From Social Gospel to Contraception

This excerpt from Daniel K. Williams, Abortion and America's Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade is published with permission of University of Notre Dame Press.

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a theological sea change occurred in American Protestantism that would eventually lead decades later to a changed view of abortion. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, a large number of Protestant ministers began to see both sin and salvation primarily in societal rather than individual terms. For most of the nineteenth century, evangelical Protestants (a designation that characterized approximately 85 percent of the churchgoing Protestant population at the time) had viewed salvation as an entirely individualistic enterprise. The focus of revival preaching in the early nineteenth century was to save individual sinners from going to hell. And if salvation was individual, so was sin. 

Moral preaching for much of the nineteenth century focused primarily on individual vices; moral lessons in American Protestant-created schoolbooks, such as the McGuffey’s Readers, did the same. Even when evangelical Protestants brought their moral campaigns into the political sphere, they still saw social legislation as a way to curb individual vice. The temperance movement of the early nineteenth century was a campaign to reform individual drunkards. The antislavery movement (which received significantly less support from white Protestants than the temperance campaign did) was a campaign against the immorality of the enslavers. 

But in the late nineteenth century, northern Protestant urban ministers such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden began to argue that both the kingdom of God and the gospel were primarily social in nature and that it was impossible to fully preach Christ’s message without advocating for better working and living conditions for the working class or addressing the causes of poverty. When the Kansas City Congregationalist minister Charles Sheldon asked the question “What would Jesus do?” in his bestselling novel In His Steps, the answer he gave was socially oriented: if Jesus were living in the 1890s, he would fight the saloon. 

In the hands of the Methodist activist Frances Willard and the other Protestant women who led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a movement that had focused primarily on stopping individual drunkenness became focused instead on a much broader social platform. Ridding the country of liquor would be the key to alleviating poverty and improving family life and women’s rights, Willard believed; for that reason, temperance advocacy should be accompanied with woman suffrage and other social reform causes. The Protestant college presidents of the early twentieth century echoed this emphasis on the social; in the sermons and college addresses they presented, they spoke of the lofty societal goals that a Christian education should equip college graduates to accomplish: the promotion of democracy, social and political reform, and world peace.

Not all Protestants accepted this new emphasis on the social gospel, but most of the so-called “modernists” or “mainline” Protestants who opposed the fundamentalists in the intradenominational fights of the early 1920s were sympathetic to it, and it shaped the priorities of some of the largest Protestant organizations of the time, including not only denominational agencies but also parachurch organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). The Federal Council of Churches, the nation’s first major ecumenical interdenominational association, outlined the goals of the social gospel in “The Social Creed of the Churches,” which it adopted as soon as it was founded in 1908. “We deem it the duty of all Christian people to concern themselves directly with certain practical industrial problems,” the “Social Creed” declared. “To us it seems that the Churches must stand: For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life.” The Federal Council then listed a series of specific political stances that it believed its constituent denomination had to take, including advocacy for a living wage, the end of child labor, and industrial regulations to protect worker safety. 

The new conception of morality as primarily social in nature prompted many Protestant ministers to become advocates of birth control. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when white middle-class Protestants thought of morality primarily in individual terms, it was easy for many of them to view birth control as a personal dereliction of duty on the part of women and closely akin to obscenity. That was the way that the few Protestant ministers who had spoken out against abortion in the 1860s had written about pregnancy termination, and it was the way that the supporters of the Comstock Act in the 1870s thought about contraceptives and birth control in general. 

Birth control was a vice, and it was associated either with sexual immorality among people who refused to accept the consequences for their fornication and adultery or with the selfishness of married women who refused to do their duty of bearing children. Such views had a long Christian history, because until the twentieth century, no Christian church endorsed birth control and one could find plenty of good Christian testimony against it, not only from Catholics but also from the Protestant Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. 

But beginning in the 1920s, the nation’s liberal Protestant periodicals were filled with articles advocating birth control. Contraceptives and birth control information were still illegal in some states, but liberal Protestants—especially the most liberal denominations of New England, the Congregationalists, the Unitarians, and the Universalists—wanted to promote birth control as a positive social good. 

When the sociologist Melissa J. Wilde surveyed over 10,000 articles on birth control from more than seventy denominational periodicals published between 1919 and 1965, she found that there was a very close correlation between a denomination’s support for the social gospel and eugenics and its advocacy of birth control. In the 1920s, denominations that endorsed the social gospel and were concerned about the rapid population growth of Catholic immigrant groups in the nation’s major cities were highly likely to endorse birth control, while periodicals from more theologically conservative denominations that did not endorse the social gospel (such as the Southern Baptist Convention or Missouri Synod Lutherans, for instance) did not. 

The periodicals that endorsed birth control argued that middle-class Protestants were already choosing to limit their family size; to reduce poverty, malnutrition, and the problems of child labor, the poor also needed to be introduced to the blessings of contraception. This was the argument of Harry Emerson Fosdick, a New York Baptist pastor who may have been the nation’s most prominent liberal Protestant minister of the decade. “There is no hope for the solution of the population problem except in the scientific control of the birth rate,” he declared in a sermon at Park Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan. “Starvation, unemployment and physical and moral decay” would result if the population growth rate was not kept in check.” 

For the first time, American Protestant ministers began to speak of “unwanted children” as a serious social problem and to view the prevention of their birth as the answer to the crisis. “Economic conditions [can] force upon unwanted children a premature life of labor, malnutrition, congested and unhealthy living conditions, and a pair of overburdened parents,” the Episcopal church rector Richard Flagg Ayres declared in Living Church magazine in 1930. “Chaining a man to a treadmill for the sake of unwanted children is a peculiar application of Christian principles!” 

As recently as 1908, the Anglican Church had condemned the use of contraceptives, but by the 1920s and 1930s, birth control was receiving support from a younger generation of Protestants. (Ayres, for instance, was only 27 when he published his pro-birth-control article in Living Church). For young ministers who came of age in the era of the Federal Council of Churches’ social gospel campaigns and were educated at colleges and seminaries that identified the kingdom of God with the alleviation of poverty, child labor, and other social ills, it was easy for them to be persuaded by Margaret Sanger’s argument that birth control could reduce poverty and ill health—and if that was the case, it must be part of the mission of the kingdom of God. The old proscriptions against birth control had to be wrong.

Convinced that they had a positive duty to promote birth control, liberal Protestants moved quickly to change their stance on the issue. Between 1929 and 1934, eight Protestant denominations – starting with Quakers and Universalists but quickly expanding to also include Unitarians, Methodists, Congregationalists, northern Presbyterians, and Episcopalians—passed liberalized resolutions on birth control. 

Margaret Sanger, recognizing that Protestant clergy could be useful allies—especially in her effort to brand Catholic opposition to birth control as a sectarian viewpoint that did not represent all religion—wrote to Protestant ministers to recruit them for her cause. In the early 1940s, Planned Parenthood established a National Clergymen’s Advisory Council; by 1946, it had 3,200 clergy supporters. In the 1920s and 1930s, liberal Protestants who endorsed the birth control campaign saw this as a logical extension of the social gospel’s emphasis on poverty relief and societal improvement, but by the 1940s and 1950s, their view of the issue may have been more individualistic. They began to describe birth control more routinely in terms of “responsible parenthood” for their middle-class parishioners – that is, as a moral decision that each couple needed to make for themselves (and which they had a duty to make “responsibly”).

This method of speaking about moral decision-making reflected a new liberal Protestant embrace of existentialist thinking in the early postwar era. While Catholics cited natural law principles and the authority of the magisterium as a universal objective standard for moral reasoning and conservative evangelical Protestants emphasized biblical precepts, liberal Protestants eschewed such inflexible standards and instead argued that each person had a duty to arrive at their own moral conclusions based on a personal encounter with the “other”—that is, through the “I-Thou” relationship, as the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber phrased it. Morality could not be dictated from above; it was discovered from within, through a thoughtful, reasoned reflection on principles of love. In the 1960s, the Episcopal theologian Joseph Fletcher took this mode of reasoning to its ultimate conclusion in his widely distributed ethics text Situation Ethics, which argued that there was only one absolute moral principle: the principle to love one’s neighbor. Even the prohibition against murder, he argued, could legitimately be broken for the sake of love for one’s neighbor. 

This new method of moral reasoning perhaps played a role in mainline Protestants’ attraction to the utilitarian calculus that shaped the movement for abortion law liberalization in the mid-twentieth century. Protestant ministers did not start the movement for abortion law reform, but they were early converts to it, and they quickly began echoing its utilitarian arguments.