Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics

From an esteemed scholar of American religion and sexuality, a sweeping account of the century of religious conflict that produced our culture wars
Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control--sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christian consensus regarding gender roles and sexual morality began to crumble, as liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion. Both those who advocated for greater openness in sexual matters and those who resisted new sexual norms turned to politics to pursue their moral visions for the nation. Moral Combat is a history of how the Christian consensus on sex unraveled, and how this unraveling has made our political battles over sex so ferocious and so intractable.

• Consuming Religion (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)
• Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States
• Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms
• Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal
• Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights
• God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America
• Sex and Secularism (The Public Square)
• God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission
• Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation
• The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West