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Moral Combat book cover
Moral Combat
How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics
2017
First Published
4.05
Average Rating
388
Number of Pages

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.

Avg Rating
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Author

R. Marie Griffith
R. Marie Griffith
Author · 4 books
Marie Griffith is the Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also serves as the John C. Danfoth Professor of Humanities. She has written extensively about religion in U.S. history and in the present. She focuses particularly on issues of gender and sexuality, matters that have grown ever more divisive in American society and politics in recent years. She has taught at Northwestern, Princeton, and Harvard, Universities and has published in both scholarly and popular venues. She is committed to civil discourse across political and religious lines, and she intends her writing to be accessible to a wide array of readers (not simply scholars). Her latest book, *Moral Combat*, explores debates over sex in American Christianity over the past century and their profound impact on U.S. law and politics.
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