America Is The Only Western Country Where Circumcision Is Normal. Why?

There is some evidence for its health benefits — but there’s more to the story.

For thousands of years, Jews and Muslims have been practising the ritual removal of baby boys’ foreskins.

The ceremony dates back to the Hebrew Bible, where God tells Abraham that all Jewish men (and their slaves) must be circumcised to seal the eternal covenant between God and Jews. The Islamic roots are less clear, but pagan Arabian tribes already practised this custom before the arrival of Islam.

The Christian world, traditionally, hasn’t joined in the tradition. As early as about 50 AD, they decided not to require it for converts, apparently reasoning that baptism occupied the same spiritual role. While circumcision survived amongst some African Orthodox churches, and remains common in the Philippines due to ancient Islamic influences, major faiths like Catholicism and Lutheranism have long denounced it.

So how did circumcision sneak its way into the US? Was it spread by Jewish immigrants? Did Christianity support it in the past? Is it true that circumcision is healthier? And if it is healthier, why do so few other nations with advanced healthcare perform it?

After millennia of mostly being a Judeo-Islamic or tribal practice, circumcision arrived in America and Britain in the 18th century through the temperance movement. Revivalist Christian preachers taught that humans are supposed to live lives of self-denial, refusing pleasure and stimulation where possible.

Two of the more famous products to emerge from this period were Graham crackers and corn flakes, designed to be as tasteless as possible; this era also led to circumcision spreading as it was believed that circumcision made it more difficult to masturbate.

With Dr Lewis Sayre in the 1870s, medical justifications began to be accepted for a procedure that was essentially being carried out on religious grounds. Sayre believed that circumcision could cure paralysis, based on the popular contemporary theory of “reflex neurosis”, which suggested that tight foreskin irritated the nervous system and caused many other medical issues. This, of course, does not align with modern medical science.

By the late 1800s, the germ theory of disease (which remains mainstream today) was becoming widely accepted across the US medical establishment, and some doctors began noting that Jews had lower rates of some diseases (like syphilis and tuberculosis) than non-Jews. A consensus began to emerge that this was because Jews didn’t have foreskins.

In truth, the lower rate of sexually transmitted diseases amongst Jews could probably be explained by the fact that they tended to date largely within their community, making it harder for STDs to become prevalent in the first place. However, vigorous debate over the potential merits of circumcision in combating STDs remains to this day.

There’s also the socio-cultural dimension to consider. In this period, circumcision became a way for middle-class white Americans to signal that they were more hygienic than the unwashed and uncircumcised masses arriving by boat from Italy, Poland and Ireland. Circumcision was a status symbol, and by the early 1900s Americans were finding uncircumcised penises weird.

As the 20th century progressed, the medical evidence in favour of circumcision became flimsier, and it was largely dropped across the rich world in the 1940s and 1950s due to the double whammy of penicillin and the emergence of public national healthcare systems post-WWII.

In Britain, the establishment consciously decided that the health benefits were too marginal to justify recommending the procedure, and it proceeded to die out as an optional surgery.

Today, circumcision is recommended by the World Health Organization as an effective preventative procedure concerning STDs, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where HIV remains a serious threat to public health.

But in the developed world, its use as a medical procedure is much more controversial. US-based organizations like the CDC and the American Society of Pediatrics endorse its use, while European healthcare systems tend to discourage it except for religious communities. In Australia, the procedure is banned in public hospitals.

Who do you think has the right idea? Is circumcision “a barbaric practice designed to remind you as early as possible that your genitals are not your own” (George Carlin), or a commonsense medical intervention that we should all endorse?