This article (re)considers Protestant (post)modern treatment of contraception. Using the 1930 Lambeth Conference and C. S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man as primary touchstones, it proceeds with a theological and literary analysis to treat a topic that the Catholic Church’s encyclical tradition resolutely settled in 1930 with Casti Conubii and subsequently deepened with the doctrinal developments of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae . In evaluating this contraceptive dialectic, I draw on primary and secondary ecclesial and academic literatures to help Protestants take up the mantle and speak boldly where Lewis laid laudable groundwork but ultimately remained less resolute. The article’s purpose is to help Protestant Christians in general––and Anglicans in particular––to reconsider present orthopraxical silences and laxities in reproductive ethics in light of wisdom gleaned from prior conciliar and cultural precedent.
Russell Galloway (Mon,) studied this question.