 as God's plan to reconcile the truths of science with the Bible. Toward this end, Bible verses were reinterpreted and found to contain what had theretofore been secret eugenics messages. Thus, in one minister's sermon, Noah's flood was God's own eugenics policy for eliminating a human race that had degraded and become inferior. Others insisted that Christ's Parable of the Talents was actually about improving the population: In eugenics exegeses, "Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken from him," took on a whole new meaning.
While some notable leaders of the broader eugenics movement kept their distance from all things religious, the American Eugenics Society recognized the importance of church leaders in selling eugenics theory to average Americans. Toward this end, the society appointed the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose radio program, National Vespers, reached two or three million listeners each week, to its advisory council. Securing the endorsement of Fosdick, one of the nation's most famous preachers, was a major coup for eugenics.
The American Eugenics Society's Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen also sponsored eugenics sermon contests, open to all ministers, priests, rabbis, and theology students. The sermon had to be preached to a regular congregation in a church or synagogue, and the minister had to take up the question, "Religion and Eugenics: Does the church have any responsibility for improving the human stock?" The prizes ranged up to $500, a hefty sum in the mid-1920s.
Many lay popularizers of eugenics also appealed to religious traditions to promote their agenda. The most notable, it seems, was Albert Edward Wiggam, who traveled the lecture circuit promoting eugenics as "the final program for the complete Christianization of mankind." Wiggam even rewrote the Ten Commandments, in which "The Duty of Eugenics" replaced "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The "Duty of Scientific Research" supplanted the proscription against making graven images, while the "Duty of Preferential Reproduction" replaced "Thou shalt not kill."
Resisters of such evil movements often receive too little attention in histories of this kind. And indeed, Rosen gives religious opponents of eugenics - - mostly evangelical Protestants and Catholics - - far shorter shrift than she does religious boosters. G.K. Chesterton offered the most scathing assessment of eugenics, she tells us. Unfortunately, Rosen devotes only two paragraphs to his critique. I would like to have seen more.
Pope Pius XI's encyclical from December 31, 1930, was highly critical of eugenics sterilization and marriage bans, and complained that eugenicists had forgotten "men are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for heaven and eternity." In 1932, entering the fray from the left, Reinhold Niebuhr added his considerable influence to the opposition, publishing Moral Man and Immoral Society, which pointedly challenged liberal Protestants' uncritical embrace of science and eugenics as the primary sources of solutions to social problems.
Within the next few years, the tide shifted, and eugenics in America ebbed. Once World War II was over, and we had clear revelations of the extent to which eugenics theory had undergirded the Holocaust, eugenics became thoroughly discredited.
All the time I was reading Rosen's Preaching Eugenics - - learning the extent to which religious leaders supported a movement that, in a most unchristian way, victimized the weakest and most vulnerable - - I kept wondering: Did these supporters of eugenics ever repent? Many of these advocates lived well beyond World War II. It would have been very interesting to learn what these mostly well-intentioned religious leaders thought about their past advocacy in later years.
Another thought kept popping into my mind while I read the book. Rosen describes a "clear pattern" of religious leaders' supporting eugenics "precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets."
Recent years have seen a rebirth of eugenic thou