CHAPTER 2 CENSORSHIP OF LITERATURE AND POPULAR ENTERTAINMENTS

THE BIRTH CONTROL CONFLICT THAT burgeoned in the 1920s intensified dissent in both religious and political realms over the exchange and distribution of sexual knowledge. Broad disagreements about the meaning of obscenity lingered into the next decade, only to erupt over materials quite distinct from contraceptive information. And the fault lines deepened: just as liberal Protestants had shifted to a more open position on birth control during the 1920s, the 1930s witnessed their gradual but steady retreat from censorship-minded public scrutiny of entertainment. This period witnessed the visible emergence of religiously rooted defenses of free expression, however cautious—as well as new disagreements among religious people regarding what should be considered obscene and whether government or religious authorities were in the best position to regulate obscenity. Mainline Protestants who might once have endorsed official or unofficial censorship became more skeptical of state efforts to censor art and literature, even as some religious people were growing more tolerant of the spiritualization of sex that had colored the FCC statement on home and marriage. Many of their fellow Christians demurred, however, and grew more adamant about the need to protect virtuous citizens from the ill effects of sexually suggestive ideas and graphic depictions of passion.

The 1930s witnessed a new openness regarding sex in literature, accompanied by the proliferation of forms of popular entertainment often seen as provocative and trafficking in obscenity. These prompted new efforts at censorship by religious people, as local citizens and church people across the nation joined efforts to stamp out erotic matter that might boost immorality among youth. But this era of censorship was notable for several new developments: Catholics supplanted Protestants as the most visible and vocal advocates of censorship in the United States, some liberal Protestants became more openly skeptical of censorship, and censorship created opportunities for collaboration, or at least alignment of interests, between Catholics and traditionalist Protestants.

Writer and artist D. H. Lawrence. BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.

A dispute over one particular novel illustrated the swiftly changing fate of censorship in this period and signaled a new era in which censorship was more controversial than it had been under Comstock. On November 25, 1929, a Massachusetts district court convicted a local Cambridge bookseller, John DeLacey, and his store clerk for selling obscene literature in the form of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence’s sexually explicit novel about an adulterous love affair. DeLacey’s Dunster House Bookshop in Harvard Square was a favorite of college professors, cultured locals, and erudite readers who lived in or visited the area. Still, the shop had not stocked Lawrence’s book; DeLacey had only acquired it at the insistence of a customer who turned out to be John Tait Slaymaker, an agent of the anti-vice group known as the New England Watch and Ward Society. Despite the whiff of entrapment, money had exchanged hands in the procurement of an obscene book; local laws mandated a guilty verdict. Judge Arthur P. Stone issued an eight-hundred-dollar fine and a severe sentence to DeLacey—four months’ imprisonment in the House of Correction—along with a two-hundred-dollar fine and two-week sentence to the clerk.¹

Edged with the titillating forbiddenness long associated with Lawrence, the author of some twenty prior volumes that included the previously censored Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, the story was ripe to make headlines in major newspapers across the country. Slaymaker, using only part of his name to avoid recognition and persisting even after DeLacey noted that he did not carry the work in his shop “because of its nature,” had demanded that the bookseller order the novel for him from a third party. Newspapers splashily exhibited the spectacle of a bookish college supplier selling smut to an anti-vice crusader posing as a scholar, one who must have felt grimly triumphant as he returned to Watch and Ward headquarters bearing—finally!—his prize. The Middlesex County district attorney, Robert T. Bushnell, condemned the deceptive tactics of the Watch and Ward Society, whose crusading in Boston dated back to 1878. Remarkably, although he was the prosecutor handling the case and would have been the right person to denounce DeLacey, Bushnell warned instead that to “induce and procure the commission of a crime,” as agent Slaymaker did here, was to engage in “criminal conspiracy.”² Nonetheless, the law demanded that he prosecute DeLacey, and he did.

The court ultimately revoked DeLacey’s jail sentence altogether, lest the “brazen piece of effrontery” committed by Slaymaker vindicate the solicitation of a crime. Although censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover endured, the stunt at Dunster House Bookshop damaged the anti-vice cause’s credibility and reaped extensive public criticism. After Bushnell’s denunciations of the Watch and Ward Society’s methods, three members of the society resigned, and the board of directors initiated an impartial investigation to see if any “illegal, improper, or unethical” methods were employed in the Dunster House Bookshop case. Vigilante justice, which in the view of the Watch and Ward Society’s many supporters served the cause well, proved deeply embarrassing to other Cantabrigians, who found its methods unseemly and disliked the national spotlight such belligerent acts shone upon their fair city.³ Ripening beneath these disagreements over tactics, though, was a more fundamental dispute about whether it was appropriate to target literature for censorship in the first place.

The Dunster House Bookshop made Boston “the butt of national ridicule”—“I am sick and tired of having Boston and Massachusetts represented as backwoods sections populated by yokels,” said District Attorney Bushnell after DeLacey was prosecuted. It also deeply damaged the standing of the Watch and Ward. Whether out of conviction or desperation, in 1930 the society invited the Roman Catholic leader of Boston, William Henry Cardinal O’Connell, to serve as an honorary vice president of the organization. The attempt by a Protestant organization to collaborate publicly with a Catholic leader known to warn his own flocks against consorting with Protestants was surprising, to say the least, although the society had cooperated with Catholic law enforcement officials in the past. The cardinal, well aware of the stain on the Watch and Ward’s reputation, declined.⁴

Catholic leaders and some conservative Protestants began to shift their efforts beyond strict censorship laws to internal ecclesiastical modes of controlling the literary consumption of their flocks. The secretary of the Massachusetts Bible Society did join a campaign for reforming the state’s obscenity laws, but the leadership of Boston’s Catholic diocese conceded that censorship laws typically provoked “a resentful counterattack waged with the weapons of ridicule and satire which largely nullify the good of the prohibition” and that “civil law is not a cure-all adapted to remedy this evil.” Shifts in tactics by no means signaled a change in values, but this famous trial foreshadowed later modifications in efforts to uphold decency. By the end of the 1930s, the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Committee reported that Boston’s Watch and Ward Society had wholly ceased its efforts at prosecuting obscene books and had “completely withdrawn from the field.”⁵

The Dunster House Bookshop case augured new fault lines regarding censorship and the religious control of literature containing sexual content. The deep conflicts that were developing in Anglo-American religious thinking about sex intensified those fault lines, and these conflicts were on vivid display in the wider religious debate over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As censorship lost credibility in many prominent circles, conservative critics continued to blast works and writers they deemed blasphemous. Analyzing Lawrence’s intentions for that novel along with its critical reception during the 1930s provides a way to link the political and religious conflicts that worked together to deepen the fracture in American Christian thinking about sex.

While popular audiences would later think of Lawrence as little more than an author of titillating smut, he was celebrated by many nonconformists and literature critics in his own day, even as censors and traditionalist Christians viewed him with disgust. Denunciations of Lawrence, including scorn for his literary talent, were always deeply inflected with moral pronouncements about his subject matter and his determination to write about sex in the frankest language imaginable, defiantly using words many considered vulgar. Such words appeared in his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which roused the most polarized reactions and was the subject of the fiercest controversies. The religious debates regarding that novel and Lawrence more generally reveal the deeper conflicts in Anglo-American religious thinking about sex that would roil obscenity debates for years to come.

DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE (1885–1930) WAS born to a miner father and former schoolteacher mother in a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire, England, the fourth of five children. A sickly child who was an avid reader and painter, he was part of a conventional family, and his upbringing was traditional and rigorously religious. His mother made sure that he and his siblings regularly attended Sunday school and services at Eastwood’s Congregational Chapel, known for its stern morality.⁶ As an adult, Lawrence would criticize the prudery of Reformed Protestantism, yet he ardently praised other facets of the tradition, notably its music. Lawrence began writing poetry and fiction while working as a schoolteacher in London, publishing his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1910.

In 1912, at the age of twenty-six, Lawrence fell in love with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his former college professors. She left her husband and children for him, and they married and remained together for the rest of Lawrence’s life. Frieda was avant-garde in her views about sex and marriage; she had had several lovers during her first marriage, including the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, a follower of Sigmund Freud who had published notable work on sexuality. Already a devoted fan of Nietzsche, Frieda drank in Freud’s ideas as reinterpreted through Gross, focusing on one in particular: “the act of sexual love was a sacrament and if the sacrament were freely given and taken the ills of society would disappear.”⁷ Frieda carried this view with her into her relationship with Lawrence and also continued to have numerous extramarital liaisons while with him; this understanding of the sacramentality of sex would emerge repeatedly in Lawrence’s writing. Lawrence cherished the romantic themes of sexual passion, raw physicality, and the wondrous beauty of human bodies in his writing, as well as his life, and for him, they had everything to do with true religion: sex itself was potentially a sacred experience.

It was during his early married years that Lawrence’s literary work first encountered controversy, when his 1915 novel The Rainbow was labeled obscene. It contained scenes of lesbianism, nakedness, and exuberant sex, all depicted in graphic detail. After receiving a complaint, a London court ordered the publisher, Methuen and Company, to hand over all unsold copies of the book; the publisher then demanded that Lawrence return his advance of three hundred pounds. Lawrence’s New York agent confirmed that with its explicit scenes the book could not be published in the United States.⁸ Women in Love, a subsequent novel first written in 1913 and thoroughly revised in 1917, was rejected by several publishers for fear of a similar reaction before eventually finding acceptance—and courting much controversy among those desiring purity in print. Even friends and former disciples sometimes turned against Lawrence, as when one described Women in Love as “sub-human and bestial.” There were other criticisms of Lawrence’s work: he often wrote from personal experience, and associates who recognized themselves as characters in a Lawrence story sometimes threatened libel suits. Still others found his writing far too earnest, stilted, pompous, and preachy to be taken seriously.⁹

But to Lawrence, the most dangerous critics were the censors, and he refused to concede any ground. His work was in no way smut, he argued, for it focused not on the dirtiness but the very holiness of sex. “Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions,” Lawrence urged in the foreword to Women in Love. “Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us.” Lawrence was here writing directly against the American censors who were complaining of his “Eroticism,” a charge that greatly puzzled him. “Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty ‘amours,’ or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?” But the trouble seemed to be not that Lawrence wrote of the spiritualization of sex, but that he wrote of sex at all. That subject landed his works in the lap of the law, over and over again.¹⁰

In 1925, living in Italy, Lawrence wrote his last significant novel and the one that would become the most infamous of all, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He also painted a number of oils and watercolors featuring naked bodies (many of them depictions of himself and several of Frieda), phallic imagery, and love and eroticism as sacred themes. Both on the page and on canvas, he conveyed very similar messages about sex, love, and life that centered on liberation from social norms and full surrender to the wise god of experience. His erotically charged painting Contadini (1928), a sensuous depiction of a naked Italian peasant man, was representative of both his work and its reception: Lawrence was photographed painting it, he mentioned it in several letters to friends, and a later biography pointed out that the figure’s “dark head and nude torso link him to Mellors,” Lady Chatterley’s fictional lover.¹¹ When a London art gallery exhibited a good number of these paintings in 1929, reportedly attracting some twelve thousand spectators, critics complained of lasciviousness and indecency, until Scotland Yard detectives seized thirteen of the “filthy productions” for obscenity. Lawrence could only take what a free speech activist called “a poet’s revenge,” publishing a derisive rhythmic poem depicting the “lily-white” officers fainting “in virgin outrage” upon beholding one of Lawrence’s nudes. The “hypocrisy and poltroonery” of these “craven, cowardly” officials, he wrote to the gallery owner, were contemptible.¹²

Struggling with tuberculosis and profoundly frustrated with the relentless censorship of his writings and his paintings, Lawrence entered a sanatorium in Vence, France, in early 1930—even as, across the Atlantic Ocean, John DeLacey awaited his final fate in the Dunster House Bookshop case. On March 2, the very day after his medical discharge, Lawrence died. Photographs accompanying the obituaries showed a worn-looking man who appeared far older than his forty-four years. His admirers would argue that Lawrence died brokenhearted though unwavering, a man who never tried to hide his loathing and contempt for those “grey Puritans” and prudish Victorians who pursued his work with salacious abandon in order to ban it for the ostensible sake of purity. The Dunster House Bookshop case was noteworthy enough to be mentioned in an appreciative New York Times obituary appearing two days after Lawrence died.¹³

GRASPING THE FORCES ARRAYED AGAINST Lawrence requires understanding the history of literary censorship in Europe and America. Legal restrictions on obscene literature long embodied a Christian consensus regarding sexuality and sexual morality, reflecting the belief that to read about sexual sin was profoundly dangerous. Leaders of the Catholic Church kept a list of publications they deemed objectionable for sexual or heretical content, called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. An early list of prohibited works appeared in the ninth century, and the first modern edition appeared in 1559. Later editions grew longer and longer, as more books appeared that church leaders found offensive, either for potentially inciting lust or for challenging church doctrine.

In France and England, anti-vice laws in the nineteenth century had generated obscenity statutes that were both more specific and more expansive than their antecedents. Between 1821 and 1892, government officials in France prosecuted twenty-six literary works, from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal to Marguerite Eymery’s Monsieur Vénus and erotic poetry by Paul Verlaine and Guy de Maupassant. In England, authors and artists fought battles of their own with officials and citizens seeking propriety and the preservation of national character. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 gave courts the power to seize and destroy materials deemed obscene; sale of such corrupting materials was a criminal offense, and offenders were regularly punished for over a century. British officials famously condemned Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, one judge at trial noting, “These unnatural offences between women which are the subject of this book involve acts which between men would be a criminal offence, and involve acts of the most horrible, unnatural and disgusting obscenity.”¹⁴

In America literary censorship arrived on the Mayflower, with Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, inflicting punishment in 1628 on a rebellious colonist found to have “composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness.”¹⁵ The first literary censorship trial in the United States took place in Massachusetts in 1821, over the printing of John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure—more popularly known as Fanny Hill—a case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Officials fought against writers such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville because of the ideas expressed in their writings, and sometimes because of their behavior as well. And we have already seen the ways in which American censors such as Comstock and the array of vice societies that burgeoned and flourished during the Progressive Era pursued not only novelists but also freethinking activists like Margaret Sanger, whom they saw as jeopardizing virtue and the status quo.

The religious underpinnings of literary censorship were personified in Comstock, for years the king of the nation’s Christian censors. He argued that lewd writing would breed lust, which “defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul.” Obscene literature had enormous power, overwhelming and overtaking even the best of people. Ordinary readers of such material, he warned, inexorably became “rakes and libertines,” polluting their families, abandoning their children, and desecrating their homes. But Comstock reserved his greatest ire for those “so-called ‘liberals’ of this land” who fought the censors and turned “monsters” and “devil-men” into martyrs for free speech. This “mawkish sympathy for criminals” left no room for the true victims: “the youth cursed for life, the wife widowed, the child orphaned, the family disgraced, pauperized, and destroyed.” To Comstock and those who shared his way of thinking, obscenity ruthlessly ensnared all who touch it, wreaked familial disorder, and devastated the broader social world; the vile sin had to be eliminated at its very source.¹⁶

During this period, tensions were growing between modernist literature and traditions of literary censorship. James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen endured charges of being an “obscene” book upon its 1919 publication, as John S. Sumner, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice since Anthony Comstock’s 1915 death, attacked its sexual content and prosecuted its publisher and editor. In 1920, editors of a well-known American avant-garde periodical, The Little Review, were hit with obscenity charges for printing work by James Joyce—excerpts from what would eventually become Ulysses. Likewise, Theodore Dreiser’s novels Sister Carrie (1900), The Genius (1915), and An American Tragedy (1925) also enraged the censors for their supposedly immoral content. In a letter to a university student writing his master’s thesis on literary censorship, Dreiser wrote starkly, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being ignored or misrepresented by a kept Press.” In that environment, it took “real courage” to write truthfully of sex.¹⁷

Those who supported censorship viewed the enforcement of purity and decency as a crucial way of maintaining order, or of restoring it during a time of change. Awash in societal changes brought about by immigration, urbanization, modernization, and feminism, as well as the economic uncertainties wrought by the stock market crash of 1929, Americans might well seek stability in traditional social norms and reassurance that younger generations would uphold them. The minds of youth, still in formation, needed protection from corrupt literature intended to arouse sensation and encourage debauchery, lest they be overtaken by lust and cease to be functioning citizens contributing to a well-ordered society. The flesh could overtake the spirit, a warning that ran deep in the Christian tradition starting with the apostle Paul’s own inner warfare; stringent disciplinary regimens had long been advocated as barriers to temptation. Perhaps this was a low view of human nature, rendering persons helplessly impressionable and even imprisonable by the power of print, but literature could also uplift, and the wholesome variety might well abet virtue. Even as many early-twentieth-century writers and readers were chafing against longstanding rules of propriety in literature, then, others held to them as pillars of moral constancy and social control. Little wonder, in such a milieu, that the literary censorship of sex became a battleground.¹⁸

The controversy over Joyce’s writing that began in 1920 did not end quickly. Joyce’s work was the subject of trials in the United States that stretched to 1934, when a federal appeals court upheld lower court judge John M. Woolsey’s earlier decision allowing for publication. It was a euphoric moment already, as Prohibition—the one against alcohol sales—had just been rescinded in December 1933; that, along with the pro-Ulysses decision, could seem to augur a more lenient age. In his foreword to the first legally published edition of Ulysses, the civil liberties lawyer Morris Ernst wrote jubilantly about the victory over the “prudery-ridden” censors who “have fought to emasculate literature…, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.” The outcome for Ulysses, Ernst continued, was “a turning point” and “a body-blow for the censors.” Writers could eschew euphemisms and “describe basic human functions without fear of the law.”¹⁹ But regardless of the Ulysses decision, literary censorship continued, with books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath attacked for supposed indecency countless times over many decades, and the government’s ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in effect until 1959.

MOST AMERICANS, OF COURSE, DID not have access to Lawrence’s infamous love story in its early days, and the vast majority in the 1930s likely accepted the notion that it was a dirty, immoral book. Debates over popular entertainment hit more people directly, and attempts to censor various products marketed for popular amusement garnered significant disagreement. Motion pictures, long a target of Christian censors like New York’s Canon William Chase and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), came in for years of more highly regulated scrutiny, for instance. Hollywood already had a reputation for debauchery, partly because of the publicity given to the romances and sexual escapades of its movie stars, and a series of scandals that shocked audiences and attracted reproach to the film industry drove industry representatives in 1921 to hire a moral overseer who would ensure decency in motion pictures. They selected Will Hays, a Presbyterian elder and postmaster general of the United States, and made him president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which they established in 1922. Industry leaders were trying to avoid censorship and increase mass audiences, and they hoped that the MPPDA would stem the rising protests against sensationalism and ostensibly lewd content in films.

One of Hays’s first actions was to invite two thousand representatives of influential religious, educational, and civic organizations to a conference in New York, offering them a voice in evaluating film content and advising industry representatives. He forged a Committee on Public Relations to serve as a liaison between the MPPDA and the public, informing the Hays office of its objections to any films and promoting approved films to the public so that filmmakers would be incentivized to make more. Religious groups were part of that committee from the outset, including the National Catholic Welfare Conference and several other Catholic organizations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis along with other Jewish groups, and the FCC as well as other Protestant associations. Hays’s office worked steadily with Hollywood producers, eventually producing a list known as the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls”—situations and topics that films should avoid altogether or treat with special care, most having to do with sex.

Hollywood moguls Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, and Fred Niblo, with Catholic clerics, 1929. JOHN KOBAL FOUNDATION/GETTY IMAGES.

Some Christian censors were not immediately mollified by the work of Hays and the MPPDA. For instance, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which had focused attention on the dangers of motion pictures as early as 1906, shortly after the five-cent theaters opened, continued to target movies into the 1930s, on the grounds that their power over children and youth was formidable and that viewers could become “addicted” to film no less than to alcohol. Seeing Hays’s office as ineffectual, a group of churchmen, women’s groups, and business leaders calling itself the Federal Motion Picture Council sought government regulation of the movie industry. In 1930, the WCTU responded to a new wave of so-called sex pictures by leading a host of Christian organizations—churches, missionary societies, women’s clubs, and more—in pressuring Congress to enact a strong censorship law and save the nation from the movies’ dangers.²⁰ Such legislation was exactly what the MPPDA had repeatedly attempted to forestall.

The Catholic publisher of the film industry’s leading trade paper, the Motion Picture Herald, was thinking deeply during this time about how to promote movies that offered virtuous entertainment to families and that reflected, or at least did not undermine, the values of the Catholic Church. Like Hays, Michael Quigley disliked the idea of movies being subject to federal oversight, but he believed a suitable instrument could be created from a code of decency whose rules were clearly articulated and would be compulsory for all filmmakers—a more formalized tool than the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls.” He worked on devising such a code with a couple of Catholic priests, including one who was also a playwright and dramatist, and he consulted with Hays along with members of the industry. The document was decidedly Christian in orientation, its details leaving “no room to doubt,” as one observer put it, “that the agenda was primarily concerned with sins of the flesh.”²¹ Adopted in 1930 as the Motion Picture Production Code, this system of self-regulation was intended to preempt federal censorship by producing salubrious movies for mass entertainment. Implemented correctly, the code itself would regulate the content and distribution of all Hollywood films concerning issues such as profanity, crime, and sexuality. The Hays office did not emphasize the Catholic origins of the code; it was better, in that climate, to describe it merely as reflective of broadly American moral values.

The code’s section on sex was considerably longer than those treating murder, religion, and other topics, and it began by insisting, “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing.” Specific instructions covered such subjects as adultery (“sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated or justified, or presented attractively”), passionate love scenes (“should not be introduced except where they are definitely essential to the plot… passion should be treated in such manner as not to stimulate the lower and baser emotions”), rape (“never the proper subject for comedy”), and interracial sex (“sex relationship between the white and black races is forbidden”).²² Other sections regulated the showing of bedrooms, dances, vulgarity, and more. By accepting the code, motion picture producers hoped to persuade critics that they could successfully regulate themselves on sexual and other moral content.

But apprehension about the sincerity of studios’ dedication to clean entertainment continued to grow, particularly as the Depression depressed movie ticket sales and racked up enormous losses that Hollywood filmmakers determined could only be reversed by more exciting, racy movies. Between 1930 and 1934, films were more sexually explicit than they had ever been, and the Hays Code was largely ignored. Henry James Forman’s best-selling book, Our Movie Made Children, published in 1933, alarmed American audiences by describing the moral damage wreaked on children by these decadent films, a message taken up and spread by Christian writers in numerous periodicals and other vehicles that blamed Hollywood for the sexual promiscuity of American youth. That same year, the president of the National Council of Catholic Women warned that Hollywood was creating films that were “a menace to the physical, mental and moral welfare of the nation.”²³ In this climate, many felt that external pressure on the studios would be needed to hold the line on wholesome film.

Protestants were apprehensive too: even those who were gradually liberalizing, though uncomfortable with the tactics of anti-vice societies, wanted wholesome amusements and knew some regulation was necessary. In late 1931, for instance, the Christian Century pontificated against an editorial in the Nation that excoriated censorship of literature and film alike. Against the Nation’s advocacy of “permitting grown-ups to decide for themselves what books they shall buy, what plays they shall see, and even what pictures of undressed females they shall look upon,” Century editors contemptuously scorned “the glib rationalizing of liberals of this kind—found in large numbers in the Manhattan sector.” While agreeing that citizens should be “freed from capricious and tyrannical state control,” it was obvious to the writers that there was a need for “some community control over the commercial activities of the individual,” lest the United States become a nation of “smut.” The occasional overreach by censoring authorities was simply “the price that the community must occasionally pay” for decency.²⁴

In 1934, US Catholic bishops established the Legion of Decency as a mechanism for mobilizing the faithful and other concerned Americans to work for decency in movies, urging adherents to stay away from films deemed dangerous to their moral well-being. Within a few months of its founding, Catholic leaders declared that over two million Americans had signed the Legion’s pledge.²⁵ Advocating consumer boycotts rather than federal legislation, the Legion soon eclipsed the efforts of the WCTU, which acknowledged the Catholic organization’s good results, noted the cooperation of Protestant organizations in its efforts, but continued to push for federal legislation. The film industry, sensing that self-regulation under the Legion was highly preferable to a federal law, began more intently to work on self-censorship.

That year, a prominent Catholic and public relations officer in the Hays office named Joseph Breen was appointed head of the Production Code Administration, serving as the chief enforcer of the Hays Code. Under Breen’s direction, officials worked to cut suggestive lines from scripts and change plotlines when they were deemed too immoral. After the censors read the script for the film Casablanca, for instance, filmmakers made adjustments to lessen the suggestion of adulterous sex in the affair between Rick and Ilsa, though it remained strongly implied. A few years later, because of the censors, the strong sexuality of A Streetcar Named Desire was toned down, and a full four minutes of scenes were deleted before its release. The censors also banned a French film version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (L’Amant de lady Chatterley).²⁶

Catholic concern about the cinema’s influence was so high, in fact, that in 1936 Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical letter on the topic, Vigilanti Cura, that praised the Legion of Decency while condemning the “lamentable progress—magni passus extra viam—of the motion picture art and industry in the portrayal of sin and vice.” Vatican leaders had already twice addressed delegations of the International Motion Picture Congress, the second held in Rome earlier in 1936. But the subject was of “such paramount importance” and the hazards of “pernicious and deadly” effects on morality so grave that the leadership deemed it necessary to address it in this encyclical. The document reproached film industry leaders for not carrying out their pledge to safeguard “the moral welfare of the patrons of the cinema.” It exhorted bishops across the world to press Catholics in the motion picture industry to work for virtuous entertainment, as part of the larger program of Catholic Action (the organized effort mobilizing lay Catholics for church work as well as broad social reform and spiritual improvement). Bishops were also to obtain an annual pledge from members of their dioceses similar to the one developed by the Legion of Decency, promising to abstain from motion pictures “offensive to truth and to Christian morality.” Moreover, the pope’s encyclical called for a bishop-led national office in every country to review all films and categorize them as “permitted to all,” “permitted with reservations,” and “harmful or positively bad.” Such a system, though expensive, would protect the morality of Catholics and non-Catholics alike and help ensure that films in all nations would promote “the highest ideals and the truest standards of life.”²⁷

Film censor Joseph Breen of the Hays office inspects the garb of two actresses to ensure their harem costumes are fit for the moviegoing public. BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.

As these organizations found success in their efforts to suppress sexual content not only for believing Catholics but for the whole of American audiences, resistance arose. As early as 1936, the Nation editorial board warned readers of the insidious Catholic influence over the motion picture industry, noting that the Hays Code had been written by the Catholic hierarchy and that Breen had now been given “dictatorial powers” to demand revisions in movie scripts even before production began. According to the editors, the MPPDA and the Legion of Decency were in cahoots, and the Catholic Church was all but running Hollywood. Given that seventy million Americans attended the cinema each week, while there were only around twenty million Catholics in the nation, non-Catholic moviegoers surely had the right to decide “whether they wish to have their films censored in advance by the Catholic church.”²⁹

The syndicated columnist Drew Pearson later gave the same treatment to NODL, denouncing the Catholic “zealots” who “have become unofficial censors of American magazines” with far too much public power. Pearson was especially incensed at the influence NODL had on US postmaster general Frank Walker, a Catholic. Similar complaints echoed in the liberal Protestant magazine the Christian Century, where articles condemned Catholic censorship efforts as encroachments on civil authority and American liberty. An article titled “Vigilante Censorship Is Spreading” denounced the church’s “cultural Ku Kluxism,” “terroristic censorship,” and “cultural storm troopers,” while the magazine’s editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, called the church hierarchy “the counterpart (or should I say, the prototype?) of the fascist or nazist or communist ‘party’ with the dictator at its head.” Edmund Wilson, criticizing Catholics’ role in suppressing his Memoirs of Hecate County and their more general “efforts to interfere with free speech and free press,” likened the church to the Stalinist comintern. The visibility of Catholics as censors prompted liberal Protestants to retreat from advocating moral monitoring of popular entertainments. It was a protracted sequel to the war over free speech and Catholic power that played out in the birth control controversy of the 1920s.³⁰

Just as liberal Protestants had loosened their stand on birth control during the previous decade, in the 1930s they shifted away from supporting censorship of mass entertainment. Their aversion to the methods of both the Legion of Decency on film and the NODL on literature evinced a shift in liberal Protestant sensibilities whereby, as one historian puts it, “moral criticism of public entertainment went from being a duty of the middle-class to evidence of its outmoded prudishness.”³¹ As Catholic leaders in essence took over the role of public moralists, those same Protestants who had as late as 1931 scorned the “glib rationalizing” of the anti-censors more or less joined their cause.

With Protestant-Catholic tensions so rife in the nation, it was early for conservative Protestants and Catholics to collaborate significantly on issues of mutual concern. But censorship was one area where they could and occasionally did. One contemporary writer, R. L. Duffus, intrigued by the “patchwork of incongruities” that had come to characterize contemporary Boston, placed censorship cases such as the Dunster House Bookshop incident at the center of his perceptive analysis of the emergent religious realignments that were rapidly transforming the “little old Boston” of the Boston Brahmins, those cultured descendants of the commonwealth’s founders. Once a largely Protestant city, Boston’s majority was now Irish Catholic. Differences of both opinion and temperament divided these English and Irish settlers, Duffus noted, but “in respect to their opinions about domestic morals the two stocks and the two religions are not far apart.” Likening Cardinal O’Connell and A. Z. Conrad—Boston’s Catholic archbishop and the long-serving pastor of the Park Street Congregational Church just off Boston Common—Duffus noted that their different theologies did not prevent concurring attitudes toward “questionable” literature. Catholic and conservative Protestant cooperation was nowhere better evidenced, according to Duffus, than in the New England Watch and Ward Society, a “perfect example of the catholicity—with a small ‘c’—of Boston’s Puritanism.” Although Protestant in origin and administrative leadership, it was an important vehicle where “Catholic and Protestant joined hands” in unity against immoral books. Catholics and conservative Protestants had discovered their agreement about “modern influence[s]” that, to their minds, imperiled the traditional family; their collaborations were just beginning.³²

In the wake of the Dunster House Bookshop case, the religious politics of censorship shifted away from federal law toward attempts by religious authorities to oversee and regulate the bounds of propriety. Traditionalist Protestants and Catholics alike took steps to impose order over popular literature and mass entertainments, and the efforts of groups like the Legion and NODL, like those of Watch and Ward, generated critique from those who did not fully share their worldview or their sense of what was appropriate to read or see on the movie screen. The ideas about religion and sex that D. H. Lawrence conveyed in his novels reaped divided reactions even when the books were out of court and the national spotlight, serving as a bellwether of much that was to come.

LAWRENCE WAS A PARAGON OF unconventional, nonconformist thinking, and his writing represented a threat to the nation’s Christian consensus on sex. It was not simply that he advocated for a wholly different morality than that of Christian chastity, traditional marriage, and the family; the larger threat lay in the fact that he presented his own vision of love and sex as a genuinely religious one, a compelling and authentic alternative to traditional Christianity. His work, influenced by radical thinkers such as the sexually daring writer Edward Carpenter, pioneered a fusion of sexual candor and religious ecstasy that would help shape how future sexual revolutionaries, including some Christians, thought about sex and sexual morality. While that wider impact was not yet evident in the 1930s, the substance of his writing, most especially Lady Chatterley’s Lover, helps explain how he drove a wedge into the Christian agreement about sexual virtue.

“I am a passionately religious man,” wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Lawrence in 1914, “and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.”³³ Whatever Lawrence may have meant by the word—and critics have long wrestled with his intention—neither he nor his works were “religious” in any conventional, institutional sense. The author was a seeker of physical and spiritual vitality, a lover of spontaneity and inward feeling as well as fleshly embodiment, a romantic who opposed the aridity of the rational intellect to dream of sacred creativity. He wrote elsewhere of poetry as “religious in its movement,” of “the essential feeling in all art” as religious, and of cosmic reverence as driving all of life.³⁴ As a later observer would note, in order to achieve his own religious quest and escape from “dead beliefs and ideas,” Lawrence had to “break free of any religious life-experience that was regimented by legalistic and moralistic religious tradition.”³⁵ A “passionately religious man” he was, by his own definition, but even so, his brand of religiousness was sure to alienate if not incense those committed to a more traditional piety.

In an eloquent and highly personal essay published in 1928, “Hymns in a Man’s Life,” Lawrence wrote tenderly of the Protestant hymns he learned as a child, acknowledging that “they mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.” However “banal” they might be in structure and substance, he urged readers to imagine the wonder they had excited in him as a child and that remained with him still. Indeed, Lawrence meditated, such wonder was surely “the most precious element in life,” one that alone could stave off the boredom and deadness of modern civilization; the “sense of wonder” was “the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea,” “our sixth sense,” “the natural religious sense.” Science, too, wrote Lawrence, partook in this selfsame wonder and was in this sense “as religious as any religion,” at least until it became stuffily didactic (“as dead and boring as dogmatic religion”).³⁶

As a onetime devout Protestant, Lawrence remained throughout his life consumed by the Bible, Jesus, and the theme of holy love, but his was no ordinary religiosity. In one critic’s wry words, Lawrence aimed to “keep the poetry of the hymnal” as well as “desecrate the church.”³⁷ In condemning its rigid prudery, however, he meant to call attention to the deeper joy and purity he felt the institution had destroyed, in its Protestant and Catholic forms alike. As he wrote in an essay posthumously published in England and not published in the United States until 1953, “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” the Catholic Church was not inherently anti-sexual, since it had made marriage “a sacrament based on the sexual communion, for the purpose of procreation,” such that the “act of procreation is still charged with all the sensual mystery and importance of the old past.” If the church taught differently now, it was the pope and the priests who had distorted its true message. Lawrence rejected what he believed to be the dry, cracked disembodiment of the Protestantism of his time in favor of a rich sacramentalism that had a mystical reverence for physicality and sexual union at its center.³⁸

Interwoven throughout Lawrence’s hot-blooded religiosity, then, was a keen sense of the vitality, the basic sacredness, of sex. In his essay “Making Love to Music,” Lawrence wrote that “sex is so large and all-embracing that the religious passion itself is largely sexual.”³⁹ In another essay, he denounced the hypocrisy that forced men and women to renounce their own sexuality in service to some distorted morality. Writing of the accusations levied against his so-called lurid and obscene novels, Lawrence retorted that he was “one of the least lurid mortals,” for he absolutely detested “cheap and promiscuous sex… heartless sex.” Rather than cheapening sex, Lawrence saw himself as writing against the artificiality of modern life, above all against contemporary forms of prudery that brought only coldness and misery into human relations. Sexuality, which enacted the “natural flow” of sympathy between creatures, was central to Lawrence’s highest religious ideal.⁴⁰

Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover deliberately and unremittingly represented such ideas. The novel is a love story between unlikely lovers: the aristocratic Connie Chatterley and her estate’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, both unhappily married to other people. Their relationship centers on their sexual passion and compatibility, suggesting the mutual sympathy and dynamism they find in one another and the restoration of their religious awe after years of dismal numbness. Connie’s unpleasant husband, Clifford Chatterley, is an example of the absolute deadness of most men of his class, a man the novel early on describes as having a cold heart, paralyzed and impotent from his time in the war, “chirpy” and “watchful” with a “slight vacancy” about him, a “blank of insentience.” Connie, on the other hand, is “a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and sturdy body and slow movements full of unused energy,” sensual in every respect. When, walking in the wood, Connie and Clifford happen on Mellors and she sees him for the first time, she feels him as “a swift menace… like a sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.” Gun slung over his shoulder, the “almost handsome” servant stares “straight into Connie’s eyes with a perfectly fearless, impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like”; she spies in his eyes “a look of suffering and detachment, yet a certain warmth” and sees him as “curiously full of vitality.” Their eyes meet, and it is “as if he wakened up”; subsequently, once Connie returns to her daily life with the dull Clifford, she is filled with “an inward dread, an emptiness, an indifference to everything.” The chapter ends with Connie going through her days “drearily, wearily,” stuck on the “empty treadmill” of habit. “Nothingness!” she inwardly despairs. “To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!”⁴¹

Mellors lives close to the earth and is more comfortable around the animals he tends than people. Indeed, he seems animalistic himself, in Lawrence’s descriptions, living by instinct and closer to nature than civilization. When Connie later chances on him bathing outdoors and first sees his beautiful naked back, sculpted by years of outdoor physical labor, it is “a visionary experience” that “hit[s] her in the middle of her body.”

She saw the clumsy breeches slipping away over the pure, delicate white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a certain lambency, the warm white flame of a single life revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!

Before long, Connie and Mellors have sexual intercourse, which “lift[s] a great cloud from her, and give[s] her peace.” After the first time Connie and the gamekeeper “come-off together,” her sexless husband Clifford detects “something new in her, something to him quite incomprehensible.” Indeed, much has changed: “the flux of new awakening,” “the new bath of life,” “the voiceless song of adoration.” The sex itself is her newfound salvation: “Connie would not take her bath this evening. The sense of his flesh touching her, the very stickiness upon her, was dear to her, and in a sense, holy.”⁴²

Some time later, after a rapturous night in which “the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her”—the “sharper, more terrible… thrills” of anal sex—Connie compares her experience with Mellors to that of Abélard and Héloïse as well as the Greek gods, the electric sensation “burning the soul to tinder”: “The refinements of passion, the extravagances of sensuality! And necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity. With the fire of sheer sensuality.” While Connie had before imagined that a woman would die of humiliation at such sexual abandon into “the last and deepest recess of organic shame,” instead she experienced blissful wonderment and dissolution of all embarrassment and fear; “naked and unashamed,” she was stripped to “the real bed-rock of her nature.” It was a triumph: “So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.” Poets and purportedly civilized people were “liars” for trying to persuade people they wanted sentiment, when “what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin or final misgiving!” Refinement and coarseness merge through this consuming, purifying union of lady and gamekeeper—both joyous, and she finally alive to “the very heart of the jungle of herself” after years of walking death.⁴³

By novel’s end, Connie is pregnant with their child, and both are seeking divorces from their livid spouses so that they may be permanently wed to each other. Theirs was what Lawrence called “a deeper morality” than obliging people’s ordinary “little needs”: the morality of seeking out the full achievement of the rhythm of life and death, the “vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe.” This rhythm emerged tangibly in love: When Connie asks what Mellors believes in, he pauses before responding, “I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.” Later, after Connie tells Mellors that what distinguishes him from other men is “the courage of your own tenderness,… like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail,” he bluntly boils down his own quality of tenderness to its perfect essence: “cunt-awareness,” or the courage to touch another embodied, passionate soul. “Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of.” The final sentence of the whole book comes from a letter Mellors sends to Connie, a droll farewell from his penis to her vagina: “John Thomas says good-night to lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart—.” However contrived, turgid, sexist, or absurd any of this may sound, the novel’s worship of ecstatic physical union could not be more obvious.⁴⁴

Lawrence was not entirely alone in writing of sex this way, but his popularity made him a sort of spiritual tribune for a new sexual morality. In his own repeated clarifications of his aims in writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence said that he sought to write of the beauty, holiness, and cleanliness of sex, over against pornography (which he elsewhere defined as “the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it”). He was delighted to see the “real revolution” in sexuality wrought by the young, whom he praised for “rescuing their young nudity from the stuffy, pornographical hole-and-corner underworld of their elders, and… refus[ing] to sneak about the sexual relation.”⁴⁵ Defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover against the censors, Lawrence explained, “And this is the real point of this book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly.”⁴⁶ Restoring the “deeper… greater morality” of humankind required returning to “vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe.” The solution Lawrence offered was not Christian—he believed it was older than Christianity, Plato, or Buddhism—for “the Christian religion lost, in Protestantism finally, the togetherness with the universe, the togetherness of the body, the sex, the emotions, the passions, with the earth and sun and stars.” But “sex is the great unifier,” and “in its big, slower vibration it is the warmth of heart which makes people happy together, in togetherness.”⁴⁷ Lawrence’s eclectic religious interests took in far more than Christianity, but there was no doubt that he perceived sexuality in profoundly sacred terms.

Many of Lawrence’s detractors deemed him abnormally obsessed with sex and offered armchair psychological diagnoses explaining his fixation. He was “a sex-crucified man,” one wrote in typical fashion—a casualty of warped cravings for whom sex was “a means of escape that will give him neither refuge nor rest, a perpetual thorn in the spirit, a reminder of his own insufficiency and weakness and lack of courage.” A tortured man whose art was merely self-justifying autobiography: such was the ignominy heaped on Lawrence long after his death.⁴⁸

The censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover supposedly centered on its steamy depictions of adulterous sex. But take another look at the full context of that sexual activity. The traditional marriage between the aristocratic and sedentary Clifford and bored but dutiful Connie is one of hierarchy and the subordination of a submissive wife to her sexless but demanding husband; against that arrangement, Connie chooses to be with a common man of a much lower class, one who disbelieves in such hierarchies and who is muscular, carnal, and erotically thrilling. Mellors speaks crudely yet treats her as an equal and speaks openly about viewing her sexual fulfillment as important as his own. Connie rejects aristocratic roles and norms of propriety in favor of a simpler, more modest life with an unrefined man who seems wholly indifferent to social conventions, disdainful of manufactured measures of social class, and untroubled by sexual equality. Hers is an unambiguous rejection of civilized society with its hierarchies and upward ambitions, in favor of the rough-and-tumble world of intimate passion she fashioned with Mellors in the forest. It is this world, characterized by freedom and personal abandon, that Lawrence promises will nourish and sustain Connie and Mellors over time, in contrast to the cramped, angry, and stifling realm of conventional wedlock.

For traditional audiences, the scandal of the book was not merely sex or an unfaithful tryst. The greater outrage was the wholesale repudiation of traditional marriage, gendered order, and elite male power. The book described more than secret infidelity, the kind that might just tear apart a marriage; it bespoke the annihilation of cherished social norms, if not Christian civilization itself.

LAWRENCE’S RELIGIOUS VISION OF SEX was controversial. However much he battled the censors and sought to explain the far distance between his writings and obscene pornography, he could not overcome their hostility. Those most vexed by Lawrence—admiring his literary gifts while detesting the content of his work—included a set of conservative Christian literary critics. The most prickly (and most influential) of these was Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), the Missouri-born writer and St. Louis native who moved to England in early adulthood and eventually became a British subject. In England, Eliot converted from the liberal Unitarianism of his upbringing to a conservative strain of Anglicanism, describing his conservative predilections in 1929 as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”⁴⁹ The Anglo-Catholic Eliot, orthodox in his Christian devotion, loathed the unorthodox Lawrence and at times seemed intent on grinding his literary reputation to dust.

T. S. Eliot did have occasional words of measured praise for Lawrence; an early reference from 1917 has Eliot describing him as “a poet of quite peculiar genius and peculiar faults.”⁵⁰ But the attacks far outweighed admiration. In 1927, Eliot published his first critique of Lawrence for La Nouvelle Revue Française, a French journal about English novels. Eliot argued that Lawrence’s “splendid and extremely ill-written novels—each one hurled from the press before we have finished reading the last” had but one subject in mind. He described Lawrence as “a demoniac, a natural and unsophisticated demoniac with a gospel,” arguing darkly that Lawrence’s characters lacked “all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in order to make love-making tolerable.” When those characters “make love—or perform Mr. Lawrence’s equivalent for love-making—and they do nothing else,” they essentially moved backward through evolutionary time, passing backward the ape and fish to “some hideous coition of protoplasm.” Eliot shuddered at the “progressive degeneration in humanity” exhibited in the novels, lamenting, “This is not my world, either as it is, or as I should wish it to be” (emphasis in original).⁵¹ It was rather a world in which Eliot found, or at least claimed to find, sex quite intolerable. Eliot’s acerbic portrait diminished Lawrence not simply to the level of brutes but to the most primitive stage of living cells.

Lawrence returned the invective, identifying Eliot as the very type of dry, lifeless corpse he found so abhorrent among civilized people. He may also have gotten back at Eliot in a slyer way. Some literary critics pointed out that Lady Chatterley’s dour husband, Clifford, seemed closely modeled in his ideas and language on Eliot, and that some of his speeches insisting on ordered emotions and belittling passion and the body struck themes from Eliot’s own writing.⁵² Further, Clifford had become a writer after his disabling injury in the war (an injury that left him impotent), and his writings, in Lawrence’s words, contained “no touch, no actual contact”: “It was as if the whole thing took place on an artificial earth,” yet Clifford was “morbidly sensitive” in wanting the approval of all. Chatterley/Eliot was a pathetic, needy, and crabbed person, all malice and superficiality, of little substance.⁵³ He was just the sort of traditionalist Christian who would despise Lawrence’s work and deem it demoniacal.

Indeed, Eliot exemplified a particular Christian way of thinking about religion and sex that Lawrence spurned, representing an attitude toward passion that would have been at home with the Christian censors. After Lawrence’s death, he wrote that Lawrence had “failed completely” at creating genuine art, for he merely reveled in his own sensations without turning them to greater ends. Lawrence was “a very sick soul,” and Eliot vilified Lawrence’s “offensive” use of Christian faith for “non-Christian or anti-Christian” ends, attributing this tendency to the decadent lure of a “shadowy Protestant underworld” that picked and chose its religious symbols at will and was far outside the bounds of orthodox Christianity. Lawrence mistook human love to be the highest good, rather than the love of God; he pined for a degree of human intimacy that was impossible between living persons, particularly for one who did not realize that “the love of two human beings is only made perfect in the love of God.” Political reform, social justice, racial equality—all were ultimately as egotistic and as inadequate for genuine human connection and meaning as sex, in Eliot’s view.⁵⁴

Eliot repeated and embellished these critiques in his 1934 book on the moral failings of modern literature, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, in which he described Lawrence as a “great genius” sickened by “a distinct sexual morbidity.” Denouncing “the deplorable religious upbringing which gave Lawrence his lust for intellectual independence,” Eliot scoffed, “like most people who do not know what orthodoxy is, he hated it.” He damned Lawrence’s lack of “tradition” and analyzed him as having had “no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity.” Having adopted what Eliot plainly deemed a “spirituality” that was flighty, self-righteous, and unmoored, Lawrence exhibited a “spiritually sick” vision, a “social obsession” with upending the proprieties of social class. Lawrence’s characters displayed “the absence of any moral or social sense,” betraying “no respect for, nor even awareness of, moral obligations” or conscience. They epitomized the worst instincts of humanity: the very model of modern heresy, the destruction of the moral universe.⁵⁵ The renunciation of traditional marriage signaled a wholesale rejection of civilized manners and obedience to the dictates of society.

Eliot was not alone in his contempt of Lawrence’s spiritual earnestness toward sex, his dismissal of civilized conventions, and his determination to renounce modesty and bring sexual matters out into the light. Not long after Lawrence’s death, Ruth Frisbie Moore, a conservative literary critic, wrote disparagingly of his frank language—calling “spades spades”—and “outrageous grossness,” a quality of the “spade cult” who claimed Lawrence as “its major prophet”: “Lawrence himself treated [Lady Chatterley’s Lover] as an inspired utterance, and the more radical critics approached it in a religious spirit, according it the reverent treatment a true Fundamentalist offers to Jonah and Genesis.” Lawrence and his “disciples” displayed “perfect moral certitude” in their assessments, a snobbery about their explicitness that was dogmatic, self-righteous, and “cock-sure”—altogether pious to the point of ludicrous condescension. “For those of us with a devout upbringing,” she wrote, “there is a decidedly musty odor about some of Lawrence’s statements.” His defenders were “veritable Impuritan Fathers,” making “obeisance to his gods” in endless praise for his work as “rhapsodic,” “flamingly intense,” “rapturous,” “ecstatic,” and more. Harold Gardiner, the long-time literary editor of the Jesuit magazine America and a widely influential Catholic critic, lamented “the minute detailing of sexual aberrations” in the novel and noted that it was like other restricted books that do not merely depict sin but in fact “teach immorality.” Lawrence, in the view of such antimodern critics, had mistaken health for sickness, honesty for vulgar desecration. By making depravity seem alluring, his writings posed an urgent danger to the culture.⁵⁶

Whereas Lawrence saw it as both possible and essential to reconcile religion and sexual candor, Eliot and many other conservative Christians believed that the sort of sexual openness embodied in Lawrence threatened the very essence of Christianity. Even if it was a “serious quest for an alternative spiritual tradition” spurred by many of the same impulses that nurtured Christian faith—alienation from rational scientism and the worship of money—it was “will-worship of the ego,” another Anglican writer put it.⁵⁷ A young Thomas Merton, who would become one of the major American Catholic writers of the twentieth century, pronounced Lawrence “a complete pagan” whose “gospel culminated in the proclamation of himself as a Messiah, as one who had come to save the world from intellectualism and give back to men the joyful ‘mindlessness’ of the Hopi snake dance.” A “very flourishing cult of Lawrence the Messiah” existed, in the view of these critics, and its antidote could not come soon enough.⁵⁸ From the traditionalist Christian point of view, the possibility of a rich and powerful alternative to Christianity coming to fruition was dire, as it would dethrone the powers of church authority in favor of something earthier and disorderly, the rejection of self-sacrifice and church authority alike. Eliot and his cohort could not abide Lawrence’s antinomian challenge.

Female sexual awakening, an important theme in Lawrence’s writings, was also a threat to a conservative Christian worldview that continued to uphold traditional gender norms as well as a hierarchy that remained closed to the idea of women’s equality within the church and the broader society. The notion that women did not merely tolerate sex for the higher good of childbearing but that, once awakened, they realized they needed sex—such an idea certainly did not trouble all Christians, but in the ordered world of the conservatives it was hazardous. The specter of the sexually liberated female, ominously embodied in Margaret Sanger, also saturated Lawrence’s work: however cogently later feminists would critique those portrayals for reifying gender hierarchy and female objectification, they were nonetheless subversive to the Christian worldview of the period. Lawrence’s frank acknowledgment and graphic depictions of female appetites was shocking in the 1930s. The threat to Christianity posed by writers such as Lawrence appeared twofold: the problem of a seemingly decadent, pagan religion was but the flip side of the hazard posed by a positive view of sexuality and the honoring of sexual pleasure for women.

Eliot and many other Christian writers detested Lawrence’s fiction for its anti-church anarchism and its renunciation of tradition, marriage, and social customs, and their perspective reflected the public Christian consensus still ascendant in the 1930s. Soon enough, however, liberal Protestants and even some Catholics reread Lawrence and undertook to defend him, sometimes even resurrecting part of his vision of sexuality for illumination and Christian appropriation. These reassessments appeared in the 1940s and into the 1950s (and beyond). Brother George Every, a British Anglican scholar and poet, wrote several times about Lawrence and showed increasing admiration for the ways in which his work illuminated “the limitations of the liberal, democratic, and scientific outlook” and exemplified a critique of “modern scientific and sociological thinking” that made some sense—even though, from Every’s Christian worldview (and certainly Eliot’s and Merton’s), his solutions were antithetical to Christian truth.⁵⁹ Citing Every’s writings, an Anglican priest argued in 1951 that some “amends” were necessary to counter “the abuse that has been hurled” at Lawrence “by so many Christians.”⁶⁰ The renowned Nathan Scott, a literary scholar and ordained Episcopal priest who helped found the academic field of “literature and theology,” gave ample attention to Lawrence and reassessed the linkage between religion and sexuality that had so profoundly offended Eliot, by resituating Lawrence within a particular mystical stream of tragedy in the European Romantic tradition; Lawrence, Scott pleaded, understood and deeply felt the “anguish” of humanity’s “ontological solitude” and utilized sex to illumine both humans’ alienation from one another and divine union or completion.⁶¹ This kind of openness to Lawrence’s writing signaled the new sorts of religious thinking about sex that were beginning to emerge.

By the summer of 1959, when a federal district court overturned the postmaster general’s refusal to transmit the infamous Lady Chatterley’s Lover through the mails and thus freed it from US censorship, Lawrence was winning praise as a religious visionary. As derision of Lawrence gave way to various degrees of admiration, even a theologian at Concordia Seminary, a school of the very conservative Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, could write, “Pastors involved in marital counseling and theologians involved in the doctrine of creation will be stimulated by Lawrence’s holistic principle to search the Biblical Word anew.” Influential Christian thinkers were treating Lawrence’s work as a font of creativity for Christian theologizing and praised his deep understanding of the meaning of Christian love and sexuality: if not quite a Christian himself, Lawrence could now be seen, in the words of one critic, as “almost a Christian.”⁶² Perhaps the culmination of this new thinking came some time later, in the 1960s, as when Horton Davies, a Welsh historian of Christianity and ordained Congregationalist minister who taught at Princeton University, wrote a piece on Lawrence that began somewhat theatrically, “Is David Herbert Lawrence also among the prophets? Is this adopted son of Sigmund Freud also among the saints?” Davies’s article focused entirely on Lawrence’s writings about sexuality, love, and the body, and his responses to these questions was an unambiguous yes.⁶³ For traditional Christians, Lawrence had gone from being a despised anti-Christian pagan to a prophet and a saint.

THE DUNSTER HOUSE BOOKSHOP CASE and successive shifts in Protestant and Catholic modes of censorship and control of literature and film are important for revealing new fault lines in American religious attitudes toward sex and the sexual content of popular entertainments. The religious debates about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, popular movies, and pulp magazines showed growing disagreements over how best to protect the morals of the nation—especially American youth—and maintain social order. The censors had perceived Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be a menace, believing that Lawrence’s sexually wild religiosity threatened to upend the gender hierarchy and conservative religious norms of the time and jeopardize the stability of the nation itself. Similar worry greeted other suggestive materials, even as the strategy shifted away from censorship laws to active religious involvement in the control and distribution of film and literature. Ultimately, the concerns articulated about sexual content were deeply tied up with worries about modernity, challenges to traditional church authority, and anxiety that feminism would upend the godly male order of the created world.

Conservative Protestants and Catholics remained suspicious of one another throughout the 1930s and beyond. But they were united in believing that sexually risqué materials should be rigorously monitored and kept out of the hands of youth. Decades later, in one of those ironies of history, it was a Catholic—Justice William Brennan, devoutly religious and no fan of graphic sexuality, and the only Catholic then on the Supreme Court—who wrote the majority opinions in the 1964 cases that overturned America’s strictest twentieth-century obscenity laws, dramatically transformed the very meaning of “obscenity,” and sharply restricted the bounds of censorship.⁶⁴ Among other lessons, it was a reminder that Protestants weren’t the only Christian group splitting ranks over sex.