I. Introduction
By the early 1980s, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was widely associated with pro-family conservative values. Prominent Southern Baptists such as W. A. Criswell, Tim LaHaye, and James Robison all became publicly involved in Republican Party politics in support of Ronald Reagan. They focused attention on social and moral issues: abortion, the role of women in both church and family, homosexuality, pornography, and school prayer. As leading figures in the nation's largest Protestant denomination at the time, they were an invaluable component of the growing religious right. By the time the convention called for a complete boycott of the Disney Company's theme parks and productions in 1996 because of Disney's support for gay and lesbian equality, the SBC was widely viewed as a key player in promoting family values politics.Footnote 1
The SBC's growing prominence in conservative politics paralleled the increasingly divisive internal battle for control over the denomination's leadership and institutions. The “controversy,” as it is often diplomatically labeled by those who lived through it (though, depending on one's viewpoint, it has also been called both a “conservative takeover” and a “fundamentalist resurgence”), began brewing in the 1970s as a group of fundamentalists within the convention began organizing to reclaim Biblical inerrancy as the defining feature of SBC theology. They challenged the longstanding leadership of the denomination's “liberals” or “moderates” (though almost no one but the fundamentalists would call many of these figures liberal or moderate in either politics or theology), who they contended had become too relativist or even humanist in their stances on both biblical interpretation and moral issues. Adrian Rogers, a leader of the fundamentalist wing of the denomination, was elected to the presidency of the SBC in 1979 and began what became a decades-long process of putting fundamentalists in control of the convention's vast bureaucracy of seminaries, missionary organizations, publications, and other institutions.Footnote 2
As they gained national prominence, fundamentalist leaders chastised their predecessors—along with the rest of American culture—for being lax on issues of family, morality, and sexuality. At their annual conventions in the 1970s and 1980s, the denomination increasingly passed resolutions on specific moral issues such as abortion, gay rights, and the role of women in society. Sexual morality became a pivotal issue for the convention in terms of both its internal denominational politics and its engagement with U.S. national politics.Footnote 3
Yet the moderates who led the convention in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were not blind to the era's changing sexual mores. Rather, they joined a host of mainstream secular and religious authorities during the early Cold War who glorified sex within marriage, condemned sex outside of marriage, and warned of a troubling rise in sexual immorality. Like others who embraced the era's ideal of “sexual containment,” Southern Baptists moderates celebrated marital sex as essential to Christian morality and to social stability because it tied spouses together, created stronger families, and contained otherwise socially destructive sexual impulses.Footnote 4 At the same time, they denounced America's loosening sexual morality, and warned their followers of the false messages of American culture and the dangerous temptations of sexual pleasure. While marital sex was salvific, sex outside the marriage bed could lead to grave social harm and even national decline.Footnote 5
This moderate theology of sexuality was critical to the sexual conservatism of the SBC in the 1980s and beyond, as fundamentalists in the convention continued to privilege marital sexuality as a source of social good and disparage extramarital sex as a source of grave social danger. Southern Baptists’ growing concern over additional perceived sexual threats to social stability—such as abortion, feminism, and homosexuality—was grounded in this original and deeper anxiety about the importance of maintaining marital fidelity in a world where pleasurable marital sex was endorsed by God, but pleasurable sex outside of marriage could lead to disaster.
This analysis reveals that a widespread interest within the SBC in matters of sexual morality did not originate within its later fundamentalist leadership. Rather, Southern Baptist moderates shaped a theology of sexuality that was later expanded upon and taken in new directions by their more conservative brethren. Likewise, and more importantly, the SBC's growing visibility in the politics of sexuality—demonstrated most vividly by their call to boycott Disney—was not simply a backlash against recent changes in American sexual culture, but rather the result of a longstanding ideological and theological commitment to the salvific power of marital sex that originated in the sexual liberalism of the early Cold War.Footnote 6
II. Defining the Stakes of Marital Sex
Beginning in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, a small number of Southern Baptist leaders set the stage for a widening denominational conversation about the essential relationship between fulfilling heterosexual married sex, spiritual wholeness, and social stability. Their approach was twofold and, on the surface, appeared contradictory: while they embraced the era's liberalizing attitudes toward sexual satisfaction by emphasizing mutual sexual pleasure, they also rejected a mainstream culture they viewed as rife with temptations that would weaken Americans’ vitality, morality, and self-discipline. While sexual pleasure was to be enjoyed, Southern Baptists argued, it was crucial that this pleasure was confined to marriage in order to maintain America's national, religious, and domestic security during the early Cold War. In making these pronouncements, Southern Baptists joined a host of mainstream authorities who likewise glorified marital sexual pleasure and denounced sex outside of marriage. Sex was a powerful tool: it could be a crucial source of stability and morality, or it could lead to social decay.
At their 1948 convention, Southern Baptists passed the “Resolution on Marriage and Family Relations,” the first denominational resolution that explicitly addressed morality in relation to sexuality and marriage. This resolution, like all SBC resolutions, was voted on by the “messengers,” or delegates, to the denomination's annual convention. In the Southern Baptist tradition, resolutions are not binding for member churches, but they do reflect the consensus of those at the convention and the general beliefs of the denomination's leadership. The 1948 resolution, passed “in the light of current trends and the increasing problems which endanger the stability of family life,” suggested that “pastors give serious study to those problems and to effective methods of dealing with them with a view to establishing a regular service in the church and community for instruction in domestic and marriage problems.” It went on to “recommend that a special series of studies in the Christian ideals of courtship and marriage be made available to young people through the regular program of the local church.”Footnote 7 This resolution was somewhat vague on both the threats to and consequences of family stability—particularly when compared to later resolutions on family and sexuality—but it declared Southern Baptists as pro-family in the early baby boom years and set them in opposition to undefined “current trends” that were deemed a threat to the family. Likewise, it posited the church as the best source for information on marriage and family for church members, the community, and especially “young people.” While previous resolutions had addressed alcohol, the film industry, and other moral concerns, the 1948 resolution was the first step toward making marriage, family, and sexuality critical to the denomination's wider analysis of American social mores.
Over time, the convention fleshed out its approach to these issues by developing a theology that emphasized the sanctity of marital sex, depicting sexuality as a force for moral good as long as it was confined to marriage. For instance, in 1953, social ethics professor Olin T. Binkley, of the SBC-affiliated Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, gave an address entitled “Sex as a Gift of God” at a Family Life Workshop in Nashville, Tennessee (where the SBC is headquartered). In his lecture, he argued that “sex is the design of God and is good.” Sex “is good,” he explained, “because it is a part of the creation. It is good for the development of a moral self. It is good for the human family. It is good for society.” He then questioned those who portrayed sex as immoral or wrong, contending that sex “is not to be interpreted as something degrading and defiling. On the contrary it is to be accepted. It is to be understood and it is to be appreciated.”Footnote 8 But sex only fulfilled its true spiritual and social purpose within marriage. “In the Christian teaching,” Binkley maintained, “sexual intercourse is associated with family life and should be confined to marriage.” “Marriage,” he continued, “is a monogamous, life-long union, a covenant between a man and a woman who accept each other as whole persons and not only as sexual beings and who promise to be faithful and loyal to one another.”Footnote 9 Binkley emphasized that, in the Protestant tradition, both personal witness to one's spouse and procreation were paramount, making the marriage relationship fundamental to spiritual wholeness, unity, and social stability.
Binkley's interpretation of the personal and social benefits of marriage was directly in line with that of other mainstream Cold War authorities. For instance, clergy from more liberal Protestant denominations, as well as many Catholics and Jews, emphasized heterosexual marriage as “a core facet of religious life” during this period. As historian Rebecca Davis has argued, they suggested that marriage was crucial to individuals’ personal and spiritual maturity, making both marriage and religion more central in Americans’ daily lives.Footnote 10 Likewise, in mainstream media and in counselors’ offices across the nation, unhappy couples—and wives in particular—were urged to save their marriages from the tragedy of divorce through hard work and personal sacrifice.Footnote 11 Binkley's belief in the power of pleasurable sex to forge a strong marriage bond was also widely shared. As historian Carolyn Herbst Lewis demonstrates, physicians “believed that mutually satisfying physical pleasure in marriage would reinforce a couple's emotional and legal commitment to one another.”Footnote 12 Similarly, everything from marital preparation textbooks to Ladies Home Journal portrayed fulfilling marital sex as an essential component to a successful marriage.Footnote 13
Binkley joined many mainstream authorities in critiquing the impact of an American culture that was encouraging young people to adopt immoral—or even deviant—sexual values. Like many at the time, Binkley found distressing the era's shifting sexual mores, such as the popularity of pinup magazines, the growing market for sexually explicit pulp paperbacks, and the increasing frankness about sex in movies, television, and radio. He blamed advertising, recent wartime anxieties, and even the freshly published and widely discussed second volume of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's research on human sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, for eroding young people's sexual values. He concluded that young people encountered increasing pressure “to isolate sex from the totality of human existence and responsibility,” which made casual sex outside of the lifelong commitment of marriage seem acceptable.Footnote 14 Binkley argued that Christian ethicists, pastors, and parents needed to do more to become a source of reliable, moral information about sex and sexuality for children and young people.
Many of Binkley's concerns about the declining morality of American culture were echoed in a 1955 SBC “Resolution on Christian Social Concerns,” which began to flesh out the broader social and even national implications for sexual immorality. “The present world order,” the resolution began, “is marked by widespread moral confusion and degeneracy that has produced a worldwide moral crisis of gravest perils.” It brought up a wide range of moral concerns, such as “crime, gambling, beverage alcohol, lust, communism, and other vested interests of greed and power.” But promiscuous sex was a crucial aspect of American immorality. The nation's families were particularly vulnerable, for “home life has felt the moral blight of divorce and marital infidelity.” The resolution ultimately urged Christians to do more to combat “the moral breakdown and corruption that characterize so much of our common life.” Failure to combat these “vicious evils” would potentially compromise “the sanctity of personal character and the stability of government.”Footnote 15
Lurking behind these pronouncements about the importance of marital fidelity in a nation that appeared to be losing its moral compass was a deep anxiety about America's ability to successfully wage the Cold War. As historian Elaine Tyler May argues: “Many high-level government officials, along with individuals in positions of power and influence in fields ranging from industry to medicine and from science to psychology, believed wholeheartedly that there was a direct connection between communism and sexual depravity.”Footnote 16 Crucially, pleasurable heterosexual married sex denoted “normal” gender relations, with strong husbands and nurturing wives. Marital sex, in other words, was crucial for preventing men and women from catering to their potentially base, immature, or deviant desires. It was an essential fortification against an array of gendered social dangers: it strengthened men who were effeminate or weak; it tamed men whose potentially violent sexual desires might run amok; it feminized and made more nurturing women who might otherwise dominate their husbands and sons; and it led couples to rear well-adjusted, gender-normative girls and boys. Without the protection of marital sex, a variety of gendered transgressions could weaken the nation from within, making it vulnerable to communist infiltration and military defeat.Footnote 17
Billy Graham, the nation's most famous Southern Baptist, reiterated and expanded on many of these points in his sermons throughout the 1950s. For instance, he delivered a sermon entitled “The Seventh Commandment” during his first crusade in New York City in 1957. The crusade ran for three and a half months with an average attendance of 18,000 people a night.Footnote 18 Although Graham generally stood apart from the SBC, moving instead in an evangelical world populated largely by parachurch organizations like his own Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, his words carried enormous weight among conservative Christians, and particularly among his fellow Southern Baptists.Footnote 19 He was an important contributor to the denomination's evolving analysis of marital sexuality and the broader Cold War discourse of sexual containment.
In “The Seventh Commandment,” Graham, like Binkley, first emphasized the holiness of marital sex. “The Bible teaches that God performed the first marriage in the Garden of Eden,” he intoned. “God performed and ordained it. Christ has sanctified it, and God gave these desires within men and women.” To further hammer home his point, he added: “The Bible doesn't have any cover-up of it [sex]. The Bible talks about it plainly, out in the open.”Footnote 20 Yet, Graham preached, sex was dangerous because men did not always use it as God intended. As Graham warned: “It is the wrong use of sex that the Bible condemns. It is the wrong use of sex that sends the soul to hell.”Footnote 21 Joining in the sexual liberalism of his peers, Graham praised sex as an important aspect of the human experience, but only within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage.
Meanwhile, Americans, Graham argued, were presumptuously ignoring God's strictures about sexuality—and coming perilously close to destruction. For Graham, the wrong use of sex was important in ways that went beyond individual salvation, for it was also “the wrong use of sex that eats out the heart of any society.” He depicted catastrophic consequences from the illicit sexuality that he believed was sweeping the nation, suggesting that it was the survival of the American way of life that was ultimately at stake. “We've been taught for twenty-five years in this country that morals are relative,” he preached. “The Bible teaches that morals are absolute, that God has never changed to accommodate Himself to us Americans.” Noting Americans’ belief in their own exceptionalism, he added: “We have an idea that we Americans are pets in God's eyes; I tell you we are not. God has given every American greater opportunities than He over [sic] gave any group of people in history. What are we doing with them?”Footnote 22 Americans were squandering those opportunities, Graham suggested, by engaging in a myriad of activities every day that violated the seventh commandment. He cited a dazzling array of Bible passages to argue that lustful thoughts, longing gazes, crude speech, sexual fantasies, provocative clothing, peer pressure from immoral friends, the consumption of unclean books and photographs, and idleness all contributed to—or even constituted in themselves—promiscuous sexuality. Americans were awash in a sea of infidelity.Footnote 23
Further, extramarital sex was an especially pernicious and socially destructive sin to Graham. He counseled: “The Bible teaches . . . that this sin hardens the heart more—listen, it hardens your heart against God more than any other sin.”Footnote 24 The guilt and shame associated with this particular violation of God's commandments isolated individuals from each other and from God. “You can continue committing this sin so long,” he cautioned, “that it hardens your heart against God and you have no chance of hearing the voice of the Spirit of the living God. You have been given up by God!” He went on: “The wrong use of this thing called sex, has destroyed more nations than any other single sin, and it could be that America may be destroyed by this sin. I don't think America will ever be destroyed by communism; but I think if America is destroyed, it will be destroyed by moral deterioration from within.”Footnote 25 Sexual immorality could ruin one's chance for salvation, and a nation of unsaved souls had little chance of maintaining global dominance.
By invoking the language of sexual containment, Graham and his fellow Southern Baptists added a spiritual and moral dimension to a broader Cold War rhetoric that defended heteronormativity and “traditional” gender norms in the face of both internal and external threats. As they confronted the rapidly changing social and sexual values of the early sexual revolution, Southern Baptists staked out a theological position that staunchly defended marital sex while also sounding alarms about the potential dangers of violating the sanctity of the marriage bed. In the process, they laid the foundations for a broadening denominational conversation in the 1960s and beyond about marital sexuality by establishing the goodness of marital sex, the potential of American culture to corrode Christian sexual values, and the potentially dangerous ramifications of illicit sexuality.
III. Spreading the Gospel of Marital Sex
During the 1960s, a wider array of SBC officials and publications elaborated on the sexual theology developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Prominent SBC pastors and organizations published sermons, resolutions, pamphlets, Sunday school lessons, and marriage manuals promoting the importance of marital sex—and the dangers of extramarital sex—to social stability and national vitality. At a moment when the denomination was growing rapidly and implementing a more centralized, corporate structure, the education of church members about the significance of marital fidelity was one avenue for promoting a unified Southern Baptist message.Footnote 26
Sexuality seemed a particularly pressing concern at the time. The sixties witnessed enormous changes in both sex and gender relations. While many of these changes had deep roots in prior decades, the 1960s represented a fundamental shift. The sixties saw the rise of increasingly frank conversations about sexuality, growing acceptance of sex outside of marriage, shifting expectations about women's household and income-earning labor, and women's greater sexual autonomy. White wives entered the workforce in ever-growing numbers and divorce rates were on the rise. The birth control pill became available for contraception, books ranging from Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique to Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response were best sellers, and feminism challenged everything from domestic violence to the Miss America Pageant. By the latter years of the decade, the counterculture made “free love” part of the national vocabulary and the gay liberation movement gained the nation's attention at the Stonewall Inn. The significance of these changes was somewhat uneven at the grassroots, as some embraced changing mores with gusto while many others approached them with caution. Nonetheless, these challenges to existing sexual and gender conventions had an enormous cumulative impact on American culture and values over the course of the decade.Footnote 27
Rather than passively watch these social transformations erode marriage and weaken American morality, some SBC leaders actively sought to buttress the institution and redeem a Christian America. In September 1965, the Christian Life Commission (the arm of the SBC responsible for offering guidance on social and moral issues) published a press release entitled “A Moral Counterattack,” which lamented the “disintegration of sex mores in our nation.” Written by Southern Baptist theologian Joe E. Trull, who was a staunch ally of moderate SBC leadership, the notice pointed to a number of factors that signaled social decline. It recounted a startling “rise of venereal diseases rates, an increase in illegitimate births, and an alarming number of ‘hasty’ marriages,” which had come “to typify our society.” Trull admonished his readers: “The time is ripe for a moral counterattack against this unwholesome trend.”Footnote 28
For Trull, Southern Baptists’ primary target should be “our sex-saturated culture.”Footnote 29 Trull was not opposed to sex and sexuality per se. Like his predecessors, he noted the many ways that “God created man as a sexual creature.” He contended, however, that “the Bible nowhere condemns sex as innately evil, but it strongly warns against the dangers of sexual license and promiscuity.”Footnote 30 The problem, according to Trull, was that American culture did much to encourage sexual immorality. For example, advances in birth control and the treatment of venereal disease, alongside a growing reliance on sex in advertising, meant that young Americans were “well acquainted with modern ‘protections’ and no longer respond to negative injunctions.”Footnote 31
Trull offered the church and home as remedies to impending “sex anarchy,” a term he likely pulled from conservative Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, whose 1956 book, The American Sex Revolution, was repeatedly used by a variety of evangelicals to link heteronuclear families to American national strength.Footnote 32 The key to reining in the era's rampant sexuality, Trull suggested, was to inspire young people to be born again in Christ and to commit themselves to Christian marriages. Failure to act would have tragic consequences for American society. He ended the press release with a warning: “Whether we witness the decline and fall of sex anarchy or the decline and fall of the home may well be determined by our response to the call to arms that sounds through the contemporary disintegration of sex mores.” Indeed, he concluded: “A moral counterattack is demanded. The future is in our hands.”Footnote 33
The Baptist Press, the SBC's weekly news service, published a similar feature in its series on “Problems of the Christian Life” in 1968. T. B. Maston, a retired professor of Christian Ethics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who had been a notable force behind the racial integration of the SBC, asked in an entry on “Our Permissive Society”: “Is the increasing permissiveness of our society a sign of decay and the approaching collapse of our nation?” He continued: “It should never be forgotten that periods such as the present one have in the past frequently been a forerunner of the decline and fall of nations and civilizations. This has been particularly true when that permissiveness had [sic] permeated the area of sex, and in the contemporary period there is no area where it is more prevalent than in the area of sex.”Footnote 34 Throughout the 1960s, the convention repeatedly emphasized the linkage between sexual promiscuity, weakening families, and national decline.
Billy Graham likewise wrote and spoke throughout the 1960s about the significant dangers he believed were posed by a growing cultural acceptance of sex outside of marriage. For instance, in his 1965 book World Aflame, Graham described the dangers of “immorality, degeneracy, and whore-mongering.” He noted that “it has always been the mark of decaying civilizations to become obsessed with sex.” He continued: “One of the world's great historians told me: ‘The moral deterioration of the West will destroy us by the year 2000 AD even if the Communists don't!’”Footnote 35 Graham believed American families were particularly endangered—an especially ominous development. “When the morals of society are upset,” he prophesied, “the family is the first to suffer.” But the problem ran even deeper, he explained because “the home is the basic unit of our society, and a nation is only as strong as our homes. The breaking up of a home does not often make headlines, but it eats like termites at the structure of the nation.”Footnote 36 He repeated similar messages in a variety of sermons throughout the decade.
In his sermons from the 1960s, Graham also began to connect sexual promiscuity to homosexuality and abortion. While he touched on abortion and homosexuality infrequently during this period, his occasional references presaged the growing significance of these issues in SBC materials in the 1970s. For instance, in a 1961 speech to the North Carolina Council of Churches, Graham suggested abortion rates were emblematic of larger social problems in the nation. Citing sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, Graham told his audience that “between 500,000 and a million abortions are performed each year largely on unwedded girls.” He went on: “Dr. Sorokin calls this ‘sex anarchy.’ He says its consequences are likely to be more far-reaching than those of any other revolution in history.”Footnote 37 Rather than condemning abortion by invoking a fetus’ right to life, which became a common argument against abortion in later decades, Graham's comments instead recalled the fierce stigma of sexual promiscuity that was attached to unwed white mothers of the 1950s, who were frequently pressured to either marry their baby's father or hide their pregnancies and then relinquish their infants for adoption. Graham continued in the late 1960s and much of the 1970s to fault promiscuity and an immoral popular culture rather than a disregard of fetal life in his discussions of abortion, even as both abortion and unwed motherhood became increasingly acceptable for white women.Footnote 38
Graham similarly argued that marital fidelity remained critical to halting the growing acceptance of homosexuality, which was for Graham and his fellow conservative Christians the lowest point in the slippery slope of sexual deviance. For example, in a draft of a 1966 lecture on “Moral Alternatives” given to the Executives Club of Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham decried some prominent liberal theologians’ promotion of “new morality,” or “situation ethics,” which he condemned as sanctioning sex outside of marriage, including homosexuality, as acceptable in some instances. Graham called instead for a return to the “Biblical morality” of marriage. Marriage was, he explained, the “human demonstration” of the covenant relationship between God and mankind. Homosexuality and promiscuity, he went on, were interrelated problems because both violated the sacred covenant of marriage. The solution was to appreciate the sanctity of marital sex: “What you do within an act of sex is just the fullest expression, the most complete expression of a relationship which is already binding, which is already covenantal in its significance because it is taken by two people who vow before God in their own time-bound and sin-filled circumstances to try to demonstrate and live out the basic relatedness of all life.”Footnote 39 In Graham's analysis, America's growing acceptance of sex outside of marriage—illustrated most alarmingly by those who defended the rights of gays and lesbians—represented a profound misunderstanding of God's intention for sexuality.
In addition to sermons and publications by Southern Baptist leaders, the SBC addressed the relationship between changing family norms and national well-being in its official publications directed toward church members. One area of concern was wives’ paid work outside the home, which threatened the gender hierarchy of male breadwinner and female caregiver that was so critical to marital sexual containment in the 1950s. Married women's participation in the paid labor force rose quickly during these years. In 1950, almost one in every four married women worked for wages. That number rose to almost one in three in 1960 and to just over two out of every five in 1970 as a growing number of American families relied on two incomes to maintain a middle-class standard of living. However, it was not simply that this ratio was changing for all married women, as many African American and working-class wives had engaged in paid labor for decades. The more salient social change was that the number of white—and particularly middle-class—wives who worked outside the home for wages was growing.Footnote 40 The Christian Life Commission responded to these changes by publishing a 1964 pamphlet to educate church members about “Working Wives and Mothers.” The pamphlet considered for church members the many economic and personal reasons that married women and mothers worked outside their homes, including financial need and personal fulfillment. But, it warned: “From the Christian standpoint it is evident that some of these motives are not altogether adequate or worthy. . . . A Christian home should be able to supply in complete honesty a worthy motive before the wife and mother yields her time-honored position as a homemaker to become a wage earner outside the home.”Footnote 41 A higher standard of living, access to consumer goods, or a wife's career ambitions, it suggested, were inadequate justifications for endangering marital stability.
The pamphlet depicted paid work as especially worrisome because it could lead directly to family and marital collapse. On the one hand, couples might delay parenthood so that a wife would not lose her paycheck or her working could cause increased tension in the family, the neglect of children, and the deterioration of quality family time. Wives’ paid work, in other words, could create a degree of gender equality among spouses that would lead to family disintegration. On the other hand, paid work also exposed wives “to moral laxity” which further increased the likelihood of “family breakup.” Working women “are exposed to moral looseness in their work as they would never be in their own homes. They often find themselves thrown into temptation on the job, while going to and from work, and at office social affairs.” “Marriage counselors,” the pamphlet cautioned, “point out that many homes break up because of moral compromises made by the woman at her office or somehow occasioned by her work.”Footnote 42 This line of reasoning, in which women's growing workforce participation increased the likelihood of infidelity and spurred the disintegration of family units, became increasingly common among conservative Christian publications during the 1970s—although most publications depicted men's susceptibility to temptation when working with female colleagues.Footnote 43
The specter of divorce lurked behind these grave pronouncements about the destructive potential of wives’ increased financial independence and their widening social and professional circles in the workplace. The divorce rate had declined during the 1950s after a rash of marital breakups following World War II, going from a peak of seventeen out of 1,000 married women becoming divorced in 1946 to nine out of 1,000 in 1960. But those numbers began to rise again over the course of the 1960s, with fifteen out of 1,000 married women becoming divorced in 1970.Footnote 44 The SBC, however, sought to reverse Americans’ growing acceptance of divorce through a reinvigorated commitment to heterosexual marriage as a pillar of a stable, moral society.
To Southern Baptists, divorce signaled both a threat to the church community and a troubling weakness of one's moral character. For instance, the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas published a pamphlet in 1964 entitled “The Christian, The Church, and Divorce” to provide guidance to church members on the growing number of divorced people in their midst. The pamphlet began by urging couples considering divorce to do their “utmost in seeking God's help to save it [the marriage].” Alongside talking over the problem with each other and a Christian counselor, they were also instructed to take into account the consequences for themselves and others, including the impact on children and “on fellow Christians and on the work of the Lord.” Rather than a private marital decision involving two spouses, divorce represented a rip in the larger fabric of the Christian community. The pamphlet went on to warn readers: “There are certain emotional and psychological factors which seem to render divorced people peculiarly subject to temptations of sexual impurity.” It urged churches to include the divorced in their ministries, but to also avoid placing those who had experienced divorce in positions of leadership. It suggested that, even as divorced men and women made up a larger share of church members, being divorced signaled a potential weakness in one's spiritual and sexual character.Footnote 45
The SBC also addressed the growing challenges to marriage by targeting educational materials about the importance of marital fidelity directly to church members in their weekly Sunday school classes. These materials argued that individual church members played an important role in saving themselves and their society by building strong, loyal marriages. For instance, the spring 1965 issue of Baptist Adults presented a month-long unit on “Basic Values in Christian Marriage.” The magazine was published by the SBC's Baptist Training Union in order to provide leaders of adult church study groups with units of instruction on various topics important to Christian living. The study materials for this unit were four essays penned by Foy Valentine, who headed the SBC's Christian Life Commission from 1960 to 1987, addressing the questions: “What are some of the basic values in Christian Marriage? Why is it important that these values be preserved? How are these values being threatened today?”Footnote 46
Valentine was known in the SBC as a staunch liberal and was eventually forced out of his leadership position at least in part due to his perceived failure to adequately renounce abortion.Footnote 47 But his views on the importance of marital fidelity aligned with those of his more fundamentalist colleagues. In his view, lifelong commitment made heterosexual marriage the meaningful, rich, supportive relationship that God truly intended. “Only in the exclusive union of one man and one woman joined together as one for life,” Valentine wrote, “can there be the abundantly full and deeply satisfying development of body, mind, and soul. This is God's intention for marriage.”Footnote 48
There was also an important social benefit of faithful Christian marriages: they could stem the societal disorder created by the growing divorce rate. To Valentine, getting divorced and then remarrying was tantamount to committing adultery. He called the practice “‘tandem polygamy,’” which allowed “a man to have several wives or a wife to have several husbands—not all at the same time, but one right after the other.”Footnote 49 He suggested this increasingly common practice was heartless and cruel: “When a new spouse is desired, the old one is simply cast off, leaving in the process uncounted emotional scars and untold human suffering.”Footnote 50 The possibility of divorce ruined the security, as well as the personal and spiritual wholeness, that was supposed to come with marriage. It also threatened the social fabric: “To be unfaithful is to reject God's way and to invite chaos in the place of order, strife instead of harmony.”Footnote 51 Fidelity was the path to happy, wholesome, orderly relationships, and infidelity was the path to despair and social chaos.
Southern Baptist leaders’ expanding commitment to the social benefits of marital fidelity—and their deepening concerns about the supposed dangers presented by America's rapidly shifting sexual mores—was also expressed through the emerging genre of sex and marriage manuals published by evangelical presses. These manuals responded to the era's increasingly frank discussion of sex and sexuality by stressing the importance of sexual pleasure to strong, Christian marriages.Footnote 52 Herbert J. Miles, who was a sociology professor at the Southern Baptist college Carson-Newman and who had earned a Masters of Theology at the SBC's Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, published the first popular evangelical sex manual in 1967.Footnote 53 His Sexual Happiness in Marriage—which opened with a ringing endorsement by Foy Valentine—became, in the words of historian Rebecca Davis, “the foundational text for Christian sexual advice literature.”Footnote 54
Miles, like other Southern Baptists at the time, articulated many social and spiritual benefits of sexually satisfying marriages. But he added to the conversation an explicit emphasis on both male and female sexual pleasure within marriage. Secular sex manuals had begun to discuss female orgasms in the 1920s, which was a hallmark of that era's sexual liberalism.Footnote 55 Miles drew that more mainstream liberal emphasis on sexual pleasure into Southern Baptists’ conversation on marital fidelity by using twenty “propositions” to help explain to readers the centrality of sexual pleasure to sustaining monogamous Christian marriages and a stable social order. For instance, proposition 10 stated: “Sexuality was designed by the Creator to be a personal pleasure relationship between husband and wife.”Footnote 56 Further, as proposition 13 elaborated: “Ultimately, the basic purpose of sexual pleasure in marriage is to bind husband and wife together in a lifelong relationship.”Footnote 57 Both spouses were to experience this pleasure, as proposition 14 explained: “The unitive plan of God calls for sexual pleasure to be a mutual experience between husband and wife.”Footnote 58 As proposition 17 reiterated for those who had any remaining doubts: “There is no conflict between the process of living a devout christian life and the process of achieving and enjoying good sexual adjustment in marriage.”Footnote 59 Miles summed up his approach to marital sexual pleasure as follows: “In Exodus 20:14 the command, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ assumes a positive command, ‘Thou shalt meet thy sexual needs in marriage.’”Footnote 60
For Miles, the sexually liberal goal of mutual orgasm was integral to his belief in the conservative power of marital sex. Indeed, the chief aim of his book was to strengthen monogamous Christian marriages at a moment when, in his mind, social decay due to widespread promiscuity seemed imminent. Proposition 18 warned: “Sex destroys when it operates outside of the creative plan of marriage,” and proposition 19 added: “The rightness of sexual behavior must be determined by the creative plan of God and not by current cultural practices.”Footnote 61 Miles advocated for proper instruction in Christian attitudes toward sex in order to help the public appreciate both the full depths of marital sexual pleasure and the supreme importance of marital fidelity to a moral, Christian society. “Sexual promiscuity paralyzes spiritual development,” Miles cautioned. “It erodes personal character. It disintegrates personality. It retards social responsibility. It breeds boredom, unhappiness, and despair. It destroys.”Footnote 62 Pleasurable sex could save marriages and society, but it could also decimate them.
Tim LaHaye, a Southern Baptist minister who went on to become a leading figure among the fundamentalist wing of the SBC and a best-selling author of Christian self-help books and the Left Behind series, similarly endorsed sexual pleasure paired with marital fidelity. In his 1968 book, How to Be Happy though Married, published by Christian publisher Tyndale House, LaHaye contended that pleasurable marital sex was integral to a happy and strong marriage relationship. He wrote: “Happy is the woman who looks upon the act of marriage as a means of showing her love for her husband and of his showing his love for her.”Footnote 63 LaHaye even suggested that devout Christians had better sex: “It may strike some Christians as strange to hear a minister say that two Spirit-filled partners can experience more physical and emotional pleasure from the act of marriage than the average couple, but I definitely believe it.”Footnote 64 The comfort, maturity, ongoing communication, and marital harmony that came from deep spiritual devotion translated into more loving, uninhibited, meaningful sex. These couples, therefore, were also far less likely to experience infidelity or divorce.
In 1969, Southern Baptist messengers endorsed the sexual education efforts of SBC leaders by expanding on their 1948 “Resolution on Marriage and Family Relations.” The 1969 “Resolution on Family Life and Sex Education” directed Southern Baptists to rely primarily on church-produced materials to learn about sexual values. It noted the importance of “a Christian understanding of the proper role of home, sex, and the family” and suggested that “human sexuality and personality fulfillment may best be understood through teaching in the home and church.” It urged Southern Baptists to make fuller use of the “family life and sex education materials” produced by the SBC and its various agencies and seminaries and encouraged the SBC to continue to produce educational resources on sexuality and the family.Footnote 65 As messengers looked for ways to address social problems, they urged the church to take an increasingly prominent role in educating believers about sexuality.
IV. Marital Sex and the Fundamentalist Resurgence
The convention's focus on the widespread social import of marital sexuality continued into the 1970s and 1980s, even as the SBC faced growing internal strife between fundamentalists and moderates over the denomination's commitment to Biblical inerrancy. Despite many areas of tension, both groups continued to promote marital fidelity as critical to the nation's families and broader social stability. Further, the Roe v. Wade decision, the rising visibility of gay and lesbian activists, and the growing controversy over the Equal Rights Amendment only heightened Southern Baptists’ apprehensions about the potential damage of unfettered sexuality on American families. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the ongoing importance of a theology of sexuality that was created by moderates but was shared and expanded upon by moderates and conservatives alike.
Early in the 1970s, SBC leadership responded anxiously to the many changes in gender roles and sexual values occurring outside the denomination. SBC president and prominent Mississippi businessman Owen Cooper, who was only the second elected lay leader in SBC history, explained in his address to the 1973 annual convention: “In our permissive society, there has never been more immorality, adultery, divorce, broken homes, sensuality, pornography, and illegitimacy.” He continued: “The problems of the home are numerous and disastrous.” He went on to suggest that “Watergate may have been worth the price” if it convinced people to return to “moral standards, Christian ethics, right and wrong.”Footnote 66 Like many who had come before, Owen linked loosening sexual morals to a weakened family and, in turn, national social and political problems that could only be resolved through a reinvigorated commitment to Christian values.
SBC members were likewise concerned about the threat of changing gender and sexual norms to American families. At that same convention, messengers passed the “Resolution on the Place of Women in Christian Service,” which condemned feminism and reaffirmed “conventional” gender roles in church and family as essential to social stability. Proposed by a conservative female messenger, the SBC's moderate leadership initially tried to soften the resolution's language—only to be voted down by the crowd. The resolution began with a reminder that: “The Scriptures bear record to the distinctive roles of men and women in the church and in the home.” It went on to charge: “There is a great attack by the members of most women's liberation movements upon scriptural precepts of woman's place in society.” It ultimately, “resolved, That we ‘redig’ or reaffirm God's order of authority for his church and the Christian home: (1) Christ the head of every man; (2) man the head of the woman; (3) children in subjection to their parents—in the Lord.” It “further resolved, That we “redig” or reaffirm God's explicit Word that (1) man was not made for the woman, but the woman for the man; (2) that the woman is the glory of man; (3) that as woman would not have existed without man, henceforth, neither would man have existed without the woman, they are dependent one upon the other—to the glory of God.”Footnote 67
In this context, a variety of Southern Baptists continued to emphasize the importance of marital fidelity to broader social well-being. For instance, the convention passed a series of resolutions that endorsed the “biblical family.” In 1975, messengers passed a “Resolution on Family Relationships” in recognition of the family “as a means of bringing order to human society, continuing the race, and providing enriched fellowship and emotional nurture for all people.” The resolution also noted that “the New Testament plainly teaches the beauty and value of a love-filled monogamy.” “We affirm our conviction,” it concluded, “that the restoration of happy and biblical family relationships is one of the most critical moral imperatives of our time.” Further, it reiterated the instructions of the 1948 and 1969 resolutions to “urge the appropriate agencies of the Southern Baptist Convention to give top priority to providing resources for Christian family living.”Footnote 68 The convention repeated the importance of supporting families, teaching the importance of chastity and monogamy to young people, and challenging “permissiveness” in resolutions throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s.Footnote 69
Women were a particularly important audience for Southern Baptist instruction on marriage and family. Widely popular manuals and workshops, such as Southern Baptist Mirabel Morgan's The Total Woman (1973), taught women to use their sexuality to create strong marriages with “conventional” gender roles in order to create a more moral, stable society. According to Morgan and other authors of Christian women's self-help books, alluring and deferential Christian wives would lead their husbands to be loyal to Christ, help retain men's masculine dominance while containing their sexual impulses to marriage, and model appropriate gender roles for the next generation.Footnote 70
Similarly, the convention continued to feature the dangers of marital infidelity in its publications. For instance, as the decade neared its end, in November 1979, the SBC magazine The Student—which was published by the Sunday School Board with the goal of “Equipping Students for Christian Excellence”—printed the first in a series of two articles on the biblical foundations of fidelity written by William Hull, a prominent moderate pastor from Louisiana who had served as provost at Southern Seminary and later served as provost at Samford University.Footnote 71 Hull endorsed the importance of sexual pleasure within marriage, but he was deeply concerned about the ongoing threats of premarital and extramarital sex to the “nuptial bond.” According to Hull, the consequences of infidelity were numerous and severe. “Without such costly devotion [of fidelity],” he argued, “individuals can never find the sense of self-worth and personal security which comes from knowing that they will always matter most regardless of what competitor may appear upon the scene.” Similarly: “Without such exclusive attachment, families can never be sure which children are their own, thus confusing those continuities of birthright and inheritance by which noble traditions of conduct are built.” But, even worse: “Without such undivided allegiance, communities can never be free from simmering suspicions and jealousies that erupt into outraged vendettas when honor has been offended.” He concluded: “In short, we are dealing here not with a puritanical stricture of ancient Israel but with an essential foundation of civilized life which is crucial to our very existence.”Footnote 72 While one might believe infidelity was no longer important, it was in fact fundamental to civilization.
A new genre of writings about promiscuity also appeared in SBC materials in the 1970s: practical advice for those coping with the temptations or aftermath of adultery. Aimed at everyone from lonely housewives to ministers who might be led astray by members of their own congregations, these publications stressed the personal, marital, and social harm created by infidelity. By the 1980s, these kinds of articles were routine, particularly in the SBC publication Home Life, “A Christian Family Magazine to help adults establish and maintain Christian homes,” published by SBC's Sunday School Board. Home Life regularly featured pieces written by men and women who had experienced infidelity in their marriages and chose to stay together alongside articles by counselors who assured readers of the many benefits of forgiveness and reconciliation despite its difficulty.Footnote 73 By acknowledging the extraordinary pain and suffering of those whose spouses had been unfaithful even as they urged reconciliation, these articles drove home the seriousness of adultery as a form of betrayal with long-term consequences.
SBC materials also increasingly linked promiscuity with homosexuality and abortion, just as Billy Graham had suggested in the 1960s. For many Southern Baptists, homosexuality was dangerous because it was not only same-sex activity but also extramarital activity. The convention passed its first resolution on the topic in 1976, which was fairly limited in its scope. It simply noted the “religious and moral dimensions of homosexuality” and “affirmed our commitment to the biblical truth regarding the practice of homosexuality and sin.”Footnote 74 A year later, however, a second “Resolution on Homosexuality” passed that broadened considerably the conclusions of the 1976 resolution. It opened with the observation that there was a “precipitous decline of moral integrity in American society” due in part to the growing visibility of gay and lesbian activists. The resolution described these activities as a “radical scheme to subvert the sacred pattern of marriage in America . . . by portraying homosexuality as normal behavior” and raised the specter of the potentially “devastating consequences for family life in general and our children in particular.” It further lauded Southern Baptist singer and Florida orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant's prominent campaign against a gay rights law in Miami, Florida.Footnote 75
These sentiments were not limited to SBC conservatives; even Jimmy Carter, whom many saw as a moderate on social issues, expressed similar concerns. In his (in)famous interview with Playboy magazine while running for office in 1976, Carter explicitly linked homosexuality with the dangers of extramarital sex. While he denied any personal prejudice against gays and lesbians, the topic made him very uncomfortable and he struggled with how to “inject it into a public discussion on politics and how it conflicts with morality.” Ultimately, he concluded: “I've thought about it a lot, but I don't see how to handle it differently from the way I look on other sexual acts outside marriage.”Footnote 76
Abortion was also a growing source of concern within the convention. While initially Southern Baptists, like many evangelicals at the time, largely overlooked or even supported the Roe v. Wade decision, the SBC paid growing attention to abortion in the second half of the 1970s.Footnote 77 When they did so, however, many Southern Baptists focused—just as Billy Graham had a decade before—on promiscuity rather than or alongside the sanctity of fetal life. For instance, Southern Baptist lawyer Linda Coffee who, with Sarah Weddington, brought the case to the Supreme Court, defended the decision while also renouncing the use of abortion to end inconvenient pregnancies in the Baptist Press. Coffee, whose mother remained active in the Texas Convention, explained to the news service that, legally, the decision was laudable because it removed the state from any moral decisions about abortion prior to fetal viability, which squared with longstanding Baptist traditions of separating church and state and kept the state out of doctor-patient decisions. Yet, Coffee shared: “From my personal perspective as a Christian, it would tear me up to have to make a decision on abortion except in the early stages.” She went on to explain that: “I would have little personal sympathy for use of abortion as a contraceptive or to avoid personal responsibility.”Footnote 78 Well before fetal life became a hot-button issue for the SBC, abortion was instead negatively linked to promiscuity.
Likewise, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, who went on to become very prominent conservative religious and political figures in both the SBC controversy and American politics more broadly, explained in their 1976 book The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love: “We oppose abortion for all personal or selfish reasons, but accept therapeutic abortion in those rare cases in which a Christian doctor, minister, and the girl's parents prayerfully agree that it is in the best interest of either the mother or the unborn child.” However, they continued: “If a girl or woman is immoral and becomes pregnant, she should bear the responsibility of her actions by giving birth to the child.” As justification, they cited both biblical uncertainty about “when the fertilized egg becomes a person” as well as a series of situations they had encountered in their ministry that involved grave danger to a mother's health, the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl by a stranger, and a couple who were likely to have a child who was “malformed in some way.” They concluded that abortion was sometimes warranted but not in instances of promiscuity or simple convenience to a woman.Footnote 79 Over time, the LaHayes became much more stringent in their approach to abortion. But, in 1976, they touted promiscuity as much as protecting fetal life as a reason to avoid abortion.
By the 1980s, as fundamentalists were rapidly gaining growing power in the denomination, the linkage between sexual morality—particularly marital fidelity—and social stability was an unquestioned and frequently invoked aspect of Southern Baptist teachings. Leading conservative W. A. Criswell, who spoke frequently on the importance of biblical inerrancy and was deeply involved in a variety of efforts to involve evangelicals in politics, expounded upon this theme in his sermons throughout the 1980s. For instance, in a sermon on sexuality from October 1980, Criswell reminded his listeners that the “New Testament presents it [marital sex] in every instance as something beautiful and glorious, never repressed, or suppressed, or sublimated, never.” However, he also lamented: “Today we live in a permissive society. . . . This is the age of promiscuity, of pill, of penicillin, and petroleum.” Permissiveness allowed extramarital sex without judgment; the pill allowed sex without pregnancy; penicillin treated sexually transmitted infections; and petroleum symbolized for Criswell a mobile society where one could simply run from one's sins by relocating.Footnote 80 A 1982 sermon expanded on these themes by focusing on the growing divorce rate and general family discord. “The dissolution of the home in America is a harbinger of the dissolution of the fabric of our society,” he preached. “There is no nation yet that has ever survived the erosion of its domestic life.”Footnote 81 By the later 1980s, the AIDS epidemic became a regular feature of Criswell's sermons on morality. For example, a 1989 sermon decried: “AIDS is a judgment of Almighty God! All venereal disease is that.” He continued: “God made this universe and put in it a man for a woman, monogamous. I can tell you this, which is self-apparent: a man and a woman, the man and his wife, can have sex for ten thousand eternities and never have AIDS, or claps, or gonorrhea, or syphilis.”Footnote 82 Criswell repeatedly emphasized the many grave personal and societal dangers of extramarital sexuality.
Similarly, Billy Graham continued to preach for decades about the countless hazards sex outside of marriage caused for American society. His sermon “Youth, Sex and the Bible,” given at a revival in Houston in 1981, made many of the same points as “The Seventh Commandment” sermon he had given twenty-four years earlier in New York. He reiterated the goodness of sex as “a glorious climax to married love.”Footnote 83 He likewise argued that adultery was prohibited to protect the strength and quality of one's marriage, adding that “if you commit immorality before marriage it affects your marriage later.”Footnote 84 Fidelity also protected one's body from venereal diseases and unwanted pregnancy and one's mind from the guilt and anguish that often accompanied pre- and extramarital liaisons. But, finally, it was also “to protect society” because illicit sexuality could “threaten the security of the nation.” Here, Graham cited ancient Rome as an example of what could go wrong for licentious societies. He added in a handwritten note a timelier concern of the recessionary early 1980s as well: “If we have a depression, America may not have the moral stamina to survive.”Footnote 85
Jerry Falwell, whose Thomas Road Baptist Church remained independent until joining the SBC in 1996, was likewise one of the most visible religious leaders who moved frequently in both political and Southern Baptist circles.Footnote 86 His organization, the Moral Majority, was among the most prominent Christian right political organizations in the nation from its founding in 1979 and throughout the early 1980s. In his 1980 screed against the intertwined dangers of liberalism, promiscuity, and communism, Listen, America, Falwell repeatedly emphasized the dangers of rampant sexuality to American national vitality. “The strength and stability of families determine the vitality and moral life of society,” he wrote. “Too many men and women, trying to protect their own sinfulness and selfishness,” he continued, “are for the desires of self-gratification destroying the very foundation of the family was we know it.”Footnote 87 Falwell likewise called morality “the deciding factor” in America's resurgence and explained: “We are economically, politically, and militarily sick because our country is morally sick.”Footnote 88 He cited feminism, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, pornography, and a corrupt popular culture as the key causes of the United States’ decline. Invoking ideas that had been circulating among Southern Baptists since the 1950s, Falwell called his fellow Christians to action to revive America's morality.
V. Conclusion
Southern Baptist moderates of the 1950s and 1960s developed a theology of marital sexuality that their fundamentalist brethren adopted and elaborated on as they gained control over the denomination and entered national politics in the late 1970s and beyond. Alongside many other advocates of sexual containment in the early Cold War, a variety of moderate Southern Baptist leaders and publications linked extramarital sexuality with social and national decline. Sex outside of marriage was bad, not only for individual morality but also for national vitality. Over time, these ideas were adopted and expanded upon by moderates and fundamentalists alike as many Southern Baptists began to connect the dangers of extramarital sex to the dangers of women's paid work, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. By the 1980s, as the SBC became increasingly associated with the family values politics of the broader Christian right, it had already adopted a sustained and well-developed ideology about the importance of marital sexuality to nourishing strong, Christian families—and the danger of extramarital sexuality to both Christian families and a Christian nation. Rather than simply reacting against the loosening sexual mores of the 1970s and 1980s, or in favor of the rising visibility of other politically engaged Christians on issues of sexual morality, the SBC instead drew on longer traditions within the denomination to engage with a changing political and sexual landscape. Ideas forged in the early Cold War had profound consequences for decades to come.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bethany Moreton, Gill Frank, Heather White, Aram Goudsouzian, and Colin Chapell for their feedback on drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Rebecca Davis, who identified herself as the reviewer for Church History. Her feedback was a model of insightful, constructive peer review, and this article is much better for her suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank Taffy Hall, Bill Sumners, and the staff at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives for their assistance with my research.
