On Contraception, Tradition, and the Wise(r) Use of Christian History

As a Protestant father with a growing family, I have followed with interest this magazine’s publications over the last few months treating contraception, a Protestant theology of the body, and whether there is already too much discourse around this constellation of subjects. I am also an ancient historian whose intellectual attention toggles between the twenty-first century and late antiquity, so my attention tends to perk up when contemporary theological disputes make sweeping claims about Christian history.

One piece by Katelyn Walls Shelton particularly caught my eye at several points. As she writes in closing, “Why should it be licit for me as a 21st century American Christian to participate in a practice that almost two-thousand years-worth of Christians abhorred?” I think this rhetorical question perhaps reveals quite a lot about her underlying reasoning. More broadly, I think the premises of the question are representative of an unhelpful theory of what church history means in the present, a problem that afflicts many ressourcement projects.   

My chief aim is here to offer a straight answer to the question. Why are Christians in the present allowed to break with the longer arc of ecclesiastical moral teachings? In short: when consistently applied, a bare deferential traditionalism throws up unpleasant moral dilemmas in the present. In reality, most of the naked appeals to Christian ethics and theology in ecclesiastical history are doing an awful lot of curation, neglecting parts that perhaps don’t suit our moral agendas as neatly. Concomitantly, I would also cautiously suggest that a theological method flatly outsourcing difficult theological questions to the past is probably oversimplifying that same past.   

What Would the Fathers Think?

To take the second point first, let’s consider the contraception issue and its history a little more directly.

There’s a commonplace account that goes a little something like this. Once upon a time, all Christians rejected contraception. Then came modernity, which brought in new technology and economic expectations, as well as a looser, de-Christianized morality. Consequently, Christian witness and teaching folded on contraception. At this point, the ostensibly rapid shift of the Lambeth Conferences’ teaching on the subject is typically brought up. By contrast, only in Catholicism has there been an institutional continuity with the ancient Christian position. If the narrator is a conservative Catholic, the apparent continuity is taken as a mark of pride; if the narrator is a contraception-skeptical Protestant, then the continuity provides a plausibility structure that we all could “get back” to the historic Christian position. 

There are different variations of this story, but the throughline is that it distorts the conversation precisely by implying some kind of seamless continuity is still on the table. For one, it leaves out the overwhelming internal support that existed within Catholicism for changing along the lines of Lambeth.¹ Worse still, it breezes through the patristic era—the real bedrock of contraceptive proscriptions—much too quickly, leaving out that anti-contraceptive Church Fathers like Augustine would not approve of the Roman Catholic dogmatic exception for NFP.

Have a look at just the most pertinent snippet of Humanae Vitae:

If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.

Fine and good, but now see Augustine on the same issue:

[Conjugal chastity], too, combats carnal concupiscence lest it exceed the proprieties of the marriage bed; it combats lest concupiscence break into the time agreed upon by the spouses for prayer. If this conjugal chastity possesses such great power and is so great a gift from God that it does what the matrimonial code prescribes, it combats in even more valiant fashion in regard to the act of conjugal union, lest there be indulgence beyond what suffices for generating offspring. Such chastity abstains during menstruation and pregnancy, nor has it union with one no longer able to conceive on account of age. And the desire for union does not prevail, but ceases when there is no prospect of generation. But if an act is done in regard to the spouse, not contrary to nature, yet passing beyond the limit of the matrimonial code, then, according to the Apostle, it is something pardonable,² because the carnal limit is not exceeded, yet, lest the limit itself be exceeded, there must be warfare against the evil of concupiscence, which is so evil it must be resisted in the combat waged by chastity, lest it do damage.³

Augustine is fairly indicative of the anti-contraceptive view common in patristic discourse, which frequently referred hyperbolically to the wasting of seed as murder.⁴ Based on the texts like the one above, I think it is patent that those same figures would be superlatively displeased with NFP as an exception. One can anticipate that they would find it to be contraception by another name, pointing out that it relies equally on modern technological artifice to achieve its end with any reliability. Meanwhile, the “unitive” purpose of sex posited by some of today’s moral theologians is (as far as I can tell) almost completely absent from patristic moral formulations of sex and marriage; Augustine all but denies its existence in the underlined text. Thus, to remain in-step with ecclesiastical tradition here, we would have to rethink not only contraception but also any form of sex not undertaken with the express purpose of conceiving, including in sterile marriages or when fertility has ceased in later life. To my knowledge, no ecclesiastical body today holds such a position. All parties in 2025 have staked out positions that differ from the consensus moral theology articulated in late antiquity. 

That, in my view, reframes the entire conversation. It turns out we are all pretty far beyond patristic tradition, rejecting their ethical and metaphysical underpinnings—and for some very good reasons, I think. Nor would many believers today ascribe to the Fathers’ two-tiered model of the Christian life, where asceticism is the ideal and marriage secondary. Now, articulating why this break with tradition is acceptable and even advisable, however, requires us to do some actual theology beyond vague gestures to tradition. Rather than immediately adopting their own conclusions, it would require us to think more deeply about the interstitial reasoning of older theologians and ecclesiastical bodies.⁵

Treating the Christian Past More Carefully    

Reasonably catechized Christians seem to know how to navigate intent, first principles, reasoning, and context with the New Testament itself. Even in Scripture, that is, we usually try to avoid picking up bare commands. Thus, you can find a few outlying literalists here and there that take a strict reading of all Paul’s instructions about heads and hair (1 Cor. 11), but you’ll find even fewer worried about consuming blood in their meat (Acts 15:29). Nor are “straightforward” warnings against women wearing expensive external adornments (1 Tim. 2:9) keeping many couples or pastors up on Saturday nights. It is peculiar, then, that we can be tempted to take a “literalist” reading (as it were) of sprawling dogmatic history when we are far more nuanced about the highest authority itself.

This is all related to what I see as an increasingly common problem with ressourcement in social issues. Many theological researchers today seem to be interested mainly in harvesting particular conclusions, prescriptions, and proscriptions to deploy them rapidly in the modern world, all without having to wrangle with all the ways our situation is radically different. Contraception is just one area in which this plays out.

Of late, it seems to be a particularly acute concern in the realm of political theology. I have argued previously that it plagues the entire Christian debate over nationalism. Parallel problems arise in most attempts to deploy classical political philosophy today. Or again, I thought some of these same fault lines were, for instance, exhibited in Ross Douthat’s recent interview of Doug Wilson. The fact is that a consistent and bald invocation of the theological past quickly generates all kinds of new, uncomfortable outcomes. 

The absurdities of this method usually escape our notice, I suspect, partly because we reflexively imagine that modern morality is attenuated and “liberal.” As a famous example, most Christian theologians in the past were much less comfortable with forms of banking and lending that are commonplace and even essential to our world; they called it usury, after all. Premodern Christians would also, I strongly suspect, be equally horrified at the mere existence of these unpleasant places called “nursing homes” and what they reveal about the contemporary family; others would find us startlingly casual about the moral contamination of physical violence. And many of them would be quite offended by our democratized social and political order.

From this perspective, our contemporary theological sensibilities might indeed seem “lax” or “liberal,” and when that impression comes packaged in a larger declension narrative—well, it’s an especially tempting view for conservatives discontented with modernity.

But it’s only half of the picture. Modern Christian ethics and moral instincts are not consistently stricter or more libertine across all moral areas, though they are often different, and those differences only multiply the more one bothers to look under the hood. The most obvious and persuasive case study for most contemporary Christians is slavery: the Bible itself makes a lot of concessions to this most ancient of social institutions. Arguably, one form or another of slavery has been at least tolerated and perhaps even accepted for most of Christian history. Or for a similar case, premodern churches and monasteries routinely had extensive land-tenants who owed significant rents that sustained these institutions. Some even owned their own slaves themselves. Or for a more contentious topic, there’s a decent amount of evidence that some ancient Christian writers approved certain limited forms of suicide, particularly in the escape of sexual dishonor.⁶ On these fronts, our contemporary moral instincts might seem much more rigorous. 

Would theologically conservative Christians be indifferent if slavery made a comeback? I’m skeptical (and even Wilson would seem to want to agree with that instinct). Or are they inclined to broaden the moral acceptability of suicide? Again, I’m mostly dubious. But it seems that a consistent and uncritical application of church history should be able to liberalize our morality as much as constrain it.

Even if we, acting modestly, were to limit ourselves to cultivating the points where the historical church has been stricter, it’s not clear why we can, say, qualify or even set aside all the sharp prohibitions on collecting interest. But one senses even fewer Christians are vexed by modern banking than the already select few perturbed by contraception. Here, my unprovable suspicion is that the latter is treated differently because it is categorized as “sexual” morality, such that it seems more urgent, whether it is or not in the eyes of God.   

In any case, when Christians appeal to history for support of moral teachings, to history they must very well go. But they had best learn to do so carefully, in a manner that abets serious theological reflection instead of bypassing it. That will entail thinking more about the “why” than simply the “what” in the doctrinal past. Contraception, I propose, is a good candidate for this more circumspect treatment, especially among Protestants whose ecclesiastical theories permit such reflections.

Being a historian, however, I leave that larger project to the metaphysicians and pastors.

Footnotes

1. If one is a conservative Catholic, then the improbable victory of the minority can be approved simply as Providence working itself out in the magisterium. Certain Protestants, however, ought to reckon with the historical significance of that “near miss” a little more carefully.

2. “Pardonable” is a probably a misleading translation in this context. In other passages on the same subject, Augustine is emphatic that the “pardonable excess” he has in mind here still constitutes sin (peccatum). So, according to him, the concession or “indulgence” of Paul in 1 Cor. 7:2 “could have been thought not to be a sin” had Paul not added “‘But I say this to you in accordance with a pardon (veniam), not in accordance with a command.’” In other words, Augustine is pretty clear that the faultless expression of sex is that which is undertaken specifically for reproduction. It is the purpose and not “the act” that he has in view.  See Enchiridion 21: https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/augustine_enchiridion_02_trans.htm#_ednref173.

3. Against Julian 3.21.43. Text taken from Elizabeth Clark, St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 89.

4. For a broader discussion, see the essential Chapter 3 of John T. Noonan, Contraception: a History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (New York: New American Library, 1965). For the notion of contraception as “parricide” see esp. Noonan, 88ff.

5. It deserves its own article, but one underappreciated point is that contraception probably did not make much sense to most married couples in history. In Roman antiquity, something like 85-90% of the population was agrarian, an economic situation where children have until quite recently been seen as an asset rather than a burden. Couple this with startlingly high mortality rates for infants and small children, and most parents were probably not too concerned about raising large families.

6. See Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 8.12; Ambrose, On Virginity 3; Jerome, Against Jovinian 46 and Letter 123.8.