Is it time to re-examine the biblical injunction? The University of Pennsylvania's William LaFleur takes a thought-provoking look at one of the basic tenets of most world religions. This article is excerpted from a longer work entitled, "Sex, Rhetoric, and Ontology: Uncovering the Hidden Nexi."

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

— H.L. Mencken, Notebooks (1956)

In 1994, when the Vatican and certain Islamic clerics initially united to oppose the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, the surprise created by two traditionally antagonistic bodies joining forces probably enhanced the perception that they represented religion on issues of sexuality and population.

Unfortunately, the position opposed by the Vatican-Islamic coalition came to be seen, even by many of its adherents, as unabashedly secular. In making their case, the secularists appealed to principles derived largely from the Enlightenment and implicitly suggested that religious values and the goals of the Cairo Conference were incompatible.

But on questions of religion and sexuality, the coalition's position is not the only religious one available, even within Catholicism (to say nothing of the broader scope of Christianity) or Islam. It can be challenged and alternatives proposed on the basis of values that are themselves grounded in the world's religions. Buddhist thinkers, as a prime example, have been willing to attribute religious value and significance to sexual unions which do not have the production of offspring as their ultimate goal. In doing so, they redefined the goals of religion, so that the realm of the sacred was no longer harnessed to the production of offspring, and they put a distance between religious values and the kind of fertility cults and fecundism that have been so much a part of most world religions.

Fecundism and its Origins
Discoveries from the earliest strata of history demonstrate that religious symbols and rites were seen as the facilitators of human reproduction. Mother goddesses and phallic forms tell us much about the pervasive human effort to locate supernatural protection from scarcity and tribal extinction. I use the term "fecundism" to pinpoint the extensive promotion of fecundity within a variety of religious systems and to demonstrate how quantity of offspring was linked to divine blessing in traditional religions.

Fecundism is much more pervasive and present than what is designated by any of the alternative terms, like natalism and "gift of life." And it has a very strong but less easily recognized perpetuation in positions taken by public theologians, especially within the rhetoric about "life" that today operates as a central term in discussions of medical and reproductive ethics.

Until very recently, the awareness that human population is on the rise simply did not exist. People noticed wars and pestilences, events that came on suddenly and quickly reduced populations so significantly that the threat of total extinction seemed quite real. The "natural" response was to try to beat such odds by maximizing reproduction. Fecundist religions appeared to be the course of prudence and wisdom. And although the roots of homophobia are deep and complex, criticisms of same-sex relations as "wasteful" because they do not contribute to the community's need for children probably have the same cause.

Questioning the Fecundist Agenda
The concept of fecundism allows for a new way of looking at crucial phases of human history, sometimes with surprising results. For instance, although it is commonplace among historians of East Asia to depict the struggles between Buddhists and Confucians as a tension between religious and secularizing forces, it is clear that supposedly secular Confucianism was fecundist in a way that Buddhism was not. Confucius' apologists often berated Buddhists for lack of patriotism and reverence (for family gods) because of their adherence to a code that placed no religious value on reproduction.

This is not to suggest that Buddhists were alone in their defection from fecundist agendas. What is interesting and important about the case of Buddhism is that, while the anti-fecundist stance might have succumbed over time to a variety of pressures, it in fact remained a discernible element of the religion as it made inroads into a variety of Asian cultures over a long period.

One way of characterizing the Buddhist position, its critics learned early on, was to describe it as founded in a negative view of reality. By 300 C.E., the Hua hu ching, a pseudo-canonical Taoist text engaged in anti-Buddhist polemics, is reported to have claimed:
...(Taoism) is primarily concerned with life, and life requires food; that the Buddhist...observes fasting is because (Buddhism) is primarily concerned with death, and death is (the result) of abstinence from food.... Taoism is primarily concerned with life, Buddhism with death.... Taoism belongs to yang, to life,...and Buddhism the opposite.

Here, it is assumed that whole philosophies are articulated in the details of daily behavior. The eating of food is expressive of a religious philosophy that embraces life; fasting is bound up with an outlook preferring death and negativity. This, it can be argued, structures thinking about these matters right down to the present. But in this structuring of juxtapositions, it was the Buddhist diffidence about the production of children that was the touchstone issue in the rhetoric about such things for more than a milennium and a half. If someone simply assumes that being is an unqualified a priori good, a temptation exists to try to settle extraordinarily complex ethical questions by taking a position that is announced to be, without qualification, in favor of life. And then those with whom there is disagreement can be categorized as champions of a philosophy of negativity or death.

A major contribution of Japanese philosopher Masao Abe has been his challenge to all such assumptions. Representative of the way Buddhism has become a renewed point of departure for some twentieth century Japanese thinkers, Abe asks where one locates the ground for asserting being's priority over non-being. He demonstrates that the philosophical languages of the West are contrived so as to let such a priority seem a priori true, not really needing proof. Abe asks how that can pass muster and in the process uncovers some unexamined assumptions in Western thought. Abe contends that death should be regarded as a natural and necessary part of reality, not, as in Christianity, as "the wages of sin" or as some kind of introjection of evil into our world. Abe has used the writings of DÔgen (a 13th century Zen thinker who held that "life does not obstruct death and death does not obstruct life") to offer a critique of the notion, demonstrably present in Christianity, of a fundamental, cosmic, and metaphysical antagonism between the two.

Who Speaks for Religion?
We live on a planet with a superabundance of human beings. Things have changed so much that the old commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" has become morally questionable. In questions having to do with religion, sexuality, and population, there is no empirical reason for assuming that specific religious traditions do anything other than represent themselves. The religions of the world are varied and cannot be expected to be univocal in what they say about either religion or sexuality. And the reason for that lack of univocality is simply that, because the religious history of humankind is long and varied, no one institution's norms may be imposed on that variegated terrain.

William LaFleur, a professor of Japanese Studies, is the Joseph B.Glossberg Term Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.