 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 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 ma