Eugenics and Protestant Social Reform: Hereditary Science and Religion in America, 1860–1940 by Dennis L. Durst (review)

Eugenics has received extensive attention from scholars in the past two decades, but the historiography exploring the intersection of the eugenics movement and American religion remains thin. Christine Rosen's Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York, 2004) represents a groundbreaking foray into this topic. Dennis L. Durst builds on Rosen's work with his thoughtful overview of how Protestant doctrines regarding original sin and the inherent wickedness of humanity reinforced eugenicist fears of biological degeneration.

Durst overturns any easy assumption that Christian ministers who embraced the biblical account of creation would automatically reject eugenics science that rested on Darwinism. He uncovers the careers of numerous Progressive ministers who advanced eugenics as well as some forgotten opponents of coerced sterilization who occupied American pulpits in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As Durst notes, eugenicists like pioneering criminologist Arthur MacDonald, who studied theology in college, used religious language to describe supposed biological defects and to issue warnings about the dangers of unrestrained reproduction by the supposedly unfit, for instance, by referring to the "'stigmata of degeneration'" (p. 9). MacDonald exploited what would have been familiar religious terminology, inverting the meaning of stigmata, which referred to the miraculous appearance of Christ's wounds on the body of a believer as a sign of holiness. MacDonald transformed the term into a marker of insidious defect.

Durst provides innovative discourse analysis, but he could have extended this analysis much further. One of the classic eugenics texts, Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York, 1920), evokes images of the unfit engulfing civilization in a Noachian-style flood. Meanwhile, eugenicists depicted the world as delicately balanced between a redemption achieved through selective breeding and a biological Armageddon brought upon the Western world through the promiscuous breeding of the degenerate and the immigration into the United States by inferior southern and eastern Europeans. The rise of eugenics parallels the popularization of premillennial dispensationalism, a theology that sees the Bible as a prophetic text that told believers of the imminent, violent destruction of the current world order. Dispensationalists' apocalyptic preaching paralleled the warnings of "race suicide" by eugenics supporters like Theodore Roosevelt (p. 33). Had Durst looked beyond MacDonald's use of Christian imagery, it would have enhanced his exploration of this topic.

Nevertheless, Durst has written an important work, compellingly recovering the eugenicist agenda of groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. He has also thrown an overdue spotlight on the careers of eugenics critics, including Protestant thinkers such as John Miley and James M. Boddy, who sharply dissected phrenology, a pseudoscience that claimed that the size and shape of a human skull could be studied to reveal innate criminality and other dangerous characteristics, and hereditarians such as Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong.

The portraits of these Protestant leaders reveal that a more vigorous debate unfolded within the Progressive-era church over Darwinism and the role of nature versus nurture in human development than is usually acknowledged in histories of eugenics. Durst has added a useful dimension to our understanding of American Christianity in the Progressive era and the dialogue between the clergy and scientists from 1860 to 1940.