Religion and Human Sexuality in the U.S.

In United States history, religion has often been used as a lens through which we understand sexuality and it’s purpose. Fierce debates arose from the intersections of religion, sexuality and politics in twentieth-century America.

What is sexuality? The definition of the term ‘sexuality’ changes based on an individual’s personal beliefs about sex, reproduction, intimacy, and the family structure. ‘Sexuality’ is not only influenced by someone’s physical acts, but also the ideas they have about these acts.

The Birth Control Movement

In the mid-1910’s the Birth Control Movement began to form and grow with the help of free thinking radicals and social reformers in New York.

The Birth Control Movement revealed two key developments in American society:

1. “…The growth of deep, consequential divisions among Christians regarding sex - more specifically, the morality of non-procreative sex within marriage.” (Moral Combat, R. Marie Griffith)

2. “…the far-reaching politicization of these divisions, involving a ferocious contest over political power and the law.” (Moral Combat, R. Marie Griffith)

The 1920’s proved to be a decade of provocative change that went hand-in-hand with the Women’s Rights Movement. By the early-1930’s, advocacy for the use of contraception within marriage was growing.

People to Know

Suggested Reading - Moral Combat: Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics

By R. Marie Griffith

Moral Combat employs narratives that explore the various dimensions involved in historical debates regarding women’s rights. Intersection of religion, sexuality, and politics have been a perpetual source of conflict in the United States, especially since the emergence of the women’s suffrage movement and subsequent shifting family structures. Religious groups present themselves as influential social and political mobilizations, and individual beliefs about sexuality and morality can be simplified and categorized within these groups. Religion provides a filter through which the political world can be navigated. Inversely, political parties utilize endorsement from religious groups to gain power.

Griffith’s purpose in providing narratives that define the sexual revolution is to clarify the relationship between American politics, religion, and sexuality. Traditional family values were the center of the conservative argument for restrictions on sex. The battle over sex education in the 1960’s exposed the paranoid temperament many parents had about what their children learned about sex in school, so proliferation of sex information received mixed responses. 

Supporters of progressive reform in sex education felt that it would cure “social problems like venereal disease among teens, rising divorce rates, and alarming statistics about teen pregnancies” by using “sex education as “preventative medicine”. (Griffith, 167) Conservatives argued that sex education would encourage sexual immorality among American youth “by separating instruction in human reproduction from education in “the higher ideals of marriage”.

Resources:

• How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics: An Interview with R. Marie Griffith

Suggested Reading - Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth Century United States

Introduction: More than Missionary: Doing the Histories of Religion and Sexuality Together

By Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton and Heather R. White

“In much historical writing, the modern sexual system is understood to be a direct consequence of the putative decline of religion in modern America, or secularization. Whether this thesis is directly stated or tacitly assumed, it informs many historians’ understanding of the relationship between the two zones of historical experience. According to the landmark survey of the history of U.S. sexuality Intimate Matters by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman—still the only book of its scope—the modern period is characterized by “a commercialized sexuality,” and “sexual relations are expected to provide personal identity and individual happiness, apart from reproduction.” In identifying the engines of change, these authors cite “the economy, the family and politics” as helping to drive what they refer to as sexual liberalism…”

“To approach religion as a key analytic term in the recent history of sexuality means rethinking a presumed teleology of recent historical change. Religion, no less than sexuality, has been a site for invention, contestation, and change during the twentieth century. These changes further intersect with a range of processes that have forged twentieth-century culture and politics, especially racialization, state formation, gender construction, and economic organization.”

Narratives about Sexuality in the United States

Winnifred Wygal’s Flock: Same-Sex Desire and Christian Faith in the 1920’s

By Kathi Kern

“No one would mistake Winnifred Wygal (1884–1972), a career Young Women’s Christian Association worker, for a bohemian sex radical of the 1920s. Yet as the passage above suggests, the author and reformer forged an erotic life that challenged both the conventions of heterosexual “companionate marriage” and the concomitant emergence of homosexual “pathology” that characterized early twentieth-century domestic relations.

Her perception of the boundless capacity of God’s love emboldened Wygal to engage romantically with a number of different women, including Frances Perry, her companion from 1910 to 1940, as well as multiple other women who became, as she sometimes put it, part of her “fold.” Rather than seeing Christian commitment as constraining of human and sexual connection, Wygal maintained that personal relationships were intimately “related to our sense of God.” She adamantly rejected the idea that her nonmonogamous, same-sex sexuality was abnormal and instead longed to find God’s love through people and work.” (Kern, p. 17)

Sex is Holy and Mysterious: The Vision of Early Twentieth-Century Catholic Sex Education Reformers

By James P. McCartin

“Aiming to make age-appropriate sex instruction standard in Catholic schools…educators hoped to instill a clear sense of moral boundaries and spotlight health threats that could befall sexually active youth. But they also aspired to impart an enduring moral sensibility, capable of aiding students through their lives, of which sexuality was an integrated part. Opting for an affirmative approach, they emphasized that sex was both “natural” and “sacred”—at once impelled by strong biological and emotional drives and bound to the spiritual nature and destiny of the human person. Rather than prescribing restrictive moralism designed merely to suppress sexual desire, these educators promoted an elevated sense of human sexuality and encouraged a heightened capacity for thoughtful reflection on the topic. In the process, they indicated a capacity for fluid engagement with a range of perspectives on sexuality but also demonstrated that Catholic approaches to sex were not universally condemnatory and routinely outdated, as critics have frequently asserted.” (McCartin, p. 72)

Family Planning is a Christian Duty: Religion, Population Control, and the Pill in the 1960s

By Samira K. Mehta

“Focusing on the language of responsible parenthood shows that, as much as the Pill caused moral anxiety in some quarters, it also provided a new landscape for Protestant moral agency. Leaders at the highest levels of mainline Protestant ecumenical cooperation encouraged making deliberate and prayerful decisions about when to have children, decisions that took into account the health of one’s own marriage and finances, the rights of children and one’s capacity to fulfill those rights, and broader social issues, particularly population explosion, as a central responsibility of Christian marriage. Protestant leadership argued that technological advances, including vaccinations, antibiotics, and birth control, created the obligation to use them for social good. They then justified the use of contraception as a social good based on scientific evidence of the dangers posed by a rapidly expanding population and on doctrine from various denominations and scriptural interpretation of both family life and ‘stewardship of the earth.’” (Mehta, p. 165)

“While race was rarely explicitly mentioned (and when it was, authors often decried using eugenics against racial minorities), race was implicit in the conversation— Africans and Asians were depicted as the people most likely to be hurt by an expanding population and therefore were implied to be most in need of birth control. While the responsible parenthood discourse sought to distance itself from racially motivated eugenics, the distance was not as great as might have been hoped for: arguments about social class in the United States often noted the high percentage of African Americans among the “lower class” of people whom responsible parenthood advocates hoped to reach…” (Mehta, p. 166)

Michael Foucault’s “The History of Sexuality”

“Up to the end of the eighteenth century, three major explicit codes-apart from the customary regularities and constraints of opinion-governed sexual practices: canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law. They determined, each in its own way, the division between licit and illicit. They were all centered On matrimonial relations: the marital obligation, the ability to fulfill it, the manner in which one complied with it, the requirements and violences that accompanied it…”

• Repressive Hypothesis