Seeking to Save the World: American Evangelicals and Global Population Control

Long before the Religious Right’s reactions to Roe v. Wade, American evangelicals debated birth control and family planning. Domestic “family values” played a part, but equally important were international concerns.  This paper explores debates over human overpopulation that shaped American evangelicals’ global outlook and engagement with U.S. foreign policy.

        Fears of a "population explosion" were widespread in the 1950s through 1970s among policy experts and popular audiences.  By 1960, leading evangelical Billy Graham went on record supporting birth control as one answer to the “terrifying and tragic” problem of overpopulation, but evangelical voices were rarely uniform and they approached the issue from various perspectives.

        Some worried skyrocketing population growth outpaced the abilities of missionaries to evangelize the entire world. Others incorporated alarmists’ fears of increased famines and natural disasters into an apocalypticism that saw these as signs of the end times.  For most evangelicals, however, the issue sparked other concerns.  As avid cold warriors, American evangelicals grasped that population growth was centered among the non-aligned countries, and foreign aid policies would prove pivotal in maintaining political alliances and the upper hand over the Soviet Union. This was not only abstract policy for American evangelicals. Evangelicals now made up the bulk of missionary doctors facing family planning questions in clinics overseas. By the 1970s, new evangelical NGOs grew to become major players in relief and development and debated how government mandated family planning policies would be received by program participants and perceived by donors. A few American evangelicals turned the question on themselves, blaming hunger less on global overpopulation and more on western over-consumption.  In 1974, more American evangelicals were discussing world hunger than Roe v. Wade, and an issue like overpopulation illustrates how the evangelical diversity and global engagement complicates the story most often recounted by historians.