The Anglican statement emerged out of the seventh decanal Lambeth Conference—a global convening of Anglican bishops and other church leaders to discuss matters of Christian import and offer guiding principles—which took place in August 1930. The body passed a total of seventy-five resolutions apropos various doctrinal and logistical matters, declarations that were not binding (as no Lambeth resolutions could be) but carried moral weight and influenced many American Protestants both among and beyond America’s Episcopal elite. A number of these focused on marriage and sexuality. Resolution 13, for instance, affirmed the sexual instinct as holy and divinely implanted in human nature and acknowledged the bonding function of sexual intercourse in marriage. Resolution 16 condemned abortion as an abhorrent, sinful practice. Reaping nearly all the attention in the conference’s wake, however, was Resolution 15, which argued that any “clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood” should follow a Christian method, the most obvious of which was total abstinence from sexual intercourse. Only when there was a “morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence” could other methods be used. The resolution roundly denounced the act of preventing conception, whatever the method, arising from “motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”79 But it explicitly suggested that contraceptive methods other than abstinence did have an acceptable use, and in this, it went squarely against the 1920 Lambeth Conference, whose leaders had warned emphatically against artificial means of contraception no matter the circumstances. The change in Anglican teachings on contraception was not universally embraced. Nearly a quarter of the bishops present at Lambeth in 1930 rejected this particular resolution (193 voted for it, 67 against), and the resolution prompted a firestorm throughout the international Anglican communion, including the Episcopal Church in the United States.
Traditionalists criticized the Lambeth resolution as vague (what constituted “a morally sound reason” for eschewing abstinence?) and confused (why was abstinence so praised in a document commending contraception?), and they condemned the apparently sudden departure from doctrinal convention that disapproved of all unnatural barriers to conception. The most caustic critics understood the document to be opening the door to chaotic disruptions in Christian thinking about sex. The renowned poet and social critic T. S. Eliot (a convert to Anglicanism from Unitarianism) published a rebuttal that scathingly disparaged the statement’s excessive reliance on the individual conscience at the expense of seeking spiritual counsel from the clergy.80 In a thoroughgoing defense of traditional Christian sexual morality, the Welsh historian and government administrator J. Conway Davies argued against dislocating the sexual relationship from its biological function, raging that the Lambeth bishops were trying to intermix a Christian view of sex with a radically distinct notion of sex as “soul-union.” The latter view, exemplified in the British writers Edward Carpenter and D. H. Lawrence (not to mention Sanger herself), promoted sexual love as what Davies belittled as “an act of practical Mysticism.” The Lambeth bishops, Davies argued, had ultimately forsaken Paul and Augustine for Carpenter and Lawrence, Sigmund Freud, and the birth controllers, succumbing to thinly evidenced psychology that attributed modern neurosis to sexual problems rather than to sin and spiritual malaise.81
Such acid evaluations made clear that birth control—more precisely, the pagan, mystical, romantic, and ostensibly selfish assumptions that justified its use—led inexorably to “feminine revolt,” and to the destruction of family and society. In opening the door to contraception, claimed critics, the bishops amended two centuries of traditional teachings on human nature, gender, virginity, and the role of the church in society as well as individual salvation, presenting a “Reduced Christianity.” Now, Davies concluded in despair, “in contrast to the great Pauline utterances on the warfare between flesh and spirit, we are given a set of side-long glances at some modern problems, concluding to a prudent and circumspect muffling of the drums.”82 No matter that the bishops had meant to strengthen marriage and the family by cracking the door open to contraception. Birth control was not a humane response to practical problems; it was a warhead annihilating the traditional meaning of sex both inside and outside marriage (since birth control information could not easily be restricted to married couples). From this perspective, the Lambeth document marked a wholesale revolution in long-established Christian thinking about crucial issues of body and soul, gender and power, and the hierarchical relation between male and female.
Four months after the release of the Lambeth documents, and with many Anglican elites still up in arms, the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church clarified its own position on birth control. Pope Pius XI elucidated the church’s condemnation of contraception in the papal encyclical Casti Connubii (Of Chaste Wedlock), released on December 31, 1930. Along with its affirmation of the unchanging nature of the moral law and Catholic teaching, the encyclical directly criticized those—the Anglican bishops, that is—who adjusted their stance for rashly departing from centuries of Christian doctrine. The document also affirmed the sanctity of marriage as an indissoluble union and offered strong censure of divorce and abortion, and it charged priests to do everything possible to enforce these moral teachings among lay Catholics. Casti Connubii underlined the importance of women’s homemaking role and summoned wives to be obedient to their husbands, holding fast to traditional gender roles and meanings of sexuality as divinely ordained. All of these teachings, the text insisted, were part of a timeless, seamless, God-ordained whole.
While the document strongly reiterated the teaching that the primary end of intercourse was procreation, it recognized “secondary ends” that were not prohibited so long as the act remained “natural”—that is, open to the possibility of procreation. Such secondary ends included marital love, a theme that Catholics were not accustomed to hearing much about from official Catholic teaching. Casti Connubii also appeared to acknowledge (if somewhat obscurely and not certainly) the acceptability, so long as one did not reject parenthood outright, of intentionally avoiding intercourse during the fertile days of the wife’s menstrual cycle, presumably a licit way to forestall pregnancy through timed abstinence (what would come to be called the “rhythm method”). Nonetheless, this was an encyclical that bolstered existing church doctrine and sought to ensure that Catholics did not go the way of the Lambeth innovators. The Vatican statement was a sharp rebuke to Anglican leaders who had broached the possibility of “Christian” methods of contraception other than abstinence—and a dire warning to any others who might be tempted to follow.
Four more months passed before the third significant religious document emerged, this one from American Protestant leaders. The US press had given extensive coverage to both the Lambeth document and Casti Connubii; both were closely studied by leaders of the Protestant denominations affiliated with the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (FCC), a body that claimed to represent between twenty-one and twenty-two million Protestant church members in the United States. After years of political wrangling over birth control and extensive efforts by Sanger’s office to lobby church officials, it was time for Protestants to decide where they stood.
Shortly after Lambeth sanctioned birth control in limited circumstances, the FCC formed a Committee on Marriage and the Home for the purpose of rethinking its own position. Universalists, Unitarians, and Reform Jews had already clarified their support for contraception; from one angle, then, the choice facing the Protestant representatives was between standing with the traditionalist Catholic hierarchy and the Anglicans or with those religionists who had already adopted a more liberal view.83 Views were mixed, to say the least: the House of Bishops in the Protestant Episcopal Church had spoken out against birth control in 1925, but some clergy were shifting their views on the subject, as were leaders in other denominations. Chaired by the Reverend Howard C. Robbins, the former dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and comprising a total of seventeen men and eleven women as signatories, the FCC co
mmittee issued a statement in April 1931 that received wide attention, including a report on the front page of the New York Times. The report showed a majority of committee members accepting birth control within marriage as “valid and moral” and as insisting that “this undoubtedly represents the prevailing Protestant point of view”; a small minority (three out of twenty-eight) claimed that the morality of contraception remained in doubt and that Christians ought to “uphold the standard of abstinence as the ideal” without recommending artificial methods.
Those committee members who endorsed the moral validity of “the careful and restrained use of contraceptives by married people” reasoned that such use allowed for the appropriate spacing of children and control of family size, protected mothers and children from undue travails and poverty, and acknowledged the inherent goodness of intercourse as an expression of a married couple’s spiritual union and love. Admitting the possibility of an increase in such evils as adultery as a result of contraceptive knowledge, the signatories further urged church, society, and parents to educate and instill morals into the nation’s youth, so that this new knowledge would be used for good rather than for ill. The dissenters, including the committee chair and two of its female members (Mrs. Orrin R. Judd, a Baptist and the president of the Council of Women for Home Missions, and Emma Bailey Spear, a Presbyterian and president of the board of the Young Women’s Christian Association), accepted the goodness of sex in marriage but held fast to abstinence as the only moral method of preventing conception.84
But the FCC committee’s disagreements were far less consequential than the points on which it agreed. The FCC committee took pains to explicate the two amazing “mysteries” that were at stake when it came to marital sex and contraception. The first and more obvious, in the context of the period’s discussions of birth control, was the creation, with God, of new and precious human life and the resulting experience of parenthood. And if it sounded traditionalist to describe the mother role as the highest realization of womanhood, the statement as plainly called the father role the supreme fulfillment of manhood. The egalitarian note struck by the equation of fatherhood and motherhood continued in the second mystery, which was the divine meaning of sex between married partners as the “supreme expression of their affection and comradeship” and a “manifestation of divine concern” for their joy—literally, a gift from God to reward their faithfulness. Committee members wanted it to be understood that, despite their disagreement on the single issue of artificial contraceptive methods, there was overall agreement that sex in marriage was good and holy quite apart from its procreative potential. Keeping desire within bounds was essential, the statement warned, in order to maintain this holiness and avoid “sex indulgence,” just as one would avoid excess in other appetites. But the statement’s bold emphasis on the sacred goodness of marital intercourse—stated in plain language, without qualification—was a significant development in American Protestant discussions of sex.85
Praise for the FCC report was soon forthcoming. The prominent Congregationalist minister Russell J. Clinchy’s defense of it appeared in the Washington Daily News (alongside an opposing piece by the Catholic priest Francis J. Hurney) and again in a prominent Congregationalist journal. Calling the report “a wise, balanced and scientific study of the physical, mental and spiritual factors of birth control,” the progressive Clinchy praised the authors for “commend[ing] the judicious, scientific and ethical use of methods of contraception for medical, eugenic and moral purposes.” He struck a robustly feminist note in emphasizing the health and well-being of the mother, insisting that a woman’s “prime function” was “not as a breeder of children” but as a “spiritual personality,” a “daughter of God” who should not be coerced into motherhood. The notion of a woman’s God-given right to control her own reproductive life could hardly acquire a more forceful defense. Clinchy also defended contraception on the grounds of children’s rights to be cared for before other children are conceived, and on its support for the happiness and lasting love of the married couple. Excessive sexual continence was “both undesirable and impossible” to couples who truly loved each other. Scientific birth control was, therefore, valid for reasons spanning a range of virtues. Clinchy imagined his audience as a like-minded group of “moral optimists” who would agree that most people would use this new technology for good, rather than for ill, and that contraception was an instrument of progress that could usher in a happier, healthier world. For those, like Catholics, who believed that this new control over reproduction was “of the devil” and had only carnal implications, “it will be the opening of the gates of death.” But for those who believed this new power was “of God,” it would bring a new era of life and love. Clinchy articulated, as well as any Protestant, the hopeful future to be sought through the liberation of married sexual love via birth control.86
The FCC report attracted reproach as well. Commonweal excoriated it in an editorial. Analyzing the report for an ethics course during his fellowship year at Union Theological Seminary, the young German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote sourly in his notes about the American Protestant turn toward the ethical, “since the dogmatic is no longer understood by Protestants,” the birth control report being one more example of the American indifference to true theology.87 The American document sparked tremendous controversy among Protestant detractors, so much so that members of the FCC spent two years fighting over it before finally laying it aside without endorsement.
The report had a massive influence nonetheless, suggesting why Sanger had worked so hard to shape it. It was both a bellwether of change and a spur to public discussion, and it was crucially shaped by Sanger’s intensive work with FCC clergy. Without acknowledging her own role in its creation (which could have been deadly to some clergy whose constituents were skeptical of Sanger), she roundly praised its emphasis on birth control as a perfectly moral way to promote women’s health and family happiness, and she maintained, as a newspaper headline put it shortly afterward, “It’s What I’d Have Written Myself.”
Protestants of this period who were increasingly accepting of birth control typically held what one historian has described as “a curious mixture of liberal and conservative views on contraception.” The “liberal” elements in Protestant acceptance of birth control included a positive view toward science and medical opinion (much of which was on contraception’s side), a focus on the laity and interest in ordinary people’s experience, an interest in privacy, an emphasis on individual rights (including the rights of women and children), a romantic sense of sexuality that interpreted human sexual intercourse as a spiritual experience, and an optimism that rightly educated people would mostly choose to be moral. The “conservative” elements that blended with these ideas were, chiefly, a concern with marriage between one man and one woman as the bedrock of civilization, a profound concern for social order and stability (hence the appeal of eugenics), a positive view of the self-control necessary to all human social relations, and an interest in holding on to important aspects of tradition even as times were changing.88 That mix was essential for persuading a wide range of Christians that contraceptive advocacy was contrary neither to their faith nor to fundamental American values.
Sanger’s cooperation with clergy continued after the report was issued, and the FCC found itself in need of her help. Amid the controversy over the report, a high-ranking FCC administrator, Worth M. Tippy, wrote a worried letter to Sanger noting that the birth control statement had “aroused more opposition within the Protestant churches than we had expected” and that some churches were dissociating themselves altogether from the FCC. Tippy asked her for names of wealthy birth control supporters from whom he could appeal for money, adding, “I assume that you would not want your name used in any such appeals.” Sanger scribbled a note on the letter that she would “help in every way gladly,” and her formal response affirmed that she was “grieved” by this opposition, would eagerly send names to help the FCC, and had �
��no objection whatsoever to your using my name in any way possible if it will be of help to you.” She continued, “I admire so tremendously the courage the Federal Council has had in taking up this subject that I want to help in every way possible to strengthen your hand and I know that there are hundreds of others who feel the same way.” Tippy regularly came back to Sanger with specific monetary amounts he needed and begged for her further assistance, which she regularly gave, including contributions from her own funds.89 The money she helped raise even paid for the hiring of a new administrator, L. Foster Wood, whose work appeared to focus entirely on educating churches for birth control. Sanger periodically reached out to supporters, such as the wealthy banker and philanthropist George Blumenthal, to help pay Wood’s salary and the budget for his work.90 Keeping careful track of donor names and contributions—and making clear that she expected her investment to reap real results in terms of support for the birth control movement—Sanger helped the FCC financially in this way for a number of years to come, helping it to survive the loss of support from conservative Protestants.
Hence the Federal Council of Churches continued on a steady course in a progressive direction on birth control and sex more generally, despite the growing complaints of some conservative members. In 1932, its Committee on Marriage and the Home compiled and published what it titled A Bibliography on Young People’s Relationships, Marriage and Family Life, a twenty-three-page annotated list of recommended books in this area. While most titles focused on subjects such as parenting, instilling religious values in children, health, and “mental hygiene,” a good number of the sources had something to do with sex: for instance, Parents and Sex Education, by science writer and educator B. C. Gruenberg; The Sexual Side of Marriage, by physician M. J. Exner; and The Sex Life of Youth, by Grace Loucks Elliott and Harry Bone. Another typical title was Young People’s Relationships, a pamphlet manual for church leaders of young people ages sixteen to nineteen, penned by Benjamin S. Winchester for the FCC’s Conference on Preparation for Marriage and Homemaking.91
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