Posted on 06/09/2010 6:00:15 AM PDT by NYer
Evangelical leaders are overwhelmingly open to artificial methods of contraception, according to the April Evangelical Leaders Survey. Nearly 90 percent said they approved of artificial methods of contraception. In a separate poll conducted by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in partnership with Gallup, Inc., 90/91 percent of evangelicals find hormonal/barrier methods of contraception to be morally acceptable for adults.1
“Most associate evangelicals with Catholics in their steady leadership in pro-life advocacy, and rightly so,” said Leith Anderson, president of the NAE. “But it may come as a surprise that unlike the Catholic church, we are open to contraception.”
Indicative of their commitment to honoring the sanctity of human life, several leaders included caveats in their affirmative answers saying while they approve of contraception, they would strongly object to drugs or procedures that terminate a pregnancy once conception has taken place. George Brushaber, president emeritus of Bethel University, said that contraception should be used “with proper biblical and medical guidance.”
“Personally, I don’t believe there are any Scriptural prohibitions to most common methods of contraception,” said Randy Bell of the Association for Biblical Higher Education. “I can say from personal experience that God can defeat such methods if he chooses to do so.”
Many noted that biblical sexuality is not limited to procreation, but that its purpose extends to the consummation and expression of love within marriage. “Our leaders indicate that contraception can be utilized if all biblical purposes of sex are upheld and that it may actually aid in keeping the balance,” Anderson said.
Greg Johnson, president of Standing Together, approves of artificial methods of contraception, but added, “I believe the church does have a responsibility to communicate and preach the importance of family and that couples should not carelessly allow themselves to use contraception as a way to avoid having children and a growing family altogether.”
Two leaders said they would not approve or disapprove, but would leave it to married couples to decide based on the ethical and biblical criteria of a given situation.
The NAE Generation Forum’s publication, “Theology of Sex,” is a resource to help ministers and church leaders create healthy dialogue about God’s intentions for sex. For more information on the Generation Forum or the “Theology of Sex” publication, visit www.naegeneration.com.
The Evangelical Leaders Survey is a monthly poll of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Evangelicals. They include the CEOs of denominations and representatives of a broad array of evangelical organizations including missions, universities, publishers and churches.
Good questions. Read post 27 kindly offered by Wagglebee as some kind of slight against the OPC when in fact it seems to be a gracious, Scripturally-faithful perspective.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2530810/posts?page=27#27
But barrier contraception is legal, moral and up to the discretion of a husband and wife.
Careful you don't get spiritual whiplash from that nasty case o' cognitive dissonance...
| by David Mills |
| 12/30/08 |
|
Sometimes a "progressive" Catholic asks me why my family and I became Catholics. As often rapidly becomes clear, the Episcopal Church we left is his ideal for the Catholic Church. We had married priests, women priests, homosexual priests, no doctrinal restrictions, evolving moral standards, and an official reason to be rude to the pope. What more could one want? How could we leave Paradise for the church of that oppressive Pole and then that oppressive German?
The regularly attending, basic-believing Catholic is usually pleased as punch to meet a convert. He rarely asks why -- and, when he does, wants only the most general of answers. Becoming a Catholic for him is just an obvious thing to do, and he is glad to have you around.
The sporadically attending, selectively believing Catholic is slightly bemused, because (if I understand him right) he seems to think of the Church as a heritage and a home and doesn't see why anyone else would be interested in it. He seems to feel as he would if you showed up to the Wisniewski family reunion or dropped into the Aquilina's for Sunday dinner or starting putting ornaments on the Rothfus's Christmas tree. Yet he is usually rather pleased that we did join, being a patriot.
The "progressive" is not so patriotic, if he isn't actually a traitor. So I will often say, in as cheery, boosterish, and cheerleading a voice as I can manage, "My wife and I discovered the truth of the Church's teaching on contraception, and after a while we just had to join the one body in the world that was telling the truth about it."
That usually shuts down the conversation. I am now familiar with the sequence of facial expressions that begins with incredulity and then, after a period ranging from half a second to four or five, moves to either annoyance, disgust, or fear. People have, when they realized exactly what I'd just said, edged away while keeping their eyes on me as if I might hit them from behind.(I am not making that up.)
Perhaps I should not provoke the "progressive" so directly, but I speak to him that way to find out how serious he is in asking his question. In my experience, he rarely wants a real answer, and quite often just wants an excuse to berate the Church for all her alleged sins. I haven't time for that kind of disloyalty, partly because (having heard all this as an Episcopalian) I think the arguments fairly stupid.
The Church's teaching on contraception was not the only thing that drew us to the Church, of course, but it ranked high, not least because the teaching so thoroughly contradicted everything we had been taught that it had to be either the truth held with supernatural aid or a delusion held for any number of foolish or corrupt reasons.
Everyone I knew, well into my early thirties, assumed that sexual activity without the "risk" of children was perfectly natural and that the number and spacing of your children was something for you to decide. Even among Christians, no one would have blinked at a married couple who said that they were not going to have children, as long as they in some way (perfunctorily was okay) invoked God's will.
When my fiancé and I went to our Episcopal church for the required premarital counseling, one of the first questions we were asked is what method of birth control we would be using. We didn't know well anyone with more than two children, and I strain to remember anyone we knew at all with four. I remember meeting, when I was about 30, a minister with five children and feeling, even then, that I had met a mythical animal.
I first began to wonder about contraception as a pro-life activist, when I noted (after reading Joseph Sobran in the Human Life Review) its emotional association with abortion: Contraception sometimes fails, and some people find this failure to be unfair, denying them the child-free sex to which they feel entitled, and thus are inclined to abortion to correct the "injustice" of having a child they didn't intend. They assume that if children were to be chosen and scheduled, the untimely, unchosen child could be rejected. Aborting him might be "tragic," but it was "a tragic necessity."
At first I thought the claim absurd, but then I heard some Evangelical Episcopalian friends -- mainstream conservatives -- say this very thing. They assumed that, for a married couple at least, sexual intercourse whenever desired was mandatory, but that having the baby that resulted was not. This didn't change my mind, but it worried me. Contraception kept bad company.
A few years later, involved in the debate over homosexuality within the Episcopal Church, I was disturbed by the difference between the conservatives' approval of non-procreative sex for married people and their loud opposition to non-procreative sex for homosexual people. They never got beyond the Bible verses against homosexuality, which seemed arbitrary without some idea what sexuality is for -- and as a result, the homosexualists who did have some idea what sexuality is for seemed to have the better arguments (though they were wrong).
I began to wonder about the end for which sexuality is given us, and to see that sexual activity couldn't be reduced to an emotional connection unrelated to the physical purposes of the organs involved. God had a reason for forbidding people to use their sexual organs with members of their own sex, but this reason implied that he intended them to be used only in certain ways even with a member of the other sex to whom they are married.
My assumptions about sexuality were further disturbed by the unanimity of the Church's witness. Anglicans, having no Magisterium, look to the Christian tradition for guidance, and traditional Anglicans have always weighted it very heavily. And here -- though "traditionalist" Anglicans were almost always in favor of contraception, and even used their opposition as an argument against Catholicism -- was a teaching about as universal as could be asked for.
These hints led me to read up on a subject to which I would have given no attention at all before. Gradually I, and my wife too (and on her own), began to understand and then to accept, and finally to appropriate for ourselves, the Church's teaching, which just a few years before had seemed to us utterly bizarre.
When we took it up as a practice, it changed our marriage as the articles had promised. Obedience led to the gift of our two youngest children, born after we accepted the teaching but before we became Catholics, and that addition radically changed our lives for the better. We couldn't imagine life without them, not just for themselves but for the kind of family their addition created.
We naturally noticed, as we grew closer to the Church, that only she proclaimed this truth that, to us, was increasingly self-evident and objectively life-changing. And she did so with a complex and extensive and subtle understanding of man, sexuality, and society, also found in its fullness nowhere else.
To us, the Church's insight and her courage in proclaiming it to a society that thought the whole idea daft was a sign -- one of many, but one of the very biggest -- that we were not yet where we ought to be. Gratitude for the life the Church had brought us, even when we remained outside her borders, drew us in.
David Mills is the former editor of Touchstone magazine and is now writing a book on Mary. He and his family were received into the Church in 2001. For a short popular explanation of the argument for the Church's teaching, he recommends Julie Loesch Wiley's The Delightful Secrets of Sex; for a description of the relation of contraception and abortion, he recommends Patrick Henry Reardon's The Roots of Roe v. Wade. |
I don’t really know how to ask this w/o having you take it as being snarky, I really don’t WANT it to be snarky but I gotta ask; “Are Catholic women to be nothing but baby-making machines?”
Please link to such long posts.
One man’s story does not a trend make.
I think it is funny when catholics post a source from some protestant group as if we prottys had the same kind of beaurocratic nightmare to deal with that they seem to have.
I am a protestant, that doesn’t make me a presbetyrian or even a baptist and they really don’t seem to be able to grasp that line of thought.
Protestants are not so short-sighted. Protestants know it is the Holy Spirit, freely given by God to His own, who transforms lives and faith.
I know a number who have done so gladly until they and their husbands are too tired to make more. And several of them, by modern, secular American standards, "can't afford" the ones they have. Doesn't matter. Children are gifts from God and they are accepted for who they are.
Once a catholic woman is too old to become pregnant, does sex between her and her husband become sinful?
David Mills ping
“And several of them, by modern, secular American standards, “can’t afford” the ones they have.”
So who supports them?
“Doesn’t matter.”
Oh yes it does.
Don’t you have to have a “compound” to be a legitimate cult?
Baby making machines?
Hmm, we do have to ask when the white Protestant community plans on eliminating itself. Their numbers shrink every year in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. On one hand, we have contraception; on the other hand baby making machines.
And on the OTHER hand, we have the fertile third world and Muslim populations that are providing the replacements that in former centuries were provided by the resident population. The replacements will be from either your own young, or from immigrant young. There are no other choices, since the leaders of the country will not permit widescale depopulation due to widespread economic decay.
Baby machines versus zero population growth (actually negative population growth). I think I know which side I’m coming down on (6 children!!).
If you would care to answer my question, I would be ever so grateful.
No, but with the caveats or qualifications listed.
Thank you for your honesty.
Certainly. I will endeavour to engage in true and sincere debate. However, if things go south, then we must go with the times.
You and Pew are wrong in your conclusions. Spinning the data doesn't change the facts. Although many Catholics at various times of their lives do stray from the Church the estrangement is rarely permanent.
Regardless of the beliefs of your Church that in many ways parallel those of the German Protestant (Nazi) Church Hispanic, Indian, Filipino, Polish, Irish, Vietnamese, and Slavic Catholic immigrants are fully human and do count in the official numbers.
Spoken like the best Planned Parenthood/Margaret Sanger propagandists.
Your momma must be so proud...
lol. Pew and countless other studies and our own lying eyes say otherwise.
If immigration laws on the southern border of the U.S. were enforced, the RCC would dwindle considerably.
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