Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Hardcover)

by Christine Rosen (Author) "On a blisteringly hot day in July 1896, a preacher in Topeka, Kansas, sat on his porch contemplating a way to increase attendance at the..." (more)
Key Phrases: eugenics sermon contest, sterilization supporters, eugenic health certificates, New York, United States, Social Gospel (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Quite aside from the intellectual and religious arguments that Rosen canvases, her book offers a panoply of colorful personalities (many of them appear in portrait photographs) that help to show how eugenics was sold to the public. The minibiographies of the eugenics star, so to speak, help to make this an enteraining as well as an instructive work of scholarship." --Magill's Literary Annual
"Preaching Eugenics is not simply revealing history, but an insightful commentary on contemporary debates."--Claremont Review of Books
"...this book takes an important first step in grappling with the role that religious leaders during the twentieth century played in public discussions concerning the regulation of childbirth."--American Historical Review


Product Description
With our success in mapping the human genome, the possibility of altering our genetic futures has given rise to difficult ethical questions. Although opponents of genetic manipulation frequently raise the specter of eugenics, our contemporary debates about bioethics often take place in a historical vacuum. In fact, American religious leaders raised similarly challenging ethical questions in the first half of the twentieth century.
Preaching Eugenics tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics-a movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time. Christine Rosen argues that religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets. The liberals and modernists-those who challenged their churches to embrace modernity-became the eugenics movement's most enthusiastic supporters. Their participation played an important part in the success of the American eugenics movement.
In the early twentieth century, leaders of churches and synagogues were forced to defend their faiths on many fronts. They faced new challenges from scientists and intellectuals; they struggled to adapt to the dramatic social changes wrought by immigration and urbanization; and they were often internally divided by doctrinal controversies among modernists, liberals, and fundamentalists. Rosen draws on previously unexplored archival material from 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, and biologists Charles Davenport and Ellsworth Huntington, to produce an intellectual history of these figures that is both lively and illuminating.
The story of how religious leaders confronted one of the era's newest "sciences," eugenics, sheds important new light on a time much like our own, when religion and science are engaged in critical and sometimes bitter dialogue.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019515679X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195156799
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #340,563 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vital to understanding the eugenics movement, December 4, 2004

By	B. Green (Bay Area) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Christine Rosen has addressed an important and before now neglected area of the study of eugenics--the role churches played in both its propagation and eventual destruction. For any student of the eugenics movement, or of American Christian history, this book is vital. It is very comprehensive and, given the excellent citations and bibliography, one of the most well researched books I have seen recently in any subject.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Marvelous History, December 9, 2005

By	Michael W. Perry "Michael W. Perry, author of... (Author of Untangling Tolkien, Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is marvelous because it does what all good history does, it gives us a true-to-life feel for what the eugenics movement was like in its heyday roughly a century ago. This isn't a dry-as-dust recital of facts or an axe-to-grind ideological spin. It's an honest and balanced look at the mostly liberal Protestant clergy who helped lend 'mainstream' legitimacy to the movement much as their counterparts in the late 1960s to early 1970s lent an air of legitimacy to abortion legalization.

Just keep in mind that these clergymen were the "choir" for what was for a time advanced as a modern and more scientific replacement historic Christianity. Those who occupied the pulpit were well-respected scientists such as Henry Goddard with his influential The Kallikak Family, then-popular writers such as Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Revolt Against Civilization, and activists such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, author of The Pivot of Civilization. At the other end of the religious spectrum were the religious conservatives--fundamentalist, mainstream Protestant, and Catholic--who were the chief opponents to eugenics, particularly the movement's attempts to legalize forced sterilization. It really is a lot like today's abortion debate.

Also keep in mind that liberal Protestant clergy were not the first to be drawn to the idea of breeding a better humanity. It began during the 1840s and 1850s with some utopia free love cults in the U.S., such as the Oneida Community. Margaret Sanger noted that in her second autobiography. They were the first to separate sex from reproduction. You could have sex with anyone in the community, but the community would dictate which of those couplings would produce offspring. Their ideas were not rooted in Darwinian evolution like the later eugenics. They simply applied common, barnyard breeding techniques to people.

Led by Victoria Woodhull, those ideas were taken up by some in the Spiritualism movement of the 1870s. And it was Woodhull who first 'mainstreamed' eugenics giving many speeches on the topic across the U.S. and the U.K. almost three decades before the usually cited founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, took up the cause in earnest after 1900. You might even say that Woodhull retired from promoting eugenics about the time that the movement's alleged founder, Galton, seriously took up the cause.

Woodhull's early ideas about eugenics were a strange blend of the sexual mysticism she used to justify her radical free love ideas and conventional folk ideas about prenatal influences. I explore those in Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull. She later dropped her free love agenda, married a wealthy English banker, and concentrated on promoting a more scientific form of eugenics that's explored in Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull.

The great strength of Rosen's books is that it gives you a peek inside the minds and hearts of the American religious suppoters of eugenics. And its very greatness points out that no one has done a comparable job with the more scientific supporters of eugenics, who typically come off as cardboard figures, or movement activists such as Margaret Sanger, who is often turned (inaccurately) into a secular saint of women's rights. And the greatest need in the literature is for an in-depth look at those who, like G. K. Chesterton, opposed eugenics with their whole hearts. Perhaps Christine Rosen will find the time to take up at least one of those much-needed tasks.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough, Well Written but..., March 7, 2008

By	Ken Jacobsen (Tempe, AZ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a thorough, well-documented and engaging book on a subject that has been swept under the rug of American history and should be better understood and examined. The author does a brilliant job of bringing it to light.

The relation between science, religion and morality is extremely important and the eugenics movement, which sprang up almost in concert with Darwin's Descent of Man, (the founder of eugenics was Darwin's cousin, in fact) represents just how wrong they can all go. The book makes the point that if the Depression had not happened, forced sterilization of the "degenerate" may be accepted practice to this day, as it was by the late 1920s.

A few points, though.

First, I have no idea why the previous reviewer, Perry, repeatedly mentions Victoria Woodhull, since she nowhere appears in this book.

One flaw that I found disappointing is the complete absence of any discussion of race in this book. Only by outside reading have I been able to confirm that eugenics was at its core thoroughly racist.

Another is that the only clergy mentioned are of a liberal bent -there is little sense of how eugenics was received by more mainstream or conservative Christians. Unlike what the previous reviewer reports, there is no point in this book at which the eugenic debate is portrayed as like today's abortion/anti-abortion movement -the supporters seem all to be liberal and educated, and only one mention is made of fundamentalist opposition -and that was in opposition to compulsory sterilization, not to the essentially racist and classist nature of eugenics.