By the summer of 1959, when a federal district court overturned the postmaster general’s refusal to transmit the infamous Lady Chatterley’s Lover through the mails and thus freed it from US censorship, Lawrence was winning praise as a religious visionary. As derision of Lawrence gave way to various degrees of admiration, even a theologian at Concordia Seminary, a school of the very conservative Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, could write, “Pastors involved in marital counseling and theologians involved in the doctrine of creation will be stimulated by Lawrence’s holistic principle to search the Biblical Word anew.” Influential Christian thinkers were treating Lawrence’s work as a font of creativity for Christian theologizing and praised his deep understanding of the meaning of Christian love and sexuality: if not quite a Christian himself, Lawrence could now be seen, in the words of one critic, as “almost a Christian.”62 Perhaps the culmination of this new thinking came some time later, in the 1960s, as when Horton Davies, a Welsh historian of Christianity and ordained Congregationalist minister who taught at Princeton University, wrote a piece on Lawrence that began somewhat theatrically, “Is David Herbert Lawrence also among the prophets? Is this adopted son of Sigmund Freud also among the saints?” Davies’s article focused entirely on Lawrence’s writings about sexuality, love, and the body, and his responses to these questions was an unambiguous yes.63 For traditional Christians, Lawrence had gone from being a despised anti-Christian pagan to a prophet and a saint.
THE DUNSTER HOUSE BOOKSHOP CASE and successive shifts in Protestant and Catholic modes of censorship and control of literature and film are important for revealing new fault lines in American religious attitudes toward sex and the sexual content of popular entertainments. The religious debates about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, popular movies, and pulp magazines showed growing disagreements over how best to protect the morals of the nation—especially American youth—and maintain social order. The censors had perceived Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be a menace, believing that Lawrence’s sexually wild religiosity threatened to upend the gender hierarchy and conservative religious norms of the time and jeopardize the stability of the nation itself. Similar worry greeted other suggestive materials, even as the strategy shifted away from censorship laws to active religious involvement in the control and distribution of film and literature. Ultimately, the concerns articulated about sexual content were deeply tied up with worries about modernity, challenges to traditional church authority, and anxiety that feminism would upend the godly male order of the created world.
Conservative Protestants and Catholics remained suspicious of one another throughout the 1930s and beyond. But they were united in believing that sexually risqué materials should be rigorously monitored and kept out of the hands of youth. Decades later, in one of those ironies of history, it was a Catholic—Justice William Brennan, devoutly religious and no fan of graphic sexuality, and the only Catholic then on the Supreme Court—who wrote the majority opinions in the 1964 cases that overturned America’s strictest twentieth-century obscenity laws, dramatically transformed the very meaning of “obscenity,” and sharply restricted the bounds of censorship.64 Among other lessons, it was a reminder that Protestants weren’t the only Christian group splitting ranks over sex.
CHAPTER 3
SEGREGATION AND RACE MIXING IN THE EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
MUCH OF THE DEBATE OVER censorship in the 1930s centered on content deemed overtly sexual or depicting extramarital relationships. Most regulations did not aim to suppress portrayals of adult relationships that might fall outside of general conventions: love affairs between Catholics and Protestants, for instance, were not regulated by the censors or production codes, even if many people in both religious groups disapproved of them. Only one kind of consensual adult relationship between a man and a woman not married to other people was forbidden by the Motion Picture Production Code: intimate relationships “between the white and black races.” The taboo on interracial intimacy in movies prevailed because the very idea of love and marriage across the color line was offensive to white Americans at this time. For years, there was no topic more forbidden, no issue more explosive, than interracial sex.
Race, of course, has always been one of the most contentious issues in American life. The African slave trade that began in the 1620s led to almost two hundred and fifty years of legally sanctioned white enslavement of black people, horrifically brutal in every respect and predicated on assumptions of black inferiority and white supremacy. Officially, slavery ceased with the end of the Civil War in 1865, but what followed were decades of conflict over the conditions by which white and African American people could coexist and interact in the United States. By the 1940s, when World War II proved to be a moment of decisive change in the nation, calls for full equality were gaining traction, even as resistance by whites remained strong; some of the most heated political debates of the time concerned race. And nothing stoked greater fury or fear than the idea of interracial intimacy, love, and sex.
The taboo white Americans placed on intimacy with African Americans long predated the 1940s, but it gathered particular momentum during that decade. Apprehensions over gender, purity, and the future of civilization that had roiled the debates over birth control and censorship found potent manifestation in the fear that this taboo might be eased or even eradicated. White Christians in the World War II–era South maintained their slaveholding ancestors’ belief that God created separate black and white races and that He intended them to stay that way for the sake of white purity; framed by assumptions permeating white Southern culture, their reading of the Bible made such a worldview appear starkly obvious, and they pressed this view on each other and their children. The very thought of sex between a black man and a white woman infuriated white Southerners who wished to maintain both gender and racial hierarchy; this had been true for decades, and the prospect was a key argument used to shore up segregation, not to mention a recurrent rationale for lynchings and other murders of black men. But challenges to segregationist Jim Crow laws in the South lately seemed to be coming fast and furious, mainly from a federal government that most white residents thought had no right to interfere with Southern tradition. As desegregation increased, both by force and by choice, the pious aversion toward racial intermixing, marriage, and reproduction in some quarters only grew more belligerent and explosive.
In the mid-1940s, amid the horrors of World War II and the fascist reign of Adolf Hitler in Germany, this issue blew up in both houses of Congress. The outburst stemmed from a 1943 collaboration between two anthropologists at Columbia University, Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, who coauthored a short pamphlet they titled The Races of Mankind. In 1944, distribution of the months-old pamphlet abruptly halted when it was deemed subversive by critics suggesting that the two anthropologist authors were likely Communists out to undermine the United States. Unwittingly or not, the authors had struck a nerve deep in the heart of Christian Dixie, threatening the architecture of racial separation and white supremacy that forbade sex across the color line. Anti-Communist sentiments were strong, and the McCarthy hearings were just around the corner; the repugnance for interracial sex that was so fierce among religious white Southerners helped speed along this new era of fear.
Anthropologist Ruth Benedict (undated). BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.
HOSTILITY TOWARD SEX ACROSS RACIAL lines—and especially toward sex between white women and black men—long rested on a specifically religious basis or rationale. Rooted in the history of slavery and emancipation, the taboo against interracial love was deeply entangled with ideas about God’s racially ordered plan. Whether they owned slaves or not, white Americans who supported the slave system had no difficulty believing that the biblical references to slavery meant that the enslavement of Africans was just and that slavery was divinely sanctioned, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no less than biblical times. Further, many white churchmen both in and beyond the South creatively inferred from the book of Genesis that
God had cursed Noah’s son Ham and his generations of offspring with black skin, consignment to bondage, and general subjugation to whites. In short, white Americans found support in the Bible not only for slavery specifically but also for racial inequality and segregation more generally: sex across the color line was thus a religious violation of God’s law.1
The word “miscegenation,” meaning the mixture of two or more races, first appeared in 1864, but laws prohibiting sex and marriage between the races in America went back to the 1660s, when colonial governments forbade interracial sex to bolster racial hierarchies, keep the so-called white race pure, and guard against the putative sexual depravity of black people. Stereotypes of Africans as more sexual and aggressive than whites had come over the ocean with the English settlers, who believed such people were “lewd, lascivious and wanton people” and were keen to mate across the color line.2 By 1705, the Virginia Assembly was resorting to six months’ imprisonment and a large fine for any white person caught fornicating across the color line, and ministers who performed interracial marriages were also fined.3 Such statutes eventually pervaded all of the Southern colonies and, later, states: at least forty-one states enacted anti-miscegenation laws at one time.
Of course, these laws rarely applied in practice to white men; both before and after emancipation, black women were vulnerable to multiple forms of sexual coercion. Enslaved black women habitually suffered the humiliation of rape by their white masters, so much so that rising numbers of mixed-race babies motivated colonial governments to pass laws declaring the children of enslaved women to hold slave status as well. Slave masters could literally increase their own wealth by raping and impregnating their female slaves, even as white women giving birth to a so-called mulatto or mixed-race infant were severely punished. The legal apparatus developed to prohibit all sexual activity between white women and black men was wholly absent for black women, who were, without penalty, subjected to forcible sex, whipping, physical restraints, and public nudity.
Such practices were obviously about white control over black labor, but they were also, as one historian starkly puts it, about “feeding the sexual appetites of the powerful and about the degradation of those made to feel powerless.”4 Mixed-race children could still shock those not from the elite South: a Vermont native visiting Monticello in the early nineteenth century wrote to his father about Thomas Jefferson’s interracial household and his slave, Sally Hemings: “The story of black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts.”5 The right of white men to manhandle black women, rape them, impregnate them, and keep those offspring as slaves was rarely questioned, adding cruel absurdity to laws forbidding interracial marriage between freely consenting partners. These ravages of the American slavery system would live on in the later sexual violence inflicted by white Ku Klux Klansmen and gangs on black women perceived to be a threat (or whose husbands were perceived as such).
Far from being a negligible factor or an afterthought, religion was foundational in the anti-miscegenationist worldview. White disgust toward miscegenation rested on—and was reinforced by—Christian theology and racialized readings of the Bible. God had created separate and distinctive races, the argument went, and He expected them to stay that way. Whites had long associated blackness with contamination and impurity and built ample religious justification for this link from the Bible, generating what later commentators have called a “theology of segregationism.”6 This theology sometimes addressed sex specifically. Christians had long believed that the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden came about through sexual sin; the serpent that lusted after Eve and tempted her into eating the forbidden apple was presumed to be male. Some pro-slavery writers before the Civil War characterized the serpent not just as male but specifically as a pre-Adamite black man, the Louisianan Samuel Cartwright going so far as to call the serpent a “negro gardener.”7 Tennessee clergyman Buckner Payne accepted this view, along with the corollary that as a creature created before Adam, the black figure was subhuman and had no soul. In 1867 Payne wrote, “A man can not commit so great an offense against his race, against his country, against his God, in any other way, as to give his daughter in marriage to a negro—a beast—or to take one of their females for his wife.” Those who disagreed weren’t simply wrong but evil: “The states or people that favor this equality and amalgamation of the white and black races, God will exterminate” (emphasis in original).8 Cartwright similarly argued that “the hybrids” created through race mixing “were so exceedingly wicked” that they impelled God to destroy the world in the great flood. Miscegenation seemed to be the root of all corruption, the vilest of sins.9
If Christian theology could so thoroughly support slavery, racism, and opposition to interracial sex specifically, it could also validate the Southern cause in the Civil War. In 1863, delegates to meetings of the pro-slavery Southern Baptist Convention—a breakaway denomination formed eighteen years before, when northern Baptists underscored their opposition to slavery—pronounced the Civil War “just and necessary” and praised God’s “divine hand in the guidance and protection of our beloved country.” The North’s opposition to Southern ways was, noted the Virginia Baptists, “alike subversive of the teachings of Christianity and the genius of constitutional liberty and order.” Their own faith lay in the “sweet assurance that our cause is a righteous one.” Pro-slavery congregations throughout the South deemed the Southern war effort a religious calling of sorts, a sacred duty in upholding God’s laws for the races.10
Even after the South’s defeat, white Christian clergy often led the way in teaching their flocks that they were nevertheless an honorable people with every right to rule over blacks, and that they were waging God’s war against the evil, atheistic North. It was a theology, in other words, that upheld racial inequality as divinely established: “We do not believe that ‘all men are created equal’… nor that they will ever become equal in this world,” averred a Southern Baptist minister in 1883.11 Gender hierarchy was fundamental to this interpretation of Christianity; so was racial hierarchy. With the end of slavery, old legal boundaries between white and black had been erased; for whites concerned to preserve their dominance in the status quo, blacks and whites needed to be thoroughly separated, and black people needed continual reminders of their limitations and their place in society—reminders that were aggressively enforced.
Slavery’s destruction did not change the core belief in black inferiority held by so many whites—Northerners as well as Southerners—committed to white supremacy. In the South, most policies of Reconstruction failed as white Southerners managed to re-create structural hierarchies of racial dominance and subordination, all while they read their Bibles, prayed, attended church, and considered themselves true keepers of the Christian faith. Trading pro-slavery for pro-segregation theology, many white Americans were adamant in their belief that they were a people chosen by God who were in every way superior to African Americans. They must therefore remain separate and not intermix. Legislatures and courts enacted this theology into law, and not only in the South: two years after the Civil War ended, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the legality of segregated railway cars, affirming that “the natural law which forbids [interracial marriage] and that social amalgamation which leads to a corruption of races, is as clearly divine as that which imparted to [the races] different natures.” State supreme courts in Indiana, Alabama, and Virginia also invoked God’s divine law to uphold bans on intermarriage and to reinforce in human law the “theology of separate races.”12 By assumption, custom, and eventually law, the presence of even so little as “one drop” of nonwhite blood in a person’s family history could exclude him or her from laying claim to whiteness.
Scientists and other scholars working in the latter decades of the nineteenth century took for granted this Christian view of the
divine origin of racial separation and the evils of race mixing. Under the pseudonym “Caucasian,” the author of Anthropology for the People: A Refutation of the Theory of the Adamic Origin of All Races (1891) wrote, “From this theory, that God made the yellow and the black races inferior, physically, mentally and morally, we infer that he designed them for a subordinate and dependent position.” There was no question that God demanded the preservation of “blood purity,” for which He implanted “the instinctive mutual and universal repulsiveness of races” so that the very idea of “political and social equality” would be “repugnant.” Lest there be any doubt, Caucasian warned that miscegenation “is not only an enormous sin against God, but a degrading bestiality which can result only in unmitigated evil and final destruction.” He echoed Payne and Cartwright in declaring that the biblical flood recounted in the book of Exodus resulted from mixing between white and nonwhite races, creating a situation so corrupt that God destroyed the world and began again.13
Other white Christian writers echoed similar claims into the twentieth century. Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and The Tempter of Eve (1902) argued vociferously that miscegenation was the worst of all sins. The Congregationalist minister and social scientist H. Paul Douglass, a vocal opponent of racial bigotry, bewailed the vast influence of The Negro a Beast in the South, noting that door-to-door sales of the book had helped it become “the Scripture of tens of thousands of poor whites, and its doctrine is maintained with an appalling stubbornness and persistence.”14 Published by the American Book and Bible House in St. Louis, the book was nearly four hundred pages of scriptural exegesis and liberal quoting from other Southern Christian writers, and it included numerous illustrations of caricatured black people and etherealized whites. One, showing a wedding between a black man and a white woman, was titled “The Beast and the Virgin” with this caption: “Can you find a white preacher who would unite in holy wedlock, a burly negro to a white lady? Ah! parents, you would rather see your daughter burned, and her ashes scattered to the winds of heaven.”15 Certainly, less dramatic versions of this taboo were far more widespread throughout the country; after all, the Motion Picture Code had, as one of its general principles, forbidden movie depictions of relationships between the races. But “Professor” Carroll, as the publisher called him, advanced “biblical, scientific, and common sense arguments” to make a dramatic Christian case against racial mixing.
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