Birth Control Battles: How Class and Race Divided American Religion by Melissa J. Wilde (review)

Melissa J. Wilde's Birth Control Battles is an ambitious project tracing the origins of conflict between religious groups over matters of sex. Spanning the years from the end of World War I to the advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s, the book traces the positions of nine of the most prominent religious groups (comprising 31 denominations) in the United States regarding birth control access and use. In this, Wilde has produced a truly intersectional analysis, a noteworthy accomplishment.

Wilde notes that conservative and progressive religious traditions initially came into conflict when they first took positions on contraception in the late 1920s. Importantly, Wilde concludes that the conflicts have a little or nothing to do with women's rights or welfare, and not much to do with sex either. Rather, religious groups came into conflict based on their positions relative to two key belief systems—eugenics and the social gospel.

Wilde draws on a wealth of data, including the Census, archival materials, and denomination-specific periodicals. Throughout the text, Wilde incorporates numerous rich quotes, giving the reader a meaningful view into the scope and depth of the data. Applying the comparative historical sociological method, Wilde deftly demonstrates the complex intersections of religion with race, immigration, geography, and class through the lens of what she terms complex religion, or how religion intersects with inequality in varied and powerful ways. Wilde is also careful to examine and falsify competing explanations for the initial divisions between conservative and progressive religious groups, such as prohibition or women's suffrage.

Wilde begins by problematizing the taken-for-granted claim that theology informs denominations' stances on contraception, focusing on 1929–1931. Wilde classifies denominations as early liberalizers if they promoted birth control openly by 1931. These groups were primarily in the Northeast and comprised of mainline Protestants and Reform Jews. These groups were concerned about "race suicide," a eugenicist belief that whites would lose their privileged position in a racialized society if they became a numerical minority. Catholic and Jewish immigrants (whom they did not consider white) had larger families than privileged whites who supported liberalization to maintain the racial status quo. In a fascinating twist, liberalizers were not only eugenicist but also supported the social gospel, the belief that God's followers have a moral duty to reform society and improve the lot of the less fortunate. Reducing certain groups' fertility was considered an important avenue for curtailing urban poverty and its attendant suffering.

Supporters, ambivalent about religious activism, favored liberalization but refrained from taking an official stance. Pastors and other leaders spoke out in favor through their respective periodicals, but denominations stayed silent. Concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, these groups were more rural and held lower class positions that liberalizers. They were even staunch eugenicists, committed to white supremacy. These groups were isolated from the problems of urbanization and prioritized the saving gospel (converting others to Protestant Christianity) over the social gospel.

Given their concern with their own numbers, neither liberalizers nor supporters supported contraception for women within their own groups, nor was there any sense that contraception was a gendered issue.

Located predominantly outside the Northeast, with significant presence in the south and west, critics rejected both "race suicide" and the social gospel. Some were immigrants and aware that they were liberalizers' and supporters' targets. Others were eugenicist Southerners who perceived Catholic and Jewish immigrants as white and not a racial threat. In terms of the social gospel, these immigrants were detached from such ideas and Southerners openly opposed them. Still others, such as Mormons in the west, objected to the immorality of eugenics and birth control.

The silent groups took no position at all on birth control. Spread out through the Midwest and eastern seaboard, these groups were generally middle class but as Blacks or recent immigrants, they were racially marginalized. These groups supported (or did not overtly oppose) birth...