Sex on the curriculum

Sex education is a battlefield over morals and

young bodies, and has exposed fractures in
American life for over a century

by Kristy Slominski

Kristy Slominski is the assistant professor of religion, science and health in the
Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. She is the
author of Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United
States (2021).

Edited by Sam Dresser

T he state of sex education in the United States is dismal. Shaped by divergent

state policies and local school board decisions, programmes are uneven in their
content and coverage. There is confusion about what is being taught where. Most
programmes are limited in scope, some are even harmful. Proponents of
comprehensive sexuality education urge the teaching of reproductive
development, contraception and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) but, far
from these goals, they have fought and failed to ensure the bare minimum
standard in more than half of the states: that lessons in sex education be
medically accurate. Meanwhile, comprehensive programmes are attacked as too
revealing and immoral by supporters of abstinence-only sex education, recently
re-branded as ‘sexual risk avoidance education’, which tends to dissuade students
from engaging in any sexual activity at all. Both factions argue that the country
will continue to fail its youth unless schools embrace their version of sex
education.

At the national level, the debate over sex education has generally followed culture
war divides, with liberals supporting comprehensive sexuality education, and
conservatives leading calls for sexual risk avoidance education. Long aligned with
the latter has been white conservative Protestantism, the religious group most
vocal in public debates about sex education since the late 1960s. But it would be
wrong to think of the sex education debate as simply ‘religious versus secular’. In
fact, religions are not one-sided on this issue, and cannot be separated from these
discussions. A look at the history of sex education in the US shows that religions
– especially Protestant denominations – have deeply influenced many aspects of
sex education, both progressive and conservative. This is not surprising given the
symbolic value of sexuality, as well as the transmission of moral values through sex
education, both of which make it a key battleground in the culture wars. Sex
education is attached to the control of young bodies through lessons about sexual
diseases, reproduction and romantic pairings, as well as the control of young
minds through the classroom. In formative ways, Christian involvement in the
history of sex education laid the groundwork for both sides of the debate today.

Sex education began with 19th-century Protestant anti-prostitution reformers.

These reformers led the ‘social purity movement’ (‘social’ was then a euphemism
for ‘sexual’). They paired their primary work of stamping out red-light districts
with educational lectures about the physical and moral dangers of sex outside
marriage. Social purity overlapped with other female-dominated reforms such as
the temperance movement; alcohol and prostitutes were twin evils that lured men
away from their Christian households. Social purity advocates such as Frances
Willard, the leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, preached
against the sexual standard that condoned men visiting prostitutes, while those
such as John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, emphasised premarital
abstinence and marital monogamy as essential to a healthy Christian lifestyle.
Ironically, social purity reformers supported obscenity laws to protect youth
against lewd sexual publications, even as they challenged the prevailing
‘conspiracy of silence’ around public discussions of sexuality.

Whereas sex education was secondary to anti-prostitution reforms, it became a

primary focus of doctors who began advocating for ‘social hygiene’ (ie, sexual
hygiene) in the early 20th century. The father of social hygiene – and the founder
of US sex education – was a man named Prince Albert Morrow, a Kentucky-born
dermatologist inspired by the advanced studies of venereal diseases in France. In
the US, he promoted social hygiene education in order to protect ‘innocent’ wives
and offspring from the ravages of syphilis and gonorrhoea introduced into the
family by husbands and fathers. He showed a flair for publicity by disseminating
stomach-turning images of syphilitic children suffering from blindness and skin
deformities. Morrow soon began to organise his campaign among fellow doctors,
but progress was slow. Despite some being passionate about fighting venereal
disease, many were nervous about treating syphilis and gonorrhoea since these
diseases were popularly seen as fit punishments for sexual sins. Easing symptoms
supposedly encouraged patients to continue their sinful behaviour – not a
position doctors were keen on defending.
So Morrow moved outside his professional scientific circle and engaged with
Protestant social purity reformers as well. They had already developed publicly
acceptable Christian rhetoric for talking about sexuality in a time when obscenity
laws stifled other public discussions. Those who accepted Morrow’s invitation to
join scientific professionals in creating the sex education movement made up the
more progressive branch of purity reform. Influenced by liberal Protestantism’s
embrace of scientific authority to reveal God’s truths about creation, they sought
to cooperate across religious and secular divisions as part of their Christian
mission to mitigate social problems. Now Morrow’s movement took off in earnest.

M orrow had learned a lesson that recurs throughout the history of sex education:
adding religious frameworks and spokespeople into medical campaigns is
necessary for success. Facts and data are often not enough to convince the US
public to take scientific lessons about sex seriously; religious persuasion is
needed too. So, since the early 20th century, the sex education movement has
treated Christianity as a fount of ample resources: live audiences (church
attendees and auxiliary networks), free advertising (religious pulpits and
publications), reputable leadership to guide and promote sensitive campaigns
(ministers and other respected church people), an ethical system to motivate
people to ‘behave’, and ideologies that safeguarded the topic from censorship by
connecting it to well-accepted ideas of love, family and Christian respectability.
Morrow’s work helped to create a coalition between social hygiene and social
purity or, as he would later put it, between ‘the medical man and the moralist’.
This eventually led to the creation in 1914 of the American Social Hygiene
Association (now the American Sexual Health Association), an organisation that
would guide the national sex education movement for decades to come.

The coalition that Morrow helped to create was particularly significant at a time of
scientific professionalisation. Confidence was high in science, especially medicine,
to solve society’s problems. As scientific authority had become largely
independent of religious authority by the early 20th century, some physicians
accused conservative Christian reformers of spreading inaccurate medical
information in their religious enthusiasm to curb vices. Doctors feared that
religious approaches would always advocate for conversion and prayer over
scientific education and medical intervention, even though liberal Protestant
purity reformers who joined them also eschewed these more conservative
evangelical reform methods.
For their part, purity reformers had reasons to distrust doctors, as some had
stymied anti-prostitution reforms with their advocacy for medical regulation of
prostitution, which would have amounted to legalising it – anathema to those
who wanted its abolition. But where there was overlap, there was success.
Christian doctors and leaders such as Morrow advocated for a balance of religion
and medicine within both groups, and helped to bridge tensions. Both agreed on
the connection between prostitution, STIs and weak morals. They decided on sex
education for children as the best way to address these problems so that boys
would learn the dangers of visiting prostitutes, and girls would choose husbands
who upheld a higher sexual standard. Early sex-education leaders made careful
negotiations to keep a balance of approaches.

Elevating religious concerns also provided a reason to keep the sex education
movement separate from the birth control movement. Endorsing birth control
would have ostracised prominent Catholic sex educators such as John
Montgomery Cooper. An anthropologist and priest, Cooper was well aware of the
Roman Catholic position against artificial birth control methods but saw great
value in sex education to discourage sin, strengthen character, and support
reproduction within nuclear families. The decision by the American Social
Hygiene Association to remain neutral on birth control – viewed as a more
radical, feminist cause – further protected the movement from censorship and
public outcry in its early years. At a time before most public schools were ready to
incorporate lessons about sexuality, religious groups provided direct access to
parents who would help to decide whether to let sex education into schools; they
also offered experimental locations for developing and trying out these
programmes.

The movement’s goals aligned with progressive education trends that sought to
use public education to strengthen moral character and, ultimately, the nation.
Sex educators of both religious and medical varieties shared concern for growing
‘problems of the cities’, which was often code for white people’s fears about an
influx of immigrants and Black people to urban areas, a trend they believed
fuelled vice and spread diseases. Like many progressive white elites of the time,
most early sex educators supported beliefs related to social Darwinism, using
middle-class Anglo-Saxons as a common benchmark for depicting ideals within
sexual hygiene campaigns. Many sex educators came to support popular aspects
of so-called ‘positive eugenics’, including the idea that keeping sexuality
contained within a ‘well-matched’ marriage (ie, same race, class, religion, etc)
would advance each race, although some sex educators notably denounced the
 eugenics movement for promoting sterilisation and other ‘negative eugenic’
measures.

A fter early experiments with public school sex education in Chicago, sex
educators temporarily shifted to the immediate challenge of educating young
soldiers about sexual temptations during the First World War. The military had a
bad reputation for letting soldiers sow their wild oats; in response to parental
uproar, the US government enlisted sex educators of the American Social
Hygiene Association and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) to build
a military sex-education programme. The sex educators focused on the moral side
of sex, while military doctors lectured on STI symptoms and how to use a
prophylactic kit when moral restraint failed. YMCA sex educators connected
these lectures to their physical programmes to keep men morally, mentally and
physically fit, with the goal of preventing men from visiting prostitutes or
engaging in the largely unspoken option of same-sex intercourse.

A US Navy poster from 1942 warning of the perils of venereal disease. Courtesy NIH
Digital Collections

YMCA lecturers such as James Naismith, the inventor of basketball and sex
educator to the American Expeditionary Forces, used Christianity as a powerful
motivator to encourage soldiers to stay morally and physically ‘clean’ while
overseas. Along with lectures and counselling sessions, Naismith considered
sports a wholesome way to expel sexual energy and distract soldiers from sexual
temptations. Chaplains, mostly Protestant, supported YMCA sex educators in
urging soldiers to strengthen their Christian character and stay away from
prostitutes. Moral education about sex was one piece of a larger ‘American plan’
to stop the spread of STIs, which included policing red-light districts.
Incarceration and forced medical examinations followed racist, classist and sexist
assumptions, as they targeted women deemed ‘problematic’ by those in power.

After the war, attention shifted back home. Religious leaders within the American
Social Hygiene Association steered away from STI education and toward family
life education. The liberal Protestant sex educator Anna Garlin Spencer led this
shift, arguing that sexuality education was intimately connected to raising morally
responsible children. As a pathbreaking female minister – the first woman to be
ordained in Rhode Island and a leader in social purity, suffrage and pacifism – as
well as a sociology professor, Spencer believed that religious groups had an
obligation to support sex education, which would strengthen the family unit as
the building block of each religion and of the nation. Her argument corresponded
with broader concerns about the perils facing the modern family, primarily
divorce, and overlapped with social scientific trends for domestic sciences, home
economics, social work and marital counselling. Family life education echoed
racial and cultural ideals of the eugenics movement about the importance of
finding an ‘ideal’ partner with whom to marry and reproduce. It further reflected
liberal Protestant efforts to be on the cutting edge of academic trends and a desire
to find common ground across religious groups, since they believed all could
agree on the religious and national importance of strengthening the social
institution of the family (read: the heterosexual, nuclear family).

Spencer created a partnership between the American Social Hygiene Association

and the Federal Council of Churches (now the National Council of Churches),
which represented many mainline Protestant denominations and provided a voice
for the moderate centre of liberal Protestantism. The Federal Council of Churches
committed itself to preserving ‘Judeo-Christian family life’ as the cornerstone of
the nation, adding Reform Jewish and progressive Catholic sex educators to their
liberal Protestant agenda. With the new focus on family life, the sex education
movement used the Federal Council of Churches to reach churches and
synagogues, convincing them to include family life education in their youth
programmes. Religious institutions provided important testing grounds at a time
when sex education was slow to catch on in school curricula, and they served as
trustworthy avenues for convincing parents that sex education was not smut and
could serve godly goals, paving the way for school programmes.

These religiously affiliated efforts pushed sex education forward through the mid-
20th century, providing further infrastructure for the movement and making the
platform more publicly acceptable. They chipped away at the conspiracy of
silence and found ways of educating parents, young soldiers and some children,
overcoming concerns that any discussion would incite sexual curiosity and
depravity. Despite progress, the specific frameworks and decisions had
consequences, shackling sex education to a certain ideal of family (as
heterosexual, white, middle-class, and nuclear) and to morals (of a specifically
white liberal Protestant variety). The overarching belief that the proper domain
for sexuality was within monogamous, heterosexual marriages forged the sex
education consensus in the first half of the 20th century. It didn’t last much
longer.

T hese progressive coalitions and agendas brought about their own downfall,
laying the groundwork for the tumultuous sex education battles of the 1960s.
Progressive religion wanted to invite everyone to the table, though still on
progressive and usually Protestant terms. One perennial challenge of this liberal
impulse is the question of how to be inclusive of those who don’t accept the same
terms of inclusiveness. Not everyone wants a spot at the table, and some exclusive
worldviews feel compromised when certain groups are allowed to join the
conversation on equal footing.

The Protestant brand of liberal theology that came to influence sex educators
centred around the ‘new morality’, also known as situation ethics. Popularised by
Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopalian professor of social ethics, it advanced the idea
that to value inclusiveness and individualism meant acknowledging that morality
is not the same for everyone in every situation. In place of absolute morality, the
new morality advocated a Christian view of love as a common denominator to
guide individuals in their unique contexts. Despite critiques that this was a
slippery slope into moral bankruptcy, proponents argued that teaching individual
decision-making guided by love would lead to higher standards. Fletcher
advocated situation ethics for people to ‘choose like people, not submit like
sheep’, suggesting that legalistic tactics produced ‘reluctant virgins and technical
chastity’, with people acting as they were told to, rather than according to their
own determinations.

As the new morality became the central religious framework of comprehensive

sexuality education, it opened the door to discussions of previously taboo topics.
Even though many comprehensive sexuality educators – including Mary
Calderone, the founder of the Sex Information and Education Council of the
United States – believed that sex belonged within monogamous, heterosexual
marriages, the new morality opened up the possibility that any sexual act could be
moral, given the right contexts and motivations. Calderone also had a personal
interest in education about the naturalness of masturbation, recalling her own
trauma at being forced to wear aluminium mitts as a child to prevent her from
touching herself. Informed by her progressive Quaker faith, Calderone advocated
for the new morality to empower individuals to follow their own conscience and to
denounce judging others’ sexual behaviour, since she believed that God could
speak privately to individuals and that only God could judge how people
responded to those intimate messages. She viewed education about sexual topics
of all varieties to be part of the search for God-given truths, as well as vital to
improving public health.

Acknowledgement of sexual diversity was significant for those rendered invisible

or deviant by traditional frameworks. It was the liberal straw that broke the
camel’s back, as conservative Christians relied upon absolute morality to support
their ethical foundation: some things are always wrong, regardless of reason or
context, a view tied to the belief that the Bible conveys unchanging, universal
truths from God. The sex education battles of the late 1960s erupted when
conservative Christian groups such as Christian Crusade launched public
campaigns against comprehensive sexuality education, accusing it of promoting
an anything-goes, anti-God morality that would lead to sexual chaos and the
downfall of Christian America. Christian Crusade’s pamphlet Is the School House
the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? (1968) inflamed opposition to sex education as
it reached households across the country.

By making sure that moral behaviour was a central concern of sex education,
liberal Protestants had convinced Americans that sex education was important
for raising children and building strong families. But after the 1960s, they lost
control over whose morals guided the lessons. When the mainstream Judeo-
Protestant consensus that had been used to justify family life education gave way
to a rejection of universal morality, conservative Christians stepped in to put their
morals at the centre of sex education. After spending years on defence against
comprehensive sexuality education, evangelicals such as Tim LaHaye went on the
offensive in the 1980s with abstinence-only education. LaHaye and his wife had
reached bestseller status with their sex manual, The Act of Marriage (1976).
Building on that success, he sought to prove that sex education could also be
sanctified for conservative Christian purposes. Others followed, making
abstinence-only education an integral part of the Christian Right’s pro-family
movement and evangelical purity culture, known for its silver rings and virginity
pledges.
In 1996, abstinence-only received an enormous boost of federal funding
($50 million a year), supporting the message that ‘a mutually faithful
monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of
human sexual activity.’ Christian abstinence-only campaigners worked to remove
the most explicit religious language to fit their curricula within public schools.
Abstinence-only federal funding has remained fairly consistent, with only a brief
lull for less than a year under the Barack Obama administration, during which
time a separate funding stream was made available to comprehensive sexuality
education.

Even the liberal Protestant trend of embracing science as a method for revealing
God’s truth came back around, as conservative Christians borrowed scientific
language to argue that their version of sex education was representative of God’s
will. Medically accurate sexual terminology that evangelicals had initially labelled
pornographic now became part of their arsenal, within a framework of ‘Just say
no.’ Abstinence-only advocates took the same statistics that comprehensive
sexuality educators used to demonstrate the need for more expansive
programmes, and argued the opposite: that high rates of STIs and unintended
pregnancies indicated the failure of comprehensive sexuality education, therefore
demonstrating the need for restrictive programmes that exclude lessons on the
effectiveness of contraceptives and the diversity of sexual and gender identities.

Peer-reviewed scientific studies have largely rejected the abstinence-only

rationale, demonstrating that comprehensive approaches are more effective
across multiple types of measurements. While some abstinence-only programmes
have proven effective on specific behavioural outcomes, scholars and some
policymakers have further critiqued such programmes for medical inaccuracies
and harmful messages against LGBTQI youth and students who have been
sexually active, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Adding to confused public
discourse over the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of programmes is a tangled
mess of policies that vary dramatically across states. The politicised nature of sex
education also leads to teachers and textbook creators self-censoring for fear of
parental complaints or school board retaliation, much as narrow anti-evolution
laws in the early 20th century had the broader effect of inclining teachers to
downplay the topic.

S ex education battles form the roots of the Christian Right, and they became
entangled with later developments of evangelical resistance to racial integration
in their schools and an alignment with the Republican Party in the 1970s.
Protests against comprehensive sexuality education provided an opportunity to
use sexuality to represent other political issues, showing the symbolic potency of
sexuality as a carrier for moral values. The subsequent growth of abstinence-only
programmes further strengthened their pro-family platform. These developments
helped the Christian Right forge its Christian nationalist ideology.

Looking back on this history prompts the question of why scientific professionals
needed religion in the sex-ed movement in the first place. Besides the resources
and experience that Protestant reformers brought to the table, in the words of the
scientists themselves, science was not enough. Early sex educators knew that data
and facts were insufficient for changing sexual behaviours. One pointed out that
doctors still contracted STIs, even though they knew the most about them, so
something more than information must be needed to convince and motivate
people to follow sexual health guidelines.

The realisation that scientific information alone was ineffective for the goals of sex
education should resonate, as there are still many cases in which the US public
remains resistant to scientific findings on controversial topics. Many Americans’
resistance to the overwhelming consensus on the basics of human evolution is
one case in point, and one in which Protestantism has similarly played complex
roles, with liberal Protestantism championing mainstream scientific authority,
conservative Protestantism developing alternative rationales for creationism, and
many individual beliefs falling somewhere along the spectrum between these
national talking points. Religious responses to COVID-19 have revealed some
similar divisions. A 2020 study found that those who held a Christian nationalist
ideology – supported mostly by politically conservative Christians who believe
the Bible should be interpreted literally – were most likely to reject scientific
findings about the efficacy of masking, social distancing, and vaccination while
other highly religious Americans were supportive of these same measures.

Religious affiliations, of course, are not the only factors influencing the public
reception of scientific data and discourses. Common distrust of ‘science’ (as if it
were just one thing) can stem from the overuse of scientific jargon, the nonlinear
process of scientific discovery, and real scientific mistakes, including corruption of
individual researchers and classist, sexist and racist projects in the past and
present. However, as the history of sex education demonstrates, religions have
complex influences on secular issues and on public receptions, and scientists and
science educators would benefit from pedagogical approaches that take seriously
religious resistance to scientific authority. More broadly, scientists and educators
 of all varieties need new ways to teach scientific knowledge effectively to the
public.

Another lesson that can be gleaned from this history is the need to re-examine the
behaviour-oriented goals of sex education. If we evaluated the success of school
mathematics classes by how many people could complete their own tax forms, we
would also have much cause for alarm. Obviously, there are important differences
between the topics of mathematics and sex, but instrumentalist assessments can
put an unfair burden on education programmes: there are many other reasons
that people engage in sexual activity (or fail to ace their taxes), completely
unrelated to the type or quality of education programmes they previously
encountered or the extent of their learning within those programmes. This calls
for critical conversations about why we desire to control what happens beyond
the classroom, whether such control is possible, and in what ways it impedes
other educational objectives that we have stronger chances of achieving through
sex education: concluding programmes with students who are well-informed and
have the critical skills to ask good questions and find reliable answers after class is
out.

The legacies of religious involvement on the history of sex education in the US will
continue to be felt, and examining them will help us better understand our
country’s messy and ambivalent approaches to sex today. Those influenced by
comprehensive sexuality education might be able to recognise traces of past
progressive Protestant influences, including the embrace of science as a way to
learn about creation, the interfaith desire to find common ground, and the
situation ethics of the new morality. Liberal Protestants also continue to generate
some of the most comprehensive sexuality education programmes for religious
education and private schools. Those familiar with abstinence-only/sexual-risk
reduction programmes might recognise aspects of earlier Protestant purity
reforms and midcentury family life education, along with the more direct
influence of evangelical pro-family politics. Previous religious sex educators
sought to move the conversation forward while also holding on to the reins as
best they could. They set the boundaries of what should be considered acceptable
in public sex education that would later break into our current divisions.

aeon.co 16 September 2021