Circumcision among Americans

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how popular is circumcision among American Catholics.
i’m young catholic I come from Poland and I just want to know if US Catholics are also circumcised od not. Do Catholics in the US experience any pressure in this respect? and are you yourself circumcised and your children?
 
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Casper said:
how popular is circumcision among American Catholics.
i’m young catholic I come from Poland and I wonder if I should be circumcised before moving to the USA.
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There is no reason for you to be circumcised.

I’m not sure what you mean by “popular”, but most babies in the US probably get circumcised— however with more immigration and many American mothers now thinking it is not necessary I think that number is changing.

But adults do NOT get circumcised when they move here.

What would you want to do that?
 
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thatkoko said:
Quick question why do Americans get circumcised despite the fact that Galatians 5:2 condemns it?
Is it only for medical(non biblical) reasons or do they actually think it’d spiritually benefit em somehow?
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It isn’t for religious reasons.

It was conventional wisdom in the medical communities in the 19th and 20th centuries in English speaking countries and it became very popular here for many years. It’s on the decline now.
 
Years ago, it used to be widely recommended by doctors, but that was in the specific case of newborn baby boys. With the development of modern pharmaceuticals, leaving your baby son uncircumcised is no longer seen as the health hazard (real or imagined) that it was in the old days.
 
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thatkoko said:
Quick question why do Americans get circumcised despite the fact that Galatians 5:2 condemns it?
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Cornflakes. Really.

The person who is responsible for the mass circumcision of American males was John Harvey Kellogg, a medical quack associated with the Seventh Day Adventist movement, who nevertheless was EXTREMELY influential, and remains so till today. He was the founder of what would become the several Adventist health care systems in the US and worldwide, second only to the Catholic ones.

In addition to the common obsession of the time with proper pooping, which he fostered by administering gallons of yoghurt per rectum, he was even more obsessed with masturbation, which he “treated” with some nasty methods, including sewing the foreskin shut on males and burning off the clitoris with carbolic acid on females. Fortunately, both of those methods were eventually abandoned, but unnecessary circumcision of infant males persists till this day in the US.

Because, like his illustrious predecessor, Sylvester Graham, the inspiration behind Graham crackers, he believed that a bland diet would kill “animal passion”, he invented cornflakes primarily to combat the urge to masturbate. He wanted them to be a free gift to the world, but his brother William had more business sense and started the cereal company we know today. Curiously, C.W. Post was a patient of Kellogg’s and would go on to form his own cereal company.

So next time you suspect your children of polluting themselves, buy some graham crackers and cornflakes before reaching for the scissors and acid.
 
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I’ve also read that circumcision became widespread during the post-war Baby Boom beginning in 1946 because of hygiene issues suffered by their fathers in the military.
 
Pitcairn17 said:
I’ve also read that circumcision became widespread during the post-war Baby Boom beginning in 1946 because of hygiene issues suffered by their fathers in the military.
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This is also what I was told. I’m not sure if there were really such hygiene issues that couldn’t be solved with proper washing, or if washing wasn’t possible in a combat situation. Later on it seems to have become more a matter of not wanting one’s son to look different from other boys in the locker room, or different from his own father. Starting in about the 70s, many younger parents started rejecting the idea of circumcision so there are now a fair amount of uncircumcised US men aged 40 and younger.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
This is also what I was told. I’m not sure if there were really such hygiene issues that couldn’t be solved with proper washing, or if washing wasn’t possible in a combat situation.
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Hygiene was never a real issue, except as an old wives’ tale.
Tis_Bearself said:
Later on it seems to have become more a matter of not wanting one’s son to look different from other boys in the locker room, or different from his own father.
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This is closer to the truth. It just became a senseless, automatic fashion choice that persisted long after the connection with medical quackery and masturbation was forgotten.
 
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We did not have that done to our son. It is an unnecessary mutilation. We were offered the choice either way, in a Catholic hospital by a Catholic doctor, and we declined.
Pitcairn17 said:
I’ve also read that circumcision became widespread during the post-war Baby Boom beginning in 1946 because of hygiene issues suffered by their fathers in the military.
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Keep in mind, too, that the postwar era in the US was one of extreme conformity. Everyone wanted to do things exactly the way that the crowd was doing them. There was also an unmitigated faith in science, progress, and everything synthetic and artificial. Women prided themselves on not breastfeeding, and birth control (such methods as were available, that is) was becoming a “thing”. Circumcision was just one more thing that spelled progress and being “up with the times”.
GordonP said:
which he fostered by administering gallons of yoghurt
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Hey, thanks, buddy, I’ll never look at yogurt the same way ever again 🤮 😃

But I do like my cornflakes.
 
thatkoko said:
So cornflakes are Jewish?
I’m switching to muesli now :3
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Joking aside, there was a bit of “judaizing” in the early Seventh Day Adventist movement, with its insistence on worshiping on Saturday rather than Sunday and it prohibition of pork. However, the circumcision craze does not appear to be motivated by this, but rather with the panicked obsession with the health effects of masturbation that started in the early 1700s. Things got pretty out of hand, especially in English speaking countries.
 
The majority of American males are circumcised. Most are not done for religious reasons but cultural ones. I think there has been a push to stop the practice but at this point I think that push is subsiding because genital alteration is something that our culture finds a choice. I circumcise my boys. It’s a choice I make. Others make different choices. And we shouldn’t put others down for that.
 
Thank you, Gordon. Until now I knew nothing about J. H. Kellogg except for his prominence in the cereals industry. I turned to Wikipedia to read more, and learned that the Seventh Day Adventists coined their own technical term for excommunication:

Disagreements with other members of the church led to a major schism within the denomination: Kellogg was disfellowshipped in 1907, …
 
That’s interesting, and given that the Jewish people lived in the desert, adds a new dimension to their religious laws regarding circumcision.
 
It’s a cultural norm in the U.S., and varies in popularity by region. It’s been a while since I looked at the statistics, but I think rates are highest in the Northeast and lower toward the West Coast.

We did not have our son circumcised and reasoned he could have it done later in life if he wanted.

I read somewhere that it became popular in the U.S. around the time of WW I on the belief that it would be more hygienic for the soldiers.
 
It’s been very common in the USA, though not ubiquitous. However, in the past few years I’m hearing more and more people talk about avoiding it and not “mutilating” their infants. Obviously I’m fine with Americans not doing it, but the blanket tone I see some people use about the practice sometimes borders on anti-Semitism (insofar as they’d like to outlaw the practice on infants regardless of creed). There I go again saying far more than was asked.

It’s been very common in the USA but may start decreasing.
 
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Fewer. The circumcision rate among infant boys in America has dropped to around half. Which is good, because it is better not to make irrevocable changes to an infant if you don’t have to.
 
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Inquiry said:
Fewer. The circumcision rate among infant boys in America has dropped to around half. Which is good, because it is better not to make irrevocable changes to an infant if you don’t have to.
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I worked in personnel. The chance of a performance of an adult circumcision (which sometimes is medically prudent), when the pain and inconvenience is considered, should have every parent getting a boy child circumcised at birth.
 
By that logic the sheer impossibility of undoing the procedures should have every parent not getting their babies circumcised at birth.

To put it another way: I’ve run across uncircumcised men who really want to be circumcised and circumcised men who really want to be uncircumcised. The former are in for some pain and inconvenience, true, but they can have what they want. The latter… they will never, ever have what was taken from them.
 
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