Evangelicals and the Contraceptive Mentality

In teaching the Marriage course last semester at Tyndale I encountered no opposition of any kind to the fact that I assigned as my main text John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. The students liked it and no one from the administration or other faculty expressed any concern. Now, I'm well aware of the fact that my fortunate situation is not replicated on all Evangelical campuses. I was talking to a friend at another Evangelical liberal arts college who has witnessed significant anti-Catholicism, including prejudice against Natural Family Planning and the TOB (Theology of the Body).

The TOB in an Evangelical Context
There are two reasons why someone might be concerned about someone teaching TOB in an Evangelical context. One arises from anti-Catholic sentiment and the other from a liberal accommodation to the sexual revolution. I submit that the former is not so much of a concern in most Evangelical liberal arts colleges; there might well be opposition to hiring a Roman Catholic professor, but not to reading Catholic books. This is especially true in philosophy and moral theology, where the major theological differences between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics are not so prominent.

On the other hand, the real likelihood of opposition to the TOB comes from Evangelicals who have embraced aspects of the sexual revolution, second wave feminism and relatively liberal views of Scripture. The problem with John Paul II, in their view, is not that he is Roman Catholic, but rather that he is conservative. If a Protestant advocated the views on sexual morality taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he would be rejected just as quickly as the Pope.

Embracing the Contraceptive Mentality
Are Evangelicals embracing the contraceptive mentality? I consider the contraceptive mentality (which I will define in a moment) to be the heart of the anti-Christian sexual revolution that has spread over the Western world during the past century and especially since the 1960s. The contraceptive mentality is a view of human sexuality that is uniquely modern and which views the meaning of sexual activity as having nothing essential to do with procreation. The separation of sexual activity from procreation means the separation of sex from children and, ultimately, from marriage. When sexual activity is detached from reproduction, women are objectifyed as sex objects by which the lusts of men can be satisfied.

The Pill plays a big role in this objectifying because it makes women available every day of the month and the monthly cycle that differentiates women from men becomes irrelevant to woman's sexual identity. Natural Family Planning works around the monthly cycle and makes family planning a joint project in which a woman's body is respected rather than medicated and mutilated.

The sexual revolution makes pleasure (in the sense of the physical and psychological sense of well-being that is derived from sexual intercourse) central to the meaning of sex. In the traditional view of marriage, pleasure is a by product of sexual activity but not its meaning. Procreation is the meaning and sex is designed to conceive children and also to bind the husband and wife together is a mutual relationship of love, which creates the ideal environment for the nurture, care, education and raising of children.

When pleasure becomes the main meaning of sex, the marriage becomes a matter of what each person gets out of it. It is a contract for the mutual use of each other's bodies for pleasure and when the pleasure ceases the relationship loses its purpose. It is the genius of John Paul II's TOB to join together the two purposes of sexuality, procreation and mutuality, into one thing. The problem with Evangelicals today is not just that they have accepted contraception; the greater problem is that in doing so they have allowed the use of artificial contraception to alter their understanding of the meaning of human sexuality.

The contraceptive mentality makes the woman continuously available for sex and removes the need for periodic continence. It thus has a negative and a positive effect. Negatively, it removes the necessity for husbands and wives to develop the virtue of self-control, which is a fruit of the Spirit. Positively, it puts the focus on pleasure as the heart of the sexual relationship instead of procreation. Thus, contraception trains us to think of sex as a "need" and as something good "in itself" (i.e. detached from its procreative purpose). The result is that sex becomes a "power," that is, a good structure of creation that bursts its boundaries and becomes an idol by assuming too much importance in and of itself.

The TOB does not have a negative view of sexual activity; on the contrary, it views the sexual relationship between husband and wife as having dignity and purity when it serves its natural end - the conception of children and the binding together of husband and wife as the foundation of the home in which those children can be nurtured with the love that parents naturally lavish on their own offspring.

The TOB does not say that sex has no purpose other than conceiving children - as if a couple with four children should only have had intercourse a handful of times in 20 years. But the TOB wisely teaches that sex for pleasure's sake reduces sex to a trivial recreation and deprives it of its power, its beauty and its seriousness.

The contraceptive mentality is not simply a natural law debate about the morality of a single act of intercourse; it is a vision of human sexuality which is shallow and depersonalizing. The implications of the contraceptive mentality are seen in the fact that when it has a chance to develop and become dominant in a society that society loses its ability to understand why homosexual "marriage" is not "just as good" as heterosexual marriage.

Conclusion
If Evangelicals do not recover the traditional understanding of marriage as an inter-generational institution that revolves around the raising and educating of the children by parents (and grandparents), then we will lose our ability to resist the sexual revolution and all its poison fruit (divorce, cohabitation, homosexuality, promiscuity, etc.)

I do not see how we can balance forever between the traditional and the revolutionary views accepting part of both and yet ever so slowly drifting toward the modern view. Evangelicals must reject the contraceptive mentality if they wish to build strong families and resist of acids of modernity that threaten to dissolve all human relationships into contracts that create shallow relationships and temporary "family structures" instead of the natural family built on a covenant between husband and wife, a covenant that is enacted and re-enacted in every act of marriage.