of History and Presence
Kirkus Reviews
2017-09-19
Thoughtful study of the great schism between religious conservatives and progressives about women's control over their own bodies.It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when many evangelical Christians were not against—and some even actively supported—abortion and its legalization. Indeed, writes Griffith (Director, Danforth Center on Religion and Politics/Washington Univ.; American Religions: A Documentary History, 2007, etc.), in 1969, a survey of Texas Baptists revealed that 90 percent "felt their state's abortion law should be loosened." What happened in the intervening years? By the author's account, the story stretches back a century and more, to the time of Margaret Sanger on one side and Anthony Comstock on the other and their war over the issue of contraception. Through Comstock's agitation, the federal government had made it illegal, as long ago as 1873, to even possess a pamphlet advocating contraception. Sanger's militant working-class Catholicism, lashed with socialism and other progressive causes, would have made her a public enemy in her time in any event, but interestingly, as Griffith notes, she was strategically crafty in recruiting Protestant clergy to what boiled down to a fairly simple thesis: laws governing the "morality" of women should be "crafted by women themselves." Though academically rigorous, Griffith's account is both accessible and eye-opening: it simply astonishes that Christian organizations were instrumental in "family life"—meaning sex—education. But that's one flavor of Christianity, of course; the other is a rigorously fundamentalist one, and the two eventually pitched "a battle over the moral framework in which sexual knowledge would be embedded and over who had the right to determine just what those frameworks would be." As with every other battle in every other arena in which conservatives and progressives face off, the heat rose with the rise of Donald Trump; Griffith hopes that one day the rancor will finally "rouse a fractured nation to build a bearable peace."A welcome addition to the vast library on American religious discord.
