PREACHING EUGENICS:
Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.
By Christine Rosen. Oxford Univ. Press. 286 pp. $35

There’s a special thrill of disgust that comes from contemplating how close one’s own society came to adopting ideas later identified as among history’s most repellent. Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, courts this thrill in her account of how some American clergymen in the first decades of the 20th century took up, preached, and ultimately discarded a range of ideas that went under the name eugenics. The linking of clerics, particularly liberal clerics, with eugenics is certainly provocative. Even more provocative is Rosen’s thesis that liberal clerics were especially susceptible to eugenic ideas because they had forsaken solid theology in favor of the Social Gospel—the idea that religion should strive not just to change individual hearts but to combat social injustice. A belief in the perfectibility of society, this argument runs, led naturally to an interest in perfecting the human material that composes it.

But did American preachers endorse anything like the eugenics that the Nazis later made notorious, or for that matter the eugenics that enthusiastic laypeople were espousing in the United States? Rosen’s otherwise interesting book suffers badly from its vagueness on this point. On the one hand, we are told, American eugenicists “called for programs to control human reproduction. They urged legislatures to pass laws to segregate the so-called feeble-minded into state colonies . . . they supported compulsory state sterilization laws aimed at men and women whose ‘germplasm’ threatened the eugenic vitality of the nation; they led the drive to restrict immigration from countries whose citizens might pollute the American melting pot.” On the other hand, branches of the eugenics tree “grew to in­clude . . . health reform, sex hygiene, radical sex reform, marriage counseling, antivice campaigns, ‘fitter family’ contests, the child-rearing advice industry, and, eventually, the birth control movement.”

In the vast majority of Rosen’s examples, it’s these latter, milder “branches” to which the clergy clung. She’s not entirely forthright in distinguishing root from branch, either: A whole chapter is devoted to clergymen’s support for mandatory health certificates for couples wishing to marry, a measure not only not “eugenic” (Rosen eventually concedes in passing that it’s closer to “hygienic”), but still considered unremarkable today. She catalogues prominent liberal ministers, Reform rabbis, and even a few Catholic priests who lent their names to organized eugenics groups or took part in a national “eugenics sermon contest”; again, though, they seem mostly to have confined themselves to the gentler forms of social direction and the scientific-sounding flourishes that the eugenics vocabulary gave their rhetoric.

“Unlike the pitched battles over evolutionary theory,” Rosen observes, “in the eugenics movement, religion and science met on common ground.” But that common ground, the desire to purge society of human imperfection and human suffering, was—as she rightly notes—illusory. Trying to link eugenics and religion, some divines were led into strange contradictions, wondering, for instance, whether traditional Christian charity actually hurt humanity by helping the weak survive. By 1930, an improved understanding of genetics had undercut the basic concepts on which eugenics relied, and the movement ran out of steam in the United States well before Hitler and hindsight made the very word radioactive. The preachers in Rosen’s story abandoned the eugenics vocabulary as well—more evidence that most of them had simply been parroting conventional wisdom.

Rosen never does draw a convincing link between eugenics and the liberal Social Gospel. The political landscape she sketches might have been fuller had she discussed the more conservative-leaning doctrines generally referred to as social Darwinism. But she tells an intriguing story nonetheless, a useful counterpoint to the standard narrative of science and religion at perpetual loggerheads.

—Amy E. Schwartz