ABSTRACT
The theory of eugenics, which dominated American and northern European scientific thinking about human heredity during the early twentieth century, split the religious community along its modernist/traditionalist fault line. Many liberal Protestants, especially those willing to accommodate their religious beliefs to scientific authority, readily accepted a hereditarian view of human physical, mental, and spiritual progress and endorsed the eugenic remedies that followed from that point of view. Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants, in contrast, typically rejected the concept that human progress could be reduced to biology and denounced proposals to limit reproduction by the eugenically “unfit.”
