Griffith’s observations are eerily prescient. Whether one tolerates misogyny or apologizes for it is a highly variable thing ... Moral Combat is an impressive history of a massive fault line running through American history and politics: namely, sex. In eight rich chapters that span a century, Griffith traces the ridge where the tectonic plates of very different kinds of Christians have abutted... The book’s vast scope is humanized through Griffith’s artful use of key figures to anchor each chapter ... Griffith clearly demonstrates that American history is not a story of religion vs. sexual freedom. Rather, it is one of extraordinarily varying religious approaches to such freedoms ... With its crisp prose and lively quotations, Moral Combat is accessible for a wide readership. It is also a critical scholarly contribution to the intersecting histories of sex, race, politics and religion in the United States.
R. Marie Griffith probes the answers to these questions, and so much more, in Moral Combat, that rare academic work that weaves incisive research into a spellbinding tale of American piety and its restless twin, sex ... She comes by her arguments honestly...and spins her story with skill and grit. As with Frances FitzGerald’s magisterial The Evangelicals, Griffith breathes spirit into dry history, fashioning sinew and muscle onto brittle bones ... Moral Combat hews to a simple argument — those who seek plurality and change will wrestle unto death with those invested in tradition and order — making its case with vivid anecdotes ... Griffith’s diagnosis is dark but spot-on: Christianity has ruptured over the political weaponization of gender. Similar to class warfare and the legacy of slavery, reactionary puritanism is an enduring strand in our national DNA.
Moral Combat offers a concise and much-needed reminder of a liberal religious tradition with a distinguished record of defending women’s and sexual rights. Still, it would have been improved by a conclusion that could identify enduring themes in its case studies. A fuller discussion of funding would have complicated the story ... The book also neglects to ask why progress toward sexual freedom has been so uneven ... But these complaints about what a book doesn’t cover should not diminish the importance of what it does ... The story Griffith tells is crucial, particularly because America is such a religious country, and liberals need all the allies they can get.
Moral Combat painstakingly documents what most of us know but would find hard to explain: that the culture wars of the 20th and early 21st centuries have been mainly about sex ...among other things, a vivid illustration of a principle that liberals understand well and that religious conservatives usually do not: Culture precedes politics ... Ms. Griffith, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, writes with cold objectivity about her material, but the subject of sexual morality does not lend itself to cold objectivity. She has written a detailed history of the breakdown of American society’s broad Christian consensus on sexual behavior but says little about the consequences of this breakdown ... The overall effect strikes this admittedly conservative reviewer as incomplete or skewed, like a book on the changing technology of warfare that never mentions death tolls or actual wars.
You might call it 'moral combat,' which R. Marie Griffith does in her new book, Moral Combat, describing how sex has divided American Christians and fractured American politics since the last century. She dissects the sweeping cultural change that tweaked religious as well as secular morality in America, changing the vocabulary of public conversation ... Sex in the pages of Marie Griffith’s Moral Combat finds the moral polarities in our history as an equal-opportunity vulnerability, humanized by both traditionalists and secularists. The sins expose unexpected shifts in attitudes, depending on context in social history and the changing times.
Though academically rigorous, Griffith’s account is both accessible and eye-opening: it simply astonishes that Christian organizations were instrumental in 'family life' — meaning sex — education ... A welcome addition to the vast library on American religious discord.
With her account of the role played by prominent clergy and religious movements working to liberalize abortion law, Griffith argues that Roe v. Wade is best understood not solely as part of the women’s liberation movement but in the context of religious support for abortion rights. Likewise, her account of the theology that justified racial segregation illustrates an area where religious and cultural beliefs clash. Griffith’s remarkably comprehensive book will be of interest to scholars and lay readers alike.
