The New Morality of Comprehensive Sexuality Education

Out of family life education grew comprehensive sexuality education, which taught sexuality as a public health topic and included information on contraceptives and, eventually, sexual diversity. Interactions between the National Council of Churches and Mary Steichen Calderone, a Quaker and public health professional, led to the founding of SIECUS in 1964 as the leader of comprehensive sexuality education. Chapter 4 argues that the “new morality,” a liberal theological trend also known as situation ethics, shaped comprehensive sexuality education and incited the intense conservative Christian opposition known as the “sex education controversies.” The new morality, with its rejection of absolutist interpretations of right and wrong behavior, tipped sex education further toward progressive sexual values. Responding to the new morality of comprehensive sexuality education, conservative Christians protested that children would learn an “anything goes” curriculum that violated their beliefs in modesty and the exclusive place of sexuality within a monogamous, heterosexual marriage.

Teaching Moral Sex

Teaching Moral Sex is the first comprehensive study to focus on the role of religion in the history of public sex education in the United States. It examines religious contributions to national sex education organizations from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, highlighting issues of public health, public education, family, and the role of the state. It details how public sex education was created through the collaboration of religious sex educators—primarily liberal Protestants, along with some Catholics and Reform Jews—with “men of science,” namely, physicians, biology professors, and social scientists. Slominski argues that the work of early religious sex educators laid foundations for both sides of contemporary controversies regarding comprehensive sexuality education and abstinence-only education. In other words, instead of casting religion as merely an opponent of sex education, this research shows how deeply embedded religion has been in sex education history and how this legacy has shaped terms of current debates. By focusing on religion, this book introduces a new cast of characters into sex education history, including Quaker and Unitarian social purity reformers, the Young Men’s Christian Association, military chaplains, the Federal Council of Churches, and the National Council of Churches. These religious sex educators made sex education more acceptable to the public and created the groundwork for recent debates through their strategic combination of progressive and restrictive approaches to sexuality. Their contributions helped to spread sex education and influenced major shifts within the movement, including the mid-century embrace of family life education.

Spiritual Significance

When challenged by a magazine editor in 1971 to cite any spiritually significant work she had done, Mead gave a fulsome response. “The list of my writings with spiritual significance is too long to burden your journal,” she wrote, offering just three sample citations: the essay “Cultural Man,” which she wrote for the World Council of Churches collection Man in Community; her introduction to the National Council of Churches volume Christians in a Technological Era; and “Christian Faith and Technical Assistance,” published in Christianity and Crisis in 1955. She continued, “I am at present, as I have been for many years actively engaged in various enterprises which seek to combine religion and science and religion and psychiatry, at various levels from the Committee on the Future of Earl Hall at Columbia University, to the activities of the Episcopal Church, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.” She was, by the early 1970s, an established authority on religion. Why did so many people who knew her name not know this aspect of her life?

Assaulting the Citadel

This chapter tells the story of how J. Howard Pew and a band of conservative activists attempted to infiltrate the National Council of Churches with the aim of undermining religious support for the welfare state. As with many odd pairings, financial considerations helped bring the parties together. The courtship began when the NCC’s architects hatched the idea of a National Lay Committee—a body of prominent laymen and women that would help the Council keep its finger on the pulse of lay opinion while also boosting the Council’s budget. From Pew’s perspective, the Lay Committee offered a potential backdoor into the citadel of the Social Gospel. The NCC needed money, and he was willing and able to supply it. In return, he asked only that the Council cease issuing pronouncements in favor of government aid to the less fortunate and instead transform itself into a champion of the free-enterprise system. The plan sounded simple enough on paper, yet it ultimately failed to accomplish its principal objective of prompting the NCC to abandon its commitment to a robust social welfare state. And, perhaps surprisingly, it was a group of prominent business leaders, not the alleged communists in the ranks of the clergy, who led the opposition to Pew’s short-lived Lay Committee.

The Radio Right

By the early 1960s, and for the first time in history, most Americans across the nation could tune their radio to a station that aired conservative programming from dawn to dusk. People listened to these shows in remarkable numbers; for example, the broadcaster with the largest listening audience, Carl McIntire, had a weekly audience of twenty million, or one in nine American households. For the sake of comparison, that is a higher percentage of the country than would listen to conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh forty years later. As this Radio Right phenomenon grew, President John F. Kennedy responded with the most successful government censorship campaign of the last half century. Taking the advice of union leader Walter Reuther, the Kennedy administration used the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Communications Commission to pressure stations into dropping conservative programs. This book reveals the growing power of the Radio Right through the eyes of its opponents using confidential reports, internal correspondence, and Oval Office tape recordings. With the help of other liberal organizations, including the Democratic National Committee and the National Council of Churches, the censorship campaign muted the Radio Right. But by the late 1970s, technological innovations and regulatory changes fueled a resurgence in conservative broadcasting. A new generation of conservative broadcasters, from Pat Robertson to Ronald Reagan, harnessed the power of conservative mass media and transformed the political landscape of America.

The Radio Right in Decline

As the National Council of Churches’ Fairness Doctrine campaign accelerated, US Senate Democrats on the Commerce Committee announced an investigation into the Radio Right. That one-two punch convinced hundreds of radio station owners to drop conservative programs altogether. The cost of paying for free response time combined with the risk of losing their station license was too much. Carl McIntire appealed for help to Richard Nixon, but the administration was much more interested in the ways it could use the Fairness Doctrine to intimidate the major television networks into giving the president and the war in Vietnam more favorable coverage. With no help forthcoming and the loss of station WXUR in 1974, Carl McIntire’s program declined precipitously, although not without one last protest action from McIntire involving a World War II surplus minesweeper blasting a pirate radio signal off the shore of Cape May, New Jersey, in defiance of Federal Communications Commission rules.

Outsourcing Censorship

After the election of 1964, the Democratic National Committee stopped its involvement in the censorship campaign, but the Fairness Doctrine rules remained a tool for any interest group smart enough to imagine the potential uses. The National Council of Churches, which had a long history of conflict with broadcaster and fundamentalist clergyman Carl McIntire, launched a wave of Fairness Doctrine complaints against stations airing the offending broadcasts. In particular, the National Council of Churches wanted the Federal Communications Commission to deny radio licenses to two stations: WXUR, which Carl McIntire had recently purchased, and WLBT, which had a history of defending segregation on the airwaves.

Why the Covenant Worked: On the Institutional Foundations of the American Civil Religion

Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what Robert Bellah called “national goals.” This article argues that a renewed focus on the relationship between civil religion and organized religion can help fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I draw attention to three mainline Protestant institutions that for much of the twentieth-century were instrumental both in cultivating respect for the national civic faith and in connecting its abstract ideals to concrete reform programs: namely, the clergy, the state and local church councils, and the policy-oriented departments of the National Council of Churches (NCC). Finally, I argue that a fresh look at the relationship between civil religion and “church religion” sheds new light on the (arguably) diminished role of civil religious appeals in the present. If, as Bellah claimed in his later writings, ACR appeals have lost much of their power to motivate support for shared national goals, it is at least in part because the formal religious networks through which they once were transmitted and interpreted have largely collapsed.