Becker & Posner on Catholicism & Contraception

I often read the Becker-Posner blog, a blog co-written by a pair of University of Chicago professors who aim to bridge the gap between law, economics, politics, and public policy. They often have very interesting takes on complicated issues--think Freakonomics on a grand scale--and I find their posts (they typically post once a week, both writing on the same topic) to be consistently thought-provoking.

Having spent time in the Vatican and Florence last week--and having been overwhelmed by the breadth and grandeur of Catholic imagery throughout Italy--I found their posts this week (Becker; Posner) on Catholicism and contraception to be both timely and intriguing. For the purposes of this post, I will focus on Posner's post. He writes:

It is always difficult to decide whether a religious tenet of a hierarchical religion, such as Roman Catholicism, reflects religious belief or institutional strategy. The Roman Catholic Church is a huge “corporation,” one that reached its present size, wealth, and influence in a competitive environment, where it had first to confront paganism and Judaism, and later Protestantism and secularism.

The Church has long been hostile to contraception, but the nature of its hostility has changed, and may be changing yet again with the Pope’s recent acknowledgment that the use of condoms may sometimes be justified as a way of preventing the spread of AIDS. I want to consider the institutional as distinct from doctrinal considerations that might explain the history of orthodox Catholic views of contraception.

In the early years of Christianity, the Church had to steer a middle course between Christian extremists who thought sex a form of purely animal behavior that Christians should eschew, and pagans, who had a notably relaxed attitude toward sex, including masturbation, homosexual and other nonmarital sex, and contraception in the form of coitus interruptus and abortion. Rejecting sex altogether was not a viable policy for an ambitious Church (think where rejection of sex got the Shakers), but accepting the pagan view would have resulted in a failure to differentiate Christianity from paganism, and perhaps reduce Christianity’s appeal to women.

The compromise position that the Church adopted was that sex was proper as long as it was oriented toward its proper function, which, the Church held, was procreation within marriage. But it had to qualify this view to avoid condemning sex by married people who turned out to be sterile, for example because the wife had reached menopause. So the Church allowed that a secondary lawful purpose of sex was to reinforce the marital bond. 

This compromise worked well for a while (think of the number of massive Irish Catholic families in cities like Boston, families very similar to my own), but ran into problems when heavily Catholic nations achieved greater prosperity.

For various reasons, birth rates fall as prosperity rises, which led to a growth problem for the Church. The Vatican tried to hold its ground by embracing the "rhythm method" of contraception, but has found itself in a place today (according to Posner) where Catholics around the world use contraception at the same rate as non-Catholics. Posner concludes,

The Church finds itself today in a quandary: its proscription of contraception is so widely ignored, and so anachronistic given today’s sexual mores, as to invite derision—to make the Church seem “out of it.” This might not matter a great deal if Roman Catholicism were a fringe faith, as Christianity was at its inception. It is, as I said, a vast “corporation.” It has hundreds of millions of “customers.” It has been losing customers in the Western world, but gaining them in Africa—but Africans, ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, are pressing for a relaxation of the Church’s ban against contraception because condoms are a cheap and effective method of preventing infection with the AIDS virus. 

It is therefore not surprising, from an institutional perspective, that the Pope should take a first, albeit hesitant. step back from the proscription of contraception by acknowledging publicly that condoms might be justifiable as a method of reducing the incidence of AIDS.

The risk, of course, is that the Church could undermine its religious authority in favor of self-preservation. Any religion derives its primary power from the faith of its constituents, but there is often a conflict between the believers of the past and the believers of the present (and future).

My own checkered history with Catholicism derives from precisely these types of conflicts--and the Church's bizarre inability to reconcile them satisfactorily. The Catholic sex abuse scandal hit close to home for me at a formative time (right around the time of my Catholic confirmation), and certainly soured my opinion of the Church to the point where I no longer actively practice any religion.

The question for the Vatican is whether or not it is possible for the Church to reinvent itself without stripping away its own authority. We no longer live in a time where religious authority implies political authority (as it most certainly did in the Holy Roman Empire, not to mention throughout the Middle Ages), and the Church is uncertain how to respond.

To admit that "corporate" concerns play a huge role in religious doctrine may seem unsavory, but it is likely the only way for the Church to remain relevant in the modern world. Posner is right on in his analysis. The Church can no longer hope to achieve growth (or even maintain relevance) through higher birth rates; it must instead make sure that its message has maximum relevance in today's world. It's a lesson that the Church has been slow to learn.


[Becker-Posner Blog]