‘Jew of the Jews, Homosexual of the Homosexuals’ - Liberal Protestantism and the Jewish Science, 1928-1941

This paper traces the co-constitution of two figures—the homosexual and the Jew—in pedagogical materials circulated by Christian clinical pastoral educators from 1928 to 1941. Historians of religion and sexuality often narrate Christians’ embrace of psychiatry as an attempt to modernize amid increasing anxieties about secularism. However, this paper reframes the incorporation of psychoanalysis into Christian practices of pastoral care as a repositioning of liberal Protestantism vis-à-vis the figure of the Jew. Pedagogical documents demonstrate a convergence of medicalized and pastoral surveillance in disciplining race, sex, and religion. Drawing on the ACPE archives, I consider the production and transference of knowledge about sex and race in clinical pastoral education settings, with special attention to Jewish psychiatric patients. I trace how the clinical pastoral educators’ stress on correcting non-normative sexuality carved out new landscapes for theologies of racial difference, grounded in developmental teleologies.