With the “poisons” analogy, the magazine suggested its deeper concern with the book’s effect on American youth: its potential to contaminate and debase the innocent.4
One of the features of Kinsey’s analysis that would attract attention was his commentary on religion. In the first volume, his discussion of religion was consistent with the book as a whole, which aimed for a tone of detached objectivity, of pure reportage on the facts as he and his research team had found them. The topic of religion received brief mention from time to time and lengthier analysis in chapter 13, “Religious Background and Sexual Outlet.” Here Kinsey established his chief historical claims:
There is nothing in the English-American social structure which has had more influence upon present-day patterns of sexual behavior than the religious backgrounds of that culture.… This is no place to work out the details of the historic development, but it is important at this point to realize that these present-day codes are quite ancient, that they are the product of still older religious systems, and that throughout their history they have been the bases for the law which has formally expressed society’s interest in controlling human sexual behavior.
Kinsey was interested in the effects of religion on the more devout members of the major religious groups he studied (Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish). He concluded that religiously inactive males of all faiths were far more likely to masturbate and pursue sexual pleasure outside marriage than were their devout counterparts. But he was still more interested in how these older religious teachings continued to influence contemporary sexual habits even among the nonreligious. In Kinsey’s view, few recognized the enduring influence of Jewish and Christian concepts of sexuality on modern notions of right versus wrong and natural versus unnatural. To uphold such categorical distinctions was perforce to “stoutly defend the church’s system of natural law.”5
If religious leaders were relieved to hear that regular worshipers mostly heeded their teachings on sexual discipline, few showed it; immediate reactions from Catholic authorities were exceedingly critical of Kinsey’s book. Shortly after its publication, Chicago’s Loyola University issued to the media a “News Release on the Kinsey Report,” comprising a condensed version of a speech made by a Catholic physician in Loyola’s School of Medicine, Herbert A. Ratner. The speech criticized Kinsey’s research for conflating two distinct concepts: that of the “average” and that of the “normal,” complaining that Kinsey’s approach would entice readers to imagine sinful behaviors as normal and good simply because of their alleged frequency. Other Catholic commentators condemned Kinsey’s Darwinian biologism (which they perceived to reduce human affections and behavior to amoral instincts) and ostensible ethical relativism while raising further questions about the study’s sample and statistical conclusions.6 Such critiques did not initially appear to influence parishioners, however: George Gallup’s mid-February poll of Americans across the country found that “both Protestants and Catholics in the population express approval of the Kinsey study, although Protestants are more in favor than Catholics are.” According to Gallup, Protestants approved of the study as a “good thing” at a rate of 57 percent, compared with 10 percent who thought it a “bad thing” (the rest had no opinion or mixed responses); meanwhile, despite a dearth of positive statements about the volume from Catholic leaders, lay Catholics who expressed an opinion approved of it at a rate of 49 percent to 19 percent.7
As Sexual Behavior in the Human Male climbed best-seller lists, other publishers rushed to hop on the lucrative Kinsey bandwagon with a series of commentaries and discussions of the famous volume. Most were collections of articles by academic experts, and all of them included contributions from religious thinkers. One of the earliest, Albert Deutsch’s Sex Habits of American Men, was released by Prentice-Hall in May and featured comments from Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergymen, along with psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, and other specialists. The Catholic writer Charles G. Wilber sharply criticized Kinsey’s suggestions about Catholicism (including the roughly 50 percent of “allegedly devout Catholics” reported to be petting to orgasm) and expanded on some of the critiques made by Ratner, protesting that the report’s authors “treat man purely as a zoological specimen” rather than as “a free agent who has duties and rights, and whose acts have social and moral implications.” Against the implication that the nation’s sex laws ought to be rethought, Wilber sharply retorted, “the mores of some of the people in the northeastern states should be changed to conform to the natural law.”8
However, the essays by Jewish and Protestant leaders were more measured, suggesting the range of religious reactions that greeted the Kinsey report. Rabbi Louis I. Newman, a colleague of Stephen Wise and prominent Zionist as well as an advocate for Reform Jewish education, served as the book’s authority on Judaism. He responded favorably to the Kinsey volume and quoted what he believed to be the finding with the most important implications for religion: “The differences between religiously devout persons and religiously inactive persons of the same faith are much greater than the differences between two equally devout groups of different faiths.” That meant, wrote Newman hopefully, that “religious groups, whatever their particular symbolism and imagery, and despite their theological warfare, do influence the conduct of their members. Perhaps if a common denominator can be found for the instruction by religionists, not defying, but utilizing aright, the research of such works as the Kinsey-Pomeroy-Martin survey, we can build a more serene and effective social order today.” For Newman, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made the case for interreligious cooperation to ensure the best instruction in sexual morality for strengthening marriage, increasing individual and family happiness, and working for the “collective betterment” of society.9
The Protestant contribution was penned by the Reverend Seward Hiltner, the executive secretary of the Department of Pastoral Services at the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (soon to become part of the National Council of Churches). Hiltner, who would later serve on the faculties of the University of Chicago divinity school (1950–1961) and Princeton Theological Seminary (1961–1980), would prove an important figure in altering mainline Protestant attitudes regarding sexual morality, and his open-mindedness was already evident in the 1948 essay. Hiltner voiced his agreement with certain values expressed in the report, such as diminishing hypocrisy and looking for ways to address suffering caused by rigid intolerance of some sexual behaviors, but disagreed with other principles he saw embedded in it, such as the presumption that human beings were wholly like other animals in their sexual appetites. Sharing Rabbi Newman’s commitment to flexible engagement with Kinsey’s text, Hiltner was adamant that the volume should be heeded by church leaders, who had a choice to make about how better to instill their tradition’s sexual teachings. “We can try to be moralistic, or we can try to teach people to be ethical,” he noted. Clergy could pontificate, or they could help their people decide things for themselves. “In the one case we become policemen and propagandists. In the other, we are educators and shepherds.” All too often, warned Hiltner, Christianity had offered poor justification for its moral teachings while etherealizing sex beyond earthly recognition. Kinsey’s view offered a crucial, fleshly corrective to such vagueness. Without appealing for changes in the church’s traditional teachings on sexual morality, Hiltner called for a less prescriptive approach in guiding the faithful to observe them.10
A mostly favorable review of Sex Habits of American Men that appeared in the New York Times in mid-May criticized the three clergymen’s articles as the weakest in the volume. “It is not surprising that this should be true,” wrote the liberal reviewer, Bruce Bliven. After all, “it would hardly be reasonable to ask any clergyman at this time to discuss in a completely dispassionate way a study so violently out of accord with many of the assumptions of organized religion.” That brusque dismissal by Bliven, the editor of the New Republic and a foe of religious fundamentalism n
o less than of Communism, lumped Hiltner and Newman’s tempered liberal responses into the same mold of conservative indignation exemplified by Wilber, despite the fact that Hiltner and Newman offered a pointed contrast and defended Kinsey against knee-jerk moralizing. What Bliven failed to see was a distinct parting of the ways among religious groups on the subject of sex.11
The responses to Kinsey did not simply divide along neat Protestant-Catholic lines, however. A week after Bliven’s review, the celebrated Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr published his own response to the Kinsey report in his magazine, Christianity and Crisis. Niebuhr granted that Catholicism and Protestantism, in their traditionally “morbid and prurient attitude toward sex,” had both failed to realize “the ideal of relating sexual life sacramentally to the whole of personality and to the whole of a loyal community of persons in the family partnership.” Such criticisms echoed, or perhaps even went further than, Kinsey’s own descriptions of religion’s effects on Western sexual morality. But Niebuhr recoiled at the solution he believed Kinsey, whom he equated with “modern secularism,” offered. In a quotable line that many would repeat in their own critiques of Kinseyan scientism, he concluded, “The modern naturalism which seeks to solve the problems of man’s sexual life by treating him as an animal, only slightly more complex than other brutes, represents a therapy which implies a disease in our culture as grievous or more grievous than the sickness it pretends to cure.”12 Censure from this redoubtable theologian carried significant weight and influence among church leaders and lay members. Time magazine reported Niebuhr’s critique, opining that the revered thinker spoke for “many another churchman” in finding Kinsey’s attitude toward sex even worse “than the sad state of U.S. morals it indicated.”13 But although Niebuhr’s condemnation of Kinsey loomed large, there was no shortage of more positive responses, most of it from younger liberals.
Some of the most vocal praise from religious leaders appeared not in the nation’s newspapers but instead in Kinsey’s mailbox. The Reverend Wesley J. Buck, a young Lutheran minister in Council Bluffs, Iowa, wrote an appreciative letter to Kinsey in which he also requested a job on his research staff.14 Another admiring letter arrived from the Reverend Ward Avery from Bloomingdale, Indiana. The handwritten missive quoted the Bible on homosexuality and concluded that “God has ordained some men to be ‘that way’ for the purpose of glorifying Him, because they have been endowed with great spiritual capacity.” Although Kinsey’s staff often marked letters promulgating strong religious views with a red sticker meaning “Crank,” this time Kinsey was intrigued, and he urged Avery to come to the university to give his own sex history.15 Another missive arrived in September from a Methodist minister in Baltimore who claimed to have just completed his fourth reading of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and who lauded the book’s broad relevance for the church: “You and your associates deserve the highest praise for such a study as you have given to the world, with all of the facts contained. May God give us, as parents, educators, social workers, judges, ministers and others working with people, sense enough to be guided by the result of the Report, in order that we might deal with them as wise persons and not the fools we have been.”16 Such fan mail from ministers likely brought some relief and satisfaction to Kinsey, offering a reminder that opinions on the ground and at the grassroots level were more eclectic and diverse, and less uniformly skeptical, than those of denominational leaders. Not surprisingly, Kinsey was a keen correspondent with religious persons sympathetic to his research.
Initially, many religious leaders maintained a wary public stance toward Kinsey, doubtless influenced by the early caustic appraisals by Catholic and a range of Protestant leaders like Niebuhr. But with time, the fissures evident in the divergent reactions of the Catholic Wilber and the Protestant Hiltner began to deepen, as mainline Protestant leaders grew more comfortable in articulating what they saw as the useful aspects of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. A sharpened Catholic reaction made national news in mid-September, when the National Council of Catholic Women passed a resolution deploring Kinsey’s volume as “an insult to the American people” and “a disservice to the nation which can only lead to immorality.”17 In contrast, the prominent mainline Protestant magazine the Christian Century printed an article by the liberal pastor and psychologist Roy Burkhart, warning that it would be unwise for church leaders to reject or resent these findings and calling for a “constructive attitude” toward them that would help inculcate “a wholesome attitude toward sex and love and marriage.” Already nationally known as an advocate for birth control and marriage counseling, Burkhart argued that the church had “an unusual opportunity” to enter into the field of sex, “since it is the only agency that gives guidance to the individual from birth until he is born fully into the life of the Spirit.”18 Since the earlier battle over contraception, Protestant church leaders had not stopped distancing themselves from what they deemed the extremism of Catholic dogma when it came to matters of sex. A tempered Protestant response to Kinsey’s work fit into that context, further deepening the divide between competing Christian worldviews.19
Burkhart’s practical experience with married couples presumably enabled him to see the practical applications of Kinsey’s work, in contrast to the abstractions offered by the more theological Niebuhr. Kinsey was distinctly aware of the varied points of view held by religious thinkers and public leaders, and he was heartened by the growing positive responses from many liberal Protestants who were actively engaged in pastoral care, chaplaincy work, and other practical professions. For instance, Kinsey commended the Episcopal clergyman Otis R. Rice—a chaplain at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan and instructor at New York’s General Theological Seminary who would shortly become an executive in the Federal Council of Churches—for an article elaborating the pastoral utility of Kinsey’s volume. In the American Social Hygiene Association’s 1948 book Problems of Sexual Behavior, Rice distanced himself from the emotional reactions of both the “pessimistic moralists” in the church, who were filled with doom and gloom about the nation’s plunging morals, and the naïve Pollyannas who so readily dismissed Kinsey’s work as nonsense. Plainly, Rice noted, the pastoral counselor “has encountered sexual behavior again and again in the course of his normal ministry”; the chief value of the Kinsey report was, therefore, to remind the church of the need to rethink its basic moral tenets, as well as the need to deal more openly and directly with human sexuality as a part of helping persons attain maturity. In the wake of Kinsey’s study, Rice argued, “We shall need to re-examine… the principles of our moral theology. We shall need to re-examine our own pastoral opportunities, our homiletical opportunities. We shall need, perhaps most of all, to examine ourselves.”20
Kinsey’s unsolicited letter to Rice was filled with gratitude and approval for Rice’s balanced point of view, as he wrote that it was “encouraging to know that there are clergymen who do publicly approve of our work” and also “encouraging to know that the Church does have leaders who can be as level-headed as you are in considering the problems involved.” Kinsey praised the positive effects Rice’s article was likely to have on broader public opinion, remarking that he was “glad that an article like yours will help persuade the public that at least some segment of the religious leaders is ready to face fact.”21 As the correspondence continued, Rice seems to have given his own sex history to Kinsey, or at least showed a willingness to establish further contacts with religious leaders. “I quite comprehend,” wrote Kinsey (as he did to many other clerical correspondents), “that it takes a considerable amount of thought for one of your station to cooperate and to give a history. In consequence, I am doubly appreciative of your help in our work with clerical groups. We shall be delighted to follow through whenever any of these possible contacts work out.”22 Like many forms of human generosity, Kinsey’s was partly calculating, a means to entice friendly correspondents to join the data sample or at least to gain their tacit approval. While Kinsey was ear
nest in wanting support for its own sake, in an atmosphere of conservative Christian antagonism, Kinsey also surely felt triumphant in obtaining clergy sex histories.
In the months and years following the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Christian leaders increasingly took issue with one another’s reactions to Kinsey. The Reverend Joseph Barth, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Miami, preached a fervent sermon that sided with Kinsey against his conservative critics. Contrasting Kinsey to “conventional Christians,” Barth noted that whereas Kinsey was interested in the everyday realities of human sexual behavior, the “traditional” priest or minister is “very interested in human sexuality, as he would be interested in a snake in his living room—to watch it, and to catch it and to kill it.” As evidence, Barth cited the recent declaration by Catholic University of America’s Monsignor Maurice Sheehy that the volume was “the most anti-religious book of our time,” a description that, Barth protested, absurdly marked Kinsey’s volume as more sinister than even Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Barth admonished, “It is easy to see that from where that Christian priest sits, sexuality is the great human sin, and fascism is a lesser evil by far.” The minister went on to contend that the biblical Jesus had upended this hypocritical hierarchy of sin and that Kinsey himself exhibited “more of maturely religious value in fact and attitude… than most of the criticism I have ever heard in this field from the lips or pens of conventional Christians.” Besides its sheer wealth of facts, Kinsey’s report bore witness to empathy’s power over judgmental bigotry: “If that isn’t, in action, the attitude of love which Christians talk so much about but so seldom practice, then I don’t know what the word means.”23
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