Moral Combat
Page 19
Cover of Billy Graham, The Bible and Dr. Kinsey (1953), the evangelist’s ardent sermon against Kinsey and the changing times.
Over these sermons hovered the specter of bawdy, degenerate women, treacherous in their refusal to submit obediently to the morality of church and home. Their flouting of authority and seeming eagerness for sexual emancipation aligned them in the traditionalist mind not only with free lovers of earlier generations but also with feminism, long an enemy to those who insisted on a divinely ordained male clergy and patriarchal family structure. Echoing older arguments against women’s legal and political rights, these conservative ministers stoked fear in their parishioners: if women were allowed to run wild in their sexual behavior, American civilization would crumble to dust, and Communism along with the devil himself would rise victorious—the evil, illegitimate offspring of female promiscuity.
In this religious worldview, the perversion of women was not the sole villain, it was conjoined with liberalism, and many of Kinsey’s critics associated the report’s female interviewees with the promotion of liberal morals and liberal religion more generally. Torrey Johnson put it bluntly:
Sow to the wind and reap the whirl-wind! This is the devastating harvest resulting from the seeds of infidelity sown by liberal preachers and theologians. It has played into the unscrupulous hands of such people as those who prepared the Kinsey reports. The preacher who does not believe the Genesis account of the creation of the world and of the creation of man and of the fall of man and of the need of regeneration is in exactly the same category with Kinsey.38
Here was a newly virulent assault on liberal ministers: the charge that, by straying from traditional Christianity and undermining the authority of the Bible, they effectively caused the nation’s catastrophic revolution in sexual morality. This reading of the female report served to deepen still more the religious gulf between conservatives and liberals.
Perhaps conservatives exaggerated a bit, but they were right to suggest that religious liberals appeared more sanguine about Kinsey’s findings, some sympathizing with the people behind the statistics. Mainline Protestant ministers typically reacted less sensationally than conservatives to the female report and refrained from imbuing it with apocalyptic undertones. Lawrence K. Whitfield, the pastor of Community Methodist Church in Millbrae, California, preached a sermon that acknowledged as valid the concerns held by many conservative Christians but called his congregation to a more hopeful perspective. “I think the time will yet come,” preached Whitfield, “when we who are so deeply concerned with the ‘rightness and wrongness’ of men’s conduct will feel indebted to Professor Kinsey and his associates for that which they have done.” The prevalence of sexual misconduct outside of marriage and unhappiness within its bonds was not new, he noted, but Kinsey’s blunt descriptions should help Christians realize the “imperativeness of rethinking our whole philosophy of sex relations” for the needs of the day.39 The mainline Protestant response was hardly univocal or universally positive, however. The president of Indiana University recalled a “vicious” sermon by an influential Presbyterian pastor in Indianapolis whose church included many important alumni, calling it a “bitter broadside” that dealt a “cruel blow” at the local level.40
Of greater national import was a set of articles penned by Reinhold Niebuhr, still a towering figure in American public life and part of an older generation that resisted moral flexibility within mainline Protestantism. In “Sex and Religion in the Kinsey Report,” published in Christianity and Crisis in 1953, Niebuhr railed against Kinsey’s conclusions about female sexual behavior in even stronger terms than he used in his critique of the first report, decrying “the absurd hedonism which informs Kinsey’s thought” and his “moral anarchism.” At the same time, many young church leaders with national reach, such as Richard Lentz and Seward Hiltner, both of the National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCCC, the successor to the Federal Council of Churches), defended the usefulness of the latest report to religious leaders and emphasized the need to take it seriously. Once again, Hiltner, invited to respond to Niebuhr’s scathing critique in a subsequent issue of Christianity and Crisis, developed a middle-ground position against Niebuhr’s intemperance, one that deemed Kinsey’s findings worthy of Christian reflection. Niebuhr retaliated against Hiltner with burning contempt, concluding, “An ignorant approach to a complex issue cannot be creative. It prevents rather than encourages a consideration of the real issues.”41 This squabble between Niebuhr and Hiltner, seventeen years his junior, was indicative of a generational divide within mainline churches concerning how to interpret the shifting sexual realities around them.
Amid this cacophonic reaction, Kinsey sought out strategically useful religious allies wherever he could. He penned a warm note to his trusted California colleague Bishop Block in which he expressed hope that Block had read the female volume. “If not, we should take pleasure in sending you a copy. I have had several of your Episcopal clergymen write approvingly of our research and many of them express increasing disturbance over the way in which our severe sex laws are damaging the prospects of too many of our youth.” Block responded enthusiastically, assuring Kinsey that he had been reading his latest “excellent study” chapter by chapter each evening and that he hoped to have Kinsey once again address the local clergy—notably specified as “the non-Catholic clergy”—upon his next visit.42
No such bonds of affection existed between Kinsey and his enemies on the right, whom he mostly ignored or left to Indiana University president Wells to handle. He was pressed to respond at least once, however, when the evangelist E. J. Daniels, a Southern Baptist radio minister and director of the Christ for the World ministry in Orlando, Florida, wrote to ask permission to quote extensively from Kinsey’s two major reports in his own critique of them, published in 1954 as I Accuse Kinsey! When Daniels submitted the quotations he wished to use, Kinsey responded explosively, pointing out Daniels had selected quotations that would wholly distort the claims and intention of Kinsey’s volume. Kinsey warned Daniels that “the publishers and their attorneys are specifically concerned with the legitimate use of the material from their books.” Kinsey’s fury toward fundamentalist critics such as Daniels would remain potent for the remaining two years of his life.43
Kinsey continued to receive support from religious allies, however, including Hiltner, who wrote about the Kinsey reports more thoroughly and thoughtfully than any other Protestant leader of his time. Kinsey responded appreciatively to Hiltner’s critique of Niebuhr’s position, but the researcher sounded demoralized: “Certainly your discussion points up the fact that there is considerable difference of opinion within the church, and if you had to face the extreme Evangelical groups that are doing writing about us, you would agree, I think, that it is difficult for you or anyone else to speak for the whole protestant church or for any single denomination.”44 Still, Kinsey appears to have been tireless in his efforts to shore up the liberal religious response, and he publicly expressed his belief that church leaders were beginning to rethink traditional teachings about sexuality.
Cover of E. J. Daniels, I Accuse Kinsey! (1954), which sought to prove that Kinsey’s female report was “unscientific, unreliable, and dangerous.”
In early 1954, he traveled to New York and spoke to the Executive Council of the NCCC, where Otis Rice was now executive director, and also to the New York Academy of Medicine. He assured his audiences that there had been a “‘peculiar reversal’ of opinion regarding his volumes on sexual behavior,” with most of his support now coming from church leaders and his critics from psychiatric sources. Rice, a steady Protestant backer who likely issued the invitation to Kinsey to speak to the NCCC, wrote afterward to express his “great joy” at the success of Kinsey’s visit and to praise him for his ongoing research: “Your work and your point of view have helped us immeasurably in initiating a re-thinking of our constituent churches and our own Department of many of the problems relating to sex.”45 Ric
e’s words exemplified the hopefulness of many liberal Protestant leaders and their sense that important, progressive changes relating to sex could and would happen within the churches.
The last major correspondence between Kinsey and a sympathetic religious leader began in the fall of 1954, when Kinsey wrote to the Church of England Moral Welfare Council to request their sex education booklets and other materials pertaining to sexuality. The Anglican cleric Derrick Sherwin Bailey responded with enthusiasm. Bailey was the author of The Mystery of Love and Marriage (1952) and was researching a study of homosexuality in the western Christian tradition; he asked to cite Kinsey’s work in this regard, to which Kinsey agreed. In the summer of 1956, despite his failing health, Kinsey wrote again to Bailey, thanking him for sending “your latest report of your church committee on sex laws.” While he noted his disagreement with Bailey’s “analyses of the scientific data on many points involved in this report,” he indicated his broader approval of Bailey’s “commendable” attitude: “It is most excellent to have church groups, like yours and the English Roman Catholic group, help make it clear what distinction should be made between sin and crime. We shall be very glad to keep in touch with you and serve you if our data are of use at any time.” Bailey wrote back enthusiastically on August 8 to ask for clarification of Kinsey’s criticisms, which Kinsey surely would have been glad to give. Sadly for Bailey, Kinsey died on August 25, before having a chance to respond to Bailey’s letter.46
IN THE EIGHT YEARS THAT followed the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey was savvy in cultivating liberal Protestant leaders. Though he made no pretense of sharing their theological convictions, and undoubtedly found these leaders quaint in their adherence to a tradition he had rejected years before, he regularly lauded their broad-minded perspectives. Perhaps he traded flattery for endorsements that could possibly ward off more conservative foes.47 But Kinsey engaged with an array of Protestant liberals who supported his work to greater or lesser degrees, and through private letters, interviews, and discussion meetings, he formed relationships that led to long-term cooperation even when they disputed some of his conclusions about human sexuality. Contrary to the common image of Kinsey as someone opposed to religion as a static, eternal source of human sexual oppression, he was in his last years in fact increasingly aware of religious variations and schools of theological interpretation that were open to—and, indeed, deeply influenced by—pioneering research in a range of both scientific and humanistic fields, including his own. Genuine respect for the allies he acquired among inquiring, moderate leaders was mixed with his keen recognition of their instrumental value to his continued research.
Whatever Kinsey’s motives, however, his measured friendliness to liberal religionists had a transformative effect on these correspondents and on religious thought about sexuality within American Protestantism in the years following his death. The relationships Kinsey formed advanced and fortified new religious conversations about sexual ethics that his books themselves had helped initiate. Religious leaders influenced by Kinsey launched new conversations along a broad spectrum of issues pertaining to sex, marriage, and family life; and here, no less than in nonreligious quarters, subjects that were once taboo increasingly received frank and open consideration in the wake of Kinsey’s reports.
Any so-called sexual revolution that occurred in Kinsey’s wake, then, was not merely secular in substance or secularizing in its effects on American culture. There was another transformation underway, one less caught up in the “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” ethos of the hippie culture than in the sober rethinking of moral and ethical norms about sex. The revolution in religious thinking about sexuality was no less profound than the revolution in less religious settings, and it too owed an enormous debt to Kinsey’s inspiration.
Consider, for instance, Derrick Sherwin Bailey, the Anglican cleric who was among the last persons to correspond with Kinsey. Bailey had already, in 1952, written on “a theology of sex” in The Mystery of Love and Marriage, in which he argued for a wholesale reorientation in Christian views of sex and presented an imaginative explication of the sacred marital union of partners into “one flesh.” In 1955, after corresponding with Kinsey, Bailey published Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, which cited Kinsey’s research several times. This book received attention in the United States as well as Bailey’s native England, where it influenced the famous Wolfenden Report of 1957, which recommended the decriminalization of consensual homosexual activity. It thus paved the way for the passage, a decade later, of the Sexual Offences Act, which legalized in England and Wales certain private sexual acts between consenting adult men. Bailey’s interest in rethinking Christian teachings on sexuality clearly predated his correspondence with Kinsey, but he took pleasure and encouragement from Kinsey’s serious critical engagement with his writing.
In 1959, Bailey published his most extensive study of sexuality, Sexual Relation in Christian Thought, a book twice as long as his previous treatments. This learned volume went back to Paul’s teachings on sex in the New Testament (including crucial context on Judaism and the Greco-Roman world) and analyzed the patristic fathers, the medieval church, the Reformation (including early Anglicanism), and Christianity in the modern era. The study was particularly noteworthy for the degree to which Bailey agreed with Kinsey’s assessment that traditional Christian doctrine was lamentably hostile toward sex. He insisted on rereading the creation stories in Genesis to derive “a more accurate exegesis” of the meaning of sexuality in the Christian tradition. As the New Testament scholar Robert M. Grant wrote in his review of the book, “Bailey’s very useful work turns out to be an example of apologetic for a modern Christian view of sex.” Bailey, in fact, would continue to be cited for his innovative research on homosexuality well into the twenty-first century.48
The liberal Protestant professor and pastor Seward Hiltner, another frequent Kinsey correspondent, would continue writing about sexuality for the rest of his scholarly career; just as importantly, he trained several generations of seminarians to think broadly about sex and sexuality in ways that would have seemed impossible before Kinsey. Hiltner occasionally expressed disappointment that religious leaders had mostly ignored his own publications on sexuality, all of which aimed in some way, as he later reflected, to get church people “to take scientific findings [about sex] into account, to update pastoral and ethical principles about sex, but to bring basic theological perspectives to bear on the subject without apology.” Both of his early books in this area—Sex Ethics and the Kinsey Reports (1953) and Sex and the Christian Life (1957)—sold well in the public marketplace, he noted, yet “were largely ignored by ministers and other church leaders I had hoped to reach.”49 But through his vast mentorship of ministerial students at the University of Chicago and Princeton Theological Seminary over a span of thirty years, not to mention his work as a leader in the emergent and burgeoning fields of pastoral psychology, pastoral theology, and pastoral counseling, Hiltner played an important role in legitimizing sexuality as a crucial subject of ministerial discussion and education until his retirement in 1980.
Many prominent liberal religious leaders with whom Kinsey had not directly corresponded also joined in the public discussion in the decade following his death, marking the new shift toward openness among mainline Protestants. In 1961, the Canadian and National (USA) Councils of Churches convened the First North American Conference on Church and Family at Green Lake, Wisconsin. Over five hundred delegates came to the conference, representing thirty-three denominations and fifty-seven states and provinces. For five days running, participants presented sex research from a wide range of specialties and took part in response panels of church leaders, lengthy discussion groups, and a number of special events devoted to issues relating to sex and sex education. Sylvanus Milne Duvall, a Congregationalist minister and cochair of the conference, outlined the week’s goals of addressing two major questions: the sex standards that Chr
istians should forcefully uphold—with attention to “birth control, abortion, and homosexuality, as well as ‘normal’ heterosexual conduct”—and the Christian position regarding “the permanence and stability of family life,” that is, whether changing conditions had made the traditional family “obsolete” or rendered permanence and stability more urgent than ever as “a crucially vital social and religious essential.”50 The proceedings were subsequently published as Foundations for Christian Family Policy, edited by Elizabeth Steel Genné and William Henry Genné, liberal Protestants who were at the forefront of rethinking these questions and who also cowrote a popular book for a wide audience, titled Christians and the Crisis in Sex Morality (1962).
Much of Kinsey’s urgent, broad-minded spirit suffused both books, as clergy “pleaded,” in the Gennés’ words, “for more understanding of both facts and the spirit of our gospel in place of the all-too-prevalent moralistic, legalistic prejudgments that characterize many church members.” Sex researchers who had been influenced by Kinsey gave frank and thorough presentations at the Green Lake conference. Wardell Pomeroy, who, with Kinsey, coauthored both the male and female volumes and also became the director of field research at the Institute for Sex Research upon Kinsey’s death, gave a frank talk on masturbation that was reprinted and cited in all subsequent publications from the event. (The Gennés, lamenting the shame heaped by church leaders on generations of Christian youth who may have succumbed to this temptation, concluded, “The church has a special responsibility to help people handle guilt feelings that may have been engendered.”51) Pomeroy praised the increasingly “free and enthusiastic exchange” between experts and ministers and later wrote, “Returning to Bloomington from Green Lake, I could only think how much Kinsey would have enjoyed the conference.”52