(SIECUS), an organization founded in 1964, achieved notoriety in the late 1960s, when it faced accusations that it subverted traditional marriage and family by promulgating a permissive “new morality” to American youth. Conservative Christians were, by far, the largest demographic in this loosely organized movement that targeted public school sexuality education programs. Conservative Christians, however, were not the only Christians in this debate. Quite a few SEICUS members, as well as other sexuality education advocates, also saw their educational programs as a needed moral intervention into social trends that imperiled marriages and families.
This paper reappraises the moral vision mobilized by pro-sexuality education advocates, and it shows the significant overlap between SIECUS members and reformers based in Christian denominations. Many liberal reformers, despite being characterized as godless humanists, gave important religious weight to educating young people about sex, and they were also concerned about trends that threatened to destabilized vulnerable marriages and families. Their responses to these trends looked much different than those of their conservative co-religionists. Rather than moral absolutes, they sought to teach children and young adults about moral agency—an approach that highly valued individual decision-making, open dialogue, and a non-judgmental framework.
Examining SEICUS from this site of overlap with religious liberalism uncovers important theological dimensions of its educational program and illuminates the liberal intervention in the institution of marriage. This intervention was couched in a language of moral freedom, which appeared to offer individuals a spectrum of moral choices. A careful look at this discourse, however, reveals the normative assumptions upon which notions of choice rested. Delivered from the constraints of legalism, sexuality reformers optimistically believed, human nature would gravitate, almost innately, toward heterosexual pairs. The end of moral agency, they believed, was healthy marriage.