One of our ministers, Rev. John A. Taylor, who served us from 1964-1968, delivered what he called “pulpit addresses” not only to us on Sunday mornings but to the wider Champaign-Urbana community through radio programs on WILL. 

In January 1965, he called a set of five of those addresses “The Heretic’s Life of Controversy,” and described the underlying attitude of that series as heresy being not a bane but a blessing for our civilization. Heresy, he said, is not limited to religion, but extends into any activity or occupation where some individuals are at odds with the established principles of that field of knowledge and behavior. According to Rev. Taylor, heretics are always engaged in continuing controversies, and largely responsible for moving culture ahead.

Frankly, I have found Rev. Taylor’s work to be a challenging read. Some writers put you in a pot of water and slowly turn up the heat, giving you a chance to get acclimated before the boil gets to roiling. Not John Taylor. Two sentences in and we are dealing with heresy upside-down and within two paragraphs, it is lodged sideways into science, art, and business. 

For this series of sermons/lectures, Rev. Taylor decided that he would approach both heresy and controversy though a review of the five ages of man, which he decided would be: Birth, Growing Up, Marriage, Growing Old, and Death. Rather than ask you to slog through my interpretation of his entire five-part series at once, I’ll just give you a bite at a time. This week, I’m writing about his first stage: Birth.

After acknowledging that there wasn’t anything even a heretic could do about the basics of birth, Rev. Taylor spoke about population control. In 1965, over-population was, he said, “the greatest social problem of our age.” He saw uncontrolled population growth leading inevitably to war. “No nation is going to starve while another lives with ample food without exhausting every possible form of persuasion from calculated reason to the most unreasonable violence.” He preferred birth control over war, but he wasn’t sanguine about convincing enough people that it was in their interests. 

He next introduced the four-step “Taylor’s Radical Plan for Population Control.” Step One: forget about foreign aid policies appealing to man’s better nature. Go for “crass materialism” and “redemptive greed.” Reward people for having fewer children. Step Two: “abolish the myth of happy families and unhappy bachelors.” Large families would be a “social and psychological disgrace.” Step Three: delay marriage, thereby allowing nature to control the number of children a couple might have. He would have liked to “return to an era when young marriages were considered socially improper.” Step Four: make Americans do it, too. He said there was a “kind of sickening snobbery” that told families in Africa, India, or Latin America to limit their number of children but allowed Americans to exhibit a “failure of conscience” by producing “an excessive number of children.” 

I got a bright-white wake-up call at this point: Rev Taylor blamed the over-population problem on women. I’m just going to quote the whole thing. “To this I must add that women play THE vital part. Several months ago, John Fischer, editor of Harper’s Magaziner, wrote an outstanding editorial in which he said, (to glibly summarize) ‘If women really want to do something for peace, they can put their Ban The Bomb signs away and start marching in picket lines carrying placards reading No More Than Two Children Per Family.’ I couldn’t agree more. The population problem will approach a solution when the well-clothed, fed, and housed American mother recognizes that the universal problem is hers in particular.” As a side note: Did you know that we didn’t have full recognition of marital rape as a crime until 1993?

Moving on … Rev. Taylor dipped into religion next, saying that maybe the Roman Catholics influenced Americans to have a bunch of babies but he also said that they had “an ecclesiastical excuse for their large families.” Then we’re off on an explication of how the history and practice of birth control is tangled up with our “perverted feeling that there is something nasty, perhaps even unnatural, about sex.” He runs us through the “demigods of celibacy and chastity,” “taboos .. and God as a sadistic despot and man as a masochistic fool,” “puritanism,” “Comstock Laws,” and “Margaret Sanger,” before coming out the other end with “birth control [as] an achievement of moral and intellectual responsibility, an ascent of the mind of man.”