In Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States, Kristy L. Slominski tells the history of sex education in the United States with attention to religious voices, institutions, and ideologies. Though the history of sex education and its primary organizing bodies have been well documented, Slominski’s study focuses on the religious insistence that “sexual information cannot be separated from sexual morality” (16). Recognizing the pervasiveness of this belief, she argues, is crucial to understand the particular philosophies, motivations, and actions of religious sex educators and sex education advocates.
Slominski begins with the emergence of American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) in 1914 and the liberal Protestant roots that placed paradigms of social purity and social hygiene at the core of the movement. Teachers, doctors, and religious leaders came to an early consensus that sex education was a crucial tool in fighting both venereal disease and the disease of sexual sin. This consensus then led to the creation of the YMCA and educational programs in the military and higher education, all influenced by the concurrent social gospel and muscular Christianity trends of Protestantism at the time. The personal character training that emerged from this early work expanded to include family life education. Collaboration with the Federal Council of Churches and conscious interfaith focus led to the codification of “Judeo-Christian” family values in the curriculum of sex education.
This trajectory of collaboration began to splinter in the 1960s with the founding of SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of the United States). SIECUS led the articulation of a “new morality” that defined moral behavior as situationally and individually determined. Opening the door to multiple definitions of morality motivated less progressive religious activists to develop the abstinence-only curriculum so well known in contemporary debates. Slominski adeptly describes the dramatic shifts in philosophies about the proper type of sex education in schools, which were a function of politically distinct presidential administrations and a persistent and varied religious influence and advocacy.
Central to Slominski’s history is the analysis of how these religion-infused philosophies and movements toward comprehensive sex education often caused as much harm as good. In both progressive and conservative sex education movements, the inscription of certain paradigms of gender, sexuality, morality, and even race caused direct harm historically in the implementation of curriculum. Indirect harm persists through societally entrenched norms of gender and sexuality that are being used to enforce, police, or otherwise prescribe restrictive paradigms today.
Slominski’s study is historically rich, well researched, and engaging. She manages to take a subject long studied and infuse it with additional layers of meaning and significance through attention to complicated religious influences. In so doing, she connects this topic to broader questions, such as the proper relation of religion and government in the United States and the difficulty in extricating religion and religious influence from American social issues. And her analysis of the contemporary ramifications of this history are particularly timely as norms of gender identity and sexuality are being inscribed or challenged in new ways. What she calls “the swinging pendulum of sex education” (241) promises to only continue to swing as new federal, state, and local administrations take power and societal norms continue to evolve.
As helpful as Slominski’s diagnoses of current debates and future trajectories are, what is most illuminating about this study are the ways in which she shows how liberal and conservative religious activists collaborated with, as well as borrowed and learned from, each other. This interweaving makes it impossible to characterize sex education as the purview of one segment of religious America. Impossible too is any attempt to draw a line from repressive to progressive curriculum and policy. As Slominski writes, this is perhaps the greatest irony of this history: “Pioneering religious efforts to increase sexual understanding through moral frameworks have . . . opened doors for programs that actively suppress knowledge about sexuality” (254). As with any aspect of the society as a whole, the evolution of sex education in the United States cannot be understood, changed, or debated without attention to the enduring and often complicated influence of religion.
Ann W. Duncan is professor of American studies and religion at Goucher College.
Ann W. Duncan
Date Of Review:
November 24, 2022
