Posted on 09/15/2019 1:53:27 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
There is one teaching that most Protestants readily recognize as Catholic, and it is usually received with derision: the prohibition of artificial means of birth control. The Protestants in my circles often disparage this teaching with little knowledge of Humanae Vitae, perhaps the most significant document to address birth control over the last one hundred years.
Our distaste for things Roman Catholic, dating back to the sixteenth century, has deprived us of a wealth of theological wisdom...Our acceptance of most forms of birth control is not helping us teach the next generation about sex and sexuality. It is time for us to reconsider our stance.
I teach ethics at a Southern Baptist seminary in Texas where one of our core ethics courses is “The Christian Home.” I cover a number of issues concerning marriage and family, but the one that receives the greatest response is my lecture on sexuality and reproductive technologies.
Our students reject abortion and “emergency contraceptives” but don’t worry about the morality of the pill and other methods. They hold this position because their churches do.
Beginning with the Lambeth Conference in 1930 and concluding with the wholesale embrace of the pill in the decade or so that followed its release, most Protestants moved away from agreement with the Catholic Church on this moral issue and never looked back. Among Southern Baptists, the drift from renunciation to acceptance of birth control had a clear trajectory. The 1934 “Resolution on Birth Control” urges Congress to reject pending legislation because its purpose
"...would prove seriously detrimental to the morals of our nation."
Some forty years later, the Southern Baptist Convention took up the issue of birth control again, issuing a series of resolutions that opposed only contraceptives distributed to minors at school without parental consent...
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
I’m a lifelong Protestant, but the Catholic position is, in general, the right one on this.
At the heart of the abortion problem in our culture is a rejection of God’s design for marriage and sexuality. This includes treating children as an inconvenience or burden, and the desire to pursue unbridled sexual pleasure with no accompanying responsibility.
A Christian marriage must at least be open to having children. Raising children in the fear and admonition of the Lord is a basic Christian duty and fundamental way of serving God in every generation.
Are there connections between use and acceptance of birth control, and a decline in sexual morality?
I recall once hearing Jerry Falwell discussing birth control, and he said that birth control was part of intelligent family planning for married couples.
For married couples, is perhaps the important point to make. Rev. Falwall was not in any way endorsing sexual activity outside of marriage.
But has it been a slippery slope, from saying that married couples have a legitimate use for birth control, to saying that engaged couples who aren’t ready yet for marriage should use birth control, and then say that birth control should be moral and allowable for anyone involved in casual sex?
I have no firm answers, just posing some questions.
And other potentially hot question to think about, is whether to reject the concepts behind Humanae Vitae just because they were espoused by a Catholic Pope?
What of age as a factor, when people live longer than before?
A 50yo may be virile & healthy & economically sound, but the prospect of offspring leaving home at age 70 is daunting.
I think part of the “slippery slope” has been the shift from saying married couples “may” use contraception to the assumption that married couples “will” contracept, and indeed, they must, because having a lot of children is, like, kind of lower class, and pretty gross, when you think about it.
Just yesterday, a FReeper asked how many babies I had “popped out.” He probably would have said “pooped out,” if he thought I was black or poor.
DP and I plan to move straight from our current house to our Independent Living apartment. When our youngest child is 20, he’ll be 69 and I will be 65.
Good points. I’ve also heard that people should limit the number of children they have because of their carbon footprint.
There are underlying assumptions behind such suggestions, that people will use birth control, and be expected to do so.
It’s such a tricky area of life anyway. On a personal note, my late wife and I had two children, and were open to more. We never conceived again after our 2nd child. So you just never know about what will happen.
It’s true that many couples have fewer children, or none, because nature worked out that way. However, for those who are naturally more fertile, the pressure is always against having another child. You’re destroying the environment, you’re crowding the schools, you’re dividing your resources and all your kids will be Failures, your 15-passenger van is hard to park, yadda yadda.
It comes down, in my opinion, to a visceral, rather than rational, concept that there’s just something *gross* about the fact that sex makes babies. Like the idea that humans should really be past something so primitive and *ick* biological.
I agree. I am also Protestant, and it took me a while to see it, but the Catholic position on this is the correct position, in my opinion.
Not according to Chesterton.
Jonah Goldberg had a guest on his podcast this week discussing demography, and one point they brought up was that a larger family can actually reduce your “carbon footprint,” because you stay home a lot more.
Just the travel habits of well-off people with one or two children use more ... atoms, or something ... than my whole family for years.
https://ricochet.com/podcast/remnant-jonah-goldberg/like-a-lyman-stone/
a) The Catholic Church and increasingly more Protestants espouse “Natural Family Planning.” The practice has much to unpack, but at the moment don’t expect the greater culture or most churches to help you along. And it’s rare to find OB/GYN’s who even know or care to discuss NFP. (And NFP, not just within the framework of pregnancy, but even how to approach other reproductive health issues. The medical establishment in this country prescribes birth control pills for just about every female ailment in the book!)
So it’s up to Christians to, in a sense ‘take back control’ as it were — and hand things back to God. NFP is a complete mentality shift from a contraceptive approach.
b) Speaking of large families, the loss of extended family structures has sterilized family life and communal culture in the ‘developed world.’ First world communities are so fragmented and isolated.
I have lived in poorer (maybe not 3rd world, but 2nd world) countries where children are out in the playground till evening and it’s just a given that someone is always watching...a grandparent or relative is always around, and neighbors are practically family. And groups coming together out and about to eat, or celebrate, play music, or have coffee and sweets...whether out in the city marketplace or in the neighborhood...it’s just organic. Not something you plan in advance.
Our society on the other hand, no longer fosters a culture in which families take care of each other through the generations. Most second and third world countries cannot afford the likes of convalescent homes and the like, but even if you were to explain the concept of one ...it’d be anathema to many.
From personal experience, I have to disagree to some extent. NFP still works with the premise that there's something wrong with women, because when they have sex, they often have babies after a while. Men have sex, whenever, and never have babies. Therefore, male sexuality is the default, and female sexuality is aberrant.
I read it all and only wish to add that blackrobe lawyers in the US imposed contraception, abortion, and fag marriage on an unwilling society.
The first two empowered society to exterminate the next generation.
In contrast, read the Preamble to the Constitution.
“So it’s up to Christians to, in a sense ‘take back control’ as it were — and hand things back to God. NFP is a complete mentality shift from a contraceptive approach.”
So is it the Catholic position or really God’s Truth?
God gave us life and made us in His image and God provides for us, should we hinder or block this gift of life through artificial contraception or abortion?
I understand that humans like choice, but why do we have so many versions of God’s Truth in our Christian churches? Do we follow the ways of the world or our version of God’s Truth?
One reason I love my Spanish-speaking church congregation is that people don’t think having a large family is bizarre. When it became apparent that I was pregnant with my youngest, an American in the church said, “I guess ‘Congratulations!’ is what you’re supposed to say to someone like you.”
A lot of those 50 yo “virile, healthy, economically sound” men face that conundrum having dumped the mother of their children just as she’s hitting menopause, in favor of the 20-something trophy wife.
Barbie wants a baby that’ll be grown before SHE hits 50.
But when tthe wife is still fertile and neither spouse wants more children, the Catholic solution is still NFP— Natural Family Planning.
Although a lot of women develop (wink-wink) health problems necessitating a hysterectomy in their late 40s on.
A friend of mine linked me to an article the other day which described how "waiting on God" is an active, rather than a passive process. Because waiting on God should actually translate into "abiding in Christ" (and not merely twiddling one's thumbs.)
Applying this logic, I figured that NFP wasn't sexist because it promotes abstinence within marriage. An 'active' abstinence involving both the man and woman sacrificially forgoing sex for a time for whatever reason (like if either the husband or wife were sick for example.)
Saint Paul advised that there is benefit to be had in taking times of mutual abstinence for prayer and fasting:
5 Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 But I say this as a concession, not as a commandment. (1 Corinthians 7)
And either way, always leaving the room for the possibility that God will still open one's womb even if 'unplanned' from the earthly end of things.
This reminds me of some article years ago in which a homosexual man was arguing that arranging for a child through surrogacy was more advanced and "evolved" and a man and a woman conceiving a child together the natural way was "practically prehistoric."
It's interesting that the sodomites find natural relations between a man and a woman so deeply repulsive, no?
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