Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 by Allan C. Carlson

Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 Reviews

• 
  Peter Jones

  This is my first Carlson book, though I have read many of his articles. Carlson plots the change in the evangelical view of birth control from 1873 and the Comstock laws to 1973 and Roe v. Wade. It is a very dense book, with a lot of end notes. I would love to see an expansion of some of the themes. Also Carlson does not give any real clear answers as to what we should do. Yet it is clear he thinks we have gone astray on this issue. Several things stood out to me.
  
  First, this is a very short amount of time for such a dramatic change in Christian views of sexuality.
  
  Second, Christianity Today played a substantial role in making birth control acceptable among evangelical Christians.
  
  Third, soft eugenics and postmillenialism played a large part in the acceptance of birth control between 1915 and WWII. After that the key factor for evangelicals was the population explosion. Billy Graham, as well as many other Christians, used the coming population explosion as sufficient proof that we need to use birth control.
  
  Fourth, prior to 1973 abortion and birth control were linked by evangelicals. Their acceptance of birth control led to many leaders also considering if not outright supporting abortion. After Roe v. Wade views on abortion were revisited and modified. However, the birth control issue was not.
  
  Fifth, the elevation of companionship as the primary reason for marriage was a key component in getting evangelicals to accept birth control.
  
  Finally, Margaret Sanger and later Christianity Today used the Roman Catholic-Protestant divide to get Protestants to accept birth control.
  
  I found the book very fascinating with a lot of excellent detail. For example, Carlson got access to boxes of notes, etc. at Christianity Today that have not been published. He also does a good job in showing the shifts in mindset that resulted in certain practical outcomes. I am looking forward to doing more reading on the subject, but this was a good start.
• 
  Kyle Grindberg

  What a great book
• 
  Michael McGinley

  "(Anthony) Comstock would find fully justified his linkage of obscene pictures and objects to abortion and birth control. He would find equally justified his equation of birth control with abortioan. All these things were one package. When one had come, so had the others." With this, Carlson explains how the 19th century American Evangelical Comstock's views - linking contraceptives with abortion - were prophetic over the next 100 years of American Evangelicalism’s views on abortion.
  
  Carlson begins by outlining the early church’s opposition to contraceptives and abortion in light of Roman attitudes and Gnostic beliefs of the day, which led them, through Scriptural study, to identify the purposes of marriage as “first…procreation” and then to live “chastely” in a monogamist relation. The author continues to point out the church’s opposition throughout the Reformation, where he notes Luther, Calvin, and the Catholic Church stood in unity on sexuality and the opposition to abortion (except, of course, their stances on clerical celibacy). He goes on to quote Luther, again connecting contraceptives to abortion, as saying “How great, therefore, the wickedness of [fallen] human nature is! How many girls there are who prevent conception and kill and expel tender fetuses, although procreation is the work of God! Indeed, some spouses who marry and live together…have various ends in mind, but rarely children.”
  
  Carlson continues to outline the Protestant’s and Catholic’s unified opposition to contraceptive and abortion beyond the Reformation to Evangelical America, where he tells the story of Anthony Comstock’s influence until the early 20th century. During that time it was Evangelicals and Protestants – not Catholics – who raised the loudest voice against contraception and abortion.
  He then goes on to tell how Margaret Sanger (the eventual founder of Planned Parenthood), after Comstock’s death, went on to divide Christian unity against contraception in the mid-20th century, at one point leaving only the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches to speak out against contraception in America. (Sadly, even my beloved church body, the LCMS, through the work of Alfred Martin Rehwinkel, encouraged Christian couples to ‘”exercise their liberty to use contraceptives” to clinics “staffed with a professional personnel” who were “ready to serve with expert advice and aid…In most cases, they will be listed in the telephone directory under ‘Planned Parenthood Association’”’. Although, to be fair to Rehwinkel, this was prior to the legalization of abortion and Planned Parenthood becoming synonymous with abortion services, which he condemned). Using the American Protestants’ anti-Catholic sentiment, the science of eugenics, fears of global overpopulation, as well as getting them to ignore their own opposition to abortion and contraception not even 100 years earlier, Sanger successfully convinced many American Protestants and Evangelicals to accept and encourage the use of contraception. Carlson explains how the acceptance of contraception, and even abortion, can be seen in the mainline Evangelical’s document titled ‘Affirmation’ in 1968 (released shortly after Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae), in which Evangelical leader’s claimed (and twisted Scripture to claim) such things as “the Old Testament…never reckons the fetus equivalent to a life,” “Scripture offers no direct teaching on the question of the participation of the fetus in the divine image,” and “The Christian is not bound by a legal code; he is free to walk in the spirit through the world and to take the measure of all possible practices (including contraception and abortion)”.
  
  Carlson does explain how “Affirmation” did receive backlash in the American Christian community, and that some identified this as “a sign of increasing paganism that we callously permit the killing of unborn children.” Indeed, Carlson concludes in the final chapter that what Christian’s are facing is an acceptance of modern day Gnosticism and a return to Roman thinking which the early church and Augustine first encountered.
  
  As a lifelong (conservative) American Protestant (and Lutheran since the age of 16), I have always accepted the use of contraceptives under the guidance of Scripture and been fully opposed to abortion. After reading Carlson’s short work (about 170 pages) on the matter, I challenging and reconsidering that stance in favor of the Church’s (especially Lutheran) historic views on contraception prior to the 19th century over the seemingly contradictory (and at times I felt hypocritical and self-serving) views of Evangelical leaders of the mid-20th century – although my views on abortion remain unchanged and unchallenged after the reading of this book. I would expect American Evangelicals and Protestants with similar views to be likewise challenged by this work.