Contraception within Marriage: Modernity and the Development of American Protestant Thought, 1930--1969 (2004)
Cheuk, Michael Koon Hung (Author)
University of Virginia
Childress, James F.
Edition Details: Advisor: Childress, James F.
Physical Details: 220 pp.
Language: English
Protestant acceptance of contraception within marriage is a very recent development. Before 1930, not a single major Protestant body officially allowed contraceptive use within marriage. However, by 1969, almost all mainline and evangelical Protestant bodies and thinkers in the United States affirmed such use. This dissertation examines the development of American Protestant teaching regarding marital contraception within the context of ``modernity,'' understood descriptively as a constellation of social conditions and values of contemporary Western societies and theoretically as a shift in our horizons of understanding of humanity, nature, history and God. The dissertation shows how the earliest acceptance of contraception by the majority of bishops at the 1930 Lambeth Conference presupposed a synthesis of a modern view of human rationality that allowed the philosophical separation of coitus from conception, and a modern Romantic view of sex that elevated the relational aspect of coitus to an independent value. In the 1930s, modernist Protestants also asserted that the experience of modern life demanded new thinking regarding marital coitus. Informed by new scientific findings pertaining to human reproductive physiology and the female fertility cycle, they argued that marital coitus should be differentiated from conception and that contraception was an important tool in the strengthening of families. In the 1940s to the 60s, Protestant scholars displayed a modern historical consciousness in examining the diversity and fluidity of teaching regarding sex and marriage within the Christian and Protestant traditions. This examination allowed not only the possibility of change regarding the traditional norm condemning marital contraception, but it also allowed the contention that such change represented a faithful recovery and development of the tradition itself. Finally, through the biblical reinterpretation of ``one flesh'' union, Protestants were able to affirm theologically the significance of the relational and unitive aspect of marital coitus. Such an affirmation led to a biblical reassessment of the other traditional ``ends of marriage'' and the morality of contraception, so that by the end of the 1960s, both ``liberal'' (mainline) and ``conservative'' (evangelical) branches of American Protestantism could affirm that contraception within marriage was morally acceptable and necessary.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/04 (2004): 1401. UMI pub. no. 3131408.
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