Evangelical engagements with Eugenics, 1900-1940

Ethics & Medicine, Summer 2002 by Durst, Dennis L

When I began my research on evangelicals and the American eugenics movement, I thought I would find a large literature of anti-eugenic arguments. I hoped that evangelicals in the period 1900-1940 could prove helpful in current debates in bioethics. For the most part I was disappointed. To be sure, within evangelical circles were occasional voices of critique for one or another of the eugenicists' more extravagant claims about marriage or proposals for social betterment. Historian Edward J. Larson has found scattered opposition to eugenics by Protestants in state legislative records, predominantly in the fundamentalist South.1 But on the whole the evangelical mainstream in the decades following the turn of the century appeared apathetic, acquiescent, or at times downright supportive of the eugenics movement. In this article, I argue that the evangelicals often accepted eugenics as a part of a progressive, reformist vision that uncritically fused the Kingdom of God with modern civilization. From this analysis I suggest a few strategies we can discern by reflecting on past failures to adequately assess and critique the eugenics movement.

The Shape of Evangelical Engagement with Eugenics

Coming out of the nineteenth century, evangelicals appeared to have a formidable grip on hegemony in American culture. Robert Linder has observed that in the presidential election of 1896, Americans were offered "a choice between William McKinley, a born-again, testifying Methodist on the Republican ticket and William Jennings Bryan, a born-again, testifying Presbyterian on the Democratic ticket."2 The optimism of many Christians of the progressive era was encapsulated in the founding of a magazine entitled The Christian Century.

Reform movements abounded in the Progressive Era, most notably through pan-denominational organizations whose activist energy was provided by middle-class, traditionalist Protestants. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) promoted an agenda of social reform for which banning alcohol was merely the tip of the dry iceberg. Founded in 1874, the WCTU became the largest women's organization of the Victorian era, numbering 200,000 members by 1892, and over 344,000 by the year 1921.3 The watchwood for the WCTU became "home protection," and members worked for women's suffrage under that rubric. While these women often supported conservative and over 344,000 by the year 1921. The watchword for the WCTU became "home protections concerning the roles of wife and members they also participated for women's suffrage under activities that rubric. While these lines between often supported conservative and public spheres. Frances assumptions concerning the WCTU, eventually of wife and mother, they also participated "each activities that helped blur the lines between private and public social-reform goal, ranging from child-labor Willard, founder of the WCTU, eventually oversaw international departments, "each, and from arbitration to social purity."4 one devoted to achieving a specific social purity found in temperance reform goal, ranging from child-labor decades of the to international century was and increasing arbitration to the children of the underclass. An important by-product of a complex interplay of scientific purity found in temperance reform literature of the early decades of the twentieth century was an increasing aversion to theories about human heredity became children of temperance reforme underclass. An important by-product of a complex interplay of scientific and popular theories about human heredity became temperance reformers' increasing fear over the degeneration of America. Habits such as alcohol abuse and smoking, mental conditions such as congenital mental retardation, and a wide array of sexual practices all entered into a growing laundry list of ills to which solutions both "scientific" and "Christian" were proposed.

The National Purity Evangelist for the WCTU served as a lecturer for the National Purity Association, and a lecturer of the Correspondence School of Gospel and Scientific Eugenics.5 Her 1906 marriage manual, The Way of God in Marriage, exemplified an effort to weave scientific and biblical authority together into a virtually seamless argument. For this author, whose name was Mary E. Teats, children in the womb could be permanently injured not only by alcohol, but also by sexual intercourse during gestation and even by the mother's thought processes while carrying her child. Echoing the starkly elitist rhetoric of activists in the eugenical sterilization movement, she proclaimed:

The great and rapidly increasing army of idiots, insane, imbeciles, blind, deaf-mutes, epileptics, paralytics, the murderers, thieves, drunkards and moral perverts are very poor material with which to "subdue the world," and usher in the glad day when "all shall know the Lord, whom to know aright is life everlasting." There are hundreds and thousands of men and women today to whom in the interests of future generations, some rigid law should say, "Write this one childless." Men and women whose habits of life are such as to curse their offspring, should be prohibited from marrying.6