Americans considered syphilis a major public health problem at the turn of the twentieth century. Due to major scientific breakthroughs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, syphilis was seen as both heritable and acquired. The recognition of this special ability, when other fears of disease were being diffused by germ theory, created an air of desperation surrounding the disease. Native, white, middle class Americans lumped their fear of syphilis in with their fear of ‘race suicide’ and sought to eradicate this threat through a variety of avenues. Although much historical work has been done on both the social conditions that exacerbated syphilitic fears, as well as the governmental public health programs to eradicate it, religious reactions to the disease are often excluded or combined with what are known as ‘secular’ reactions.
Religious reactions to syphilis were engaged in a burgeoning social reform movement that had swept through American society. Both Protestant and Catholic groups developed views on syphilis eradication based on how the particular denomination approached all social reform at the time. Many historians have included liberal Protestants as a component of ‘secular’ reform but it seems more informative to analyze the differences between the Protestant reform movement and that of the American government. Others have suggested that Catholic reform was outside of the scientific and medical society of the time: in essence, that Catholicism rejected many reforms based on fears about science. Instead, a closer examination of Catholic reform suggests that Catholics did not reject new science outright but that internal disorder disallowed the American Catholic community from reaching beyond its own borders to a wider, non-Catholic audience. The community did not reject sociology or genetics out right; instead, it utilized a new place in these social reform communities to help their growing populations establish themselves in American society.
Protestant and Catholic reactions to syphilis at the turn of the century are more complex than just ‘secular’ or ‘sacral’. Instead, they offer images of religious recognition of the burgeoning world of modern science, as well as their recognition that they could, and did, have a place in that world. Although many objectives and reform avenues shifted in both groups, the appearance of secularization is directly mirrored by a sacralization of new medical techniques and social reforms, therefore making the world and the ability to shape it a sacred endeavor. This work seeks to highlight the misapplication of labels applied to religious groups in the early twentieth century due to their social reform efforts involving disease eradication. By concentrating on a disease that was seen as both a moral and physical illness, and that experienced major medical breakthroughs during the time, we can view the dual duty that these groups felt that they were performing; both as a moral compass for the entire nation and as a physical guard protecting the unique physicality that permitted Christianity in humans.
