Preaching Eugenics

Abstract

Abstract Preaching Eugenics tells the story of a heretofore-unexamined group of eugenics enthusiasts in the early half of the 20th century: American religious leaders. It describes how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders adapted to, rejected, and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics-a movement emblematic of modern science and progressive thought in the early 20th century. Facing new challenges from scientists and intellectuals, adapting to the dramatic social changes wrought by immigration and urbanization, and often internally riven by doctrinal controversies among modernists, liberals, and fundamentalists, leaders of churches and synagogues in the early 20th century found themselves forced to defend their faiths on numerous fronts. Preaching Eugenics describes these challenges through an exploration of religious leaders’ confrontation with eugenics. Many religious leaders embraced eugenics, often arriving at their support through their involvement with other social reform movements, including campaigns to sterilize the “feebleminded” in the states; new efforts by the state to regulate marriage; the birth control movement; efforts to combat “social evils” such as venereal disease; and the movement to restrict immigration. The book draws on a wide range of sources: the records of the American Eugenics Society; religious and scientific books and periodicals of the day; and the personal papers of religious leaders such as Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rev. John M. Cooper, Rev. John A. Ryan, biologist Charles Davenport and Yale geographer Ellsworth Huntington. In a period when religion and science were engaged in critical dialogue and in bitter feuds, the story of how religious leaders confronted one of the era’s newest “sciences,” eugenics, offers insight into the history of ideas and the history of religion in the early 20th century.