Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement
By Christine Rosen
Oxford University Press, 296 pp., $35
Reviewed by Wesley Smith
Eugenics - - now, there's one of those words that has a dated, distant sound: a remnant of Victorian arrogance that got taken up by the Nazis and made an excuse for murder. But that is ancient history. We would never again stoop to such evil. We have learned better than to think some people have lives not worth living.
Or, at least, we're too embarrassed to call it "eugenics" any more. The movement got its start from the English statistician Francis Galton in the second half of the 19th century. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, became convinced the human race was degrading because the birthrate among "unfit" people was high.
To remedy this crisis, Galton, inspired by Darwin's theories and Gregor Mendel's work in genetics, proposed that society take control of human evolution and save the race through a "positive eugenics" in which eugenically superior people would be encouraged to mate and procreate bountifully.
Eugenics - - the word means "good birth" - - quickly crossed the Atlantic, finding fertile soil among the American elite. But American eugenicists concluded that more drastic measures were required than merely promoting eugenically proper marriages to accomplish the cleansing task the Eugenics Movement had set for itself. Funded abundantly by progressive philanthropic foundations such as the Carnegie Institute and led by biologist Charles Davenport - - a forgotten figure, but one of the real villains of the 20th century - - American eugenicists developed a theory of "negative eugenics," in which the unfit were to be prevented from procreating by the state.
"Unfit" in this context meant people with congenital disabilities or supposed genetic failings such as alcoholism or sexual immorality. And the movement was successful enough that many state governments legalized involuntary eugenic sterilization, a violation of human rights that was given the explicit sanction of the Supreme Court in the notorious 1927 decision Buck v. Bell. Between 1908 and 1960, some 70,000 Americans were involuntarily sterilized.
Much has been written, and well, in recent years about this scandalous era, most recently by Edwin Black in his splendid War Against the Weak. In her interesting new history Preaching Eugenics, Christine Rosen focuses instead on the little-known and shameful promotion of eugenics by a surprisingly large number of American ecclesiastics. Take, for example, the Reverend Washington Gladden, a leader in the "Social Gospel" movement, who asserted in 1926 that Christianity "must be a religion less concerned about getting men to heaven than about fitting them for their proper work on earth."
Christians who agreed - - mostly within mainline Protestantism, as it happens - - found it surprisingly easy to support the eugenics movement's attempt to promote social virtue by controlling procreation as part of their overarching embrace of "progressive" social reform. Those who believed the first duty of Christians is to save souls tended to oppose eugenics as a threat to the lives of the weak and vulnerable, an unwarranted interference with the sanctity of marriage, and a pernicious assault on the intrinsic preciousness of human life.
Before reading Rosen's Preaching Eugenics, I had assumed the churches resisted eugenics almost uniformly - - and no doubt been subjected to withering criticisms from modernist public personages, academics, and members of the science establishment, the primary boosters of the pseudoscience from the late 19th century on. But, as Rosen ably demonstrates, history is rarely that simple.
The Social Gospel movement, led mostly by Congregationalist and Unitarian ministers, grew rapidly in these years among mainline Protestant churches. The Social Gospel reconceived Christianity as being less about faith and salvation, and more about, as Rosen writes, "ushering in the Kingdom of God on earth through [social] reform and service."
Many Social Gospel adherents viewed eugenics