Eighteen Months That Reversed Nineteen Centuries

For nineteen centuries the church, East and West, spoke with one voice on contraception. The Reformers held the line as firmly as the Fathers. Then, in the space of about eighteen months, the consensus broke, and it broke in the English-speaking Protestant world.

The record deserves to be stated exactly, because parts of it are routinely misremembered, and our credibility depends on getting our own history right.

1920: the warning

At the Lambeth Conference of 1920, the assembled bishops of the Anglican Communion issued “an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception” (Resolution 68).[1] That was the settled position, restated.

1930: the reversal

Ten years later the same conference reversed itself. Resolution 15 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference permitted contraception where there was a “clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood” and a “morally sound reason” for avoiding abstinence. It passed by 193 votes to 67, with 46 abstaining.[1] A substantial minority of the communion’s own bishops voted against it.

With that vote the Church of England became the first major Christian communion in history to permit contraception in any circumstance. One smaller body had moved first: peer-reviewed research records that the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church sanctioned birth control shortly before Lambeth, the only ecclesiastical body in Europe or North America to have done so.[2] The exception is worth naming precisely because it is the only one. It measures the consensus it broke.

1931: America follows

In March 1931 the Federal Council of Churches in America followed. Its Committee on Marriage and the Home voted 22 of 28 to approve “the careful and restrained use of contraceptives by married people”, while acknowledging the risk of serious evils. The decision made the front page of the New York Times.[3]

State this carefully, because it is often stated wrongly, and was stated wrongly in earlier drafts of our own material. The FCC approved contraception. It did not reject it. The famous protest language belongs not to the Council but to its critics.

The men who saw it

And there were critics, named and dated, and their words are the most instructive part of the record.

The Presbyterian magazine wrote in 1931 that the Council’s “recent pronouncement on birth control should be enough reason, if there were no other, to withdraw from support of that body.”[4]

Bishop Warren A. Chandler of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, said on 13 April 1931 that the Council’s deliverance “has no authorization from any churches representing it”, that he regarded it as “most unfortunate, not to use any stronger words”, and that it did not represent the Methodist Church “and I doubt if it represents any other Protestant Church”.[5]

These were not Roman Catholic voices. They were Protestant leaders watching a Protestant consensus dissolve, and saying so in public, at the time. Within a generation their protest was forgotten, and within two the position they defended sounded foreign to the very churches that had held it for nineteen centuries.

Why we tell it exactly

It would be easy to sharpen this story. To put the critics’ words in the Council’s mouth, as some accounts have done. To call Lambeth the first mover without the Methodist footnote. We decline, every time. A smaller case honestly stated is worth more than a larger one that will not hold. The exact record is damning enough: a nineteen-century consensus, reversed in eighteen months, over the recorded protest of men who saw precisely what was happening.

The novelty is not this site. The novelty is our silence.

Sources

1. Lambeth Conference 1920, Resolution 68; Lambeth Conference 1930, Resolution 15 (193–67, 46 abstaining). https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/127734/1930.pdf
2. Andrew Moeller, “Eugenics and the Approval of Birth Control at the 1930 Lambeth Conference”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge University Press, 2023), footnote 12. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/eugenics-and-the-approval-of-birth-control-at-the-1930-lambeth-conference
3. Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Marriage and the Home, March 1931; front-page coverage, New York Times, 21 March 1931.
4. The Presbyterian (1931), quoted at https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/position-of-the-church-on-artificial-contraception-9635
5. Bishop Warren A. Chandler, public statement, 13 April 1931, quoted at https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/position-of-the-church-on-artificial-contraception-9635