Eugenics was an offshoot of Darwinism that sought to improve the human race the same way you improve cows, horses, or corn: by selective breeding. Essentially, the fit were to breed, and the “unfit” -- those deemed socially, racially, intellectually, or physically undesirable or unwanted--were to be sterilized, or worse.
The modern eugenics movement began with Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton read Darwin's theory, which proposed that all the diversity we see among plants and animals came about because of “natural selection.” For Darwin, natural selection was simply selective breeding—a process already very common and familiar in the late 19th Century—only, instead of a human breeder, mother nature selects who will breed. In the constant struggle between predators and prey, Darwin theorized, those individuals who survived long enough to breed did so because of inherited advantages which would be passed to offspring more frequently, eventually spreading through the whole species, and changing it.
Impressed that selective breeding was an extremely powerful process, Francis Galton went a step further than his cousin and argued that this process should be applied to human beings, for the betterment of the human race. The idea was that if human breeding could be controlled in the same way farmers control the breeding of their stock, the race would naturally improve and become stronger and smarter. Galton coined the term “eugenics” from the Greek for εὐ- "good" and γενής "come into being, growing".
Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities. Organizations were formed to win public support for eugenics, including the British Eugenics Education Society, formed in 1907, and the American Eugenics Society, organized in 1921.
Both these organizations sought support from leading clergymen, and they adjusted their rhetoric to give it more of a religious appeal. Many clergymen and preachers eventually aligned with the eugenics movement.
In a book entitled, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, Christine Rosen writes about how many American pastors got involved in the eugenics movement. Her conclusion: it was the liberals who got roped into eugenics.
In her introduction, Rosen notes that the preachers who embraced eugenics:
embraced modern ideas first and adjusted their theologies later. Theirs were the churches that had naves and transepts modeled after gothic European cathedrals--as well as bowling alleys. And it was when these self-identified liberal and modernist religious men abandoned bedrock principles to seek relevance in modern debates that they were most likely to find themselves endorsing eugenics. Those who clung stubbornly to tradition, to doctrine, and to biblical infallibility opposed eugenics and became, for a time, the objects of derision for their rejection of this most modern science. (p. 5)
The religious leaders who became involved in eugenics included Protestants of nearly every denomination, Jews, and Catholics, and they overwhelmingly represented the liberal wings of their respective faiths.
Many of them ministered in large churches or synagogues in big city parishes that fit historian Stow Persons' description as being centered on "the resonant personality of a pulpit orator who blended the elements of an innocuous theology with discussion of current interests." They were the ministers, priests, and rabbis who were inspired by the developments of modern science and accepted the new historical criticism of the Bible. These modernistic liberals wanted to reconcile what they identified as the enduring principles of Christianity with the vagaries of modern experience and culture. (p. 15)
When Christians wander away from biblical preaching and religion, they are likely to embrace any nonsense the culture happens to be entertaining at the time, no matter how disgusting it will seem to future generations.
The liberal pastors who embraced eugenics tended also to embrace the "social gospel" of salvation through earthly improvement. They tended to be post-millennialists, believing that an earthly millennium would be brought about through human effort and reform, creating the Kingdom of God on earth.
Protestant supporters of Eugenics included former Seventh-day Adventist and Ellen White protégé, John Harvey Kellogg. Rosen’s book reproduces a photograph (p. 89) of the delegates' banquet at the first National Conference on Race Betterment, held at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1914. Rosen notes, however, that Dr. Kellogg's association with the Adventist Church ended in 1907 (and by 1914, Dr. Kellogg had wrested control of the Sanitarium away from the Adventist Church).
To drive her point home one last time, Rosen notes in her final chapter that:
The evidence yields a clear pattern about who elected to support eugenic-style 'reforms' and who did not. Religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets. The liberals and modernists in their respective faiths--those who challenged their churches to conform to modern circumstances--became the eugenics movement's most enthusiastic supporters. (p. 184)
The eugenics episode illustrates why conservative Christians are hesitant to embrace the enthusiasms of religious liberals; it calls to mind today’s social justice warriors who want to involve the church with movements such as “Black Lives Matter.” They say, “how could you be against black lives mattering? Don’t black lives matter to you?” just as their ancestors a century ago said, “how can you be against bettering the race? Aren’t three generations of imbeciles enough?”
Liberals seek to have the church join in support of what they deem to be worthy crusades for good things. But often the church must stand athwart history yelling, 'STOP!’ If the church has been co-opted by culture, it cannot fill that important prophetic role. "If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing, and is thrown out and trampled underfoot." Mat. 5:13
History has a way of discrediting the enthusiasms of the moment. At the height of the eugenics movement, in 1924, Virginia passed a forcible sterilization act (as many other states did during that era). That crack about three generations of imbeciles being enough was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Virginia could forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck "for the protection and health of the state."
It would later be shown that Carrie Buck was not an imbecile. She was an average student. But in sixth grade her foster parents took her out of school to make her their full-time maid. At age 17, her foster-mother’s nephew raped Carrie and she became pregnant. To cover up the crime and the reason for Carrie’s pregnancy, her foster parents had her committed to the “Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.” The daughter Carrie gave birth to, Vivian, was also an average student, but certainly no imbecile, before she died at age 8 of complications of the measles.
The eugenicists also sterilized Carrie’s sister, Doris, when her appendix was removed, but they never told her they had done so. Doris married, and she and her husband tried to have children; it wasn’t until 1980 that she learned why she couldn’t conceive.
Carrie Buck was released from the institution shortly after being sterilized. Reporters and researchers who visited her later in life said she was a woman of normal intelligence. She married twice, and later expressed regret that she had been unable to have any more children. She died in 1983. Virginia repealed its forcible sterilization act in 1974.
We will not need to wait half a century for it to become apparent that any connection to “Black Lives Matter” and the current Maoist cultural revolution will prove deeply embarrassing for the church. It is already obvious. Thousands of blacks have died needlessly because of the de-policing, called the “Ferguson Effect,” urged by Black Lives Matter, beginning after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August, 2014. Shootings and murders are up 100% or more in large cities since the beginning of the George Floyd riots—call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect. Black Lives Matter, by de-legitimizing the police and calling for their abolition or de-funding, are condemning thousands of black to death.
Over the weekend, two armed protestors in Atlanta shot into an automobile that had driven past their illegally placed barricade, killing Secoriea Turner, an 8 year-old black girl. “They say black lives matter,” said her grieving father, “but you killed your own.”
Black lives matter, but not to Black Lives Matter.