Evangelical engagements with Eugenics, 1900-1940

Ethics & Medicine, Summer 2002 by Durst, Dennis L

In a later section, she connected such unfortunates with Malachi's prophetic rebuke of postexilic Israel's offering of blind, lame, and sick animals as sacrifices. She scoffed at the notion that "the lame, halt, deaf, blind, mutes, imbeciles, idiots, drunkards and moral perverts" could be properly called "God-given children," or considered a proper offering and gift to God.7

Was such rhetoric merely an aberration among those who had roots in the nineteenth century evangelical reform ethos? In degree, perhaps. But in kind, unfortunately, the answer is "no." Both women and men promoted a range of societal reforms aimed at issuing in Christ's kingdom, reforms that included components of the eugenics movement. Social historian Leila Zenderland has identified numerous figures among Bible-believing Protestants who offered similar assessments of what were regularly identified as "paupers," "imbeciles," "criminals", or simply "defectives." According to Zenderland, the melding of eugenic ideals with biblical proof-texts "illustrate efforts by American Protestants to reconcile age-old Christian messages with new eugenic doctrines. In doing so, their writings blurred together the many meanings of a good inheritancepopular, biblical, and now biological."8 The rhetoric of the "kingdom of God" provided a key nexus between evangelical religion and eugenic ideals of modern civilization. Confident of the ability of moral reforms, achieved by scientific methods, to issue in the kingdom of God, such reformers harshly criticized citizens who lagged behind and thus impeded progress toward a purified society.

The Department of Moral Welfare of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. represents a milder form of support for eugenic thought. In the 1925 annual report to the denomination, the department's General Director, Charles Scanlon, enunciated the list of subjects addressed by the department. Items on the list included: "Social hygiene, protecting the very fountains of life and fostering wholesome eugenics," and "Defectives and delinquents, caring for the unfortunate, restoring the erring and wayward."9 Of course, such a brief reference to eugenics gives the student of history little evidence of what policies such a stance embraced. For example, did "protecting the very fountains of life" entail negative eugenics, including birth control and even involuntary sterilization of those in mental institutions? Or was the term "eugenics" used here in a more benign sense of positive eugenics-the careful choice of a healthy mate? Recent scholarship has pointed out the complexity of the term "eugenics" in early twentieth-century discourse. Marouf Arif Hasian, Jr. has noted that:

As both a science, movement, and ideology, eugenics was popularized in part because of its very ambiguity. To the chagrin of hard-liners, millions of Anglo-Americans believed that the term was simply another name for heredity. At the same time, hard-liners did gain the support of others who believed that the existence of socially stratified communities seemed to provide natural evidence of the immutable physical, biological, and social differences between 'races' and `classes: Ordinary citizens who believed themselves to be living 'eugenically' disagreed on the degree to which the cold and harsh 'necessities' of life demanded there be an abandonment of the right to reproduce or the liberty of avoiding sterilization. 10