More Religion and Contraception
So Contraskeptic is still looking for a way out of his bind, but it seems that things aren’t going as well as he hoped. I have to admit I’m getting a little skeptical of his purported intent, since he’s posing a question that is unanswerable from his religious perspective. Today he’s asking:
As I’ve detailed in previous entries, many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, believe that God also forbids contraception. Contraception, they say, is a refusal of God’s blessing of children, a withholding of one’s self from one’s spouse, a perversion of the marital bed. They say that contraception has spiritual and emotional consequences as well, such as estrangement and divorce.
The people who say these things are people I respect, people whose views I take seriously. I had hoped to hear from some of them in response to my request for advice. So far, I’ve had only one commenter from that perspective offer advice: Andy, who suggested NFP, which, as I explain above, is an option that has already been ruled out.
I’d like to reserve the comment box for this entry for those Christians who believe that contraception is a sin, to suggest solutions to my dilemma: How do I protect my wife from a dangerous pregnancy while avoiding the sin of abstinence and the sin of contraception?
The way I see it, he only has three options.
- He gets a vasectomy and he lives in sin.
- He doesn’t have sex with his wife and they live in sin.
- He has sex with his wife and risks her getting pregnant.
I guess that 4 might be to divorce his wife and find a woman who is willing to abide by god’s commands with him. But somehow I doubt that that is what he has in mind.
In fact, I generally start to doubt his commitment to the whole evangelical Christian thing. It seems, from his latest post that he’s attempting to strike some sort of bargain with god, essentially saying that if enough other Christians tell him he’s doing the right thing, then its okay to commit a sin and maybe god won’t mind so much. One of things that any Christian religion will tell you is that you don’t mark bargins with god. God tells you how it is and you obey his commandments or else. The ‘or else’ part varies from religion to religion and so does the interpretation of what the commandments mean, but the not barginning part remains a pretty firm constant.
And since evangelical Christianity is pretty black and white when it comes to things like contraception, I really don’t see how he expects anyone to find a resolution to this problem. Which means that Contrskeptic is either someone attempting to bait evangelical Christians or someone wrestling with what it means to have faith. If he is just baiting people, then who cares? Does it really accomplish anything to stir up this pot? In the case of religious faith, you can never ‘prove’ anything, so there is no ability to make some grand point about the ridiculous of religion. The people who already agree with you will nod their heads and the people who don’t aren’t going to care.
But if he is wrestling with his faith or at least heading down a road where he is wrestling with his faith, then that is a much more interesting situation. The position he is in is one that cannot be resolved given the current bound that his religion places upon him. In order to change his position, he would need to change his religious situation.
The entire idea that a Christian needs to take their moral code from the church has always fascinated me, especially since it seems in contradiction to what Jesus taught. One of my favorite verses of the bible is from Matthew 6, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says:
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. –Mathew 6:5-6
To me, what Jesus is saying here is that everyone’s personal relationship with god it just that. A personal relationship. The idea that a church and a rigorous body of religious law is necessary to mediate a connection with the divine appears to not enter into Jesus’ calculation of religion.
The question that Contraskeptic needs to ask himself is why does his communion with god necessitate that he follows the strictures of the evangelical church? If adhering to their view of the world plunges his life into misery and his family into crisis, it is really doing god’s will to continue? And is that really the only way that he can find Jesus?
February 27th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
You said “since evangelical Christianity is pretty black and white when it comes to things like contraception, I really don’t see how he expects anyone to find a resolution to this problem.”
I don’t think this is actually true. Catholics are the only ones that I know of who have a policy on this. I think Lutherans and Presbyterians are slightly more toward the “no birth control” side… but pretty much everyone else in the evangelical community leaped for joy when the pill was introduced. It became the assumed thing… most couples now plan to wait for 3-5 years before having kids. The only way to do that with raging hormones and sex drives going 90 to nothin is to have contraception and plenty of it.
I think your statement though, is just the opposite of the problem- it has been pretty one-dimensional. There has been no debate. Catholic policy was seen as kooky, most Catholics don’t actually follow it, and everybody else was choosing from the myriad options at the drug store (i.e., Elaine and her sponge on Seinfeld). Only recently has there been strong debate, and that’s why so many young evangelical Christians who heartily want to live by the Bible have been asking questions about the use of contraceptives. They never heard anything about it and are now debating it for themselves.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:04 am
I was using evangelical in what has become the current American use of the word, which is to refer (somewhat incorrectly) to the right-wing Christian movement in this country. The term evangelical is almost never used to refer to mainstream Lutheran and Presbyterians in America, as opposed to Europe. Although there are Lutheran groups with the word evangelical in their name, which don’t actually fit the modern conception of Evangelical.
Irregardless, I agree that a majority of ‘mainstream’ Christian religions in America are in favor of birth control. And actually, I’ll have to admit that it seems that more of the right-wing fundamentalist churches are ambivalent on at least some form of contraception in marriage (although many only advocate NFP) than I originally thought. And then there are movements like Quiverful, which are fiercely against birth control.
I’ve been doing too much reading of conservative Christian statements on teaching birth control in schools which lead to the false assumption that they were anti birth-control in general.
Given that it appears that his church does not prohibit birth control, it does rather make the end of the post rather irrelevant to this particular situation from a religious institution point-of-context. The question still stands about whether actions that hurt his family are part of god’s will, but I’m glad that that is question he is attempting to answer on his on.