Repairing the Three-Legged Stool

James Tonkowich
August 27, 2008

The following originally appeared in a recent IRD Weekly e-newsletter.  If you would like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, click here and select “IRD Weekly.”

God in his wisdom and mercy created a three legged stool, a remarkably stable, secure, and adaptable structure.  The legs of the stool are marriage, sex, and children—in that order.  You can find the plans in Genesis 1:28; 2:23-25.

The social history of the twentieth century is in part the story of sawing the stool apart.  Contraception technologies and abortion have allowed us to separate sex from childbearing.  The minimal risk of an actual child made it easier than ever to separate sex from marriage.  You can choose sex without children and thus marriage without children.  In addition, so-called “reproductive technologies” including in vitro fertilization and sperm banks separated childbearing from sex and made marriage or even a casual relationship between mom and dad optional.

Years ago churches helped hold the stool together.  One church even adopted a document that called artificial birth control “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.”

Someone may guess that the document is Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in which the Catholic Church “banned” all contraception.  The encyclical was issued 40 years ago at the height of the “population bomb” scare and caused a crisis in the Catholic Church that continues to reverberate.

Of course, as Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution notes in her insightful article “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul didn’t “ban” birth control.  In tones gentle and pastoral, he simply reiterated two thousand years of Christian teaching on marriage, sex, and children.

“Martin Luther in a commentary on Genesis,” she writes, “declared contraception to be worse than incest or adultery.  John Calvin called it an ‘unforgivable crime.’”

The harsh words about artificial birth control being “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare” came from the 1908 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops.  The bishops, says Eberstadt, changed their minds in 1930 and permitted contraception.  Lambeth 2008 just ended with bishops scrambling to keep the Anglican Communion from breaking under the stress and strain of gay bishops and same-sex marriage, that is, the stress and strain of sexuality run amok.

Eberstadt suggests a link:  “If a church cannot tell its flock ‘what to do with my body,’ as the saying goes, with regard to contraception, then other uses of that body will quickly prove to be similarly off-limits to ecclesiastical authority.”  Privacy becomes the individual’s trump card.

We have seen the same chain of events in federal law.  In 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut declared the sale of contraceptives to married couples legal in the United States and in the process claimed a right to privacy in the Constitution.  That right to privacy was the wedge that legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade and struck down the Texas sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.  It fuels the drive for same-sex marriage.

In Humanae Vitae Pope Paul not only warned his fellow Catholics, but “all men of good will” of the dangers of birth control.  Regarding marriage, he predicted greater “marital infidelity and a general lowering of standards.”  Regarding women, the Pope said that men “may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”  Finally regarding the state, Pope Paul foresaw the possibility of the coercive birth control subsequently imposed by China and India.  He was right, but did not see how far things would go.

Of course, many faithful Protestants believe birth control in marriage is permissible.  Gilbert Meilaender, a Lutheran, and Philip Turner, an Anglican, writing at the thirty-fifth anniversary of Humanae Vitae disagree with the argument made in the encyclical and the Catholic Church’s position on contraception.  Yet they admit that since the encyclical was written “sex has become increasingly a form of play,” and childbirth and the nurture of children have become “a voluntary project one can pursue for private reasons apart from any thought of marriage.”  They go on:

Together these developments have played havoc with the public meaning of marriage. It has become less and less a public vocation that presents each couple with a task and more and more a private arrangement entered into by individuals for their own purposes. . . . [T]his subverts the order of creation, the estate of matrimony, and the wellbeing of men, women, and children.

Sadly some church leaders seem determined to add to the havoc through relentless efforts to normalize same-sex marriage and homosexual ordination—not only separating the legs of the stool, but kicking them further apart.

Regardless of our positions on the use of birth control in marriage, the challenge for believing Christians as well as “all men [and women] of good will” is to put the broken stool back together—in our own lives and families, in our churches, in our communities, and in the public square.