There is no large Protestant denomination that takes this stand. However,
some very conservative evangelicals not only oppose oral contraceptives, but any contraception at all–including NFP!
Thank you for saying this.
In the last evangelical Protestant church that we were part of, the senior pastor and his wife had ten children (two were deceased-RIP), and the youth pastor and his wife had seven children. The “head layperson” (the one with the most money and power in the church) and his beautiful wife had eight children. And many of the laypeople had 4-6 children and were open to more.
Many times in sermons, we heard the senior pastor admonish the congregation to be open to life and add more children to their family.
I think that Catholics have to understand that my generation, the late baby boomers (born in 1957 or later) grew up learning that the Pill and other artificial birth control methods are perfectly acceptable, and no one taught us about natural methods of spacing children.
Also, we grew up in the time of “women’s lib” and the emerging extreme feminist movement. Even those of us who were docile and compliant to the teachings of our churches and the Bible were influenced by the women’s movement which urged us to put our careers and personal lives ahead of having large families. Just this month in Good Housekeeping, Betty Friedan’s historic article was reprinted–this article did tremendous damage, IMO, because it gave women the idea that they could dump their children into daycares and head off to work just to “fulfil themselves.”
Finally, there was the rising rate of divorces, which sobered many women and made us work hard to be able to take care of ourselves just in case we became one of the 50% of women who ended up divorced. Many women realized that it’s harder to be a single parent with many children than it is with 1.5 children, so they made sure to contracept for their financial security.
At any rate, it was a rare evangelical Christian girl/woman who realized what was happening and resisted the pull of these feminist teachings and the fear of divorce leaving them destitute. Not knowing the traditional teachings of the Church was the final nail.
I think that most people in the Protestant churches, especially the evangelical Protestant churches, literally “forgot” about God’s teachings on contraception. Remember, there is no pope or magisterium in the evangelical churches. Many of the evangelical churches are very anti-Catholic and actually teach avoidance of anything Catholic, urging their members to avoid “contamination” by a “pagan, woman-worshipping Babylonian mystery cult.” Evangelical churches, at least until recently, have completely isolated themselves from the teachings of other churches, and only in recent years, with the advent of the internet, have evangelical Christians begun to learn about the traditions and history of Christianity.
It’s interesting to me that the emerging church that contarini mentioned started up when the internet use became common. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I predict that as more and more evangelical Christians begin to find sites like Catholic Answers, we will see more and more evangelicals convert to Catholicism.
Criticize them if you like, but one thing that most evangelicals have in common is a detailed knowledge of the Scriptures–and the Scriptures clearly point to the Catholic Church as the Church that Jesus Christ founded. One of the main reasons why I converted to Catholicism is that it was in complete, 100% agreement with the Bible–the first church I had ever attended that WAS in complete agreement with the Bible! When I first started attending Mass and listening to Catholic priests, I was so excited when I found references to Biblical passages in Old and New Testaments, and finally understood these passages!
Teachings about contraception are one of the discoveries of these evangelical Christians exploring the traditions of Christianity. I deplore that my husband and I missed out on this. We were taught from childhood that artificial birth control is perfectly acceptable, and that’s how we went through our fertile years. It was only when we started learning about the Catholic church when we were 47 years old that we realized that we had learned wrongly all those years. By then it was too late and our fertility was gone.
