Birth control and the churches

Christian couples are free to plan their families, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church regard the use of birth control as part of the responsible love of husband and wife. In 1930 the bishops of the Anglican Communion, meeting at the Lambeth Conference, became the first major church body to accept contraception within marriage, and most Protestant churches followed within a generation.

Perhaps you grew up hearing otherwise, or you and your spouse are trying to make a faithful decision about your family before God. Either way, the decision belongs to the two of you together, made in prayer. Some Christians still hold, in good conscience, that artificial contraception is wrong, and their concern deserves a respectful hearing. Christians on both sides agree on what matters most: sex is a gift of God, and children are a blessing.

What did the Lambeth Conference decide in 1930?

Until the twentieth century, Christian teachers of every tradition condemned contraception. The Lambeth Conference of 1908 had condemned “all artificial means of restriction.” In 1930 the bishops changed course, and the wording of their decision shows how seriously they weighed it. Resolution 15 said that when there is “a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood,” abstinence is the first method, but that “where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used.” The resolution passed by 193 votes to 67, with 47 bishops not voting. The same conference recorded its “strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception-control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”

In 1958 the Lambeth Conference went further and taught that the responsibility for deciding the number and spacing of children “has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere.” That sentence places the decision with a husband and wife, made in prayer and before God.

What do the mainline churches teach today?

In 1961 the National Council of Churches in the United States summed up the change: “Most of the Protestant churches hold contraception and periodic continence to be morally right when the motives are right.” The mainline churches still teach it that way today.

Scripture helps explain why. In the second creation story in Genesis, God makes the first couple for companionship, and the story says nothing about children: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him” (Genesis 2:18). Mainline marriage services still name mutual joy, help, and comfort among the purposes of marriage, alongside the gift of children when God gives them. Sex in marriage has more than one God-given purpose, and Paul wrote about the shared intimacy of husband and wife without mentioning children:

Let the husband give his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife her husband. The wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise also the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Don’t deprive one another, unless it is by consent for a season, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and may be together again, that Satan doesn’t tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

1 Corinthians 7:3–5

The mainline churches draw a firm line between contraception, which prevents a pregnancy, and abortion, which ends one. For that separate question, see what does the Bible say about abortion?

What do Orthodox Christians teach about birth control?

The Orthodox churches have no single binding rule on contraception. Many Orthodox priests and theologians today accept methods that prevent conception, while rejecting any method that might end a pregnancy, and they leave the decision to married couples in consultation with their priest. The Russian Orthodox Church’s statement of social teaching, The Bases of the Social Concept (2000), says that methods “which do not involve interrupting an already conceived life, cannot be equated with abortion in the least” (XII.3).

Christians who still reject artificial contraception do so out of a serious and loving concern: to keep love and new life together, and to treat fertility always as a gift of God and never as a disease. Mainline Christians can honor that concern while leaving the choice of method to the conscience of married couples.

What was the sin of Onan?

For centuries Christian teachers, including Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, cited the story of Onan in Genesis 38 as proof that God condemns preventing conception. Onan’s older brother had died without a son. Under the custom later written into Deuteronomy 25:5–6, Onan was to father a child with his brother’s widow, Tamar, so that the child would carry on his brother’s name.

The text says that Onan “spilled his semen on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother” (Genesis 38:9). The story names his motive: he took Tamar sexually while refusing the duty he owed her and his dead brother, and he left a widow without the son who would have secured her future. Many modern interpreters read Onan’s sin as that injustice against Tamar and his brother. The same story is discussed in is masturbation a sin?

What does “be fruitful and multiply” mean?

God blessed them. God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.”

Genesis 1:28

The words “Be fruitful, and multiply” appear first in Genesis 1:22, spoken over the fish and the birds, and God repeats them to Noah and his sons after the flood (Genesis 9:1). Each time the text introduces them with “God blessed.” They are a blessing on all living things and on humankind as a whole, and they do not require every couple to have as many children as possible.

Jewish tradition reads the verse the same way. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, records that the school of Hillel considered the duty to have children fulfilled once a man had a son and a daughter (Yevamot 6:6). Jesus never married, Paul wished that others could live unmarried as he did (1 Corinthians 7:7), and the church has always honored people who have no children. For couples who long for children and cannot conceive, see IVF and Christian ethics.

Whatever size your family becomes, the calling of marriage stays the same: to give yourselves to each other in love, and to make your home a place where God’s love can be known. Children, when they come, are a gift, and every marriage, with children or without, is held in God’s blessing. You can make this decision together, in prayer, trusting the God who blessed humankind at the beginning to bless your love and your home.