Moral Combat Read online

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  Copyright © 2017 by R. Marie Griffith

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  First Edition: December 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Griffith, R. Marie (Ruth Marie), 1967- author.

  Title: Moral combat : how sex divided American Christians and fractured American politics / R. Marie Griffith.

  Description: New York : Basic Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037768 (print) | LCCN 2017040616 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465094769 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465094752 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and politics--United States. | Sex--Political aspects--United States. | Sex--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Christians--Political activity--United States. | Protestant churches--Relations--Catholic Church. | Catholic Church--Relations--Protestant churches. | United States--Church history. |

  BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | RELIGION / Christianity / History. | RELIGION / Sexuality & Gender Studies. | RELIGION / Religion, Politics & State.

  Classification: LCC BR516 (ebook) | LCC BR516 .G75 2017 (print) | DDC 261.8/3570973--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037768

  ISBN 978-065-09475-2 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-065-09476-9 (ebook)

  E3-20171028-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 The Battle over Birth Control in the Roaring Twenties

  2 Censorship of Literature and Popular Entertainments

  3 Segregation and Race Mixing in the Early Civil Rights Era

  4 The Kinsey Revolution and Challenges to Female Chastity

  5 Sex Education in the Sixties and the Surging Religious Right

  6 The Abortion War Before and After Roe v. Wade

  7 Sexual Harassment at Century’s End

  8 Same-Sex Marriage and LGBT Rights in the New Millennium

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  For Zach, Ella, and Jasper

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN THE US SUPREME COURT released its 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges finding a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex couples, the national reaction was as polarized as the court itself. Most progressives and liberals celebrated the outcome as a long overdue affirmation of equality for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, while many conservatives condemned the decision. Some Christian traditionalists blamed the ruling on “the emotional terrorism of the left” and identified it as a dire blow to religious liberty and the nation’s welfare. Religious leaders on the right admonished their flocks that, as a Family Research Council official put it, “the truths of Scripture regarding human sexuality are not malleable” and that “neither the rulings of a court nor the pressure of secular culture should sway their allegiance to clear and authoritative biblical instruction on men, women, family, and marriage.” The influential Catholic lawyer Robert P. George, past chair of the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposing same-sex marriage, wrote that Obergefell should be regarded much as Abraham Lincoln viewed the Dred Scott decision in 1857: as an “anti-constitutional and illegitimate ruling in which the judiciary has attempted to usurp the authority of the people.”1

  The Obergefell decision, released on June 26, 2015, made same-sex marriage into settled law. But it hardly stemmed the attempts to shun, restrict, and even outlaw such marriages. Within weeks, Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky and a conservative Pentecostal Christian, became a media sensation and a heroine to the grassroots right for going to jail to avoid authorizing same-sex marriage in her jurisdiction. Others sought exemption by refusing such services as wedding cakes to same-sex couples, hoping the judicial system would support their religious freedom to do so; indeed, courts will be hearing cases related to the ruling for years.

  Such fiery emotions and legal wrangling have not been restricted to the issue of same-sex marriage. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, a prominent fundamentalist Christian leader appeared on national television and blamed the terroristic violence on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle… all of them who have tried to secularize America.”2 Another blamed a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, on “a sin problem” that he saw embodied in the permissibility of abortion and similar signs of an ungodly nation.3 Still another attributed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to the effect of atheism, abortion, and same-sex marriage, saying, “We have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition.… I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.”4 Over and over, America’s “sexual depravity” and embrace of various types of sexual “immorality” have been held liable for horrific acts of violence that God has ostensibly refused to prevent.5

  Why do these sexual issues provoke such fervent and enduring debate in the United States? Why have our public debates over sex and sexuality been so numerous, so ferocious, so religiously inflected, and so immune to definitive resolution? The answer is not simple, and many of the common ideas about the origins and nature of our current impasse over sexuality—the virtual civil war that has come to seem such a disheartening and permanent part of our nation’s social and political fabric—are simply incorrect. Some argue that this impasse results from fissures that opened after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but conflicts like these have a far longer history. Many see the conflict as pitting religious people against sexual freedom, and some religious people similarly see a secular crusade against religious liberty. But neither explanation really illuminates the ferocious controversies over issues ranging from birth control to same-sex marriage.6

  To fully comprehend how we got to this divisive and seemingly intractable culture war over sexuality, we have to come to terms with a deeply historical religious preoccupation with sex and understand how it has shaped subsequent American political debates over women’s rights, gender roles, and sexual mores. That preoccupation emerged out of the long history of Christianity and was made all the more powerful by entrenched notions, both overt and unspoken, that Christian morality should provide the basis for our nation’s law and politics. Certainly, religious leaders outside Christianity have also been involved, sometimes deeply, in these huge debates over morality, sexual behavior, and gender roles. But for most of US history, until quite recently, Christians played a dominant role in American life; so too Chris
tians, across the Protestant-Catholic divide and the full range of traditionalist to progressive, have predominated as those most vigorously connecting sex and politics and waging the most passionate battles in this arena. Many citizens have believed that sexual morality consists of a system of values that must be guarded and preserved for the greater social good, but whether those values focus on obedience to traditional family norms or on freedom of sexual expression and relations has grown into a source of profound division, even within American Christianity itself. Indeed, by the time the Obergefell decision came down, the rupture between Christian antagonists in the sex wars felt irremediable: one could plausibly argue that American Christianity had flat out split into two virtually nonoverlapping religions.

  Moral Combat tells a story of the steady breakdown, since the early twentieth century, of a onetime Christian consensus about sexual morality and gender roles and of the battles over sex among self-professed Christians—and between some groups of Christians and non-Christians—that resulted. That consensus was both Christian and national, as Christians overwhelmingly dominated the nation numerically and in terms of influence for most of its history. Up through the end of the nineteenth century, whatever else Americans disagreed about—slavery, states’ rights, urbanization, immigration, labor laws—most accepted, and took for granted as natural, a sexual order in which men were heads of households, wives were to submit to husbands’ authority, and monogamous heterosexual marriage was the only sanctioned site for sexual relations. Those who broke the rules were punished or shunned, as when early New England courts prosecuted sodomy, adultery, and divorce; or when communities rejected groups that forswore monogamous wedlock in favor of communal celibacy (Shakers), polygamy (some Mormons), complex marriage (the Oneida community), or free love (various associations others deemed “cults”).

  The modern women’s rights movement—above all, the push for women’s right to vote—prompted a crisis for those shared assumptions. Slowly but relentlessly, the old unanimity splintered, with some Christians embracing new ideas regarding women’s rights and roles and others redoubling their efforts to preserve the old sexual order. Women’s increasing presence in the workforce and growing access to contraceptive technologies further sundered this consensus. Again, many Christians staunchly resisted change; others hailed it as a step on the long march to justice. Like the wider populace, American Christians—who remain profoundly influential a century after suffrage, notwithstanding the growth of religious diversity and secularization—are a great deal more divided over sex than a hundred years ago. And with each side claiming God’s blessing in pursuing its moral vision, this division has helped lead to deep, thoroughgoing cleavages in our politics.

  Claiming God’s blessing in political debates was not new to twentieth-century America. In fact, one of our nation’s most ingrained impulses, going back to some of the early colonial settlers, has been the presumption of speaking in the name of God, willing as God wills, doing as God would have us do. But as a result of the fracturing Christian consensus, the period covered here did witness a new sort of enthusiasm for such claims by both advocates of the old sexual order and sexual progressives or reformers. Just as God-talk, broadly defined, framed countless political debates over the Revolutionary War, Manifest Destiny, and slavery and abolitionism, so too would it later underlie the political rhetoric on issues of sex and gender. Feminists supporting women’s right to vote and anti-feminists calling on women to stay home and focus on their children, white supremacists fighting for a racially pure America along with traditional gender roles and civil rights workers demanding justice for African Americans and the poor, pro-life activists picketing abortion clinics for the sake of the unborn and pro-choice marchers invoking women’s health and rights: citizens on all sides of these and other bitter political fissures have claimed godly righteousness for their cause.

  For those who worked to sustain the old sexual order and resisted models for sexual relationships and behavior outside traditional marriage, a driving force has been fear. That is, fear of certain kinds of changes has aroused passionate defiance, motivated acts of resistance, and galvanized political support for the anti-change side. In the warfare over sex, the fear is typically one of three kinds: fear of increasing women’s freedom, especially freedom over their own bodies as well as the ways that women’s sexuality might call into question their dependence on men; white Protestant fear of encroaching religious or ethnic “others,” a fear that long manifested against Catholicism and Catholic power and would later manifest against African Americans, “Muslims” writ large, and more; and a widespread and easily stoked fear that America is a once great nation now pitched into grave decline, largely because of the evil activities (very often, evil sexual activities) of some of its own citizens. So women, nonwhites, and homosexuals and other “nonnormative” sexual actors (the transgendered, the fluid, the flagrant) have repeatedly represented something like the enemy within, shredding the sacred fabric binding together a God-blessed nation.

  In an important way, then, debates around sex can be characterized broadly as a conflict between change and tradition, at least in a very specific sense: those who oppose changes in the norms governing social expectations and legal frameworks for regulating sex and gender versus those who are comfortable with at least some of those changes or who grow comfortable in time. Those who call themselves (and whom I will call) traditionalists or conservatives tend to be of the first mindset. Progressives or liberals, from the moderate middle to the edge of the spectrum, tend to be of the second and value changes perceived to be inclusive, that is, those that expand access to power and influence for persons once excluded, marginalized, or stigmatized for behaving outside the norm. These labels—traditionalist, conservative, progressive, and liberal—are imprecise and imperfect modifiers, to say the least, subject to caricature and lumping people together who do not always wish to be so lumped. But Americans have employed them for a long time, and they work reasonably well to convey particular attitudes toward change and tradition when it comes to sex and gender, as I am using them here. This “two camps” model is not to suggest that there are only two singular and coherent attitudes toward sexuality—there have always been many whose position on some issues might lean conservative and on others liberal, and plenty of people have stood somewhere in the ambivalent middle of the far poles. But our political culture, rightly or wrongly, has made it difficult to break out of these either/or options, not least when it comes to sex and gender. On any given sexual issue at any given time in the history I recount, the overall clash has ultimately crystallized into two sides: those favoring, to varying degrees, change and progress versus those keen to preserve order and tradition.

  Over time, these two attitudes toward sex and sexual morality became aligned with two increasingly divergent and oppositional outlooks on modern life itself. One was eager to be open to modern ideas, inclusive of eclecticism and expansive diversity, and relatively accepting of women’s equality and changing roles; the competing outlook longed for traditional order, resisted many changes to the status quo, and remained consistently wary of shifting gender norms and changing attitudes toward sexual morality. Doubtless these divergent attitudes toward change and tradition have been rife in many historical times and places; at least in the US context, however, such attitudes were once less widely aligned with opinions regarding sexual morality. More and more over the course of the twentieth century, attitudes toward sex signaled attitudes toward modernity itself: openness to changing sexual norms bespoke openness to other modern cultural and social changes, whereas resistance to such norms accompanied resistance to—and fear of the effects of—many other forces of modern change. One’s stance on sex, then, has increasingly over time become shorthand for an attitude toward contemporary challenges to tradition.

  As the following chapters illustrate, these competing outlooks shaped and fed on each other in a sort of dialectical process over time. Progressive gains in libe
ralizing or legalizing certain practices—birth control, say, or sex education in public schools—served to confirm their conservative opponents’ sense that modernity was sinful; in turn, conservative efforts to fight back and restore the old values confirmed progressives’ sense that sexual liberation was utterly crucial to progress. In other words, the rival attitudes of the traditionalists and the progressives have been, in crucial and persistent ways, mutually constitutive of one another; and each side has galvanized supporters with narratives of nightmare scenarios sure to occur in the absence of immediate action. Politicking for causes has always worked this way, of course; rousing adherents via doomsday threats is nothing new. But we cannot understand our own debates—over LGBT rights, trans-friendly bathrooms, abortion, marriage, sex education, chastity, sexual harassment, even religious exemptions for health-care coverage of contraception—until we go back to the past and attempt to understand this specific dialectical trajectory concerning sex.7

  AT THE HEART OF THE twentieth-century conflict over sexual morality were debates over the very meaning of sex, gender, and sexuality. At the turn of the twentieth century, the prevailing view across the religious and most of the political spectrum was that male and female were fixed categories, the differences in reproductive organs proof that these divisions were part of biological nature and/or God’s created order. Inextricably bound to these natural categories were the social and cultural meanings, expectations, and public as well as domestic roles that defined and separated men’s activities from women’s. Hence, these roles and meanings, too, were presumed fixed and not simply proper but, indeed, normal. If male and female were divinely fixed categories, embodied in men’s authority over women and fulfilled in female chastity followed by marriage and childbearing, then any sexual relationship outside of monogamous, procreative, heterosexual wedlock was—especially for women—beyond the pale.