Revolutionary Con(tra)ceptions: Evangelicals, Family Matters, and Presidential Politics
by Carol Faulkner
For
readers of Religion in American History, Saturday’s online New York Times juxtaposes several interesting articles. The first
is a Room-for-Debate exchange on Newt Gingrich’s response to his ex-wife’s allegation
that he asked for an open marriage (“False!”), which received resounding
approval from a South Carolina audience this week. The second is a column by Mark Oppenheimer on how evangelical voters celebrate the large families of the
Republican presidential candidates. The
third is an opinion piece on Gingrich’s marital revelations by Gail Collins.
Collins and the other NYT writers all puzzle over the evangelical voters’
tolerance of hypocrisy and contradiction. These articles also present a unified
portrait of the conservative evangelical vision of marriage and the family.
Gail Collins is funny and on-target, as always, writing:
South Carolina is probably not
the ideal state in which to be accused of breaking the matrimonial bonds, then
smashing them and jumping up and down on them until they’re just a pile of
marital powdery dust. But Newt has framed his sexual history — the parts he
isn’t totally denying — in terms of a redemption story. (“I’ve had to go to God
for forgiveness.”) Everybody likes a story of the fallen man who rejects his
wicked ways and starts a new life. Remember how well George W. Bush did with
the one about renouncing alcohol on his 40th birthday? There is, however, a lot
of difference between giving up drinking on the eve of middle age and giving up
adultery at about the time you’re qualifying for Social Security. Cynics might
suggest that Newt didn’t so much reform as poop out.
In Mark Oppenheimer’s article,
Newt Gingrich’s other weakness might be his two children (his current opponents
have 5-7 children each). According to Oppenheimer, for most of the
twentieth-century, evangelicals viewed large families as undesirable: a sign of
Catholicism, poverty, and/or backwardness. In more recent years, however, some
evangelicals have embraced large families as God’s will. An essential part of this worldview is the
submission of women. Though not all (or even most) evangelicals share this view
of contraception, Oppenheimer writes:
Today, however, even those
evangelical Protestants who use contraception — the vast majority, it would
seem — have developed a cultural respect, in some cases a reverence, for those
who do not.
Oppenheimer
refers to a book by Allan Carlson called Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973,
which, according to Oppenheimer, argues that prior to 1920 American Protestants
rejected the use of contraception as sinful and a violation of God’s order to
be fruitful and multiply. After 1920, Carlson suggests, evangelicals fell away
from this belief and quickly endorsed the use of contraception.
A brief
glance at the book’s description indicates that Carlson is talking about evangelical
leadership rather than lay people, but even so, his argument is somewhat puzzling
for anyone familiar with the history of American fertility and birth control.
American fertility rates began declining as early as 1760, and, in the
well-known demographic transition, dropped steadily over the course of the 19th
century. By 1900, American families had an average of 3.5 children. Susan
Klepp’s excellent Revolutionary Conceptions shows why and how this decline happened (see my review of Klepp’s book here). What is very
clear is that it could not have happened without the enthusiastic participation
of Protestants, including evangelicals. In
addition, as historian Andrea Tone has demonstrated, even at the height of the
Comstock laws, Americans—men and women, Protestant and Catholic—purchased and
used contraception.
Today, the numbers for contraceptive use are overwhelming: 99% of American
women, and 98% of Catholic women (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cecile-richards/birth-control-coverage-a_b_1220668.html).
Today’s evangelicals who condemn contraceptive use are bucking three centuries of family limitation.
The
Room-for-Debate exchange asks: If more people considered such
openness an option, would marriage become a stronger institution — less
susceptible to cheating and divorce, and more attractive than unmarried
cohabitation? The writer Dan Savage points out that Americans, including South Carolina evangelicals, accept adultery as a sad fact of marriage: The lesson in Gingrich’s angry denial and the applause that greeted it: An honest open relationship is more scandalous, and more politically damaging, than a dishonest adulterous relationship.
W. Bradford Wilcox of the National Marriage Project believes that tolerance for adultery is bad for women and children. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá hope that greater tolerance for different types of relationships will emerge, asking, How many outspoken defenders of “traditional marriage” (whatever that is) must be exposed as adulterers before voters just roll their eyes at those two words? They also inform readers that “esposas,” the Spanish word for wives, also translates as “handcuffs.” Nice.
As
Collins suggests, South Carolina Republicans may endorse Gingrich’s tale of
marital redemption. In doing so, they are celebrating a gendered vision of
marriage and the family in which the man reigns supreme. It may be “traditional” in that this view of
marriage harkens back to the cultural ideals of the nineteenth century. While
the ideal wife was submissive and sexually chaste, not to mention economically,
politically, and legally dependent on her husband, the husband had few
restrictions on his sexual behavior (in or outside the marriage). These conservatives might consider, however,
that even in nineteenth-century Christian marriages, wives controlled their
fertility.
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