THE 1940S RACIAL CONFLICTS OVER segregations and miscegenation left a sustained legacy, as religious arguments for and against race mixing endured long after Benedict and Bilbo. Sex remained a profoundly divisive instrument in American Christianity and the nation’s larger political milieu, now sharpened by intensifying disagreements about race. To some liberals, conservative sexual morality would come to seem profoundly if not permanently tainted by racism, corrupted by the hate that appeared to fuel segregationist theology and the hypocritical disgust for open love across the color line. To Christian conservatives, anti-racist activism appeared hopelessly mired in an anthropological “culture” paradigm of cross-culture relativity that encouraged sexual decadence and amorality; from that angle, the fight for racial equality was bound up with a newly unleashed moral laxness and a hedonistic sensibility careless of social order. Whether caricaturish or factual, such divergent interpretations of the sexual politics of racial attitudes fueled a deepening rupture within American Christianity that simmered only just below the surface of broader party politics before breaking through a few years later.
Anti-miscegenationist and anti-Communist views became deeply entwined in the controversy over The Races of Mankind. The governmental attacks on Boas, Benedict, and Weltfish in wartime were just the beginning of a years-long crackdown on many scholars in anthropology and other disciplines for their alleged Communist sympathies and subversive activities undermining the nation. In the minds of anti-Communist crusaders, the threat represented by proponents of racial equality, in particular, was vast. In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy, elected to the US Senate in 1946, summoned a wide range of artists, filmmakers, activists, and scholars before his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (part of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations), the group aiming to root out Communist ideologies. Benedict was dead by then, but Weltfish was one of those called in 1953.64 The specter of interracial sex and miscegenation was one of the factors that brought her to the committee’s attention.
Only weeks after the Supreme Court in May 1954 handed down its anti-segregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, White Citizens’ Councils arose to fight integration as well as mechanisms such as voter registration drives targeting potential African American voters. Citizens’ Councils widely distributed pamphlets like A Christian View on Segregation by Reverend G. T. Gillespie, a white minister in the Southern Presbyterian Church and the long-time president of Belhaven College in Mississippi. Gillespie blamed anti-segregation agitation on “negroes of mixed blood” along with “sources outside the negro race, and outside of America”—above all, Soviet Communism, which aimed to instigate a world revolution and “the complete amalgamation of all races.” Besides quoting segregationist statements from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T. Washington, the pamphlet cited numerous biblical examples as data pointing to God’s establishment of segregation, including the earth-destroying flood God sent to punish the “promiscuous intermarriage” of the different races descended from Adam and Eve; the prohibitions given to Moses not to crossbreed diverse strains of cattle, plant mixed seeds, or mix wool and linen in clothes; the warnings of Moses and Ezra to the Israelite Jews not to intermarry with pagans; and the order by Jesus to his twelve disciples to go “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” in their first gospel mission.65
Soon thereafter, a young Baptist minister named Jerry Falwell tapped into Southern associations of civil rights and Communism. Preaching against school integration to his congregation in Lynchburg, Virginia, Falwell said, “Russia has made our racial problems her top ammunition in her propaganda scheme of proving the fallacies of capitalism to the world.… If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s Word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made.”66 The White Citizens’ Council of Montgomery, Alabama, agreed, attacking a children’s book titled The Rabbits’ Wedding in which the male rabbit had black fur, the female white. Author and illustrator Garth Williams noted at the time that the book had “no political significance,” adding drily, “I was completely unaware that animals with white fur, such as white polar bears and white dogs and white rabbits, were considered blood relations of white human beings.”67 The independent Baptist fundamentalist John R. Rice, editor of the widely influential periodical The Sword of the Lord, wrote that Jim Crow laws were preferable to “unrestrained intermarriage of the races.”68
W. A. Criswell, pastor of the world’s largest Southern Baptist church (in Dallas) and one of the most influential Baptist leaders of the twentieth century, spoke out against desegregation to a joint session of the South Carolina state legislature, begging: “Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decisions,… to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family.” The Georgia Baptist minister T. C. Hardman wrote to the Christian Index: “To enforce social equality, as would result from mixed schools, would mean miscegenation and this brings about amalgamation, degeneration and approach to the level of the lower of the race.”69 As yet another white Southern minister put it, “To meet the requirements of being God’s chosen for a purpose, racial purity is essential.”70
These fundamentalists continued to rail against the twin specters of amalgamation and intermarriage as the chief evils to be avoided, often declaring that the real agenda of the NAACP was not merely desegregation but fostering intermarriage between blacks and whites. In the words of the fundamentalist Southern Baptist minister James F. Burke, “the amalgamation of races is part of the spirit of anti-christ. The Word of God is the surest and only infallible source of our facts of ethnology, and when man sets aside the plain teachings of this blessed book and disregards the boundary lines God Himself has drawn, man assumes a prerogative that belongs to God alone.”71 Many followed the example of Falwell, who founded Lynchburg Christian Academy, a private school that excluded African Americans and other nonwhites and exclusively served white children—literally, a segregation academy to keep the races apart and prevent sex across the color line so as to protect the purity of whiteness.
The South Carolinian Bob Jones went so far as to refuse African Americans admittance to his Christian college, Bob Jones University, until the Internal Revenue Service threatened its tax-exempt status in 1971—and then prohibited interracial dating by BJU students for nearly thirty more years. Pastor Noel Smith, who edited the Baptist Bible Fellowship’s Baptist Bible Tribune, repeatedly invoked the threat of intermarriage as the natural—and most fearsome—outcome of the civil rights movement, writing crudely in 1961, “To make intermarriage between Whites and Negroes as commonplace as black tomcats squalling in back alleys is the supreme goal of this integration campaign.”72 The trial judge writing to sustain Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law in Loving v. Virginia (1967) invoked the so-called fact that God had intentionally placed different races on different continents as clear proof that God “did not intend for the races to mix.”73 But the US Supreme Court, unbound by traditionalist white Christian antipathy for sex across the color line, did not agree and struck down the statute, opening the way for interracial love to flourish in legal marriage in Virginia and throughout the nation.
The events surrounding The Races of Mankind in the 1940s laid the foundation for these later conflicts. White segregationists, conservative in their Christian theology, grew ever more convinced that liberals were culturally relative, sexually amoral, racially subversive, and likely sympathizers with Communism. Their liberal counterparts increasingly saw racism and conservative sexual mores bound up in the same tight package of rigid adherence to a tradition of white male power upheld by fear. Sex and love across the color line threatened the racial hierarchies dear to many Southern whites. Those hierarchies were, in the minds of those devoted to them, the will of God and the ballast of a great American nati
on, even as others saw them as relics of a brutal racist past. Birth control and racy entertainments had already shocked the American Christian consensus of the early twentieth century. Interracial sex too, it seemed, could destroy the world.
CHAPTER 4
THE KINSEY REVOLUTION AND CHALLENGES TO FEMALE CHASTITY
AFTER WORLD WAR II ENDED in 1945, the United States faced new political challenges. Tensions quickly mounted with the Soviet Union and led to the Cold War, a hostile standoff between the two global superpowers that lasted nearly a half century. The threat of possible nuclear disaster hung heavy over Americans and especially so in the near aftermath of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rates of religious membership, church and synagogue attendance, and religious institution building markedly increased in the immediate postwar era, as Americans sought a measure of peace and reassurance amid the political uncertainties of the time.
The national anxiety of this postwar period fortified a tendency to hold fast to familiar social and cultural norms, including traditional assumptions about sex roles, gender, and the family. Beginning in 1946, a spike in the nation’s birth rate occurred that would come to be known as the baby boom (“boomers” are those born between 1946 and 1965). Families who could afford it, and who weren’t prevented from doing so by the widespread redlining against ethnic minorities, moved their families into the suburbs, where they hoped to find safety in secure enclaves. The chosen lifestyle of most white Americans was purposefully traditional, and the values upholding it were part of the broad Christian consensus that continued to hold regarding marriage, casting sex as appropriate only within monogamous, heterosexual wedlock. Those flaunting or violating such norms—such as bohemians, unmarried girls who got pregnant, and divorced women—could pay a heavy social price, and some—like gay people—were treated as criminals.
Biologist-turned-sexologist Alfred Kinsey. BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.
Crevices were continuing to form beneath the surface, and forces not yet visible in 1945 would shortly burst onto the scene, causing them to heave and expand. One of the most explosive episodes occurred thanks to two major studies on American sexual behavior nicknamed “the Kinsey reports,” a study of men published in 1948 and a report on women that came out in 1953. Both volumes were exhaustive in their coverage and boldly explicit in their descriptions of ordinary people’s sex habits, the upshot of each study being that Americans in private were far more sexually adventurous than their decorous public norms permitted. The books were publishing sensations that reaped divided reactions. American Christians were especially split in their responses: on the one side stood conservative Protestants and Catholics, on the other liberal Protestants, and especially younger generations of Christians. Even more important than these divided reactions was the fact that the reports induced figures across this religious spectrum to opine, for the first time, very publicly about sex. The reports thus spurred two sorts of upheavals: a revolution in religious thinking among some church people about how to think about normal sexual behavior and a sharp rise in open discussion and debate about sex, which pushed both liberal and conservative Christians into publicly staking out divergent stances on sexual morality.1
The taxonomic reports that electrified the nation had as the chief author Alfred C. Kinsey, an entomologist-turned-sexologist who did not shy away from provoking any audience. The two major volumes he supervised, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were the publishing sensations of their day and roused zealous if discordant responses, as did their author. To admirers, Kinsey was a pioneering scientific researcher in an age of moral hypocrisy, a tireless investigator of human desire and intimate behavior whose contributions to human history ranked with those of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Adam Smith. To critics, he was a dissolute pseudo-intellectual bent on shredding the moral fabric of the nation by wrecking the family. Towering scientist and liberating revolutionary to some, lascivious fraud, religious threat, and likely Communist to others: Kinsey stood with Senator Joseph McCarthy as one of the most divisive personages of the 1950s.2
One of the most important legacies of the Kinsey reports was the revolution they inspired in religious thinking about sexuality. While he has often been credited, or blamed, for the so-called sexual revolution of the countercultural 1960s and the youth who based their (im)morals on “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll,” his impact was just as significant, if not greater, on religious leaders inspired to rethink Christian moral and ethical norms about sex. A virtual revolution in religious thinking about sexuality occurred in the wake of his reports, thanks in part to his dogged commitment to working with religious leaders where he could.
FROM THE START, KINSEY’S ACADEMIC work on sexual matters encountered mixed reactions from religious figures. In 1938, when he was forty-four years old, Kinsey began teaching a course on marriage at Indiana University that included frank information on the biological aspects of sex as well as lectures from other faculty members relating to economics, law, religion, sociology, and psychology. He also began conducting interviews with students and colleagues that he termed “sex histories.” That fall, a member of the campus religious council sought to assure skeptics that the marriage course emphasized “the positive aspect” of sexual behavior, namely “the everlasting beauty of the sacrament of marriage.” The course soon became infamous for its explicit discussions and graphic illustrations of sexual practices, however; within two years, indignant members of the local ministerial association petitioned the Indiana University administration to do something about the course, and the pressure forced Kinsey to stop teaching it. Undeterred, he focused his energies on interviewing as many men and women as possible to collect their sex histories, detailed accounts that sought to document the full range of their sexual feelings and behavior from earliest memory to the present. By 1939, Kinsey’s standardized questionnaire for these sex histories contained two hundred and fifty questions.
Among those whose sex histories Kinsey wished to learn about in detail were religious people. A nonbeliever himself, Kinsey had grown up in a devout Methodist home but had rejected the faith in adulthood and was critical of the role played by both Jewish and Christian sexual codes in fueling shame and guilt among the religious. He had a strong interest in understanding how religion affected sexual behavior, and he tirelessly pursued interviews from an array of religious sources, including clergy, for his planned books on the sexual behavior of ordinary people. A typical letter posted in September 1944 thanked Leonard Anderson, an Episcopal priest and director of Chicago’s first home for dependent African American boys, for giving his own sex history and also getting those of “all the boys who were in the house.” In another letter from early 1945, Kinsey wrote to E. Fay Campbell of the Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church (USA), describing the parameters of his research and politely requesting Campbell’s own sex history, as well as introductions to other church people for additional histories. “If our sample is to cover the whole range of society,” pleaded Kinsey, “it must include a goodly representation from persons who are active in religious groups.” That request was apparently less successful, for though Campbell wrote back to thank Kinsey for his “interesting letter,” he ignored the request for sex histories and broader contacts.3 Kinsey persisted, however, eventually amassing a rich trove of interview data from diverse religious sources.
On January 5, 1948, Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, based on his interview data, was published by Philadelphia’s W. B. Saunders Company, a staid and relatively unknown publisher of medical texts. Nevertheless, the volume had been well publicized and heavily marketed in advance, and reviews preceded its official publication date in major venues such as Newsweek, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. These early appraisals were quite positive, as were most other assessments in the secular press. Some religious commentators rushed to condemn the book before it was even published, however. A
n editorial in the Jesuit publication America lambasted the book’s advance publicity as “pandering to prurience.”
The sound conclusions of genuine science are part of God’s truth and as such are never to be disowned, flinched from, hushed up. But there is a vast difference between the recognition and use of scientific truth by those who have a legitimate interest in it and its helter-skelter popularization among those who have no ground for interest save curiosity. As well might one popularize for the masses a strictly scientific treatise on the compounding of poisons.
Moral Combat Page 16