Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  She holds that aside from the propagation of children, the sexual act has of itself a spiritual and uplifting (!) value which it was intended to have by the Creator. It is an expression of supreme attachment and the unity of two beings. It can therefore be indulged in not only legitimately but is a help in our spiritual progress, apart altogether from its use to bring a child into the world. For this reason science is helping man in his spiritual progress by putting into his hands means more hygienic and prophylactic than heretofore used.… I told Mrs. Kennedy the so called spiritual value she was putting on the sexual act was a purely emotional and sensual one. The spirituality of the act lay solely in the knowledge and in the disposition at the moment of conception that a human being was being brought into existence endowed with a soul in God’s image and likeness, and which it was God’s intention should one day return to Him to enjoy eternal bliss.62

  The parenthetical exclamation point accented how absurd the Catholic hierarchy found the suggestion that sex might be a wholesome act even if conception did not occur.

  But “the most important result” of this meeting, in Ward’s terms, was Kennedy’s disclosure that the American Birth Control League was “considering Federal legislation to allow doctors to give contraceptive advice” (emphasis in original) and, still more, to distribute and sell contraceptive devices obtained directly from manufacturers. Coming efforts to change American laws pertaining to birth control would pose a whole new host of challenges to a church that had been compelled to take a more public stance on contraception, for in light of such legal challenges Catholics found themselves entangled in national political debates on intimate sexual matters. The tides were shifting on women’s roles and the regulation of sex, thanks in no small part to Sanger, the woman once baptized Roman Catholic, and American Catholic leaders felt duty-bound to speak out politically like never before.63

  PROTESTANTS, TOO, WERE TRANSFORMED BY Sanger and the birth control movement, particularly as a result of the Town Hall raid. Sanger had opened a door to church leaders in her final speech, when she asked them to “have more confidence in women.” That invitation was tinged with a taunt, of sorts—“If we cannot trust woman with the knowledge of her own body, then I claim that two thousand years of Christian teaching has proved to be a failure”—but she held fast in her hope that some church leaders saw it her way and would work collaboratively with her movement.64 That hope bore fruit—for whatever ambivalence toward contraception remained prior to the Town Hall raid, Protestant acceptance of birth control coalesced quickly and dramatically during the 1920s.

  Sanger has her mouth bound as a protest against not being allowed to discuss birth control, Boston, 1929. BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.

  Fear of Catholicism was an important factor enabling Sanger’s rapid and far-reaching success among Protestants. Aided by the associations between Catholic authoritarianism and anti-Americanism, and by widespread indignation that a celibate clergy would dare to halt even discussion of contraception in a democratic society, Sanger exploited anti-Catholicism to secure Protestant support. She worked diligently, often behind the scenes, to reach out and secure greater openness on the part of Protestant leaders toward birth control—and toward sexuality more broadly. However little stock she may have put in the religious arguments about morality that occupied Protestant clergy and church committees grappling with the subject, Sanger understood the importance of securing Protestants as allies. And she continued, in this endeavor, to make the most of the strategic usefulness attached to anti-Catholicism.

  One of Sanger’s allies, the Anglican priest William R. Inge, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, elaborated this view of the Protestant-Catholic contrast with particular disdain. In a 1923 Atlantic Monthly essay, revealingly titled “Catholic Church and Anglo-Saxon Mind,” Inge sought to explain precisely what distinguished Protestantism from Catholicism. All sorts of racial presumptions pervaded the article (submissive Poles, Irish, and Mediterraneans versus the hard-working Nordics), but Inge’s chief point was to show that the Catholic Church “has steadily developed, in accordance with the inner logic of its principles, into an autocratic, militant empire claiming universal sovereignty.” The fatal flaw was indelible and permanent, as the very notion of independence, to Inge, was “absolutely irreconcilable with Catholicism.” Inge went on to make typical claims about Catholics being more loyal to church teaching than to their own nation (describing the church as “a powerful solvent of state loyalty”).65 Ultimately, the Vatican was “anti-democratic,” Inge noted; there was no room for any notion of progress, and the best thinkers of modern times were “banned as poisonous.” In short, “the Catholic universe of truth is static.” Inge’s unforgiving conclusion was that Catholicism, despite its “numerous and potent… attractions” for masses of people, was “an imposture.” Protestantism, by contrast, was “the religion of the genuinely modern culture, the civilization of experimental science and hopeful political experiments.” Protestantism did not merely accept but openly welcomed the advances of “philosophy, Biblical criticism, and natural science,” making it ultimately “the form of religion which is homogenous with and adapted to modern civilization.” Inge spoke for many birth control supporters in condemning Catholicism as, at base, anti-American.66

  While Protestant anti-Catholicism played a significant role in the Protestant acceptance of birth control, animus toward Catholics was not the only, or even the most important, factor. As Inge suggested, the Protestant position on birth control followed an internal modernist logic consistent with a progressive position on a number of other issues in American society, including the teaching of Darwinian evolution and the publication of literature formerly deemed obscene. Progress appeared inevitable and largely good; knowledge led to illumination and the betterment of society; independence of thought and intellectual freedom were absolutely essential to true understanding and development, and antithetical to self-appointed authorities. These were some of the positive grounds on which Protestants could base their support for birth control access as well as critique the Catholic Church. Protestants knew that the Catholic hierarchy was insistently anti-Protestant and had been since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. If American Protestants were open about voicing their own anti-Catholicism, it was within a much longer context of vocal conflict and dissent.

  Among white Protestant clerics, Sanger scored a major victory in March 1925, at the Sixth International neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference held at the Hotel McAlpin in New York. There, after a session on the religious and ethical dimensions of birth control, a number of Protestant and Jewish clergy—the Protestants including Episcopalian, Congregational, Unitarian, and Baptist ministers—endorsed birth control, passing a resolution calling on churches to support it as “a moral and religious duty for the betterment of the human race and the establishment of the Kingdom of God among men.” Rabbi Stephen Wise of the Free Synagogue gave a vigorous defense of the movement, noting that a child’s life was so sacred that it should only be brought forth if society could give it “fair opportunity to find its highest service.” The Reverend Dr. Charles Francis Potter, a Unitarian, called birth control “the greatest moral issue before the church today” and urgently advocated for the open distribution of technical knowledge as an antidote to immorality, insisting that even if knowledge led some into sin, the greater harm was the suffering caused by ignorance—a sign that the very definition of “immorality” was shifting. The Reverend Potter showed himself to be partisan to the eugenic side of the movement as well, insisting upon the Christian duty to stave off the births of the “unfit.”67 The topics of these and the other clergy talks varied, but the general message endorsed birth control on the grounds that it would promote monogamy, morality, peace, and health. Perhaps it was the resonance of this message that inspired Sanger to appeal to Protestants’ deepest ideals for Christian life in a book she published the following year: Happiness in Marriage was a paean to the institutio
n and a guide for ensuring that sex between a married couple was not solely meant for procreation but was a sacred experience.

  By 1927, one of the nation’s most prominent liberal Protestant clergymen, Harry Emerson Fosdick, was widely known as supporting birth control. He had first gained national renown with his 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” which criticized fundamentalist intolerance and called for a model of “Christian fellowship” defined as “intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant.”68 Five years later, and fourteen months after his appointment as the pastor of New York’s Park Avenue Baptist Church (the church of John D. Rockefeller Jr., which would shortly move to Riverside Drive), Fosdick delivered an explicitly pro-contraception sermon that received wide media coverage. Fosdick cited overpopulation as his main rationale for favoring birth control, while asserting the need for sexual self-control and ridiculing the “new freedom” of sexual expressionism that undercut monogamy.69 Fosdick’s sermon—along with a 1929 article, “Religion and Birth Control,” which received wide distribution and circulation when Sanger’s newly formed National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control (NCFLBC) reprinted it as a pamphlet—perfectly encapsulated the grounds on which religious leaders were willing to support the birth control cause, none more important than strengthening marriage.70 Indeed, as one historian has noted, it was marriage itself that gave Protestant clergy an “existential opening to other-than-absolutist views on marital contraception,” differentiating themselves sharply from Catholics.71

  The NCFLBC aimed to generate a national lobbying effort to convince members of Congress to amend the federal laws that still listed contraceptive information and devices as obscene and forbade their transmittal through the postal service. Sanger knew that Protestant leaders and their denominations were a crucial constituency that needed to be lobbied, and she did so with gusto, attending countless church conventions in order to reach religious leaders directly and corresponding regularly with them by mail, as she urged them to reach out to fellow ministers within their own denominations. Although her legislative goals were not quickly met, her extensive efforts with clergy bore much fruit among religious communities.

  A number of Protestant leaders interacted with Sanger behind the scenes. For instance, in April 1929, the Unitarian John Haynes Holmes, minister of the Community Church of New York, initiated a correspondence with Sanger that would last several years. It began with Holmes offering his support in the wake of a recent raid upon Sanger’s clinic, “a perfectly outrageous affair” that Holmes believed was initiated by “the same old benighted forces” she had long fought.72 Sanger thanked Holmes for his offer to help, and by September 1930 he was serving as vice chair of the eastern district of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. She spoke at Holmes’s church on more than one occasion and wrote a short blurb to honor his twenty-fifth anniversary in the church’s ministry in 1932; in between, Holmes actively supported Massachusetts senator Frederick Gillett’s bill to remove significant federal restrictions on physicians’ ability to distribute contraception. As their warm correspondence shows, Sanger and Holmes worked collaboratively on several fronts to persuade others of the rightness of the birth control cause.73 Protestant denominations began taking a stand in favor of her committee’s bill to repeal the Comstock law.

  Sanger was gaining allies not only among white Protestants but among African Americans as well, including religious leaders. During the 1920s, coverage of Sanger’s campaign in the black press was overwhelmingly positive, as black writers editorialized about the positive gains to be made from the birth control movement. In February 1923, a writer for the Baltimore-based Afro-American, a black-owned-and-operated newspaper, remarked approvingly on Sanger’s recent visit to Baltimore and noted that the government must either permit women to obtain contraceptive knowledge or set aside funds to aid their children. Two years later, William N. Jones, in his regular column for the Afro-American, wrote of the progress to be wrought from the movement’s promotion of “the deeper meaning of the marriage vow in future children.” A few years later, the paper transcribed the entire commencement address delivered by Dr. Adam Clayton Powell of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church to Nannie Helen Burroughs’s National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC, where he quoted Margaret Sanger’s words in a recent address: “‘Supreme happiness does not consist in seeking one’s own pleasures, but in working for the good of others.’”74

  Glowing articles in New York’s major African American newspaper, the Amsterdam News, accompanied a lecture by Sanger at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, sponsored by the North Harlem Community Forum. The coverage focused again on the divide between what Sanger termed “two classes” of American women: “those who have birth control and those who have not”—rich and poor. Enthusiasm accompanied Sanger’s hope of establishing a birth control clinic in Harlem, and in October 1929, the social workers of Harlem, meeting at the New York Urban League headquarters, voted to endorse the plan after a persuasive speech by Sanger insisting that birth control “reduces both infant and maternal mortality,” improves “the health of the mother,” and raises “the economic condition of the entire family.” When the newly established birth control clinic in Harlem held its official “house warming” in November 1930, the featured speakers included no less than the revered African American intellectual leader Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Harlem Hospital surgeon Dr. Louis T. Wright, along with prominent black clergy: Shelton Hale Bishop of Harlem’s St. Philip’s Episcopal Church (the second-oldest black Episcopal congregation), Floarda Howard of St. Jude’s Chapel (also Episcopalian), and Willard Monroe of Memorial Baptist Church. According to the Amsterdam News, “they all welcomed the establishment of such a center in Harlem,” and their support of Sanger’s work would long continue. In her column for the paper, “The Feminist Viewpoint,” Thelma Berlack Boozer praised Sanger and recommended the recent “Negro number” (a special issue focused on issues facing African Americans) of the American Birth Control League’s Birth Control Review, praising the league’s position that federal law should legalize birth control. Birth control was necessary, Boozer insisted, in order to solve the nation’s poverty and attendant ills.75

  As time went on, not all coverage in the African American press was positive. In 1934, Cornelius Scott’s Atlanta Daily World rebuked Sanger and her movement for interfering with “God’s law and His plans” and lamented the selfishness of modern women who would shirk their homemaking role.76 Another negative reaction to the movement would grow among African Americans suspicious that the birth control campaign targeted blacks and was a surreptitious method of genocide. But even when her support for negative eugenics was pronounced, she made clear that the targets were “the mental defectives, the morons and those with transmissible diseases” and not racial groups, as she told an undergraduate interviewing her for the Yale University newspaper in 1934.77 Sanger condemned racism on numerous occasions and told Earl Conrad of the Chicago Defender, “The Negro’s plight here is linked with that of the oppressed around the globe.” With her message that birth control aided in dismantling racism by placing greater value on each human life, Sanger consistently had the support of many African American leaders, including clergy. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would eventually become an ally of the birth control movement, accepting Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award by proclaiming the importance of family planning to white and black Americans alike: “Together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation, not of races in general, but of the one race we all constitute—the human race.”78

  The Christian leaders, black and white, who supported Sanger in the 1920s counted on her defense of traditional marriage. As a sex reformer who needed to secure deep support for her cause from religious allies, Sanger adopted a pose of conventional morality in her prescriptive writing, one she did not always live out in her private life. She
believed that it was necessary to speak to potentially sympathetic constituencies in terms and values with which they identified. In this case, marriage and the family were major points on which she connected with many supporters; after all, she too had married and lived the domestic life (though eventually divorced), and she too was a mother. Church leaders’ attempt to reconcile support for contraception with a continued defense of traditional marriage would soon come under fire from conservative Protestants who saw the two as incompatible. But leaders increasingly saw support for contraception as a necessary engagement with modern realities. Whatever remnants of hesitation lurked in the hearts of Protestant leaders in 1921 about the need for substantial change regarding birth control virtually evaporated in subsequent years.

  BY THE END OF THIS tumultuous decade, the polarization over birth control within American Christianity had noticeably intensified. The divergence was evident in three documents on contraception issued in close proximity to each other—one Anglican (important and influential for the Episcopal Church in the United States, and broader American Christian debates as well), one Roman Catholic, and one American Protestant. Together, these revealed much about the deepening gulf among Christians and how these groups faced the dilemma of shifting societal views on sex and gender. While Anglicans made minute but discernible adjustment to conservative principles, Catholics responded with determined retrenchment against shifting values, and American Protestants with outright acceptance of, and adjustment to, modern realities. None of these positions was without controversy. The Protestant documents generated internal disagreement during the process of their creation—there were dissenting votes on both—and all three prompted substantial conflict among American religious leaders and church members. But they did indicate the broad contours of the increasingly divided landscape.