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The Religious Encounters of Alfred C. Kinsey
R. Marie Griffith
| Alfred C. Kinsey (1894–1956), the entomologist-turned-sexologist whose taxonomic reports on American sexual behavior electrified the nation, was a notorious provocateur. The two major volumes he supervised, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were the publishing sensations of their day and roused zealous if discordant responses across the country, indeed the world. To admirers such as the sexologist Robert Latou Dickinson and the publisher Donald Porter Geddes, Kinsey was a pioneering scientific researcher in an age of moral hypocrisy, a tireless investigator of human desire and intimate behavior whose contributions to human history ranked with those of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Adam Smith. To critics such as Monsignor Maurice Sheehy, the head of Catholic University's Department of Religious Education, he was a dissolute pseudo-intellectual bent on shredding the moral fabric of the nation by wrecking the family. Sheehy called Kinsey's work, unmistakably "the most antireligious" of the time. Towering scientist and liberating revolutionary to some, lascivious fraud, religious threat, and likely Communist to others: Kinsey stood with Senator Joseph McCarthy as one of the most divisive personages of the 1950s.1 |
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That Kinsey's publications marked a watershed moment in the history of American sexuality has been widely assumed, however disputed the specific results remain. An early, influential plot line credits his explicit discussions with inspiring a historically anomalous sexual revolution that flourished in the sixties, characterized by an experiential ethic of "if it feels good, do it"—an ethic blasted by critics as permissiveness—and accompanied by drugs, feminism, and the beginnings of a gay rights movement. Although that dramatic scenario still surfaces in mass media depictions of Kinsey, historians of sexuality have, in recent years, challenged its more simplistic facets—as when John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, in Intimate Matters, pointedly refer to the so-called sexual revolution and to a plurality of sexual revolutions in U.S. history; or when Beth Bailey, in Sex in the Heartland, explains how Americans have used the metaphor of "revolution" to make sense of bewildering sexual changes (or perceived changes) around them. Other scholars have contributed by further illuminating the histories of homosexuality, transsexuality, and marriage debates well before the 1960s, helping temper exaggerated depictions of an overnight change in American sexual mores. Such important correctives, deposing the model of a singular upheaval in erotic norms arising out of the frigid fifties, have both scholarly and political uses, as they expose historical variety in sexual norms and downplay the novelty of recent changes in sexual custom or jurisprudence.2 |
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Yet the revisionist accounts, taken together, have tended to obscure an important consequence of Kinsey's emblematic role in the enduring popular perception of a decadent sexual revolution and his figuration by conservative opponents as a secularizing villain. Again and again, writers have painted Kinsey as unqualifiedly antagonistic to religion, apparently concurring that the influence of his work—and of whatever sexual transformations may have occurred in his wake—stood in stark opposition to the religion of his time. That presupposition has concealed the fact that although he was scrupulously secular in his own convictions, Kinsey played a critical religious role in the United States by enlivening Protestant liberals to reconsider and, indeed, revise their views about sex. Even as many Christian authorities were moved to rebut or denounce him, Kinsey inspired others to reflect anew upon sexuality, advancing among many a rigorous, introspective reappraisal of traditional moral norms and prejudices that would endure long after his death. Religion surely infused the heated arguments about the famous scientist's life and legacy, most visibly in the admonitions of religious conservatives who then and later would vilify Kinsey for imperiling traditional American values. But religion could and did play other decisive roles as well.3 |
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