The Sins of Scripture (5 page)

So the need to “be fruitful and multiply” has over the centuries slowly but surely lost its urgency. But if you have been programmed since the dawn of conscious time by a survival mentality and are convinced that this injunction was somehow the command of God, then the power of the injunction lives on when the need to obey it is no longer relevant. That is where we are today. The command originally given to enhance life has now become a command that threatens to destroy life. At first the human ability to prolong life so dramatically was a source of great joy and a reason for much celebration. We seemed, as our medical technologies advanced, to be constantly successful in our quest to survive. No downside was visible.

There were also some setbacks along the way, however, that tempered our optimism and restored momentarily the sense of an eternal and divine command found in the words “Be fruitful and multiply.” The Black Death—or the bubonic plague, as it was sometimes called—occurring in the fourteenth century, was the most recent illustration of such a setback in the historic memory of the Western world. Somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of the citizens of Europe, depending on which statistics you accept, died as the result of that infection. It is hard to imagine the psychological impact of that much death on human life in that region of the world. The population of Europe actually declined and it took generations before human beings felt that their extinction was not once more right around the corner. That disaster served to enhance the power of the ancient command to continue our reproduction rate.

Other plagues or disasters, some natural and others human-made, that occurred throughout the world were much more localized, if no less devastating to those involved. Massive deaths administered by human hands were sometimes directed against a specific segment of the world’s population. We now call that ethnic cleansing. Sometimes these murderous outbreaks were conducted in full view on the stage of human history. Sometimes they occurred in parts of the world where human prejudice or limited communications muted their full horror. One thinks first of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, in which perhaps 50 percent of the Jews of the world, plus great numbers of the mentally sick, the physically impaired, the known homosexual population and others Hitler thought unfit to continue living and therefore breeding, were destroyed. Then there was the enormous slaughter carried out in the civil war in the late twentieth century in Rwanda and Burundi, where millions from among the two competing tribes—the Tutsis and the Hutus—were annihilated. More widespread still was nature’s slaughter in the AIDS epidemic in Africa in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which whole villages were decimated all over the continent and the population growth of that vast land was dramatically affected. Each of these horrors raised anew the possibility of extinction and revivified among those affected the sense that the first divine command to the human creature, who in the biblical story was appointed by God to be the master of all that God had made, was to multiply. In time, however, these horrors faded and the relentless march toward overpopulation began anew.

The reality for human beings has been that slowly but surely the enemies of human survival have been defeated, one after another. The proof of this is recognized when one looks at the statistics of human population. Human life emerged on this planet, according to the best estimates of anthropologists, between one and two million years ago. Yet it took from that point of origin until 1750 CE for the number of human beings to top one billion. It then took only about one hundred and eighty years for the human population to reach the two billion number plateau, which demographers believe was achieved around the year 1930 CE. It then took only forty years until 1970 to add the third billion. Since then, in the thirty-plus years between 1970 and the present, the world’s human population has doubled to approximately six billion people. Even now, when the rate of growth has finally begun to slow, the actual expansion of human beings has not.

Current estimates are that before the twenty-first century fades into history, the human population will reach a figure of somewhere between nine and ten billion people. There are still some who do not see this as an impending disaster. We hear them saying, “There is no need to curb our breeding habits.” We can do it all, they seem to say. We can “be fruitful and multiply,” because we can conquer anything.

Human accomplishments have indeed been spectacular, as a quick look at our history will reveal. We have demonstrated that as our numbers expanded we could respond by forcing the land to produce more and more food per acre until the land itself was all but exhausted. We then learned how to revive the land with a variety of chemical fertilizers. We developed electric milking machines designed to extract from the cow every ounce of its milk for human use. To expand our livable space we built air conditioners to push back the heat and heating systems to push back the cold. We created combustion engines and installed them in cars, planes, trucks and tanks, as well as in tractors, lawn mowers, leaf-blowers, snowmobiles and golf carts. We electrified life so that we could cook with convenience, have our dishes and clothes washed and dried for us and our garbage disposed of easily. We built irrigation systems to push back the desert and used our water supplies as if they were unlimited. We were not concerned about the waste products that we pumped into our atmosphere because space seemed limitless.

We developed genetically modified foods and scientific methods for increasing the supply of livestock, poultry and fish to satisfy the needs of our ever-expanding human population. In the process we performed that biblical calling to have dominion over all the earth. We also assumed that human life was the only kind of life that ultimately mattered, so whatever it took to support human life was deemed to be both necessary and good.

We began to lower our sense of what it meant to guarantee some reverence for all living things. We castrated cows, sheep and hogs to make their meat more tender. We created stockyards and slaughterhouses, where brutality is practiced daily so that meat markets may be filled with steaks and chops. We created, thereby, what animal rights activists call a holocaust for subhuman creatures. We now grow poultry to the desired weight with scientifically devised feeding programs that number the days from hatching to dispatching on huge chicken farms where these creatures never escape the confines of their cages. We pour chemicals into what the chickens are fed to fatten them for human tastes and human profits. We freeze fish at sea, making it possible to extract even bigger catches until some species have begun to be extinct. We have developed the “farming” of fish such as salmon and talapia, again feeding them chemically to increase their size quickly for the market. We took a large wild bird called a turkey and domesticated it, turning it into a misshapen, big-breasted creature so top-heavy it can barely stand up, its bulk producing abundant quantities of that white meat that consumers seem to prefer. I think it is fair to say that we have obeyed what we took to be the divine command. We have reproduced ourselves in abundance and now we clearly have dominion over all the earth.

That was an enormous achievement not to be denigrated. But instead of seeing our accomplishment as building that mythical kingdom of God on earth, we looked again at our world and discovered that human life now seems to be quite vulnerable all over again. The conquered earth over which we today exercise dominion still has trump cards to play and in that fact lies a new challenge to our survival.

We discovered that the chemicals we used to expand the capacity of the land to produce great quantities of grain and other foods are now showing up in the breast milk of young mothers and poisoning our infants. The salmon we farmed on our quick-growth plans is not now regarded as safe for a pregnant woman to eat, because it contaminates the unborn. There is a price to pay when profits are given a higher value than health. The antibiotics that we have used on cattle, sheep, hogs and chickens are now discovered to be lowering human immunity to the next generation of germs and viruses. The water that once seemed abundant is now both polluted and in short supply. Bottled water is today sold in supermarkets at a cost beyond what we pay for soft drinks or beer. The air we breathe is now making us sick in such numbers that health alerts about air quality are issued daily along with the weather reports. The fossil fuels we burn are giving us global warming and their increasing shortages are tilting inflation ever upward. No end is visible in these spiraling realities. Indeed, increasing demand for fossil fuels, clean air and pure water are undeniable.

The developed nations of the Western world, by which I mean that belt that stretches across the northern hemisphere from Japan through Russia to Europe and on to North America, once had a monopoly on the resources we need to create the life of ease for our citizens. But today the world’s fastest-growing economies are in China and India, two nations that claim between them about 30 percent of the world’s population. One can only imagine the environmental disaster that will occur when the Chinese and Indians want to have the same percentage of automobiles, air conditioners, gas-fired appliances, telephones and computer terminals that are available in the United States today. Our excessive lifestyle in the developed nations has destroyed any moral ground we might have had to seek to hold developing nations to the standards our common environment might be able to absorb. Since we have no credibility and thus no ability to temper the coming disaster to the environment, our world will almost inevitably and relatively soon be pushed over the brink of destruction.

Can this pending tragedy be averted? I see no way to achieve that hope without a limitation on human expansion. Once the supposedly divine command to “be fruitful and multiply” was seen as necessary to enable the human race to survive. Now it must be seen as nothing less than a prescription for human genocide. Once it was accepted as the “Word of God.” Now it must be viewed as a terrible and life-threatening text. Once we were able to see and embrace this terror primarily on the level of individual family tragedies. Our hearts ached at the pain endured by the McCourts in Ireland and the Yarnells in the southwestern United States. But now these family tragedies threaten to become global disasters. A text attributed to God and created to enable life to survive has become one of the sins of scripture that, if followed literally as the “Word of God,” all but guarantees our annihilation. A new way to read the scriptures becomes a crying, even a frantic need.

The Word of the Lord to us can no longer be “Be fruitful and multiply.” We wonder if we can hear a new “Word of the Lord” that will save us from this pending disaster.

T
he most apparent fact about the public face of Christianity in recent history is that it is continually in conflict over issues of human sexuality. The battles being fought represent a major war within the Christian community. In order to place the crisis of our burgeoning human population into a context where it can be discussed meaningfully, we need to look at this contemporary conflict in the light of the history of our cultural understanding of both religion and sexuality. Religious people think that it is a moral battle. Nonreligious people think of it in survival terms. Light needs to be thrown on this debate that today produces mostly heat.

Historically, the leadership of the Christian church has always attacked vigorously any procedure that might separate sexuality from procreation. That leadership has consistently stated that if this separation were ever allowed to occur, the door to moral anarchy would be opened so wide that it could never again be shut. The only constraining power, they have argued, capable of keeping sex in line and therefore moral is the fear of pregnancy. Out of this belief has arisen the prohibition against anything that might come between sexual activity and conception. As the issues facing the world have changed, however, the human birthrate has begun to threaten the survival of the whole ecosystem. As reproducing life has faded in importance across our society it has been replaced by the concern that appears to dictate a compelling need to slow down the human birthrate. Survival replaced morality as the driving emotion in this conflict, and in response the major religious institutions of the West began to experience a dramatic identity crisis. The Christian church, which historically had claimed for itself the right to define and to defend public morality, suddenly discovered itself still supporting the expansion of the human population as the highest good. Christians justified this behavior with the claim that they were preventing the gift of sexuality from becoming “irresponsible” or from being practiced without the “punishing” consequences necessary to secure control over all sexual activity. Today those same Christians fail to understand that this is no longer the substance of the conflict.

Throughout human history an ancient dance has been conducted between religion and sex. They have been bound together like the yin and the yang. It will be helpful, therefore, to see the present phase of this dance as only one more part in an ancient and long-term relationship.

Sex and religion have never been separated in human history. It is almost amusing to listen to church leaders, caught up as they are in the debates of this present generation, discussing questions about the acceptability of various changing patterns in sexual behavior. How many times have I heard some form of this pious yearning, “I wish we could quit talking about sex and get back to concentrating on the church’s mission.” They do not seem to recognize that sex is and has always been at the heart of the mission of every religious system. Sex and religion have moved in tandem since the dawn of human self-consciousness. Sex is such a powerful force that religion has always felt it must master and control it in order for religion to have credibility. Organized religion has also related to sexual activity as something to be feared, which in turn has led to enormous efforts throughout history to tame it, incorporate it, deny it or in some manner make it the servant of religion.

On one side these efforts were seen in those ancient religious systems, shaped by the agricultural cycle, which believed that God was worshiped by co-opting sex to serve the fertility needs of that culture. That was when temple prostitutes, both male and female, became part of religious liturgies. On the other side of this debate has been the Western Catholic tradition which, reacting to loose sexual practices in the Mediterranean world, made the suppression of sex the first prerequisite for the holy life of both the ordained and what they called “the religious”; that is, monks, nuns, sisters and brothers who lived under vows in various orders. In this view holiness and sexual practice were defined as mutually antithetical.

To undergird this conviction, church leaders in this period of Christian history began to teach people that bodies were unclean, even loathsome, and physical desire was nothing other than the mark of the evil one, manifesting itself in our “fallen natures.” This attitude reflected, far more than the church has ever recognized, not a biblical perspective so much as a Neoplatonic Greek worldview that separated bodies from souls, flesh from spirit and material things from spiritual things. In this Western tradition marriage itself came to be regarded as a compromise with sin, while virginity was installed as the highest virtue. It was St. Paul who proclaimed that he was “captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Rom. 7:23). He spoke of a war that went on inside him, enabling his mind, which was spiritual, to follow one law, while his body, which was carnal, followed another. “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24), he asked. His words would later be used to equate celibacy with holiness. The only virtue found in sex was ongoing procreation and the preservation of the human species. Outside of that purpose, it was believed, sex had no redeeming features.

The church had by this time clearly lost that part of its own biblical creation story in which God was portrayed as creating ex nihilo—out of nothing—and calling good all that God had made, including the physical earth and presumably the physical bodies of human beings together with their sexual desires (Gen. 1:25). The battle in religious circles over birth control was, therefore, a battle that pitted a religion of control and repression against a religion that celebrated the goodness of creation. It is certainly not accurate to portray it as a battle between morality and the breakdown of morality, as so many religious spokespersons, even today, like to assert.

Primitive attempts at birth control have been around since human beings became aware of the relationship between sex and procreation and were motivated primarily by the inconvenience of an unwanted pregnancy. There is even a biblical story about a man named Onan who did not want to produce an heir by his deceased brother’s widow, so he practiced what came to be called “coitus interruptus” and, as the Bible said, “spilled his seed on the ground” (Gen. 38:9, KJV). This “seed” was thought of as the “source of life,” and its “holiness” was not to be wasted. Religious negativity toward masturbation finds some of its roots here.

Before DNA evidence could trace parenthood so precisely, the only way a man could guarantee the legitimacy of his own offspring was to keep his wife confined in a place where no opportunity for sexual indiscretion existed. As one person observed, the primary difference between knowledge and faith was that the woman knew she was the mother of the baby while the man had “faith.” A desire to make the man’s faith as certain as his wife’s knowledge led to social prohibitions on women’s mobility. That too was a form of birth control, but it was thought of as godly, not sinful. There were also techniques developed to produce a “spontaneous abortion,” but none of them was particularly satisfactory or safe. The only sure method of birth control in those days was abstinence and the primary force undergirding abstinence was public opinion, enforced by the moral pronouncements of ecclesiastical leaders. Hence in the Western world, the Christian church staked its claim to being the guardian of this powerful sexual force, which they believed had to be controlled or public morality would be doomed. Birth control became, therefore, the implacable enemy of the church and thus was by definition evil.

In earlier parts of history, the number of women appears to have been greater than the number of men. This was because of the predominantly male casualties suffered in both warfare and the hunt. The extra women in the tribe could be cared for only with a system of multiple wives, so polygamy was not only encouraged, it was said to have been blessed by God. Religious systems have always accommodated reality in ways such as this. The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories that illustrate this principle. The patriarchs of Israel’s history—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph—all had numerous wives.

Since women were considered to be the property of men, wives were a sign of wealth and power. Alliances were frequently sealed when one king gave his daughter to the harem of another king. The Bible tells us of Solomon’s one thousand wives and concubines. The day had not yet dawned when this male-imposed stereotype of the female and her purpose was thought of as immoral. Women’s feelings were given no consideration, since controlling the woman’s body for the sexual benefit of the male was the only priority and men claimed that right exclusively for themselves.

When monogamy, reflecting an increasing appreciation of women, became the norm, the sense of a woman’s worth was a potent force that contributed to the importance of family planning. Some natural processes of birth control then came to be called moral by the church. These included postponing the weaning process in the belief that pregnancies were less probable while the mother was nursing, thereby resulting in better spacing for the children. Then religious institutions began to encourage couples to practice periodic withdrawal from sexual activity for pious reasons. A couple might give themselves to prayer and abstinence for the forty days of Lent, for example, which would, not coincidentally, take the woman out of production temporarily. The modern attempt to predict the moment of ovulation by the woman so that sexual intercourse might be withheld at the time of fertility is still regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as a natural (and acceptable) form of family planning. Critics refer to it by the less generous term “Vatican roulette.” These crude forms of birth control received ecclesiastical blessing because none of them committed what the church regarded as the cardinal sin of separating sexuality from procreation.

There was also in Christian history a widespread use of mistresses—especially postmenopausal mistresses, who posed no threat of pregnancy and whose presence meant that wives could be spared the regular risk of childbirth. This was a reflection of that well-entrenched double standard of morality. It was quite public, and yet no word of disapproval from the church was forthcoming. The church condoned the morality of sexual activity outside of marriage by men much more quickly than it allowed any restriction on conception inside a faithful marriage. Many parts of the Christian church are still locked in this antiquated position.

In the twentieth century, however, many new things coalesced to produce a dramatic sexual revolution. First, there was the development of the sanitary napkin, which did more to free women from the old stereotypes than has yet been fully understood. The inhibiting “bustle,” designed to keep the bulky clothing worn during menstruation from being obvious, was doomed once the sanitary napkin gained ascendancy. Such cover-up styles were quickly replaced by the form-fitting dresses worn by the “flappers” of the 1920s when they celebrated this new freedom by doing the Charleston. Next there was the rise of other powerful emancipating forces. The suffragette movement established women’s right to vote and thus their right to full citizenship. The opening of the doors of higher education to women followed quickly. Teachers’ colleges were set up primarily for women to alleviate the teaching shortage, a crisis created when the profession paid so poorly that men stopped seeking this role. The same source of cheap labor would also open nursing and secretarial positions to women.

Progress was slow, however, until World War II created the need for women to enter the workforce in massive numbers. It even sent women into heavy industry. “Rosie the Riveter” entered our consciousness and has never departed. Following World War II there was a rush into coeducational university life in all of the most prestigious centers of higher learning. This, in turn, opened the doors for women to enter the workforce in the professions and at executive levels in business from which they had previously been prohibited. These new freedoms meant that women had an ever-rising need to balance career with family. Birth control became increasingly necessary. A safe, relatively efficient condom was developed. This was by every measure the most successful method of birth control yet devised, and it is not surprising that condoms are still today readily available through dispensers in almost every public restroom in America. Finally, “the pill” was created through medical and scientific research and birth control had at long last become convenient, safe and fully effective. It was also increasingly socially acceptable.

These were the forces that created the era of sexual freedom that appeared to justify the worst fears of the most righteous moralists, including strident voices from both the Protestant and Catholic sides of the Christian church. The 1960s were a decade of rampant sexual experimentation. The pill separated women once and for all from living under the burden of a male-imposed biological definition. The pill also began finally to affect population growth. Every nation in the developed Western world today has slowed its birthrate substantially, with some nations, like Italy—incidentally, a predominantly Roman Catholic country—no longer even reproducing their present population.

The people of the Western world have now simply risen up and discarded the family-planning repression of Western religion. The Protestant churches, by and large, adapted to these new realities and ceased condemning birth control. The Roman Catholic Church held firm to its condemnation of all “unnatural” means of birth control only to see its constituency abandon their church’s teaching on this subject almost totally. Polls indicate that Roman Catholic women in the developed nations of the world practice birth control in exactly the same percentages (90-plus percent) as do Protestant women, Jewish women and nonreligious women. Papal teaching on this subject is simply ignored. The only place where the traditional sexual teaching of the church fuels emotion today is on the issue of abortion, which I regard as nothing more than the last gasp of the birth control battle. Abortion would be minimal today if sex education and birth control were available to all of our citizens. But, of course, conservative Catholic and Protestant churches would never allow that. It is, however, a battle they are destined to lose. The increasing popularity of the so-called morning-after drugs, such as Plan B and Preven, now legally available in the United States without a prescription, will quickly diminish the need for abortion. The great moral battle of the previous century is destined to die without a whimper.