In the face of such criticisms, Christians on the theological right, both Protestant and Catholic, dug in. Catholic priests took special offense at Kinsey’s declaration of the abnormality of celibacy. As Sheehy complained to one journalist, “Dr. Kinsey’s report gives the impression that if one has not some hidden or overt means of sexual expression he is beyond the pale of normalcy.”24 But conservative clergy mostly chose to center their critiques on matters of broad concern. The mere fact that the report broached such unpleasant or even odious topics as homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality, and all manner of extramarital sex meant it was not “scientific” but plainly lascivious, they argued, and hence indefensible by any civilized standard.
Although Kinsey complained of such “emotional and illogical” reactions in his correspondence with religious leaders he deemed friendlier, he did not wholly trust the goodwill of any of the religious leaders of his time and certainly not of those leaders who seemed to him to cling to outmoded theories and superstitions.25 Yet he persisted in seeking out supportive religious leaders, and he found them in growing numbers. In June 1951 he wrote a hopeful letter to Karl Morgan Block, the Episcopal bishop of California who presided over lofty Grace Cathedral, to remind him of a pleasant meeting the two of them once had and to request an appointment during Kinsey’s upcoming visit to San Francisco. A July thank-you letter shows that such a meeting did occur, laying the groundwork for Block to introduce Kinsey to other Bay Area religious leaders. Some months later, Block wrote to thank Kinsey for “the magnificent service you offered our clergy at the conference on Pastoral Counseling in the matter of sex, held in the Cathedral House April 8, 1952.” Block praised the “insights and help” Kinsey gave to this group, remarking, “I can wish for nothing better for our clergy of all communions than to have the privilege of such an informal conference as was ours. Every priest and pastor will have a far more useful ministry if he obtains scientific knowledge of the sex life from one so unusually gifted and highly qualified.” A pleased Kinsey noted that the meeting “renews my faith in the belief that I have always had, that there are many groups in the church who are interested in utilizing what help science may give to an understanding of human problems.”26 Although many conservative Christians disagreed, Block plainly believed that the church had much to gain from the era’s most famous crusader for sexual candor. That proposition shortly grew even more contested with the publication of Kinsey’s explosive new volume two years later.
RELIGIOUS APPRAISALS OF KINSEY’S WORK grew immeasurably more contentious with the publication of his Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in September 1953. An acrimonious telegram sent to Kinsey on the day after the book’s release (and likely reacting primarily to advance media coverage) gives a clear account of how the volume was perceived in some conservative Christian quarters. John Chapple, the Catholic editor of the Ashland, Wisconsin, Daily Press, wrote:
I consider your report on sexual behavior in the human female the most direct and devastating attack upon Christian civilization during the present century with the single exception of the Lenin Revolution in Russia in 1917, of which it is a tremendously effective corollary.
I hope the American people recognize this report for what it is, a direct frontal attack upon Christian civilization and a dirty, beastly attack upon American womanhood. A disintegrating force let loose out of a Pandora’s box of evil which only after exhaustive efforts can be effectively neutralized.…
As for you, Dr. Kinsey, I as one American editor consider you as one of the most loathsome wretches ever produced in human form, or else an individual utterly bewitched by the forces of evil and darkness.27
Although criticism from Catholic quarters was hardly surprising, this fuming missive was particularly vivid in its accusations that Kinsey was well-nigh demonic and that his report on female sexuality was no less than an assault on “Christian civilization.”
Other Catholics reacted with similar venom and velocity. The Indiana Provincial Council of Catholic Women demanded information from Indiana University president Herman G. Wells about Kinsey’s teaching and general influence at the school.
If you, Dr. Wells, do not recognize how dangerous it is to popularize incendiary suggestions like these, we tremble at what may happen to our sons and daughters entrusted to the care of Indiana University.… In recent years we have seen in Nazi Germany what can happen to men when the traditional idea of moral law is questioned and then scoffed at. Dr. Kinsey questions the worth of Christian morality; he comes close to scoffing at it. Does he represent your thought, Dr. Wells? Does he represent the thought of Indiana University?
Wells’s response ignored the Nazi parallel but assured these Catholic women that “Dr. Kinsey’s research project is entirely divorced from the University’s teaching function.” Furthermore, Wells astutely countered the group’s religious argument with one of his own, defending Kinsey’s research and “the right of the scientist to investigate every aspect of life in the belief that knowledge, rather than ignorance, will assist mankind in the slow and painful development toward a more perfect society. To deny this right and this objective would seem to deny the belief in a divine order as it pertains to man and the universe.”28 Wells’s contention could not have been clearer: scientific knowledge was a necessary element of moral progress, and to suppress the one was to stifle the other and undermine genuine religion.
Wells’s response, however shrewdly it sought to turn religion to scientific ends, surely missed the point for Catholic and Protestant conservatives who attacked the female book much more furiously than they had the male volume. Two distinctive attributes of the second volume—neither of which was addressed by Wells but repeatedly emphasized by Kinsey’s critics—intensified the censure. First, the book paid closer attention to religion than the 1948 volume had, seizing every opportunity to blame and ridicule traditionalist religion for its sexual prudery. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female did not argue against God or theism in general, but it had plenty to say about antiquated superstitions and tyrannical religious institutions. Devoted adherents could surely perceive Kinsey’s contempt for their worldview, and they also sensed his glee in concluding that the “attempt in Judeo-Christian cultures to impose pre-marital chastity upon both males and females” was a visible failure, with nearly 50 percent of his sample having had coitus prior to marriage. It was surely also shocking to see in Table 92 that, of devout religious women who had premarital sex, 62 percent of Protestants and 50 percent of Catholics felt “no regret” afterward.29 Nonetheless, Kinsey did find that, just as was true among men, religiously devout women were more obedient to religious moral codes than were nondevout women, a point of potential encouragement for Christian leaders, who could thereby affirm religion’s effectiveness in instructing their most devout believers. Conservatives, however, rarely underscored these positive implications.
More offensive than the statistics pertaining to religiosity were Kinsey’s blunt assessments of what he considered to be religion’s negative attitudes toward human sexuality in general. Kinsey concluded (again, more pointedly than in the male volume) that those attitudes stemmed from irrational fear, which he associated with conservative Christians and Jews. Kinsey laced his discussions of “Hebrew” and Christian codes with terms such as “impediments,” “restrictions,” “obligations,” “absolutist philosophies,” and others suggestive of rule-bound legalism. Throughout the volume, Kinsey placed the blame for the “shame, remorse, despair, desperation, and attempted suicide” of women who transgressed particular moral codes on the religions that developed the codes, not on some purported “intrinsic wrongness or abnormality of the sexual act itself.” Eastern religions fared much better in Kinsey’s worldview, as did “primitive groups.” Both were examples of the “many religious groups which have extolled the beauty and sacred nature of all sexual activity, and have incorporated sexual symbolism and sexual ceremonies into their worship.” Such sex-positive religious folk as those who wrote �
�the ancient Sanskrit love books” offered hopeful inspiration: “The temple worship in ancient Athens and in certain Roman and Hindu cults, and religious ceremonies among primitive groups in many parts of the world, recognized the morality of both marital and non-marital sexual activities.”30
These appraisals of religion exasperated religious conservatives, who despised the elevation of promiscuity as something “sacred” and who detected insufferable smugness pervading what was, to them, the outlandish charge that strict mores either wreaked horrific psychological damage or abetted wanton depravity. But far more sinister and worrisome than Kinsey’s rendering of religion was the second attribute that decisively distinguished this book from its predecessor: its graphic focus on the sexual activity of women and girls. The volume’s fastidious attention to the regularity of female masturbation, petting, premarital intercourse, same-sex activity, and other practices besides marital coitus in the supine missionary position, was the chief subject of conservative religious rage toward the book and largely accounts for the sheer ferocity of the reaction to the Female volume. After all, the male volume had already proclaimed that men experienced about half their orgasms in situations that most Americans reputedly still reckoned sinful, unlawful, or otherwise objectionable. But when Kinsey claimed to find that much the same was true for women, his work threatened to upend the gendered sexual roles and expectations that, for religious conservatives, comprised the very foundation of a godly civilization. In short, gender figured deeply in the explosive reactions among religious conservatives to Kinsey’s publications.
The female volume included statistics on premarital sexual activity in contemporary women’s lives that made mainstream social norms look archaic and those who professed them positively two-faced. Fifty percent of women were having sexual intercourse before marriage? This number seemed outrageously high to religious critics, but still higher was the number who, claimed Kinsey with deadpan certainty, had been virgins in name only when they donned the wedding veil—plenty active, sexually, drawing the line only at actual intercourse. Kinsey declared that of the females in his sample born around 1890 to 1900 (members of a professedly more “sexually restrained” generation), some 80 percent described some sort of petting in their histories—sexual caressing that stopped short of intercourse—while about 90 percent of the entire sample and nearly 100 percent of those who had married had petted prior to marriage. Kinsey noted that many persons anxious about the “moral bankruptcy” of youth viewed petting as “the product of an effete and morally degenerate, over-industrialized and over-educated, urban culture.” But far from being a harbinger of the collapse of American civilization, petting was the product of “ancient mammalian origins”; it was not simply harmless but downright beneficial in preparing young women for sex in marriage. Kinsey made sure that religious leaders heard these points loud and clear, insisting, “It is petting rather than the home, classroom or religious instruction, lectures or books, classes in biology, sociology, or philosophy, or actual coitus, that provides most females with their first real understanding of a heterosexual experience.” Kinsey also claimed that female masturbation rates were quite high, even among the religiously devout: “In some of the most devout groups, as few as 41 per cent had ultimately masturbated,” he wrote—a startling statistic for conservative Christians that did not suggest “few” at all.31
As for the girls who had intercourse before marriage, Kinsey assured readers that no harm was done to them: 69 percent of those who were still unmarried at the time of their interview asserted they had “no regret” about their premarital sexual experiences, while a whopping 77 percent of the married women, Kinsey wrote, “looking back from the vantage point of their more mature experience, saw no reason to regret their pre-marital coitus.” Citing a variety of experts who claimed that premarital sex was naturally harmful and guilt-inducing for women, Kinsey acridly retorted that religion itself was the cause of such harm, not the sex itself. (He made a similar argument linking authoritarian religion with lesbianism, warning, “Our case histories show that this disapproval of heterosexual coitus and of nearly every other type of heterosexual activity before marriage is often an important factor in the development of homosexual activity.”) Whether by petting, masturbation, or other forms of sexual behavior, women who had experienced orgasm early in life were, Kinsey insisted, much better adjusted sexually in their married lives; moreover, such premarital orgasms among women were already common. In all, Kinsey wrote matter-of-factly, “about two-thirds (64 per cent) of the married females in our sample had experienced sexual orgasm prior to their marriage.”32
The overall pattern that emerged from the report was of vast and diverse sexual activity among girls and women, married and unmarried, in the United States. But the female volume did not claim that this situation had always been true; rather, the current scene was the product of important historical changes. The volume’s foreword, written by officials in the National Research Council, the entity through which the Rockefeller Foundation funded Kinsey’s work, attributed the “exceedingly rapid and revolutionary change in sex attitudes and practices” over the past half century to three factors: “woman’s progressive sexual and economic emancipation,” the “all-pervasive influence of Freud’s views and discoveries,” and the “exposure during the World Wars of millions of American youth to cultures and peoples whose sex codes and practices differ greatly from those in which they had been reared.” But of these factors—feminism, Freud, and foreigners—the first provoked the most explosive response by religious critics excoriating the female report, making plain that, for them, women’s emancipation represented a singularly dire threat.33
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female prompted an outpouring of articles in religious publications as well as pulpit and radio sermons, more than a few of which were reprinted for widespread distribution. These reflected the growing polarization in religious reactions to Kinsey’s work, from irate condemnations by Catholics, Baptists, and some Methodists to admiring paeans by Unitarians along with many mainline Protestants such as Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Critics on the right repeatedly warned that Kinsey’s report on women threatened to trigger the collapse of American civilization. At the First Methodist Church in Albuquerque, the Reverend William D. Wyatt raised the possibility of Kinsey’s connection to Communism and urged his congregants to recognize the report as “unsubstantiated, unscientific propaganda” that aimed for “moral anarchy.” First, Wyatt argued, Kinsey’s results were false: they were based only on interviews with women “willing to discuss sex matters with a stranger”—women, therefore, who held “liberal views on morals.” “Normal American women,” he insisted, “would refuse the request for such an interview”; he quoted other self-styled experts to bolster his view that those women were abnormal in either their licentiousness or their neurotic fabrications of “sensational affairs.” But worse than being false, Wyatt argued, the report was deeply dangerous, in that Kinsey had spurned “the morality of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, which has built our civilization.” If its data were not seen as phony factoids amassed to “junk our morality,” Wyatt warned, husbands would soon suspect their own wives of infidelity, and greater infidelity would indeed occur, since “we, like sheep, want to be like others, and are prone to yield to high-pressure propaganda.” Loose women placed the institution of marriage in peril, and American civilization hung in the balance.34
John S. Wimbish, the pastor of New York’s prominent Calvary Baptist Church, agreed with Wyatt, aiming a few more insults at the nearly six thousand women “who were lewd enough to be thus cross-examined” for Kinsey’s study. The volume “constitutes an attack on our American way of life more overwhelming than that of Pearl Harbor,” and Wimbish warned those who took it closely to heart that apocalyptic destruction would be its consequence:
As our civilization totters on the brink of chaos, we need to remember that God destroyed the antediluvians with the flood because of immorality.
God destroyed the cities of the plain with fire and brimstone because of immorality, and what was wrong in the days of Noah and the days of Sodom and Gomorrah is still wrong today. May God have mercy on our nation when religion is frowned upon and Kinsey is idolized!35
The evangelical crusader Dr. Torrey M. Johnson concurred, preaching, “If Kinsey prevails there will be no future for the United States.” Johnson’s answer to the evils spawned by Kinsey was a “Holy Ghost revival” that would confirm the conception of the American home put forward by the Founding Fathers while satisfying a palpable fantasy of revenge. “When that day comes, the problems of America will be solved and the Kinseys and the Communists together with all other enemies of God and America—borers from without and within—will finally be driven to their holes never to return.”36
Most prominently, the internationally known evangelist Billy Graham delivered a dramatic radio sermon on “The Bible and Dr. Kinsey,” a message broadcast over the ABC network and soon published for even wider distribution in the expanding networks of evangelical Christianity. Graham castigated Kinsey for the graphic details throughout Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and warned, “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America.” Graham singled out the statistics on female marital infidelity as particularly shocking, and he emphasized the “lopsided and unscientific” nature of the report’s claim that “seven out of ten women who had premarital affairs had no regrets.” Those women, Graham assured his audience, were not among the “millions of born-again Christian women in this country who put the highest price on virtue, decency and modesty.” Those women were debased and callous in their sinful deeds, and their overrepresentation by Kinsey was an immoral misuse of science and “an indictment against American womanhood.” “Thank God,” Graham averred, this was not the full story; for, as yet, “we have millions of women who still know how to blush—women who believe that virtue is the greatest attribute of womanhood.”37
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