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This project seeks to understand one of the first steps along the way in how we got to our modern "culture war" focused on gender and sexuality by examining how the divergence began on the issue of birth control. We do this by examining the stances of all the major American religious denominations of the Twentieth century, from the more progressive Quakers and Mainline Protestants, to the more conservative American and Southern Baptists, Orthodox Christian and Evangelical Protestants, as well as outlier groups such as the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, and racially or ethnically marginal groups such as the immigrant-rich Roman Catholic Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews. We focus on the first moment of the story of birth control liberalization that occurred around 1930, the year that the vast majority of religious groups, almost all Mainline Protestants, liberalized their stances on contraception. We find that those who liberalized on birth control early were not simply more progressive (as our Twenty-First century minds would understand the term) on women's or sexual issues than those who remained silent or openly opposed them. In fact, they were the very opposite of what our understanding of progressive means today: they were eugenicists who were deeply concerned about the future of their race, and believed that birth control needed to be made accessible to the "undesirable" classes in order to protect the superiority of it and by extension their country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]