Liberal Theology & Eugenics

The complicity of the progressive theologians in eugenics, including its associated racism and classism, is well known to scholars, though perhaps not so well known in mainline liberal Protestant denominations.  There is an entire book on the subject, published back in 2004, by Christine Rosen entitled Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.

But a new interest in the topic has emerged recently.  Christianity Today‘s books editor  Matt Reynolds brought up the issue and reviewed Rosen’s 21-year-old book in his article  When Pseudoscience Swallowed Scripture.  And now the distinguished church historian Philip Jenkins, in the course of a separate study of American religion in the 1890s, goes further.

He has written about his research at the Patheos history blog Anxious Bench in a long post entitled 1893: What Would Jesus Do To Improve the Race?

That rather shocking title is an allusion to the slogan popularized in Charles Sheldon‘s 1896 novel In His Steps, “What would Jesus do?”  Sheldon was an important popularizer of the social gospel who is discussed in Rosen’s book.

Jenkins notes the seeming disconnect between the radical progressivism of the social gospel movement–women’s rights! organized labor! social justice!–and its recommended tactic of eugenics for “inferior” races.   But, says Jenkins, this was no contradiction for a good part of the educated public at the time.  “In fact, not only did prominent clergy support such opinions, they were their primary exponents in US culture.”

The “science of eugenics” and “scientific racism” had its origins in Darwinism, which taught that species evolve to higher levels as the best-adapted breed more and the mal-adapted die out.  Progress comes from the “survival of the fittest.”  Darwin himself draws the eugenic lesson in a passage Jenkins quotes from The Descent of Man (1871) [his italics]:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, … will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Note the word “exterminated.”

The new liberal theologians sought to embrace “modern science,” including Darwin.  And they sought to leave behind the “primitive” form of Christianity, with its supernaturalism, un-scientific doctrines, and fixation on eternal salvation, with the help of the Higher Criticism of the Bible and the new purpose of reforming society.

Let me just give you some of the quotes that Jenkins assembles.  Here is Horace Bushnell,  hailed as “the father of American religious liberalism“, as summarized by Jenkins:

At this early date, just two years after Origin of Species, he stressed that that Christian growth was a matter of population expansion rather than mission, and that this expansion was the result of selection and evolutionary advantage, that is, of “fitness.” Particular developed and maintained characteristics, whether civilized or savage, and the advantages of civilized races allow them to grow and spread at the expense of inferiors. Christians, he believed – and by this he invariably meant White American Protestants – stood at the highest end of such a racial hierarchy. As a race achieves new levels of “personal and religious character,” so it increases its “populating power,” which allowed it to outnumber and dominate less successful and “fit” groups, such as Catholics and Latinos. He praised “The Out-Populating Power of the Christian [that is, White Protestant] Stock.” Over time, those lesser races had to submit and accommodate the successful race, and they faced a real chance of extinction.

Here is a quotation from the even more influential social gospeller Josiah Strong:\, plus Jenkins’ comment:

Then this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it — the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization — having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the “survival of the fittest”?

In language that has chilling connotations for modern readers, Strong suggests that “in what Dr. Bushnell calls ‘the out-populating power of the Christian stock,’ may be found God’s final and complete solution of the dark problem of heathenism among many inferior peoples.” Yes, he did refer to a final solution.

Do read all of Jenkins’ post, which goes into more detail and gives more quotations, including Strong’s complaint about how not only inferior races breed too much but also “the Mountain Whites of the South, who are little more than semi- civilized,” and how something must be done to stop that.  And, indeed, under such influence, the United States passed compulsory sterilization laws and carried them out on many populations.

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was, of course, part of this movement.  I wonder if the support for abortion among mainline liberal Protestants as well as other political progressives is a carry-over of those beliefs.

May abortion one day be seen as hard to square with social justice as racist eugenics is today.

Illustration:  Josiah Strong (1893) by Artist unidentified – https://books.google.com/books?id=L8saAQAAMAAJ, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49224105