The Protestant movement, which began in the sixteenth century, was not simply a theological movement, but rather one deeply associated with the political, economic, and social issues of the time. Many of the leaders who accepted Lutheran or Calvinist teachings did so in part out of desires to end the economic and political power of the papacy in their territories, or, in Germany, to oppose the power of the Holy Roman Emperor. Nobles in France saw it as a way to combat the power of the monarchy as well as the papacy, and in England Henry VIII clearly recognized that a confiscation of church property would swell the royal treasury.
Martin Luther (1481-1546) was the spark that began of the revolt against Catholicism but he was not alone; a host of others included Ulrich Zwingli (1484—1531) in Zurich and John Calvin (1509-1564) in Geneva. As communities and political jurisdictions broke with Rome, the churches they established came to be called Protestant after a 1529 document issued by princes who followed Luther and who protested a papal order that they abandon their religious innovations. Attempting to preserve Catholicism was the Holy Roman Emperor, and the issue of which countries and areas would be Catholic and which Protestant was eventually decided by the wars of religion that dominated the last part of the sixteenth and first part of the seventeenth centuries.
Sex was an integral part of the Protestant movement because all segments of the reformers abandoned the idea of clerical celibacy. Luther himself conspicuously demonstrated his opposition to celibacy in 1525 by marrying Katherine von Bora, who had fled her convent.The Protestants, however, were no less interested in regulating sexuality than the Catholics had been, and both Calvin and Zwingli established courts to handle marriage and morals cases. Though the Protestants rejected traditional canon law, Luther even burning a canon law book, they still followed most of its traditions regarding sex and marriage. The Protestants were also strong Augustinians, and Luther, as the Catholic theologians before him, linked original sin and sexual desires. He differed, as did most Protestants, however, in emphasizing that marriage was the ideal state for almost everyone.
Calvin went further than Luther by taking some of the initial steps in empowering women. Calvin taught that the primary purpose of marriage was social rather than generative. Woman had not been created simply to be man’s helper in procreation, nor was she just a necessary remedy for his sexual needs caused by the corruption of human nature by the Fall. Rather, woman had been created as man’s inseparable associate in life as well as in the bed chamber. Although Calvin agreed that the scriptures emphasized men instead of women, he questioned whether it should be concluded that “women are nothing.” Instead he held that women were included under the generic term “men,” although he believed that women clearly should be subordinate to men. He did not deal with contraception in any detail but he stated that coitus interruptus was monstrous.
Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, John Knox (15131572), and many other reformers were known as “magisterials” because they believed that the church should work with the state and its officials, and in many matters this meant that civil law took over many of the issues previously held to be matters of canon law. Both Luther and Calvin, for example, rejected the concept of marriage as a sacrament. They, however, did not believe in the separation of church and state, and still assumed that laws and church teachings would be the same.
Though procreation was held by almost all Protestant groups not to be the only reason for marital sex, some modicum of control over sexual passion was to be exercised. In England, Puritan leaders such as Robert Cleaver in the seventeenth century held that when men and women raging with “boiling lust” meet together as “brute beasts” it would be a just judgment of God to send them either monsters or fools as offspring.
But Protestant groups were not united and there were many radical groups, many of them linked together by the term “Anabaptist” because they refused to allow their children to be baptized and instead held that baptism was something reserved for those old enough to truly believe. The Anabaptists were vigorously denounced by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin and severely persecuted by both Roman Catholics and Protestants. Some of the more radical Anabaptist groups were so concerned with the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply that they accepted polygamy as a necessity. Other groups such as one known as the “Dreamers” emphasized the goodness of all aspects of sex and sexuality. The eighteenth century Moravians sang hymns to Jesus’s penis as well as to Mary’s breasts and uterus. Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf (1700-1760) defended such hymns by asserting that shame about the sex organs was a denial of the full humanity of Christ. Some of the more radical groups saw the Christian message as giving them an inner light, freeing them from existing religious and secular laws and reverting to an early Christian heresy known as antinomianism. The early antinomian groups of believers had taught that Christians are by grace set free from the need of observing any moral law. The seventeenth century Ranters in England, for example, proclaimed that
What act soever is done by thee in light and love, is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery . . . No matter what Scripture, saints, or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned. (Quoted by Weisner-Hanks, p. 67)
Eventually the very diversity of Protestantism made divergent views of sex more possible, and the increasing emphasis put on women as partners, particularly by the American Puritans, made limitation of family size a conjoint effort and created an attitude more receptive to some means of birth control.
In the United States, many of the early settlements were by religious groups attempting to establish disciplined moral and sexual utopias where God’s law, as they interpreted it, would be the basis of all social and legal institutions in ways that were impossible in the more decadent Europe. This was true of the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Amish in Pennsylvania, the Shakers in northeastern parts of the United States, and later the Hutterites in the Dakotas and upper midwest, the Mormons in Utah, and even the groups of the more secular utopias such as New Harmony in Indiana and the Perfectionists in Oneida, New York. Catholicism also had its “utopian” groups, especially among the Jesuit mission settlements in Canada and Latin America. For brief periods such communities may have been the most sexually disciplined communities in the Christian world, but their isolation was difficult to maintain for long, and those who objected to such discipline went elsewhere, again creating a more receptive audience for effective family planning. It was perhaps no accident that the secular movement for birth control originated mainly in Protestant-dominated areas, which were somewhat less hostile to the concept. It is important to emphasize, however, that the birth control movement spread also to Catholic areas and to other parts of the world, and France, for example, was a pioneer in practicing such methods although not in public discussion of them.
