Left Field

by Patricia Nell Warren

In April, Roman Catholic authorities elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as their 265th pope. Liberal Catholics who hoped that the Church might pull its feet out of the concrete on an array of issues, from female clergy to condom use, will likely be disappointed. The new pontiff, who took the name Benedict XVI, promises to sink his papal satin slippers into the same concrete where his most conservative predecessors stood—and that includes their stance on condoms. In turn, Catholic inflexibility signals a growing resistance to condom use throughout areas of Christianity that were once more liberal on this issue.

I find it interesting—and hair-raising—to look at some “new ideas” that galvanize American politics, and to note their roots actually go deep into the well-composted manure of age-old Western religion. “There is nothing new under the sun,” according to a popular Bible quote. Many people today quote this line without knowing its religious origins. Like Catholicism, major religions manage to keep themselves going for thousands of years by allying with powerful governments and empires that help propagate the faith. Compared to Catholicism, Protestantism is a new kid on the block, yet right-wing Protestantism is just as hostile as Catholicism to condom use in HIV prevention.

The fact is—hostility to contraception is an old story. Long before Christianity emerged in the early centuries of the present era, a whole array of practices were popular with pagan peoples of the Mediterranean world, who were ingenious at preventing pregnancy and guarding against known sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea. Ancient art shows people engaged in anal and oral sex, and men using condoms. The Romans used tampons soaked in herbal spermicides, and condoms made of goat or fish membrane. A popular oral contraceptive was silphion, a medicinal tea brewed from giant fennel (the plant was harvested to extinction by 100 CE). Judaism thundered against these pagan practices, as a way to guard its own identity. 

When Christianity captured the Roman Empire’s government and religious bureaucracy, the new religion dissociated itself from its Judaic roots—but it did hang onto some core precepts of “old morality,” including Old Testament prohibitions against contraception. From the very beginning, the church’s position was that God had created sex only for procreation, and only within marriage. Any practice that directly interfered with “natural law” was to be condemned.

So early Catholic theologians thundered against contraception. In 74 CE, Barnabas quoted from the Old Testament about “wickedness with the mouth” (oral sex). In 191 CE, Clement of Alexandria preached against masturbation, saying, “Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated.” In 225 CE, Hippolytus fulminated against wealthy Christian women who resorted to the old herbal contraceptives. By 522 CE, Caesarius of Arles was insisting that any woman who used anti-fertility drugs was guilty of murder for every single time that she could have conceived a child. 

Though centered in Rome, early Christianity evolved into many ethnic and cultural subgroups but called itself “catholic,” from the Greek word katholikos meaning “universal.” However, when Eastern churches began splitting away over issues about papal supremacy, these maintained the old bans on contraception. A similar thing happened between 1517 and 1533, when both the Protestants and the Church of England broke with Rome. Anglicans and Protestants differed hotly between themselves on many points, but they all agreed that contraception was evil. This agreement lasted clear into the 1930s, when the Anglican Church finally allowed that contraception was acceptable, bowing to vast social change and growing secular acceptance of birth control. Many Protestant churches followed suit. 

The United States, with its streak of stiff-necked Puritanism, took longer than Europe to legalize the use of condoms. Not till 1965 did a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, open the use of “rubbers” (as they were called then) to all U.S. citizens. As a reaction, in 1968 Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae vitae, in which he reaffirmed Catholicism’s condemnation of any and all “direct interruption” of natural reproductive processes.

Today, after just forty years of freedom, with many Americans taking availability of condoms for granted, our government is being captured by church interests as nakedly as the Roman Empire once was. Amid the reactionary atmosphere of religious revival and tightening-up of sexual mores, most Protestant and Anglican authorities are reverting to the old position that contraception is evil. The global epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases—not only AIDS, but syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, herpes, HPV, chlamydia, and others—doesn’t budge their feet out of concrete. It matters not that condoms—despite their drawbacks—do save some lives and prevent some degree of transmission. In the rightist view, condoms facilitate sex outside of, and before, marriage—especially by teens. So people must be frightened away from condoms, or prevented from using them, at all costs. 

Under pressure from religious leaders, the CDC now pushes abstinence as the number-one way to prevent HIV infection.  Only grudgingly—as a sop to “religious freedom” and “science”—does the agency mention condoms as an option. The policy is termed A-B-C, i.e., Abstinence, Be Faithful, Correct and Consistent Condom Use. In the 1980s, A-B-C was tried out in the Congo and Uganda, supported by African church authorities and U.S. government health liaisons. A-B-C was deemed such a success that it was launched in the U.S.

A few Catholic theologians mutter that hygienic use of condoms—as distinguished from contraceptive use—should be permitted to Catholics. But the Vatican is swift to punish dissidents—in January it swatted down a Spanish bishop who had dared to tell the press that condoms “are part of the integral and global prevention of AIDS.”

Most Americans today have only a hazy idea of what different religions teach, except possibly their own church, if they attend one. If you press the average Catholic about what specific doctrines make a Jew different from a Muslim, or if you ask the average Protestant why most Protestants view Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists with suspicion, they probably can’t tell you. So they have little idea about the long history that drives this dramatic turnaround on condoms, and the long-time agreement between Catholics and many Protestants on this question.

Recent comments on prevention come from infectious disease expert Carlos del Rio, who teaches medicine at Emory University in Atlanta. Del Rio said, “The U.S. has had a clear failure in HIV prevention....Prevention means all the ABCs: abstinence, delayed sex, reduced number of partners, and condoms. We need to do all three.” The fact that Emory is not a radical-right evangelical school like Bob Jones University, but a Methodist-based school with a history of tolerance for free speech, and that a member of its faculty advocates abstinence as well as condoms, is a sign that not only the ultra fringe of Christianity, but mainstream religion as well, is swinging back toward the old-time position. Del Rio adds, “We’re debating too much what to do and are not doing enough.”

“Doing enough” will surely involve a growing rigor of criminal laws controlling people’s sexual behavior, as 2,000 years of “moral tradition” tightens its grip on our health bureaucracy.   

Author of fiction bestsellers and provocative commentary, Patricia Nell Warren has her writings archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at patriciawarren@aol.com.

Copyright © 2005 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.