Moral Combat

How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics

Bibliographic Data

ID4155482
AuthorsDavid E Settje (Concordia University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume105
Issue3
Pages700-701
Publication date2018-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jay356
OpenAlexW2905729524
LanguageEN
Citations received25

From contraception to abortion, including LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual) rights, sexual harassment, and sex education, nothing ignites American passions today more than sexual politics. Based on these issues, staunch moral points of view inform voting behavior and the choice of political party. Conservatives derive their stance from traditionally held convictions, while liberals often champion human equality and social justice. The public debate involves passionate opinions, inspires angered responses, and sways elections from the local level to the presidency. Historians have attempted to explain various facets of this reality, but few brave the idea of an expansive history. R. Marie Griffith's Moral Combat ventures to understand “why so many American Christians seemed disproportionately obsessed with sex” (p. 323, emphasis in original). Griffith organizes her chapters by decade, and within each decade she concentrates on the emergence of one issue. Readers thus travel from the mid-1910s through the 1920s with the debate over contraception, into the censorship of erotic novels in the 1930s, and then to the controversy over race mixing in the 1940s and 1950s. Griffith remains in those two decades to include Alfred Kinsey's studies of sexuality, goes into the 1960s and sex education, before coming to abortion in the 1970s, sexual harassment in the 1990s, and same-sex marriage in the twenty-first century. She approaches each chapter and subject with a consistent methodology. By scrutinizing one particular person to represent each point of view per chapter, she reveals the basic argument from both sides, what motivated these passions, and how rivals combated one another. Such short vignettes on debates over the highly charged matters of gender, sex, and sexuality provide her the means to grapple with complex debates in an accessible style for any reader. A gifted storyteller, Griffith undertook an ambitious project to uncover the contentious roots of contemporary sex politics through this approachable formula

Harassment · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Politics of the United States · Sociology · Transgender · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Law

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