On the eve of the election, as the results were just beginning to trickle in, I was guest lecturing to a group of college students on the topic of epigenetics and Christian ethics. Epigenetics is a relatively new field in genetics. It’s producing increasingly incontrovertible evidence that the things we experience and endure during our lifetimes, including and perhaps especially trauma, can make a lasting biological imprint. Furthermore, this imprint can, it appears, be passed on to one’s children, grandchildren, and maybe even beyond. The work of scientists like Katharina Gapp,[1] Gustavo Turecki,[2] and Rachel Yehuda[3] is suggesting that the effects of suffering can be biologically inherited. What this means is that your grandmother’s traumatization may influence the way genes responsible for things like stress regulation, brain plasticity, and metabolism are expressed in your own body and mind.
During my time with these students, I asked them to consider the very likely possibility that many brown-skinned people in this country (African Americans and Native Americans especially) literally bear in their bodies the scars of their ancestors’ past traumas—traumas acquired at the hands of White oppressors who carried out their many and varied brutalities in a systematic, governmentally supported way over the course of much of America’s relatively short history.
I did not ask students to speculate on the possible implications of the result of the current presidential election (at the time unknown) in the light of the epigenetic study of trauma. Now I wish I had.
Over course of the past two years, we have observed time and again how racism, xenophobia, and misogyny characterize Donald J. Trump’s person, and contour, as well, his planned policies. Under a Trump presidency, I fear it probable that a culture of legitimized violence toward women as well as non-White, non-Christian, non-heterosexual individuals will be more deeply entrenched in our society. The recent burning of a black church in Trump’s name gives just one chilling intimation of ways in which Trump’s ascendency is emboldening those among us who are most driven by fear and hate, those who appear most ready to carry out traumatizing action toward people who have already suffered long in a society permeated by and built on brutal, unjust power structures.
In view of what science is revealing about the intergenerational effects of trauma, what does a Trump nation mean for our future? For our children’s and grandchildren’s future? Our soon-to-be president brags about his own ability to sexually assault women at will, is heartily endorsed by the infamously racist (and historically violent) Ku Klux Klan, and has touted his wish to bar or expel from our country certain brown-skinned and non-Christian others. Such facts threaten to intensify a cultural climate in which physical and psychological violence against those most vulnerable is normalized, even encouraged. And for each act of violence perpetrated in such a climate, a cascade of trauma-induced epigenetic alterations may be launched in the genetic information systems of the victim, and may impact, too, the genetic information passed onto her descendants.
Brown-skinned and female American writers too numerous to mention have long said that the oppression their ancestors endured is inscribed into their very bodies and minds. I will be honest: in the light of the epigenetic study of trauma’s heritable effects, a Trump presidency causes me to fear the literal perpetuation and proliferation of just this inscription.
I am a Christian, and my scriptures speak of the “sins of the fathers” visiting “even unto the third and fourth generation.” (e.g., Exodus 34:7). I am not a biblical literalist, nor am I someone who looks to the Bible to prove or debunk the claims and findings of current science. But in this case, the parallels between this ancient Hebrew maxim, and the modern epigenetic study of trauma, are eerily resonant. This fact fills me with an unsettling combination of awe, terror, and the desire—no, the need—to do whatever I can to stem the tide of the effects of social sin in our day.
Whatever your political proclivities, whatever your religious or spiritual affiliations (or lack thereof), I hope you will join me in folding into your sense of personal calling a commitment to helping create a world wherein the violence and lasting damage that comes of fear and hatred is lamented and prevented, and wherein the bodily, psychic, and spiritual well-being of both those living and those yet-to live is prized and protected.
[1] Gapp, Katharina, Ali Jawaid, Peter Sarkies, Johannes Bohacek, Pawel Pelczar, Julien Prados, Laurent Farinelli, Eric Miska, and Isabelle M Mansuy. “Implication of Sperm RNAs in Transgenerational Inheritance of the Effects of Early Trauma in Mice.” Nature Neuroscience 17, no. 5 (May 2014): 667–69.
[2] Lutz, Pierre-Eric, Daniel Almeida, Laura M. Fiori, and Gustavo Turecki. “Childhood Maltreatment and Stress-Related Psychopathology: The Epigenetic Memory Hypothesis.” Current Pharmaceutical Design 21, no. 11 (April 2015): 1413–17.
[3] Yehuda, Rachel, Nikolaos P. Daskalakis, Linda M. Bierer, Heather N. Bader, Torsten Klengel, Florian Holsboer, and Elisabeth B. Binder. “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation.” Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5 (Sept. 2016): 372-380.
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