[Brownbag] Fwd: Special Colloquium this Friday Morning: Melissa Wilde, "Birth of the Culture Wars: How Race Divided American Religion, " Friday, April 25, 10:30-12:00pm in 402 Barrows Hall (fwd)

[Liz Ozselcuk]

Special Sociology Colloquium, of interest to demographers:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 16:07:21 -0700
From: John O'Donnell <od at berkeley.edu>
To: undisclosed-recipients:  ;
Subject: Fwd: Special Colloquium this Friday Morning: Melissa Wilde,
     "Birth of the Culture Wars: How Race Divided American Religion, " Friday,
     April 25, 10:30-12:00pm in 402 Barrows Hall

I noticed I had the wrong month on the flyer below, it is indeed this
Friday, April 25 (not May), sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Inline image 3

Melissa Wilde, University of Pennsylvania



Job Talk, HIFIS Religious Diversity Search
Fri. April 25, 2014, 10:30am-12:00pm, 402 Barrows Hall

Birth of the Culture Wars:  How Race Divided American Religion



Contemporary American religious groups are often classified as progressive
or conservative by their views on sex and gender.  It is taken as a given
that progressives are pro-choice, feminist and pro-gay marriage, and
conservatives the opposite.  But how did we get here?  In 1931, American
religious groups were also riven by sex and gender, but over an issue that
galvanizes few today: the legalization of contraceptives.  Back then the
debate was not about women’s rights, privacy, or even the proper role of sex
(in marriage, or society).  Instead the debates focused on the future of
“our race,” and the higher fertility of Catholic and Jewish immigrants.  The
key question: what could, and should, be done to prevent these
“undesirables” from irrevocably polluting, diluting, and ultimately
destroying White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant’s (WASP) legacy in America?  By the
mid-1920s, almost half of the major American religious denominations
professed a strong belief in these concerns and the corresponding concept of
“race suicide” in their periodicals.  Within a few years, between 1929 and
1931, many of them proclaimed that birth control, rather than being a sin as
was commonly and until very recently, understood, was actually a duty (for
less desirable groups).  The early liberalizers’ stance on birth control was
a crucial first step on the path to their identities as religious (and
sexual) progressives, even though the reasons for that support are far from
what we would see as progressive today.  Largely forgotten, the first
religious debates about birth control chronicled in Birth of the Culture
Wars demonstrate that the politics of sex and gender that today divide
American religion are rooted in inequalities of race and class.



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