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For the most part, prominent Christians were not involved in the eugenics movement. However, there were two streams of thought in Protestantism that enthusiastically welcomed eugenics. The first of these came from the liberal wing; the second from that which espoused the “social gospel.”
According to Chris Gherz Christine Rosen painstakingly documented the first stream in her 2004 book Preaching Eugenics. She “argues that ‘eugenics flourished in the liberal Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish mainstream’ precisely because of those religious Americans’ enthusiasm for evolutionary science. She concludes that ‘in eugenics they found a science whose message moved effortlessly from laboratory to church.’”
“The title of Rosen’s book alludes to the ‘eugenics sermon contest’ that the American Eugenics Society (AES) inaugurated in 1926. “We see that the less fit members of society seem to breed fastest and the right types are less prolific,” Reverend Phillips Endicott Osgood, rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis, told parishioners that Mother’s Day. “Until the impurities of dross and alloy are purified out of our silver it cannot be taken into the hands of the craftsman for whom the refining is done…. Grapes cannot be gathered from thorns nor figs from thistles.” [a liberal reading of Matthew 6:17]
A leading supporter of eugenics in Britain was William Ralph Inge, an author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, and among the most influential Christians of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.
In 1899, Inge delivered the Bampton Lectures, on the subject of ‘Christian Mysticism’, in which he discussed his belief that the church should not focus on claims about the miraculous but upon personal experience of God and prayer. According to The Guardian, ”A remarkable conflict of opinion has illuminated the Church Congress today. Dean Inge has been urging that Churchmen must understand eugenics, and in so doing admitted the force of the evolutionary theory and invited the Congress to realize that this generation is responsible for the behavior and mental efficiency of its successor.
“The Dean’s precipitation of the subject was in the form of a reasoned statement which might have gone far enough to imply definitely the sterilization of the unfit and the control of conception had the speaker so wished. He stopped short of that conclusion, merely observing that the time may not have come for the drastic methods of the stud farm and explaining that his only desire was to secure an alteration of the attitude of churchmen.
“It might be asked what eugenics had to do with religion. His answer would be an attempt to convince Church people that they must add a duty to posterity to their new moral obligations…The Dean said: “I believe there is still a weight of prejudice to be removed before Church people will be ready to listen to the spirit of the age. I am not advocating any particular program of racial hygiene, I know enough to be aware of the great complexity of the problems which this very young science has to deal with. It may be that the time has not come for drastic measures.”
Inge made this statement with direct reference to his position as a member of the clergy, and noted that ethics had, for the ‘majority of people’, ‘a religious sanction, or even a religious foundation’. With this in mind, Inge described ways in which he believed eugenics fulfilled true Christian morality. Inge argued that people in ‘Class I’ had neglected ‘the chief duty which God and his country required of him’ when they chose not to have children. He attacked ‘any supposed interests of Christian morality’ which failed to challenge ‘degeneration’, and said the height of Christian ethics was found in Christ’s command ‘“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect”’. With eugenics thus given the sanction of Christ, Inge looked to Christian history to develop his argument in a more disturbing manner:
“Christian ethics does not (as is often supposed) teach the duty of preserving and multiplying life at all hazards. Once convinced that so-and-so was an undesirable citizen, the Church … lost no time in hurrying him out of the world. No doubt they usually burnt the wrong people, which was very unfortunate; and you must not suppose that I want to see autos da fè even of our most degraded specimens (!!!); but my point is that there is nothing inconsistent with Christianity in imposing as well as enduring personal sacrifice where the highest welfare of the community is at stake.
The second stream of Protestant support came among those who supported a social gospel. Many religious groups found eugenics a welcome addition to their existing charity work and social services. For example, In the early 20th century, Oscar McCulloch’s misguided attempt to ease societal ills was utilized to strip Americans of their reproductive rights. “On the heels of economic depression triggered by the Panic of 1873, he implemented his Social Gospel mission. He sought to ease financial hardship by applying the biblical principles of generosity and altruism.” Brent Ruswick stated in his Indiana Magazine of History article, McCulloch “brought a blend of social and theological liberalism and scientific enthusiasm to his work in Indianapolis.” He also brought a deep sense of empathy for the impoverished and soon coordinated and founded the city’s charitable institutions, like the Indianapolis Benevolent Society, Flower Mission Society, and the Indianapolis Benevolent Society.
But then he went off the rails. In 1878, McCulloch encountered the Ishmael family, living in abject poverty. Disturbed by the encounter, McCulloch headed to the township trustee’s office to research the Indianapolis family, who lived on land known as “Dumptown” along the White River He discovered that generations of Ishmaels had depended upon public relief. According to Ruswick, McCulloch came to believe that the Ishmaels, “suffering from the full gamut of social dysfunctions,” were not “worthy people suffering ordinary poverty but paupers living wanton and debased lives.” Over the course of ten years, the pastor sought to discover why pauperism reoccurred generationally, examining 1,789 ancestors of the Ishmaels, beginning with their 1840 arrival in Indiana.
McCulloch’s nationally renowned 1888 “Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation” concluded that heredity and environment were responsible for social dependence. He noted that the Ishmaels “so intermarried with others as to form a pauper ganglion of several hundreds,” that they were comprised of “murderers, a large number of illegitimacies and of prostitutes. They are generally diseased. The children die young.” In order to survive, the Ishmael’s stole, begged, “gypsied” East and West, and relied on aid from almshouses, the Woman’s Reformatory, House of Refuge and the township. Assistance, he reasoned, only encouraged paupers like the Ishmael’s to remain idle, to wander, and to propagate “similarly disposed children.” In fact, those benevolent souls who gave to “begging children and women with baskets,” he alleged, had a “vast sin to answer for.”
In addition to revoking aid, McCulloch believed the drain on private and public resources in future generations could be stymied by removing biologically-doomed children from the environment of poverty. Ruswick noted that McCulloch, in the era of Darwin’s Natural Selection, believed “pauperism was so strongly rooted in a person’s biology that it could not be cured, once activated” and that charities should work to prevent paupers from either having or raising children. This line of thought foreshadowed Indiana’s late-1890s sterilization efforts and 1907 Eugenics Law. The Charity Organization Society, consulting McCulloch‘s “scientific proof,” decided to remove children from families with a history of pauperism and vagrancy,
At the end McCulloch had a change of heart. He began to rethink the causes of poverty, believing environmental and social factors were to blame rather than biological determinism. Ruswick notes that “Witnessing the rise of labor unrest in the mid-1880s, both within Indianapolis and nationwide, McCulloch began to issue calls for economic and social justice for all poor.” To the ire of many of his Indianapolis congregants, the pastor defended union demonstrations and pro-labor parties. He no longer traced poverty to DNA, but to an unjust socioeconomic system that locked generations in hardship. McCulloch believed that these hardships could be reversed through legislative reform and organized protest. To his dismay, McCulloch’s new ideology reportedly resulted in his church being “‘broken up.’”
The Catholic response was quite different. It was in response to Inge that one of the most prominent Catholic opponents of eugenics, G. K. Chesterton, with a readership to rival that of Inge, launched a scathing attack on eugenics:
“The Eugenist doctors … do not know what they want, except that they want your soul and your body in order to find out. They are quite seriously, as they themselves might say, the first religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal. All other established Churches have been based on somebody having found the truth. This is the first Church that was ever based on not having found it.”
It is clear that the message about a religion of eugenics had been received, but not always in a positive light. When eugenicists were clearer as to their intentions, such as when seeking sterilization legislation, there was an even stronger opposition from Catholics.
So argues historian Sharon Leon in her 2013 book, An Image of God. She cites an issue of the Jesuit magazine America that came out in 1927. That same year, in ruling against Buck (a woman whom the state of Virginia wanted to sterilize), Supreme Court Justice Wendell Holmes opined, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
Appalled by the reasoning of Holmes and the other justices, the editors of the Jesuit magazine America, based their objection:
“on the fact that every man, even a lunatic, is an image of God, not a mere animal, that he is a human being, and not a mere social factor. To care for the dependent with sacrifice, foresight and charity, is a work which ennobles the individual, and is a source of vigor for the State. To care for them with a surgeon’s knife and nothing else and then to stamp this method as “enlightened” shows how far we have wandered from the concepts of humanity and of Christian civilization.”
The Canadian catholic doctor, Letitia Fairfield, was a forceful critic of eugenics. She wrote in The Case against Sterilization.
“This notion of preventing needless suffering and improving the race by sterilizing the members of so-called ‘tainted stocks has become a veritable religion with many well-meaning persons who have lost all sense of spiritual values.”
and
“Already the specialists in mental disorders who have few illusions about the possible value of sterilization have been stampeded by the doctrinaire eugenicists and social reformers into a qualified support mainly on the ground that it can “do no harm.” Catholics who see the dangers of even the smallest surrender of principle more clearly, will have to bear the brunt of the fight but may reckon on the support of non-Catholic fellow-countrymen when the full implications of the proposal are better understood.”
But the full force of the Catholic Church became arrayed against eugenics when Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical, Casti Connubii, on Christian Marriage. In this encyclical, the Church declared:
“Finally, that pernicious practice must be condemned which closely touches upon the natural right of man to enter matrimony but affects also in a real way the welfare of the offspring. For there are some who over solicitous for the cause of eugenics, not only give salutary counsel for more certainly procuring the strength and health of the future child – which, indeed, is not contrary to right reason – but put eugenics before aims of a higher order, and by public authority wish to prevent from marrying all those whom, even though naturally fit for marriage, they consider, according to the norms and conjectures of their investigations, would, through hereditary transmission, bring forth defective offspring. And more, they wish to legislate to deprive these of that natural faculty [compulsory sterilization] by medical action despite their unwillingness; and this they do not propose as an infliction of grave punishment under the authority of the state for a crime committed, not to prevent future crimes by guilty persons, but against every right and good they wish the civil authority to arrogate to itself a power over a faculty which it never had and can never legitimately possess.
