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 watchword for the WCTU became "home protection," and members worked for women’s suffrage under that rubric. While these women often supported conservative and traditionalist assumptions concerning the roles of wife and mother, they also participated in activities that helped blur the lines between private and public spheres. Frances Willard, founder of the WCTU, eventually oversaw nineteen departments, "each one devoted to achieving a specific social-reform goal, ranging from child-labor laws to international peace, and from arbitration to social purity."⁴

One form of social purity found in temperance reform literature of the early decades of the twentieth century was an increasing aversion to the children of the 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:

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 inheritance—popular, 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:

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 feeble-minded" 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.

The rhetoric of evangelical zeal provided the scaffolding of Kellogg’s appeal for healthy living. But the underlying edifice had been radically reconstructed when compared with the ideals of nineteenth-century evangelicals who called for conversion as a prerequisite to moral reform. The heart of the message had now become physical well being, to be reformed by means of a relentless moralism long on law and short on grace. The later excesses of the American eugenics movement become more explicable when we explore their connection to the emotional power of the older evangelical rhetoric employed by figures such as Kellogg. "The human race is bound to extinction," he intoned, in the familiar terms of the camp evangelist’s endless warnings about the end of history, "unless a radical reform in habits of life can be effected." Science and religion were one for Kellogg, as he continued: "Every person who has been enlightened in relation to this fact ought to become an earnest missionary of the true principles of right living, a preacher of the gospel of health both by precept and example." The physicality of the appeal was, for Kellogg, a sacred calling, as he challenged his readers with the following charge: "Let us hope that every reader of GOOD HEALTH will aid in the propaganda of the principles of physical righteousness." He explicitly commended the efforts of Irving Fisher, a director of the Eugenics Record Office.¹⁴

Some evangelical intellectuals offered public opposition to the more extreme forms of eugenics. For example William Hallock Johnson, a frequent contributor to the Princeton Theological Review, then a leading journal of evangelical thought, expressed skepticism over the philosophical and scientific viability of eugenics.¹⁵ He critiqued the philosophical notion underlying eugenics, namely, that "the struggle for existence is transferred to a struggle among the constituents of the germ plasm." Johnson had more than a decade earlier voiced his concern about the loss of free will to modern deterministic philosophies rooted in scientific claims.¹⁶

The largest corpus of writings on eugenics by an evangelical in this period came from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s Walter L. Maier. Maier served for many years as editor of the youth-oriented Walther League Messenger and became the leading voice of the immensely popular radio ministry, The Lutheran Hour. Maier addressed eugenics throughout his marriage manual For Better, Not for Worse, which went through at least six printings.¹⁷ It is important to point out that in the 1930s when this book appeared, the eugenics movement was beginning to unravel. In part this came from developments in genetics that made the hereditarian explanations of complex human behaviors favored by eugenicists appear ludicrously simplistic. Furthermore, by the late thirties news of Hitler’s extreme applications of eugenic principles was already alarming thinkers in the rest of Europe and in America.¹⁸ Maier’s criticisms were thus drawn from many contemporary sources of opposition to eugenics, blended with his own conclusions as a biblical scholar and theologian.

Maier made much of the distinction between negative eugenics (prevention of the propagation of those of disadvantaged heredity) and positive eugenics (inducement of propagation by those of "superior" stock). Not wanting to appear unreasonable, Maier did accept, at least in principle, a limited form of negative eugenics. Under the subheading "The Church and Faddist Eugenics," Maier stated that: "the Church is not unsympathetic to a broad interpretation of the eugenic desire to improve the human race. It does not hide its head in the sands of theological abstractions while research in heredity presents its theories of genes and chromosomes." In a moment of ill-informed hyperbole, Maier went so far as to claim that the church "has never protested" legislative efforts in a list of states "where epileptics, insane, or feeble-minded persons" or "any one who suffers from an uncured social disease" are prevented from marrying.¹⁹ The terminological slipperiness of eugenics manifested itself in Maier’s claim that:

Yet Maier proceeded to demonstrate that such a definition was not, in fact, the predominant understanding of eugenics in Anglo-American society. He asserted that "it has come to denote a peculiarly technical cult and a program of extremist principles that penetrates into almost every fiber of the modern social fabric." He lambasted the "eugenic platform" as "scientifically, morally, and socially reprehensible."²¹ He first criticized the scientific uncertainty over the predictability of precise causes of hereditary traits upon which eugenics was based. Such had been admitted by scientists. Maier cited geneticist H. S. Jennings of Johns Hopkins University, as well as other scientists such as Dr. Caswell Grave, a zoologist at Washington University in St. Louis and Sir Arthur Keith, a British biologist. All had panned the simplistic views of heredity endemic to popular eugenics.²²

Secondly, Maier offered a theological critique of eugenics. Arguing against the "over-stress of the physical and mental" in eugenic thought, Maier cited Matthew 4:4: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The crux of this critique was thus, "Ultimately, eugenics leaves no room for God. If we cannot run the world of today without God, how can we hope to govern the generation of tomorrow without divine sanction and supervision?" Essentially, Maier attacked eugenics as an egregious instance of pride, the original and frustrating flaw in human nature. An echo of Maier’s sober Lutheran anthropology reverberated through his comment that "Even if this race-building program were biologically possible, the stern element of sin can in a brief moment puff over the house of eugenic cards that has been years in the building."²³

For Maier, the eugenics movement, which he derided as "this cult of the superman," was guilty of promoting social injustice. He found the studies on tenement dwellers by eugenicists as both condescending and "a startling contradiction of Christian ideals." Couching his criticism in terms evocative of an ethos both biblical and democratic, Maier asserted that "To prevent underprivileged individuals from accepting their inalienable and divinely bestowed pleasures of parenthood is not only a physiological error, but it is also an act of presumptuous discrimination."²⁴ Maier quoted at length from Catholic essayist G. K. Chesterton’s scathing critique of the eugenics program.²⁵ Maier allowed for state segregation of violent persons (by imprisonment), or those who could spread "physical contamination and infection" (by quarantine). But on the question of sterilization, the case "should stand on indubitable ground." Only when it could be demonstrated "that imbecility will beget imbecility" did the state have a right to "exercise jurisdiction over the bodies of its citizens." Yet even in such cases, Maier raised numerous questions.²⁶

Maier quoted approvingly from a German social pathologist, Dr. Ulbrich, who pointed out social influences and upbringing as the sources of most pathological behaviors. He proposed placement in homes and asylums particularly those operated by churches—as the best preventative measure, not sterilization. He also drew upon the report of the American Neurological Association in 1936 urging that so little is known of human heredity that scientific justification for sterilization is rare and highly selective. Maier concurred with the report’s assessment that eugenics enthusiasts were far too alarmist in their assessment of the effects of the breeding patterns of society’s "unfit" members.²⁷

Maier objected further to "radical eugenics" for what he perceived as "its open alliance with easy divorce and birth control, the inevitable corollaries of selective breeding."²⁸ Pastoral concern mingled with a theological and social conservatism yielded in Maier a profound distrust of such "modern" developments as meddling with traditional concepts of the married state and child-bearing.

In a subsection entitled "The Eugenic Elysium" Maier provided excerpts from the utopian fringes of the eugenics movement. He cited Richard Marvin Chapman’s A Vision of the Future, wherein the state provides birth houses, spouses are basically replaced by consorts, and the courting process is directed by doctors using rigorous physical exams. He quoted Frederick Seward, author of The Making of a New Race, who offered the prospect of selectively breeding races of giants, pygmies, strong men, and men of superior intelligence. Maier
pointed out the Marxist affiliation of H. J. Muller, a biologist at the University of Texas, whose book Out of Night essentially predicted the development of in vitro fertilization.²⁹

For Maier, such notions were utterly absurd and fantastic. Far more advantageous to the human race, in his view, was "the plain sense of duty in matters of health inculcated by the Christian religion." In a catena of scripture references, Maier offered his down-to-earth pastoral advice as the surer way to the happiness of the next generation:

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 unproblematic—lacking 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.

Secondly, it behooves evangelicals to support active engagement in research areas that touch on human procreation. A biblical scholar and radio commentator such as Walter Maier could warn the public at large about the excesses of eugenic thought, but only because he was widely read in the literature of his time. More effective still is internal critique from professionals inside the disciplines in question. The absence of talented persons in such fields simply abandons those fields to professionals who may not hold a worldview that cherishes persons as reflections of God’s image. Thus, denominations and congregations need to fund promising students in the areas of medicine, nursing, biology, genetics, bioethics, and public policy studies. Beyond mere funding, Christian denominations need to foster a more robust discussion of professional Christian vocations to be lived out intentionally in the public square. We can no longer define discipleship in terms of our daily quiet time.

Thirdly, beyond direct funding of young scholars, we need to provide our youth with resources for sustained lifelong mentoring in character formation. Too often, the Christian worldview is perceived in academia as merely a private affair to be left out of the lab. History shows that to leave one’s Christian worldview outside the lab is merely unwittingly to embrace another worldview that tends toward the destruction of human life and purpose.

Finally, evangelicals need to be more astute students of history, particularly the history of theological reflection. Though the eugenics movement saw a handful of Catholic supporters, for the most part the Catholic church was the most vocal critic of the eugenics movement. The resources of a natural rights tradition are available to all, but are known best in Catholic circles. We as evangelicals need to avail ourselves of the nuanced theological anthropology that has developed over the course of Christian history. This includes both Western (Roman Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) repositories of theological anthropology. The failure of evangelicals to participate with Catholics in discussions over the imago dei in the past does not mean we must perpetuate the same pattern in the future. I already sense openness to just such a fruitful engagement arising from among my fellow evangelicals. Let us encourage such fraternal engagements across the Christian community. Let us work together and further our common cause in the interest of human life and human dignity. E&M

References
¹ The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, s.v. "Eugenics."

² Robert D. Linder, "Division and Unity: The Paradox of Christianity in America," Dictionary of Christianity in America (Downers Grove: IVP, 1990), 12.

³ Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933, Women in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 5.

⁴ Ibid., 5-6.

⁵ Mary E. Teats, The Way of God in Marriage: A Series of Essays upon Gospel and Scientific Purity (Spotswood, N. J.: Physical Culture Publishing Co., 1906), frontispiece.

⁶ Ibid., 30. In a chapter entitled "Alcohol and Eugenics," Edith Smith Davis, Superintendent of the WCTU Scientific Temperance Department, declared: "That there is nothing new under the sun receives confirmation in the fact that the law of Moses is the law of Eugenics—that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Likewise the children shall have health and happiness whose parents have lived according to the law of life which is the law of God." Edith Smith Davis, A Compendium of Temperance Truth: Largely Contributed by the Counselors of the Department of Scientific Temperance Investigation and of Scientific Temperance Instruction of the World’s and National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (Milwaukee, WI: Advocate Publishing Company, n.d.), 116.

⁷ Ibid., 43-44.

⁸ Leila Zenderland, "Biblical Biology: American Protestant Social Reformers and the Early Eugenics Movement," Science in Context 11 (1998): 522-23.

⁹ Second Annual Report of the Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1925), 50.

¹⁰ Marouf Arif Hasian, Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 22.

¹¹ Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement Three, 1941-1945, s.v. "Kellogg, John Harvey;" American National Biography, s. v. "Kellogg, John Harvey;" Richard W. Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, M. D. (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1970), 82-94.

¹² John Harvey Kellogg, "The Race Betterment Conference," Good Health 62 (November, 1927), 5.

¹³ Official Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Race Betterment (Battle Creek, MI: Race Betterment Foundation, 1915), 89.

¹⁴ John Harvey Kellogg, "Mendel’s Law of Heredity and Race Degeneration," Good Health 45 (1910), 737. See Irving Fisher, "Eugenics," Good Health 48 (1913), 582-84, where Fisher ended his address with the following paean to eugenics as religion: "We shall make of eugenics the biggest pillar of the church, and eugenics will become embedded in the religion of the future. It shall happen hereafter that instead of conflicts between science and religion, these two great human interests will be marching together, hand in hand." For another instance of melding eugenics and religion, see the address given at Battle Creek Sanitarium Golden Jubilee, Charles B. Davenport, Eugenics as a Religion (New York: Cold Spring Harbor, n.d.), 3-8.

¹⁵ William Hallock Johnson, Professor of Greek and New Testament Literature, and later President of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, wrote for both scholarly and lay audiences on the implications of science for Christianity. Lincoln University was one of the leading institutions of higher learning for African Americans during this period, boasting such graduates as Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. See William Hallock Johnson, The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1916), 63-65; and Can the Christian Now Believe in Evolution? (Philadelphia: The Sunday School Times Company, 1926). See also Horace Mann Bond, Education for Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

¹⁶ See William Hallock Johnson, The Free-will Problem in Modern Thought, Columbia University Contributions to Philosophy, Psychology, and Education, vol. 10, no. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1903). See also his Stone Lectures at Princeton University, published as Humanism and Christian Theism (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1931)

¹⁷ Walter A. Maier, For Better Not for Worse: A Manual of Christian Matrimony, 3rd ed., rev. (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1939), vi; cf. Paul L. Maier, A Man Spoke, A World Listened: The Story of Walter A. Maier (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1980), 110-26, 164-215.

¹⁸ See Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 113-28; 164-75.

¹⁹ Maier, For Better Not for Worse, 232.

²⁰ Ibid, 232-33.

²¹ Ibid, 233.

²² Ibid., 233-36.

²³ Ibid, 236.

²⁴ Ibid

²⁵ Ibid, 237. See G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1927).

²⁶ Ibid

²⁷ Ibid, 238-39.

²⁸ Ibid, 239.

²⁹ Ibid, 240-42.

³⁰ Ibid, 242.

³¹ Ian Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940, Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), viii.

This article appeared in Volume 18:2 of Ethics & Medicine.