Would it be sin?!?

In 1930, the Anglican Church made a decision that proved tragic for the entire world. About the only two voices that realized the problem were, of course, the Catholic Church, and surprisingly, an agnostic.

The year is 1932. On the Continent, Adolf Hitler is still 11 months away from gaining control of the German government. Though he continues to search for a way to gain the electoral majority necessary to rule Germany, he has already won a major victory in England, a victory that will continue to grow and metastasize long after he lies dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a burning bunker in Berlin 13 years in the future.

Yet, even as English Churchmen nurture the seed of Hitler's philosophy on their isle, another voice has risen from among the inhabitants of that gallant land. This voice has spent the last two years forming one of the most insightful and strident attacks on Nazi philosophy ever concocted, and it is now, in February, 1932, that the author releases his work into the stream of history. The battle between the philosophies continues to be fought down to this very day: the battle between the eugenics, advocated in seminal form by the Church of England, and the natural law, upheld by an agnostic who saw the preposterous conclusions to which the contraceptive philosophy must inevitably lead.

The agnostic was Aldous Huxley; his book, Brave New World, would constitute not only an incredibly prophetic description of the contracepting society, but also a deft parody of the Christian church which first legalized the idea. Prior to 1930, contraception had been uniformly condemned by every Christian denomination in the world since the death of Christ.

By the early 1920s, Margaret Sanger and several of her English lovers were touting contraception and involuntary sterilization as a way to limit the breeding of the "human weeds," as Sanger called them: the insane, the mentally-retarded, criminals, and people with Slavic, Southern Mediterranean, Jewish, black or Catholic backgrounds (ironically, Sanger was herself raised by a Catholic mother). Though most supporters of atheistic rationalist scientific progress don't advertise it, Hitler's racial purity schemes were nothing more than the application of 1920s "cutting-edge" biology. When this attitude encountered Christianity, the results were uniformly explosive. Ever since 1867, Anglican bishops had been meeting roughly every ten years at Lambeth Palace, London, in order to discern how best to govern their Church. Mounting eugenics pressures had required the bishops in both the 1908 and the 1920 conferences to fiercely condemn contraception. But the constant eugenics drumbeat would not let up.

The 1930 conference brought even greater internal challenges; many of the people advising the bishops were eugenicists, indeed, at least one attendee, the Reverend Doctor D.S. Bailey, would be both a member of the International Eugenics Society and an active participant in the conference.

Between the general mood of society and the insistence of advisors, the Anglican bishops were placed under extreme pressure to allow some form of artificial contraception. On August 14, 1930, after heated debate, they voted 193 to 67, with 14 abstentions, to permit the use of contraceptives at the discretion of married couples. The decision rocked the Christian world — it was the first time any Christian Church had dared to attack the underlying foundations of the sacred marital act, the act in which another image of God was brought into creation through the parents' participation in co-creation with God. Pope Pius XI, deeply saddened, issued Casti Connubii, just four short months later on December 31, 1930, reiterating the constant Christian teaching that artificial contraception was forbidden as an intrinsically evil act.

H.G. Wells' stories of a scientific utopia combined with the publication of the Lambeth decision and Casti Connubii to fire Huxley's imagination. What would a society which fully endorsed contraception look like? Though Huxley was by no means a Catholic, he possessed a keen intellect and an incisive pen.

His conclusions were soon plain — society as we understood it would fail to survive. Writing in the grand tradition of English parody, he constructed a wickedly accurate portrayal of the contraceptive society, written so as to ensure his English audience would recognize his portrayal of the Church which had set them on the road toward it. In so doing, he inadvertently created an allegory which supports Catholic teaching.

......Though Huxley, the man whom a contemporary called a "neo-pagan" and who eventually began to dabble with Hinduism, did not consciously understand the theology which lies behind the acts of sexuality and contraception, he instinctively understood their interconnection. Because he wanted his Brave New World society to embrace and live out a contraceptive mentality, it replaces the tree with the industrial complex. Huxley understood that universal sterility is unnatural, and no tree, no living thing could produce it. By removing pregnancy, his worldly society removes the curse of the pain of childbirth. His society further ensures this by populating itself with abortion clinics and factories which bring children into existence through in vitro fertilization, in vitro gestation and cloning. Most women are created sterile, but a few are permitted to retain their fertility so their eggs could be harvested in order to produce the next generation. These women are distinguished by their contraceptive cartridge belts, which they are drilled to use from the time of childhood.

The contraceptive society desires not children, but pleasure. Where there is no desire for children, there is likewise no desire for parents — indeed, the very words "mother" and "father" are curse words, the lowest and most vile form of insult, as the phrases "Mary, our Mother" and "Our Father" are in certain circles today. But a sterile world is impossible to live with on a daily basis. The delight in worldly pleasure leaves an ever-thirsting spiritual desert. His society solves this problem with "soma" — the psychedelic wonder-drug which removes the individual from reality. Still, the use of soma is not enough. People need symbols and liturgy, and Huxley knows it. Fortunately, the Anglican Church left his fictional society a rich legacy. They have the sign of the "T," a reminder of the first mass-produced item in the world, the Model-T Ford, and not-so-coincidentally a broken echo of the Cross, with its vertical connection to heaven cut off:

.....In less than 180 devastating pages, Aldous Huxley not only tears the mask from the face of contraception, he also provides an excellent proof for the necessity of the papal office. The Anglican Conferences which Huxley so neatly parodied demonstrated that any essentially national church must eventually fall prey to the social pressures they operate within. The Anglican Church, having no leader outside of England, was simply unable to protect itself from the concerns of the country and the people to whom they ministered. The fears sown by the eugenicists and the selfishness of the people were simply too compelling for any religious leader to publicly denounce. Any Church which permitted its doctrines to be socially influenced to this degree would eventually allow their cardinals to become "Arch-Community Songsters." As it turned out, the papal office alone possessed the strength to protect Christianity from the lies bound up within the grinning death's heads of the contraceptive mentality and its twin sister, the abortion mill.

......"Did he love me when he begot me?" When we actively put up chemical or physical walls between ourselves, our lover, and the child which might be begotten, will we truly have loved that child into existence as God loved us into existence, Who gave Himself totally for us? Are we acting in the image of the living God?


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