Sermonizing is a science of sorts, at least to its more avid practitioners. On 8 May 1926, the Reverend Phillips Endecott Osgood, rector of St. Mark’s Church in Minneapolis, ascended the pulpit to deliver his 11:00 A.M. Sunday sermon. . . . That was Mother’s Day, and . . . Rev. Osgood eschewed the usual praise of womanly virtues in favor of the exotica of an Oriental bazaar. Amid the haggling shopkeepers and motley crowds of such a bustling marketplace, Rev. Osgood told his congregation, you will come across a man quietly toiling over a charcoal brazier. He is a refiner, bent on his task of purging dross and alloy from his bubbling concoction of metals to reveal pure silver or gold. So, too, are we refiners, Osgood said, but with a different task: improving the human race. “We see that the less fit members of society seem to breed fastest and the right types are less prolific,” Osgood preached, but he emphasized that a practical solution to this alarming problem was at hand. “Taking human nature as it is and not ignoring any legitimate emotion or tendency, eugenics aspires to the refiner’s work.” Decrying the “insane and criminal specimens of humanity” whose “slatternly daughters” and “idle, ignorant” sons strained social institutions, Osgood warned his flock, “Until the impurities of dross and alloy are purified out of our silver, it cannot be taken into the hands of the craftsman for whom the refining was done.” The Kingdom of God required eugenically fit believers, Osgood said: “Grapes cannot be gathered from thorns nor figs from thistles.”. . .

In 1926, hundreds of Osgood’s fellow clerics, representing nearly every major Protestant denomination, as well as several Reform rabbis, preached eugenics across the country . . . . Their efforts were part of a “eugenics sermon contest” sponsored by . . . the American Eugenics Society, but the impulse to link organized religion with eugenics was much broader than a single contest could capture. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, eugenics flourished in the liberal Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish mainstream; clerics, rabbis, and lay leaders wrote books and articles about eugenics, joined eugenics organizations, and lobbied for eugenics legislation. They grafted elements of the eugenics message onto their own efforts to pursue religious-based charity in their churches and adopted eugenic solutions to the social problems that beset their communities. They explored the eugenic implications of the biblical Ten Commandments and investigated the hereditary lessons embedded in the parables of Jesus. . . .

Certain kinds of religious leader gravitated toward eugenics in the early twentieth century, ministers anxious about the changing culture but also eager to find solutions to its diagnosable ills. Theirs was a practical spirituality. . . . And it was when these self-identified liberal and modernist religious men abandoned bedrock principles to seek relevance in modern debates that they were most likely to find themselves endorsing eugenics. Those who clung stubbornly to tradition, to doctrine, and to biblical infallibility opposed eugenics and became, for a time, the objects of derision for their rejection of this most modern science.