Eugenics and American Religions

Eugenics and American Religions

Abstract

Eugenics frequently bridged religious and scientific aspirations for social betterment, while eugenic ideas and practices were promoted by a number of American ethnic and racial groups who belonged to different and even competing religious traditions. This essay explores the small and still nascent body of scholarship on eugenics and American religions. This scholarship reveals the important role that American religious expression played in the social dissemination of eugenic ideas and practice in the United States by demonstrating how a number of religious traditions–including Protestantism, Catholicism, African American Islam, and Reformed Judaism –shaped public acceptance of eugenics as a modern reproductive morality. Charting the appeal of eugenics across a spectrum of American religio-racial communities, this essay surveys emerging scholarship to argue that American religions had a direct impact upon the socially uneven and ideologically variable deployment ofeugenic thought and practice in the United States.

Essay

Eugenics was a modern scientific discourse that equated

reproductive hygiene with political progress and that rose

to prominence during the first few decades of the twentieth

century. Eugenics frequently bridged religious and

scientific aspirations for social betterment, while eugenic

ideas and practices were promoted by a number of American

ethnic and racial groups who belonged to different and even

competing religious traditions. In this essay, I explore the

small and still nascent body of scholarship on American

religions and eugenics. This scholarship, I argue, reveals

the importance of American religious expression for the

social dissemination of eugenic ideas and practice in the

United States, as it underscores how a number of religious

traditions and religiously inspired movements shaped public

acceptance of eugenics as a modern reproductive morality.

Rather than framing religious engagements with eugenics as a

clash between competing worldviews, as one might suspect,

this scholarship has instead tended to emphasize the ways in

which American religions sometimes supported and sometimes

contested the racial and hereditarian paradigms that

eugenics used to explain human differences and to promote

reproductive hygiene.

In the next section, I provide an overview of American

eugenic thought and practice. Drawing upon recent

scholarship, I emphasize the variability of eugenics as a

modern practice of reproductive hygiene, showing how both

2

whites and blacks endorsed eugenics while contrasting their

respective support. I then turn to explore the ways in which

scholars have explained the intersections of eugenics and

the following American religious traditions: liberal

Protestantism, Catholicism, African American Islam, and

Reformed Judaism. These represent the spectrum of American

religions whose engagements with eugenics have thus far been

chronicled by scholars. Here, I focus on the broader

historiographical questions and problems that have shaped

the ways in which scholars understand these religious

traditions’ engagements with eugenics. My discussion in this

section thus aims for historiographical comprehensiveness

and not historical specificity. I conclude by sketching two

overlapping ways in which emerging scholarship might change

the way in which we research and teach eugenics. First,

eugenics ought to be seen as an important part of American

modernization, which entails understanding how religion and

science have together shaped Americans’ ongoing political

investment in reproduction. Second, like the history of

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American religions, the story of American eugenics is

simultaneously a narrative of oppression and struggle.

Overview of American Eugenics

American eugenics was a popular and professional

scientific movement for reproductive hygiene that peaked in

the decades leading up to World War II. The fundamental

assumption advanced by eugenics was that one could improve

the population by controlling environmental and hereditary

aspects of human reproduction. Although scholars have

documented the persistence of eugenic ideas and practices

after World War II in a number of important ways (Kline

2001; Stern 2005; Schoen 2005; ed Lombardo 2010; Hansen &

King 2013), this essay focuses on the 1910s, 20s, and 30s,

the period in which, following modernist currents, eugenics

discourse was at its height of popularity in segregated

America.

Up until quite recently, eugenics was associated nearly

exclusively with scientific racism, often characterized as

4

an overtly racist pseudoscience that sought to strengthen

the socio-political power of white America in the face of

the demographic shifts initiated by industrialization.

Recent scholarship, however, differentiates between three

forms of eugenics discourse in pre-World War II United

States, all of which agreed upon the idea that heredity

played an important role in determining human potential

while disagreeing upon the relative significance of

environment and the eugenic importance of race. Only one of

these discourses, referred to by scholars as “mainline”

eugenics, was supported by whites, although it was the most

popular eugenics discourse, the most politically dominant,

and the most consequential with respect to American history

(Kevles 1999[1985], pp. 96-112; Mitchell 2004, p. 86).

Mainline eugenics sought to improve the population through

policies that supported white racial hygiene, endorsing a

eugenics program that privileged hereditary interventions

over environmental reforms in endeavoring to preserve the

racial hierarchy of segregated America. Mainline eugenicists

like Charles Davenport defined orthodox eugenic science

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during the pre-War years, while promoting eugenics as a

popular movement (Kevles 1999[1985], pp. 41-56; Bruinius

2006, pp. 108-137). Mainline eugenics has received the most

scholarly consideration to date.

The other two American eugenics discourses were smaller

in scale and influence than mainline eugenics, developed and

promoted by African Americans seeking socio-political

empowerment in segregated America. Gregory Michael Dorr and

Angela Logan refer to the first of these as

“assimilationist” eugenics, which is distinct from the other

mode of African American eugenics that supported the

separatist racial politics of black nationalist groups like

Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association

(UNIA) and the Nation of Islam (NOI) (Dorr & Logan 2010, pp.

68-92; Mitchell 2004, pp. 218-239). Both of these African

American eugenics discourses, scholars suggest, can be

understood as responses to mainline eugenics, especially the

claims it made regarding black racial inferiority and the

policies it enacted to promote white racial hygiene (Dorr &

Logan 2010, pp. 70-71; Deutsch 2009, pp. 139-154).

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Mainline eugenicists promoted population development

through three general race hygiene initiatives: 1) the

encouragement of “fit” whites to marry and have more

children; 2) the elimination of inferior stock within the

white race; and 3) the biological protection of white

America from hereditary influence of allegedly inferior

races. In pursuing the first initiative, mainline

eugenicists developed “positive” eugenics programs,

including a number of popular educational campaigns that

facilitated cooperation with churches in order to spread the

eugenic gospel of reproductive fitness. (Rosen 2004) In

pursuing the second initiative, eugenicists promoted

“negative” eugenics measures like the segregation and

sterilization of “unfit” whites (Rafter 1988; Wray 2006, pp.

65-95), while they advocated immigration restriction and

anti-miscegenation laws in pursuing the third (Jacobson

1998, pp. 77-90; Dorr 2008, pp. 137-166).

Most scholarship to date has focused on mainline

eugenics’ successful enactments of negative eugenic

policies. Mainline eugenicists, for example, directly

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influenced the passage of the highly restrictive 1924

Immigration Bill, the enactment of Virginia’s sterilization

law that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1927

decision in Buck v. Bell, and the institution of anti-

miscegenation statutes. As scholars have documented, each of

these components of mainline eugenics’ race hygiene program

had serious consequences. Over the course of the twentieth

century, for example, over sixty thousand Americans were

legally sterilized thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in

Buck v. Bell (Hansen & King 2013, p. 3).

Mainline eugenics deployed two overlapping modes of

discrimination that supported its modern reproductive

morality: scientific racism and hereditarianism, with the

latter representing a kind of biologized classism. In

addition to arguing that there were qualitative differences

between races and that these differences were quantifiable

through allegedly empirical analyses like IQ tests, mainline

eugenicists promoted the idea that intra-racial breeding

produced qualitative differences within races and that

certain racial “stocks” were thus superior or inferior to

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others. Scientific racism and hereditarianism were often

marshaled simultaneously to scientifically and morally

support mainline eugenic initiatives (Kühl 1994, pp. 70-72),

although they also had distinct uses. Hereditarian

arguments, for example, were employed to justify eugenic

sterilization policies before the 1930s and 40s, policies

that, early on, targeted the supposedly deleterious

fecundity of poor, “feebleminded” whites (Wray 2006, pp. 65-

95). Hereditarianism was also used to suggest that mainline

eugenic science was “objective” by allowing mainline

eugenicists to argue that the scope of negative eugenic

policies applied to all races equally (Deutsch 2009, p.

133).

Black support for eugenics was considerably smaller

than whites’. Nonetheless, eugenic thought and practice

found popular endorsement among African Americans.

Assimilationist eugenics represented a popular eugenics

discourse promoted by leading race intellectuals like W.E.B.

Du Bois, male and female African American medical and

scientific professionals, and health minded women’s writers

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who sought to develop programs of black racial uplift in

segregated America (English 2004, pp. 35-64; Mitchell 2004,

pp. 76-140). Assimilationist eugenics rejected mainliners’

racism while accepting hereditarianism, insisting that,

while there were no significant differences between human

races with respect to intelligence and morality, each race

consisted of good and bad stocks. Under Du Bois leadership,

the NAACP served as the mouthpiece for assimilationist

eugenics, staging positive eugenics programs to promote

reproductive hygiene among “fit” segments of African

American communities (Dorr & Logan 2010, p. 75).

Assimilationist eugenics never developed an operative

negative eugenics agenda and, in contradistinction to

mainline eugenics, emphasized environmental reforms over

hereditary interventions. Yet leading proponents of

assimilationist eugenics made hereditarian distinctions

between racially “worthy” and “unworthy” individuals while

also endorsing birth control for poor blacks whose fecundity

supposedly stymied racial uplift (Deutsch 2009, pp. 151).

The goal of assimilationist eugenics was to ensure full

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socio-political enfranchisement for African Americans

through a racial uplift program grounded in reproductive

hygiene.

Black nationalist movements like the UNIA and the NOI

adapted popular eugenic ideas and practices in their

separatist racial programs (Mitchell 2004, pp. 218-239;

Deutsch 2009, pp. 130-154). Black nationalist groups

inverted the racist claims made by mainline eugenicists,

upholding the black body as a reproductive ideal. Unlike

those who supported assimilationist eugenics, black

nationalist groups viewed eugenics as a reproductive hygiene

program that could preserve black racial purity in the face

of white oppression and violence, thereby restoring black

political dominance. In inverting the racism advanced by

mainline eugenics, the UNIA and the NOI thus modified many

of its key moralizations, including mainline eugenics’

emphasis on progress through race hygiene. As Michele

Mitchell demonstrates, black nationalist groups like the

UNIA promoted race hygiene through pro-natal ideologies that

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supported traditional gender roles and sexualities (Mitchell

2004, pp. 218-239).

In the early twentieth century, eugenics, as both a

science and a racially variable scientistic ideology,

represented a modern discourse of race betterment embraced

by whites and blacks alike. As scholarship is increasingly

showing, American religions played a leading role in public

acceptance of eugenic ideas and practices. Far from

describing a war between American religions and eugenics,

scholars have instead highlighted the ways in which American

religious expression positively and negatively shaped the

variability of eugenics as a popular discourse of

reproductive hygiene.

American Religions and Eugenics

Protestantism

Scholarship on American religions and eugenics has

primarily focused on liberal Protestantism. This body of

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research has zeroed in on one question in particular: why

were liberal Protestants such vocal supporters of mainline

eugenic initiatives? As Christine Rosen observes, “[Liberal]

Protestants proved the most enthusiastic and numerically

powerful group of religious participants in the eugenics

movement.” (Rosen 2004, p. 15) Rosen and others have

uncovered the leading role played by liberal Protestants in

the popularization of mainline eugenic initiatives, arguing

that liberal Protestant clergymen embraced eugenics through

their progressive faiths and their modernist commitments to

forging partnerships with science in building a Christian

society.

More broadly, research suggests that explaining liberal

Protestant support entails understanding the ways in which

American Protestantism facilitated the mainstreaming of

eugenic modes of discrimination, including the justification

of socio-economic hierarchies in hereditary terms and a

racialized valorization of evolutionary struggle. Some

scholars also suggest that comprehending liberal Protestant

enthusiasm necessitates uncovering the ways in which liberal

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Protestant Christianity, as a matrix of mainstream ideals

for human embodiment, shaped the “secularity” of eugenics,

especially mainline eugenic knowledge and practice (Bruinius

2006; McCloud 2007; Chamberlain 2012). In insisting as much,

these scholars have nuanced the conclusions drawn by some

historians who explain the development of eugenics in terms

of the waxing influence of science as an agent of

modernization. Michael Burleigh, for example, argues that

the appeal of eugenics lay in its capacity to inspire

devotion to a new scientistic creed that outmoded the

“Judeo-Christian moral tradition” (Burleigh 2000, p. 62).

Scholars who have focused on eugenics in the American

context, however, argue that American Protestantism itself

facilitated the mainstreaming of eugenic modes of

discrimination, thereby emphasizing continuities between

mainline Protestantism and eugenic morality and ideals.

Thus, for example, in the earliest critical history of

eugenic thought in the United States, Richard Hofstadter

argued that nineteenth century liberal Protestants like

Henry Ward Beecher embraced social Darwinism as a way of

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translating Calvinist doctrines of election and innate

depravity into the biologically deterministic idiom of

heredity, which helped to acculturate social Darwinist

concepts by fusing them to middle class American socio-

economic ideals (Hofstadter 1992 [1944], p. 10).

Hofstadter’s argument suggests that eugenic ideas and

practices did not arise in spite of culturally dominant

patterns of American religiosity or apart from these

patterns, but within and through them, with eugenic modes of

discrimination achieving social legitimacy in the American

context through the theological, moralistic, and racialized

lineage of Calvinist Protestantism.

Since the 1990s, a number of analyses of the

intersections between liberal Protestantism and mainline

eugenics have been published (Larson 1991; Zenderland 1998;

Durst 2002; Rosen 2004; Hall 2008; Wilson 2014). This work

corresponds with a broader “discovery” of the popular

dimensions of American eugenics, especially recent

revelations regarding the extent to which eugenic thought

and practice saturated nearly all dimensions of white

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American culture in the decades before World War II (Rydell

1993; Pernick 1996; English 2004; Cogdell 2004; eds Currell

& Cogdell 2006). Taken as a whole, this recent body of

research confirms Hofstadter’s early conclusions, revealing

that public acceptance of eugenic initiatives was advanced

by transformations within white Protestant Christianity

itself.

Two examples from this body of scholarship will help

convey this point. In her 2008 monograph, Amy Laura Hall

shows how mainline eugenic modes of discrimination gained

social acceptance through the development of early twentieth

century Protestant domesticity, illustrating how eugenic

ideas and practices successfully folded religious and

scientific aspirations together into a common discourse of

procreative hygiene (Hall 2008, pp. 213-289). Her work thus

demonstrates that the white, middle class, religiously

liberal household functioned as one of the most important

relays for the social dissemination of eugenic morality, and

thereby contributes to an emerging body of work on eugenics,

gender, and sexuality (Kline 2001; Richardson 2003; Mitchell

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2004; Lovett 2007). More recently, Brian Wilson has explored

the popularization of eugenics through the life and labor of

John Harvey Kellogg. Wilson uses Kellogg to demonstrate the

ways in which Protestant modernism, as a theological

commitment to seeing evolution as an ongoing work of

redemption, boosted liberal Protestant acceptance of

mainline eugenics as a practice of race hygiene. Wilson’s

biography of Kellogg helps us to understand how Protestant

modernism bridged religious and eugenic discourses,

providing a crucial discursive matrix through which mainline

eugenics –including positive and negative eugenic policies

and practices –claimed Christian and thus social

authenticity. (Wilson 2014, pp. 133-170)

For some scholars, explaining liberal Protestant

support for eugenics has also involved attending to the ways

in which Protestantism shaped and legitimated mainline

eugenics’ “secularity,” especially the moral idealism that

animated its hereditary struggle for race hygiene. Harry

Bruinius, for example, shows how the career of Charles

Davenport, America’s most prominent eugenicist during the

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teens and twenties, bore the moralistic impress of his proud

Puritan identity (Bruinius 2006, pp. 108-137). Sean

McCloud’s book on class in American religions and Ava

Chamberlain’s reinterpretation of the life and legacy of

Jonathan Edwards’ paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Tuttle,

reveal how the secularity of mainline eugenics was premised

upon racial categories and ideals that were profoundly

Protestant in inspiration and explicitly or implicitly

rooted in a New England sense of election (McCloud 2007;

Chamberlain 2012). These works help to resolve a major

oversight in existing scholarship on “whiteness” and

eugenics in America by showing how mainline eugenic

categories of racial fitness were barely conceivable apart

from Northeastern middle class Protestant norms and ideals

for human embodiment (Rafter 1988; Jacobson 1998; Wray

2006). Moreover, they help to us to account for white middle

class America’s general willingness to accept or even

embrace negative eugenic policies like sterilization,

policies that targeted poor whites in the early years and

18

that were premised upon “ideas of human perfectibility”

(Mottier 2010, p 142-143).

Given the intimate connections between liberal

Protestantism and eugenics uncovered by scholars, however,

we need to know more about how the regional and

denominational variability of white Protestantism shaped the

development of mainline eugenics in particular locales. This

should include comparing and contrasting a range of

Protestant voices from different parts of the country –

voices of opposition, accommodation, and outright

endorsement. There is also a need for more comprehensive

research on the ways in which Protestantism shaped mainline

eugenics from within, so to speak, by influencing the

scientific comportments of mainline eugenicists.

Catholicism

If Protestants proved the most enthusiastic supporters

of mainline eugenic ideas, practices, and initiatives,

“Catholics,” as Sharon Leon argues, “comprised the most

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significant and organized opposition to [mainline] eugenic

policies” (Leon 2013, p. 3). Scholarship on Catholic

engagements with eugenics has focused on the following

question: why were American Catholic leaders and laypersons

often so vociferously opposed to eugenics? Although American

Catholics demonstrated qualified support for particular

aspects of mainline eugenics, scholars emphasize concerted

Catholic opposition to negative eugenic policies like

sterilization, the hereditarian and highly racialized models

of human degeneracy upon which these policies were based,

and the eugenic modes of discrimination that scientifically

and morally authorized these policies (Hasian 1996; Rosen

2004; Leon 2013). Importantly, Catholics opposed negative

eugenic ideas and policies on both religious and scientific

grounds (Hasian 1996, p. 107; Rosen 204, p. 146; Leon 2013,

p. 5).

Before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1927 constitutional

endorsement of eugenic sterilization in Buck v. Bell and Pope

Pius XI’s 1930 condemnation of sterilization in Casti Connubii,

“a spectrum of Catholic opinion [on eugenics] existed”

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(Rosen 2004, p. 139). Catholics tended to support positive

eugenic initiatives aimed at strengthening family life (Leon

2013, p. 9). They also sympathized with the general eugenic

aim of improving the human race (Hasian 1996, p. 102; Rosen

2004, p. 143). Yet scholars argue that Catholics grew more

uniform in their opposition as mainline eugenics became

increasingly associated with sterilization during the 1920s

(Hasian 1996, p. 100), attacking the empiricism of mainline

eugenicists’ claims regarding the hereditary basis of

“feeblemindedness” and forging one of the most consistent

and successful oppositions to state sterilization laws

across the country (Leon 2013, pp. 66-88).

Like their liberal Protestant counterparts, Catholics

were drawn to eugenic ideas and practices out of an interest

in social reform. Unlike liberal Protestants, however,

Catholics were much more likely to oppose eugenics as

program of race hygiene, especially the practice of

sterilization. Scholars argue that much of Catholic moral

opposition to sterilization originated within Catholicism

itself, with Catholics drawing upon the Thomistic tradition

21

of natural law to counter the ethical precepts of negative

eugenics. This tradition included an emphasis on the dignity

of the person (Rosen 2004, pp. 140), recognizing the

“potential for every member [of society] to contribute to

the common good, regardless of material limitations” (Leon

2013, p. 4).

But, as scholarship also emphasizes, Catholic

opposition to negative eugenics arose from the unique

position of the American Catholic community with respect to

mainstream American religious life. Recently arrived

Catholics from Ireland and Southern Europe were often the

objects of eugenic discrimination, particularly the nativism

that characteristically found expression in negative eugenic

social policies like immigration restriction (Hasian 1996,

pp. 93-94). Indeed, Catholic engagements with mainline

eugenics cannot be dissociated from the issue of

immigration, the question of assimilation, and, as Matthew

Frye Jacobson attests, the politics of whiteness during the

early twentieth century (Jacobson 1998, pp. 69-70). With

American mainline eugenicists understanding religion in

22

racial terms, viewing themselves as racially Protestant

while vilifying the racial degeneracy supposedly represented

by Catholicism, mainline eugenic concepts of degeneracy

underscore the fact that race, religious affiliation, and

the question of socio-political fitness were inextricably

bound up with one another during the eugenics era (McCloud

2007, pp. 39-42). Catholic opposition to mainline eugenics,

therefore, often focused on the intrinsic connections that

eugenicists drew between religious affiliation and

hereditary fitness, frequently by calling public attention

to the ways in which mainline eugenic science and policies

perpetuated a Nordic Protestant bias (Leon 2013, pp. 60-61).

Catholic opposition also took aim at mainline

eugenicists’ claims regarding the power of heredity, with

Catholics insisting that environment played an equally

powerful role in determining human potential. Importantly,

as Leon argues, Catholic challenges to hereditary

determinism did not represent a clash between religious and

scientific worldviews, but rather, an opposition to the

empirical dubiousness of a particular scientific methodology

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(Leon 2013, p. 5). To a much greater extant than Protestant

leaders, Catholic clergymen were critical of the mainline

claim that degeneracy was transmitted solely through human

heredity (Hasian 1996, pp. 102-104; Rosen 2004, p. 146). In

disagreeing with mainline eugenics’ principal scientific

tenet, Catholic leaders often articulated competing visions

of race betterment that focused on social justice issues and

environmental reforms that could ameliorate the same socio-

economic disparities that the mainline eugenic language of

hereditarianism sought to naturalize (Hasian 1996, pp. 102-

104).

The emerging evidence on Catholic engagements with

mainline eugenics recommends a historiography that

emphasizes agency over victimhood, with eugenic ideas and

practice offering American Catholics an early forum for

asserting their ability to shape American politics (Leon

2013, pp. 163-169). Yet given scholars’ focus on Catholic

opposition to sterilization, there is still need for

research on the ways in which Catholicism shaped Americans’

reception of positive eugenic initiatives aimed at

24

strengthening family life, as Catholic leaders were, as

scholars point out, much more willing to accommodate these

practices.

African American Islam

While African Americans were often the victims of

eugenic discrimination and segregation era violence –

including anti-miscegenation laws (Hasian 1996, pp. 56-52;

Mitchell 2004, pp. 197-217 Dorr 2008, pp. 137-166) and

lynching (English 2004, pp. 117-139; Dorr & Logan 2011, pp.

82-83) –a small body of relatively recent scholarship has

shed light on an African American eugenics movement that –

while small and less politically consequential in comparison

to its white, mainline counterpart –embraced eugenic ideas

and practices as a means of racial uplift. As already

discussed, scholars differentiate between two kinds of

African American eugenics discourse: assimilationist and

black nationalist (Dorr & Logan 2011; Mitchell 2004).

Unfortunately, however, scholarship on assimilationist

25

eugenics has yet to closely consider the role that African

American religious expression played in its social

deployment. Only the still very limited scholarship on black

nationalist eugenics has considered the influence of

religious expression on the formation of African American

eugenics discourse. This is because Islam played an

important role in black nationalist efforts to use eugenic

ideas and practice to develop and promote programs for black

racial hygiene.

In one of the most important works on American eugenics

published to date, Michele Mitchell demonstrates how the

hereditarian discourse of eugenics provided race conscious

African Americans, particularly modernizing medical

professionals, intellectuals, clergymen, and women writers,

with an ideology and practice for affirming the nobility of

the black body in the face of the racism endorsed by

eugenicists and other pro-segregation whites. Most

generally, her work uncovers the flexibility of eugenics

with respect to the politics of segregation after

Reconstruction, with eugenics capable of supporting the

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scientifically encoded white supremacism of mainline

eugenics, the scientifically informed assimilationist agenda

of elite African Americans like Du Bois, and the separatist

ideology of black nationalists like the Marcus Garvey.

Unfortunately, however, the role of religion in African

American cooption of eugenic discourse remains a peripheral

concern for Mitchell, with her work sometimes including the

voices of race conscious religious leaders but not pausing

to reflect upon the specific role that religion or churches

may have played in shaping these leaders’ support for

science inspired racial uplift (Mitchell 2004).

Nathaniel Deutsch’s 2009 work sheds light on the

relationship between African American religious expression

and the deployment of eugenic ideas and practices in African

American communities. Deutsch’s work underscores the

important role that Islam, as a claim to “Asiatic”

otherness, played in the development of black nationalist

movements like Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple and

the NOI. Islamic identity allowed race conscious African

Americans to sever ties with the history of Christian

27

oppression (of which mainline eugenics was seen as a part)

by enabling an alternative and empowering narrative of black

racial otherness. In fact, “one of the most fundamental and

enduring beliefs of the Nation of Islam,” the “Yakub myth,”

demonstrates the ways in which Islamic otherness permitted

NOI members to incorporate eugenic ideas into their quest

for racial purity while at the same time inversing the

debasing racial stereotypes of blacks perpetuated by

mainline eugenicists (Deutsch 2009, pp. 151-152). In this

way, the NOI represents an important example of the ways in

which religion fostered a historically oppressed minority’s

appropriation of eugenic ideas and practices into an

empowering, if politically marginalized vision of racial

progress.

Given that scholarship on African American eugenics

remains nascent, there is still much to learn about the

relationship between black religious expression and the

social deployment of eugenic ideas and practices.

Specifically, there is need for more exhaustive research on

the ways in which African American Islam developed as an

28

organized response to mainline eugenics. We also need to

know more about how African American religious expression –

and especially African American Christianity –may have

shaped the popular dimensions of assimilationist eugenics.

Reformed Judaism

Christine Rosen briefly considers the support that

eugenic ideas and practices found within Reformed Jewish

circles in New York. During the early years of mainline

eugenics’ rise to prominence, Reformed Jewish leaders, Rosen

argues, demonstrated a “measured support for eugenics”

(Rosen 2004, p. 109), typically out of an interest in social

reform like their Protestant, Catholic, and African American

counterparts. While Jewish engagements with eugenics in the

United States remains one of the most neglected dimensions

of American eugenics, no doubt because of its potential

controversy, Rosen shows that there is evidence to suggest

that Jewish attempts to wrestle with eugenic ideas and

practices constituted an important part of Eastern European

29

Jews’ attempts to navigate assimilation. Leading Reformed

Rabbis like Stephen S. Wise, Rosen argues, engaged eugenic

ideas and practices in debating the question of

intermarriage. (Rosen 2004, pp. 99-109) Rosen suggests that

the eugenic question of race betterment was seen by growing

ethnic minorities as a prerequisite for socio-political

inclusion, with politically powerful non-white groups like

Catholics and Jews understanding that their acceptance into

the American mainstream (racially, religiously, and

politically defined) depended upon their ability to publicly

tackle the eugenic syllogism of socio-political fitness

through racial improvement.

In spite of Rosen’s critical observations and despite

its potential controversy, however, much more work needs to

be done on Jewish engagements with the American eugenics

movement. Presently, for example, there is very little to

explain why Reformed Jewish leaders were drawn to eugenics

beyond a desire for socio-political empowerment and

incorporation.

30

Conclusion

While eugenics represented a modern scientific approach

to race betterment and societal advancement supported by a

number of American ethnic and racial communities,

scholarship suggests that religion had a powerful influence

on the social deployment of eugenic ideas and practice in

the United States. Religion especially shaped public

acceptance of eugenic modes of discrimination, sometimes

positively and sometimes negatively. American religions

inflected and deflected these modes of discrimination in

ways that profoundly shaped public acceptance of eugenics as

a modern reproductive morality. Our presently limited

understanding of the nature and variability of this impact

underscores a rich area of research for scholars of American

religions. To conclude this essay, I sketch two ways in

which current scholarship on eugenics might change the ways

in which we research and teach eugenics as part of American

religious history.

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Through the 1980s, American eugenics was associated

almost exclusively with the history of scientific racism in

the United States (Haller 1984[1963]; Kevles 1985; Barkan

1991). Recent scholarship, however, emphasizes a more

complex picture of eugenics built upon two premises. First,

American eugenics cannot and should not be reduced to the

history of scientific racism, but understood more broadly as

a socially and ethically complex episode within the

modernization of the country. Second, American eugenics is

both a story of racial inequality and oppression, on the one

hand, and a narrative of racial struggle and uplift, on the

other.

Following scholars who, drawing upon the work of Michel

Foucault and others, focus on the biopolitical dimensions of

eugenics, one should see eugenics as an intrinsic part of

American modernization (Foucault 1990; Foucault 2003; Turda

2010; eds Bashford & Levine 2010). Viewing eugenics in such

a way requires understanding how the reproductive body (both

male and female, but especially female) became central to

competing visions of social progress. In such a light,

32

scientific racism remains an important part of the story of

American eugenics, but our understanding widens to include

the ways in which racial and ethnic groups with and without

traditional access to power have embraced, contested, or

accommodated practices of reproductive hygiene in order to

strengthen their communities and ensure collective destiny.

When we locate eugenics within the political history of

reproduction in America, we are in a better place to

identify the obvious and obscure ways in which eugenics

intersects within other defining aspects of modern American

social history, including religion, race, science, gender,

and sexuality. Focusing on the uneven and variable

deployment of eugenic rhetoric through the overlapping

contours of religious expression and reproduction, moreover,

would allow scholars to complicate the hackneyed

historiographical tendency to oppose religion and science.

We are only beginning to understand how American

religious expression contributed to the racial and social

variability of eugenics as a modern discourse of

reproductive hygiene. Collectively, current scholarship on

33

American religions and eugenics demonstrates that the uneven

social deployment of eugenic ideas and practices in American

racial and ethnic communities intimately depended upon

religious authority over the reproductive sphere, especially

religious dispensations regarding marriage, reproduction,

family, and racial ideals for human embodiment. Nonetheless,

there is still great need for in depth and even comparative

analyses of how American religions shaped eugenics as a

modern discourse of reproductive hygiene.

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