Sex & the Church

Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr last week took cognizance of the Kinsey Report. Like many another churchman, he found Scientist Kinsey's point of view toward sex "distressing"--even more so than the sad state of U.S. morals it indicated.

Writing in the fortnightly Christianity & Crisis, Theologian Niebuhr attacked Kinsey on two main counts. First is the Report's assumption that the prevailing sexual license reflects the inadequacy of sex standards set up by the churches. Niebuhr admits that neither Catholic nor Protestant attitudes toward sex are all they might be. But with all its faults, maintains Niebuhr, Christian teaching comes much nearer than Dr. Kinsey to a true understanding of the place of sex in human relations. The Kinsey Report, he writes, "proposes to solve the problem, simply by ignoring all deeper aspects of human existence. Sexual drives are analyzed as if they were merely biological impulses, and 'sexual objects' are discussed as if 'impulses' had to find their 'objects' without the overarching personality in each case. "Even more dangerous is the assumption that new norms can be created by a statistical study of the actual sex practices of the day. Here we have the modern sociological approach to the problem of norms reduced to its final absurdity . . . All we need in the future is an accurate Gallup poll. That would be the final triumph of a 'scientific' civilization.

"Christians are . . . frequently guilty of a graceless and self-righteous legalism, lacking in charity toward those who have been worsted by the tumult of their own passions. There is nothing in the present situation to encourage complacency among those of us who call ourselves Christian. Yet we do have at least a tenuous hold upon a dimension of existence which is not touched in this Report . . . The modern naturalism which seeks to solve the problems of man's sexual life by treating him as an animal, only slightly more complex than other brutes, represents a therapy which implies a disease in our culture as grievous or more grievous than the sickness it pretends to cure."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.