Evangelical engagements with Eugenics, 1900-1940

Ethics & Medicine, Summer 2002 by Durst, Dennis L

If all the young people of the nation could be brought to understand that by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit their bodies are temples of God, that these sanctuaries must not be profaned, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate God, that those who sow to the flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, this realization of our responsibilities in matters of physical welfare, coupled with the corresponding understanding of our own intimate relation to the bodies of our descendants, would do more than a thousand years of eugenic dreaming.30

Learning from the Mistakes of History

From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that we cannot generalize about "the evangelical response" to the American eugenics movement. Instead, we must speak of varied responses. The rhetoric of the eugenicists seeped into the discourse of Christian social reformers. Sometimes evangelical social reformers employed derogatory terminology for persons with diseases or mental disabilities, even to the point of calling the full humanity and worth of such persons into question. Evangelical criticisms of eugenics came somewhat late in its development as a movement in American culture. By 1940, some 30 states had involuntary sterilization laws on the books.31 Whatever opposition evangelicals might have mustered toward negative eugenics in those states, it was clearly nothing like the scale of their opposition, for example, to the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

It is important to observe what I hope by now is obvious. The Kingdom of God and modern civilization are two very different realities. In fact, we can now say that they were and are often opposed. The Kingdom of God has room, and, in fact places a high value upon, "the least of these." The Apostle Paul rejected "efficiency" in human relationships when he proclaimed that "those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable." The Kingdom of God is often hidden, and usually less than obvious. Its paradoxical nature is just what renders it antithetical to the remorselessness of rational social control. Modern Civilization is confident that the means of progress are clear and unproblematiclacking only the willpower to accomplish Utopia. Citizens of the Kingdom of God will always be diffident and deeply suspicious of such claims. They will always insist "The Kingdom of God is among you," meaning the reign of God among all sorts of people, including the Palestinian peasants originally addressed by Jesus. Modern Civilization would demand that we sacrifice the currently slow and inconvenient for a promised future of beauty and perfection. The Kingdom of God would insist "My grace is sufficient for thee, for my power is perfected in weakness."

What lessons may current evangelicals and others concerned about bioethics and the dignity of human life today learn from the earlier eugenics movement? First of all, I think it is clear evangelicals have good cause to urge caution upon the scientific and governmental communities who promote social policies based upon any science in its infancy. Had such caution been exercised in the early twentieth century, many perfectly normal persons, who had hastily been identified as "defective," might have retained their freedom to procreate. Instead, thousands were deprived of the basic dignity of marrying and starting families. When evangelicals are accused of recalcitrance or of foot-dragging on such matters as fetal stem-cell research, we have the right and the responsibility to point to the eugenics movement. There we can confidently identify a cautionary tale of scientific and governmental elites striking a Faustian bargain that trampled the very human rights a liberal society purports to hold dear.