Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

Committee Chair/Advisor

Dr. Austin Steelman

Committee Member

Dr. Elizabeth L. Jemison

Committee Member

Dr. Otis W. Pickett, Sr.

Abstract

Ministers who submitted to the American Eugenics Society Sermon Contests in 1926, 1928, and 1930 were biological determinists. They used Walter Rauschenbusch’s postmillennial language of the Social Gospel to present eugenics as a reform effort consistent with environmental reform efforts. However, ministers’ embrace of eugenics represented a turning away from previous Social Gospel thought. Ministers existed along a spectrum of treating eugenics as a religion or treating it as a tool for reform. Most followed in the footsteps of the “father of eugenics” Francis Galton and the author of The New Decalogue of Science Alfred E. Wiggam in treating eugenics as a religion. They saw it as a replacement for environmental reforms, which they believed prevented natural selection from running its course. No minister who submitted to the 1926 Sermon Contest completely viewed eugenics as a tool for reform, although some believed that more strongly than others. Baptist ministers Harry E. Fosdick (a monumental figure in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and a judge of the 1926 Contest) and Walter Rauschenbusch (a leader of the Social Gospel who died in 1918, before the AES was founded) represented ministers who viewed eugenics as a tool for reform rather than a religion which would replace it. They differed from the aforementioned eugenicists and ministers in their esteem of environmental over hereditarian “reform.”

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