University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 3-23-2016 Surfing the Tide of Sex Anarchy: How Sexual Co- Revolutionaries Remade Evangelical Marriage, 1960-1980 Robert Nathanael Morris University of South Florida, rnathanmorris@yahoo.com Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.edu/etd Part of the United States History Commons Scholar Commons Citation Morris, Robert Nathanael, "Surfing the Tide of Sex Anarchy: How Sexual Co-Revolutionaries Remade Evangelical Marriage, 1960-1980" (2016). Graduate Theses and Dissertations.edu/etd/6328 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact scholarcommons@usf.
Surfing the Tide of Sex Anarchy: How Sexual Co-Revolutionaries Remade Evangelical Marriage, 1960-1980 by Robert Nathanael Morris A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts with a concentration in American History Department of History College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: David K. Stephen Prince, Ph. Date of Approval: March 22, 2016 Keywords: sexuality, therapeutic culture, traditional family, conservatism Copyright © 2016, Robert Nathanael Morris TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract.ii Chapter One: Introduction.1 Chapter Two: Who are Evangelicals and What do They Want?.23 Chapter Three: The Tide of Obscenity, The Playboy Philosophy, and the New Morality.36 Chapter Four: The Evangelical Marriage Revolution.49 Chapter Five: Epilogue: From Subversive Marriage to Subversive Virginity.92 i ABSTRACT This project examines the conservative evangelical response to 1960s era sexual revolution in order to explain how and why evangelicals both resisted and adapted tenets of sexual modernity in a process that transformed the theological foundations underlying the conception of Christian marriage and sexuality. Though evangelicals and conservatives are typically portrayed as resistors to cultural and sexual change, my research reveals the ways in which conservative evangelicals agreed with key critiques of the sexual status quo in the 1960s, and deliberately worked to change Christian teachings and attitudes to keep them vibrant and attractive to postwar generations.
Previous examinations of evangelical thought on sexuality has focused on rhetorical analysis and social history to the exclusion of examinations of the close ties between evangelical marital theology, sexual practice, and political activism. This project seeks to integrate all three into a cohesive historical framework that reveals evangelical response to sexual revolution as more complex and adaptive than it is typically described. Close readings of conservative evangelical texts from 1960 to 1980 combine the long term editorial trajectory of Christianity Today magazine with ideological and theological texts from the 1960s with popular, practical texts from the 1970s to demonstrate that the evangelical marriage project was deliberate, deeply rooted in a modern hermeneutic of Biblical interpretation, and nimble in its ability and willingness to adapt changing sexual attitudes to accommodate Christian theology and practice. The resulting portrait of evangelical response to sexual revolution is more complex, contextualized, and nuanced than previous narratives.
ii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION To evangelical Christians in America in the 1970s, a typical family's day neared its conclusion when Dad returned home from work, weary from fighting commuter traffic and irate customers, to find Mom freshly bathed, perfumed, and coiffured, waiting for him in the foyer wearing nothing but Saran wrap (the unsuspecting children presumably safely locked in their rooms). Feminists derided this astonishing image as sexist and retrograde, and more than two decades later critics still attributed it to advice given by Marabel Morgan in her book The Total Woman.1 While this scene attracted enough attention to even be featured in the film Fried Green Tomatoes, Morgan never actually advised wives to trade their clothes for plastic wrap to seduce their husbands at the end of the day (although she did recount the story from one of her workshop attendees who actually originated the idea). The truth aside, the anecdote has survived as a buffoonish representation of Morgan's marital advice specifically, and evangelical Christians' marital admonitions generally. But despite the efforts of their cultural opponents, evangelicals are publishing books in ever greater numbers about marriage, sexuality, and family life.
They are reacting to continuing perceived threats from the 1960s counterculture that they view as disruptive and destructive to what they term “traditional families.” Historians, and the general public, typically describe the changes in American attitudes 1. Mark Oppenheimer, “In the Biblical Sense: A guide to the booming Christian sex-advice industry,” Slate.com, November 30, 1999, http://www.com/articles/briefing/articles/1999/11/in_the_biblical_sense. A greatly abbreviated version of this anecdote serves as the sole reference to Morgan or her book by John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), 330.
1 regarding sexuality that began to dominate popular culture and practice in the 1960s as the sexual revolution. Evangelicals initially reacted to the sexual developments of the 1960s with critical disapproval, but by the 1970s sexuality became a major theme of evangelical literary culture. Historians have examined evangelical involvement in American society primarily from the standpoint of political involvement in presidential campaigns and national organizations such as the Moral Majority. While politics has been a prominent battleground in the culture war, contemporary evangelical politics is rooted in disputes over changing American sexuality.
For evangelicals, the only legitimate and healthy form of sexuality is expressed in heterosexual marriage. The increasing importance and value placed on sexual expression by American popular culture influenced evangelicals to create a corresponding emphasis on formation and maintenance of “traditional families” and “family values.” While rhetorically appealing to family forms legitimized by their valued role in a mythical American past, the idea of the “traditional family” is a modern creation that relies on incorporation of key elements of popular culture into its ideological matrix in order to thrive. The “traditional family” as a dominant political and cultural motif is a second generation response to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The first generation response, that of evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s, focused more directly on the sexual revolution itself.
Conservative evangelicals may be typically understood as opponents of the liberalizing sexual trends that became dominant in the 1960s, but their role in that revolution is more complex than simple opposition. Evangelical publications with wide appeal, like Christianity Today, joined with evangelical authors to present to both Christian and secular communities a response to the sexual revolution that attempted to blunt its damage to Christian sexual norms and values by absorbing some of the impact of its criticisms in ways that changed evangelical 2 involvement with American culture and the social institution most prized by evangelicals: marriage. In this effort, evangelicals joined secular American society in embracing therapeutic culture and science as credible contributors to the construction of social and cultural values. Therapeutic culture played a key role in shaping the evolution of evangelical rhetoric about marriage, sex, and the family.
Therapeutic culture inclined Americans towards turning to and accepting sociological and psychological perspectives about social and personal problems. Evangelicals also learned to incorporate these approaches into their arguments about sexuality and marriage, in some cases relying on them more heavily than scripture in attempts to convince the public to adhere to Christian sexual ethics. Evangelicals saw the sexual revolution as a rejection of Christian sexual values and a direct threat to marriage, but they also came to believe that Christianity had strayed from its original roots regarding sexuality and marriage, and that this theological deviation had directly led to the secular, social challenges to Christian sexual ethics in the middle of the twentieth century. In order to effect the transformation of marriage that they saw as necessary in order to restore it to “authentic” Christian standards, evangelicals first acknowledged and validated certain aspects of the counter-culture's critique of Christianity and marriage.
They acknowledged that sexual repression was a serious problem in American society, and identified the Christian components that demeaned even marital sexuality as stemming from ancient pagan infiltration into Church theology. They countered this “heresy” by interrogating Biblical texts anew and “restoring” what they contended were their original and ancient interpretations about sex. Next, they set out to reinvigorate Christian marriage as a sexual ideal, incorporating into it aspects of the new sexual and therapeutic prerogatives of the postwar era by tying them to apparent scriptural mandates. In this way, during the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals increasingly sought 3 “the progressive enlightenment of the Church” as their primary means of cultural defense, claiming that “only when it can say, sincerely and without equivocation, 'thank God for sex,' can it begin to respond in any authentic manner to the challenge of the Sexual Revolution.”2 But due to their strategy of absorption and deflection, I contend that evangelicals of the postwar generation were sexual co-revolutionaries rather than counter-revolutionaries.
Evangelicals criticized what they saw as the excesses of sexual revolutionaries like Hugh Hefner, but they also embraced key elements of the secular, sexual zeitgeist, and in doing so transformed evangelical Christian marriage and evangelicals' own role in society. What began as a secular attempt to liberalize sexual values and reject Christian moral limitations prompted evangelicals to become more involved in politics, education, and public policy, and eventually stimulated the creation of new, subcultural, evangelical movements dedicated to abstinence and sexual purity. The contours of the sexual revolution eventually changed the evangelical landscape itself, so that by the twenty first century, sexual politics and sexual culture have become as integral to evangelical identity as they are to secular American society. Though evangelicals have been part of the fabric of American society since early European settlement of North America, in the second half of the twentieth century evangelicalism became not just a description for a particular style of Protestant Christianity, but a distinct movement with a social and political agenda beyond a strict religious focus.
Ellwood pinpointed 1950 as the pivotal year in American religious history when evangelicalism became a separate movement within mainstream Protestantism. This evangelical movement was diffuse throughout American denominations and united through shared associations with parachurch organizations such as “educational institutions, publishing houses, radio ministries,” 2. David Mace, The Christian Response to the Sexual Revolution (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970), 134. 4 and publications like Christianity Today.3 The new evangelicalism appealed to a nostalgia for the flavor of old-time religion, but updated its transmission with modern communications and mass marketing, while benefiting from the rising discretionary income of the postwar middle class.
The subculture of evangelicalism has attracted the attention of scholars from departments of religion, sociology, and political science, though historians have focused on it primarily due to its relationship to modern conservatism and the post 1960s Republican party. Academic evaluations of evangelicalism cast it as an anti-modern force in American society that yearns for a nostalgic past and battles the onrush of a modern, secularizing present and future. This essay integrates theological, cultural, and political perspectives through close readings of evangelical texts in order to demonstrate how late twentieth century, conservative evangelicals refashioned and modernized their belief system into an assertive force in American society.4 Anti-modernism continues to be a potent element of conservative, evangelical perspectives on theology and society, especially in their rhetorical expressions, but, in contrast to the prevailing academic assessment, I contend that contemporary evangelicalism is no longer squarely within the anti- modern camp alongside Christian fundamentalism. In the 1960s, evangelicals' embrace of therapeutic culture and the language and technique of science began to blur the boundaries of anti-modernism in ways that have been largely unrecognized by observers used to viewing evangelicalism solely through an anti-modern lens.
This essay builds on the work of historians such as Elaine Tyler May, Lisa McGirr, Bethany Moreton, and Beth Bailey, whose histories of the conservative movement and post war 3. Ellwood, 1950 Crossroads of American Religious Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 188. For a thorough examination of the long trajectory of anti-modernism see T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).