Evangelical engagements with Eugenics, 1900-1940

Ethics & Medicine, Summer 2002 by Durst, Dennis L

Despite its sloppiness, the rhetoric of eugenics was important in making repressive policies toward the poor and mentally ill thinkable, palatable, and practicable. The constant drumbeat of phrases like "the menace of the feebleminded" and "mental defectives" had its toll in the dehumanization of the "unfit."

One particularly virulent practitioner of a public rhetoric devaluating such persons was John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg was a colorful character, wearing several hats including medical doctor, educator, theologian, health reformer, and inventor of the cornflake. An excommunicated Seventh-Day Adventist, Kellogg used his magazine Good Health to reach a wide audience, and the guest list of his Battle Creek Sanitarium reads like a Who's Who of American elites of the early twentieth century. Kellogg was convinced that poor dietary and moral habits were leading America down the path of "race degeneration." His solution was eugenics, not merely as a set of policies, but as a quasi-religious ideology.11

Ever the zealous social reformer, Kellogg was instrumental in hosting and organizing three distinct "Race Betterment Conferences." In 1914, 1915, and 1928, numerous prominent eugenicists as well as interested onlookers gathered to hear the problems of "race degeneration" surveyed and specific proposals for "race betterment" espoused. In the 1914 conference, Kellogg offered in his opening address a gloss on Jesus' parable of the wheat and tares. But instead of enjoining Christian discipleship or spiritual regeneration as the answer to the world's corruption, Kellogg expostulated: "The field is the world of degenerate humanity and the force is the regenerating power of applied sciences." The extent of his pilgrimage away from the evangelical ethos that nurtured him is encapsulated in his statement: "It should be the constant aim of the promoters of this Conference to establish its work on an enduring basis and to promulgate no opinions, nor conclusions, nor recommendations that are not sustained by the immutable truths of science. ,12 Though more sober-minded scientists throughout the twentieth century have stressed the provisional character of the scientific enterprise, for Kellogg, at least, perhaps the authority of science had come to fulfill functions traditionally reserved for the teachings of religious faith. In Kellogg's remarks to the second Race Betterment Conference in 1915, the emphasis in human procreation had become the efficiency of the animal breeder. Critics of the efforts of eugenicists to arrange marriage unions according to eugenic criteria had argued that such endeavors omitted love from the equation. In a sharp rejoinder, Kellogg reveled in his role as defender of scientific efficiency: "One newspaper said Dr. Kellogg and Dr. Burbank were trying to make the United States into a great stock farm, by breeding for human efficiency. I wish," Kellogg retorted, "we had the power to do that very thing. It would not be such a bad idea," he continued, "it certainly would be a great deal better than to have the United States a great stock farm, breeding mongrels-which is what we are doing now.13 Human uniqueness, once enshrined in the treasured biblical doctrine of the imago Dei, took second place to the greater good of society, as defined by Anglo-Saxon elites such as John Harvey Kellogg. Anyone who did not measure up to his physiological or moral ideal was not fit for the kingdom, or, more precisely, for the forward march of a scientifically efficient and modern civilization.