‘This Mighty Struggle for Life’: Modernist ProtestantMinisters, Biopolitical Violence, and Negative Eugenics in

the 1920s United States

Leif C. TornquistDept. of Religious Studies

UNC-Chapel Hill

In one of several sermons that he wrote as Secretary of

the American Eugenics Society’s (AES) Committee on

Cooperation with Clergymen, Rev. Henry S. Huntington soberly

observed that the compulsory sterilization of the

“feebleminded” challenged Christian ethics of charity and

compassion for the poor and abject. “It is a challenge to

society,” the ordained Baptist minister of the Northern

Convention declared, “to attack hereditary crime and

pauperism and feeblemindedness at the very sources of life.

[It requires] courage to recommend sterilization of

defective stocks in order that they may not propagate their

kind.”1 Delivering his sermon in the late 1920s, just around

the time that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the

constitutional basis of compulsory sterilization on eugenic

1 Henry S. Huntington, “Eugenics and the Church,” in “Huntington, Henry S.” (Philadelphia, PA: American Eugenics Society Papers, American Philosophical Library), 6.

grounds,2 Rev. Huntington publicly declared from the pulpit

that the sterilization of the “feebleminded” constituted a

moral exigency whose benefits for the health and prosperity

of the nation far outweighed any reservations about its

invasiveness and cruelty. Sterilization of the feebleminded

fostered the regeneration of the “white race,” Huntington

believed, and hastened the realization of its destiny, the

“kingdom of God on earth.”3 Comparing the eugenic regulation

of human reproduction to a battle against race degeneracy,

he proclaimed, “The door of birth must be besieged and

taken. It cannot be omitted from this mighty struggle for

life.”4

2 For an account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell (which established the constitutionality of eugenic sterilization), see Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 107-12.3 In another AES sermon Huntington opined, “If God’s kingdom is ever to come and His will to be done on earth as in heaven, the race must demandits birth right, the more abundant life. Man must dedicate himself to his partnership with God for the creation of a sounder, saner, finer, and nobler humanity.” Henry S. Huntington, “The More Abundant Life,” in “Huntington, Henry S.” (Philadelphia, PA: American Eugenics Society Papers, American Philosophical Library), 7. Huntington wrote at least nine sermons in his capacity as Secretary of the AES’ Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen. Many of these sermons have the same name (e.g., “Eugenics and the Church”), although they are often quite different in emphases, examples, and argumentation. As his sermons are undated, it is impossible to ascertain when and where, exactly, Huntington’s sermons were delivered.4 Huntington, “Eugenics and the Church,” 6.

2

There are over sixty extant pro-eugenic sermons written

and delivered by Protestant ministers for the AES in the

late 1920s, supporting one historian’s claim that Protestant

leadership proved “the most enthusiastic and numerically

powerful group of religious participants in the eugenics

movement.”5 Why did so many Protestant clergymen of the time

enthusiastically endorse negative eugenic policies aimed at

purifying the white racial body? In this essay, I seek an

answer by exploring “modernist” Protestant theologies of

immanence, theologies that heralded a God whose

manifestation in the racial body expanded through the

purifying forces of evolutionary violence and death and a

God who worked through evolution for the purpose of

advancing Christian civilization. I argue that, from the

modernist Protestant perspective of divine immanence, white

degeneracy appeared as an ontological problem in so far as

it confounded the enlarging presence of God in the life of

the race and slowed the advance of his kingdom on earth.

5 Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15. Rosen is presently senior analyst for The New Atlantis.

3

Segregation and sterilization of the “feebleminded” were

frequently endorsed as ways of doing God’s work,

constituting important measures for unfolding the divine

through the evolutionary perfection of the white racial

body.

In this essay, I sketch the historical and theological

framework that supported Protestant ministerial advocacy of

negative eugenics in three sections. In the first section, I

explore the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and the

work of Josiah Strong in order to historically contextualize

and characterize modernist Protestantism as a religiously

inspired discourse of civilization, tracing turn-of-the-

twentieth century synergies between evolutionary thought,

racism, and a liberal Protestant teleology of civilizational

advance. In the second section, I illustrate the development

of proto-modernist evolutionary theologies during the

nineteenth century, focusing on Henry Ward Beecher’s

theological justification of evolutionary “fitness” and

“death.” Here, I show how the famous nineteenth century

preacher used social Darwinist ideas to hereditarily fuse

4

the notion of racial fitness to a white Protestant teleology

of civilization.6 In the third section, I return to

Protestant ministerial support for negative eugenics during

the 1920s, demonstrating how pro-eugenic modernist ministers

like Rev. Huntington helped to popularize negative eugenics

as part of an onto-political struggle against race degeneracy

and for the kingdom of God on earth. I conclude by arguing

that modernist ontologies of the divine offer a new

scholarly framework for readdressing the role that

Protestantism played in the popularization of negative

eugenic initiatives in the United States.

Following Michel Foucault, I define “eugenics” as a

biopolitically racist mode of state power, one in which the

state’s sovereign right to kill is transformed into6 I use the term “social Darwinism” to refer to the evolutionary thoughtof Herbert Spencer and others who sought to apply Darwin’s “biological scheme of evolution to society.” Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 38. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and believed that the “pressure of subsistence upon population must have a beneficent effect upon the race.” His ideas had a strong influence on modernist and proto-modernistProtestant ministers like Henry Ward Beecher because “he was more concerned with mental than physical evolution” and he subscribed to a Lamarckian version of heredity, maintaining that the “intellectual powers of the race” could be evolved over several generations into the “ideal man.” Ibid., 39. This framework allowed Protestant clergymen to translate religious nurture, morality, and idealism into an evolutionaryidiom of racial fitness.

5

medicalized violence aimed at protecting the racial and

biological purity of the population.7 Although American

eugenicists did not endeavor to “kill” in the literal sense,

they did seek to eliminate white degeneracy by promoting and

ultimately institutionalizing surgical solutions that would

cut unfitness off at its hereditary sources.8 Through these

sterilizing measures, eugenicists sought the “evolutionary

death” of the feebleminded, and they promoted sterilization

as a clean, efficient, and even humane way of doing so. By

“eugenics,” I also mean a body of knowledge about the

hereditary nature of degeneracy and disease that naturalized

medicalized violence against degeneracy and that intersected

with other discursive matrices, including evolutionary

theory and scientific racism. My conclusions bear relevance

7 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador Press, 2003), 254-63.8 Sterilization techniques promoted by American eugenicists included vasectomy for feebleminded men and “ovariotomy,” salpingectomy, and hysterectomy for feebleminded women. Harry H. Laughlin, Bulletin No. 10A: Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population: The Scope of the Committee’s Work (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office, 1914), 63. It is worth notingthat the popular early twentieth century modernist Protestant minister, Newell Dwight Hillis, served on Laughlin’s 1914 committee, both as an expert on “religion and morals” and a consultant with respect to the “ethical, moral, and ontological aspects of sterilization.” Ibid., 7.

6

for that historical period in the United States lasting from

the 1870s and into the 1930s when many professionals in

various medical and scientific fields were preoccupied with

the issue of white degeneracy as both a moral and racial

issue.9

Modernist Protestantism and the World’s Parliament of Religions

Modernist Protestantism emerged as a religiously

inflected discourse of civilization that primarily affected

northern Protestant churches. It synergistically intersected

with the rise of American imperialism and the ascendance of

evolutionary paradigms of cultural advance and decline at

the end of the nineteenth century.

Scholars of American religious history cite the first

World’s Parliament of Religions held at the Columbian

Exposition in Chicago in 1893 to characterize modernist

9 When I use the term “eugenicist” I mean scientific and medical professionals officially connected with the Eugenics Record Office, the AES, or other professional eugenics organizations. These organizations came into existence in the second and third decades of the twentieth century in order to promote race betterment and thus a socially and racially conservative version of eugenics that sought to purify the national germ plasm of degeneracy.

7

Protestantism. The Exposition, as Richard H. Seager notes,

was organized and constructed in order to “celebrate

Christopher Columbus’s achievements,” while the Parliament

was promoted as the Exposition’s “most noble expression” of

the Columbian spirit of progress.10 Transpiring over a

seventeen-day assembly held in September of 1893, the

Parliament brought together representatives from the “ten

‘great religions’ of the world” in order to “exemplify a

spirit of national and world religious unity that many

thought would characterize the twentieth century.”11 Martin

E. Marty cites the Parliament as the paradigmatic expression

of a “universal outlook” of civilization that animated

modernist Protestantism, an outlook that characteristically

sought to “overcome the provincialism that [modernists]

thought afflicted religion.”12 Motivated by F. Max Müller’s

belief that the “‘[t]rue religion of the future will be the

10 Richard H. Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), xv.11 Ibid., xvii.12 Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion: The Irony of it All, 1893-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 17.

8

fulfillment of all the religions of the past’,”13 many

Protestant attendees championed the Parliament as a sign of

the ineluctable advance of God’s kingdom on earth.14

If the Parliament exhibited a “cosmopolitan habit” that

was characteristic of religious modernism,15 it also

underscored four interconnected and equally important

dimensions of modernist Protestant faith in a global,

terrestrial kingdom of God. The first was the fervent idea

that Protestantism was the most civilized and thus the most

evolved of the world’s religions, a notion that was

materially inscribed in the grounds of the Exhibition. As

Seager illustrates, the landscape of the Exhibition was

divided between the “White City,” where the Parliament was

held, and the “Midway Plaisance,” where anthropologists from

Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian Institute

brought “peoples from around the world to live […] for the

13 Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1986), 44-45.14 Marty, Modern American Religion: The Irony of it All, 17. Although Müller was unable to attend the Parliament, Marty quotes Müller as insisting that the religious “congress would be ‘one of the most memorable events in the history of the world’.” Ibid., 21.15 Ibid., 17.

9

summer of 1893.” 16 Reflecting the scientific discourse of

cultural evolutionism that was dominant at the time, these

peoples were hierarchically arranged from most “primitive”

to most “advanced,” with the Plaisance culminating in the

civilized splendor of the White City.17

Second, the Parliament showcased modernist Protestant

optimism in reconciling religion and science in the common

objective of building a global kingdom of righteousness.

Reconciling religion and science necessitated bringing them

into common teleological purpose, and this meant, above all,

that they had to be ontologically calibrated in order to

ensure the “irresistible march of [Christian]

civilization.”18 As we will see, one of the most common ways

of doing this was by drawing on theories of heredity in

order to show that religiosity, race, and evolution all

16 Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions, 4.17 Seager suggests that the architecture of the Exhibition reflected theideology of an American liberal Protestant “imago mundi.” That is, the White City signified the triumphalism of a culturally and racially evolved people whose religion emphasized morality, progress, and universality and the Midway represented those who were “less evolved, the backward or out-of-date, the unenlightened or the superstitious, theEast or the merely particular.” Ibid., 24-25.18 Ibid., 18.

10

pointed toward the same thing: the possibility of a morally

perfect, physically robust, God-like humanity.

Third, the Parliament demonstrates how a rising turn-

of-the-twentieth century white race nationalism suffused

modernist Protestantism. Marty draws from the work of Josiah

Strong to illustrate this point. Strong, the author of the

1885 American best-seller, Our Country, was General Secretary

of the Evangelical Alliance, a Protestant ecumenical group

that held a congress at the Exposition following the

Parliament. After participating in the events in Chicago,

Strong published his 1893 book, The New Era or the Coming

Kingdom, which envisioned the global advance of the kingdom

of God as being commensurate with the destiny of the Anglo-

Saxon race, with Strong emphatically insisting that Anglo-

Saxons represented the “greatest race, the greatest

civilization, […] the greatest physical basis for empire!”

As Marty demonstrates, Strong’s arguments underscore how

modernist Protestantism often collapsed any distinction

between evolution, racial identity, and righteousness.

Strong explicitly claimed, “Anglo-Saxon religious life [is]

11

more vigorous, more spiritual, more Christian than any other

race’s.”19

Strong’s work brings to light a final and paradoxical

dimension of modernist Protestantism as a discourse of

civilization, a dimension that implicitly haunted the

evolutionary triumphalism of the White City. This final

aspect underscores how modernist Protestantism developed as

a part of, and in response to, a broader and rather

pessimistic medico-political discourse of degeneracy in

which social Darwinist thought transformed existing racial

constructions of political fitness into a hereditary

framework of selection, struggle, and survival.20 This

discourse forced many modernist Protestant intellectuals to

reevaluate the relationship between Christianity and

civilization. In The New Era, for example, Strong argued

that, through charity and eleemosynary institutions aimed at

19 Marty, Modern American Religion: The Irony of it All, 23. It is important to notethat Strong was an incredibly popular writer. As Marty observes, his 1885 work, Our Country, was said to have been an American bestseller, second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ibid, 22-23.20 For a history of the intersections between “whiteness,” republicanism, and political fitness during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 15-90.

12

the moral and physical reform of individuals, Christian

civilization perpetuates the “weak in body and mind,” or

those inferior racial specimens who would be naturally

disposed of in more savage societies.21 Sharply

distinguishing between “Christian civilization” and

“nature,” Strong redefined civilizational progress in terms

of natural selection, cautioning his readers about the

racially deleterious consequences of a Christian manhood

conceived in terms of sympathy for the abject. He wrote:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon

eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a

vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the

other hand, do our utmost to check the progress of

elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the

maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our

medical men exert their greatest skill to save the life

of every one to the last moment […] Thus the weak

members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No

one who has attended to the breeding of domestic21 Josiah Strong, The New Era or the Coming of the Kingdom (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1893), 34.

13

animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious

to the race.22

Strong has been cited to document the development of

Anglo-American “muscular Christianity,”23 but the New Era

also underscores the confluence between eugenic thought and

modernist Protestantism in so far as it advances a

distinctly modernist Protestant inflection of what Stefan

Kühl refers to as “eugenic racism.” In identifying the “weak

members of civilized societies” as impediments to the march

of Anglo-Saxon civilization, Strong appealed to a “genetic

understanding of race […] as a unity of procreation,

preservation, and development.”24 Thus, when Strong argued

that Christian civilization “not only preserves the

defective classes and permits them to propagate their

kind,”25 he was insisting that the march of the Kingdom was

being slowed by the reproduction of white degeneracy as much

22 Ibid., 34-35.23 For example, see Beryl Satter’s brief analysis of the importance of gender in Josiah Strong’s work in Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 36-39.24 Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 70-71.25 Strong, The New Era, 35.

14

as it was by the spiritual, intellectual, and physical

backwardness of other races. In short, he was making a

eugenic claim that degeneracy hereditarily impedes the

perfection of the Anglo-Saxon racial body from within.

Fitness and Death in Proto-Modernist Evolutionary Theologies

In order to understand more fully how white degeneracy

became an ontological hindrance to God’s kingdom on earth,

one must see how nineteenth century precursors to modernist

Protestantism theologically fused together evolution, race,

religion, and civilization through the conceptual and

material medium of heredity. There are three interrelated

things to know about the political history of heredity

during the nineteenth and early twentieth century that are

relevant. First, as mentioned above, theories of heredity

became a privileged way of understanding white degeneracy as

an issue of civilizational decline and for scientifically

tracking and eliminating it.26 Second, hereditary theories

26 The issue of “white degeneracy” as a medico-moral issue first gained popularity with the publication of R.A. Dugdale’s study of “the Jukes” family in 1874. Studies of white degeneracy continued to be published during the remainder of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

15

complicated racial hierarchies that rested upon

morphological, linguistic, or other scientific distinctions

between races by making fitness an issue of reproduction.

Third, the popularization of the eugenic idea that heredity

should be cultivated for civilizational purposes was

inextricably intertwined with Protestant evolutionary

theologies that envisioned the white racial body as

evolutionarily imperfect, yet potentially divine. This

section considers the first two of these interrelated points

as they relate to the emergence of proto-modernist

evolutionary theologies in the nineteenth century, while the

next section focuses on the third point with respect to the

development of full-fledged modernism in the early twentieth

century.

In the pro-eugenic homilies that he delivered as

Secretary of the AES’ Committee on Cooperation with

Clergymen, Henry Huntington invoked a figure with which his

while these studies were the single most important medium by which the issue of degeneracy and thus the need for negative eugenic measures likesegregation and sterilization were publicized. For an analysis of eugenic family studies as a genre and an edited compendium of these studies, see Nicole Hahn Rafter, ed., White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

16

congregants were likely quite familiar: the nineteenth

century Congregationalist minister, Horace Bushnell. Other

AES ministers too invoked Bushnell in order to justify

eugenic control of heredity as a means of developing a more

righteous race.27 Bushnell, frequently identified by

scholars as a “precursor of American liberal theology,”28

was especially concerned with “character” as an object of

religious development. In 1847, he famously argued that

given proper love and instruction by Christian parents “a

child could grow up a Christian without ever having any

awareness that he was ever anything but a Christian.”

Seeking to provide the theological basis for a domestic,

middle-class piety, Bushnell argued that the “aim, effort,

and expectation” of Christianity ought not to be the

27 For example, an anonymous ASE minister wrote, “Horace Bushnell taughtus that ‘the child ought to grow up a Christian and never having known himself to have been anything else than a Christian’. Just so. And this is none other than the thought and passion of those who are promoting the Science of Eugenics. Science is making righteousness possible and isteaching us that goodness is inherited, that a love of the true and beautiful and the good has been transmitted by devout parents who reverence God and who worshipped Him ‘in Spirit and in truth’ and ‘in the beauty of holiness’.” “Eugenics,” in “1926 Contest” (Philadelphia, PA: American Eugenics Society Papers, American Philosophical Library), np.28 Glenn A. Hewitt, Regeneration and Morality: A Study of Charles Finney, Charles Hodge, John W. Nevin, and Horace Bushnell (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1991), 125.

17

conversion of sinners but what he referred to as the

“organic unity of the family.” In effect, Bushnell

proclaimed that a conversion experience was superfluous for

religious regeneration, as parents could “beget their own

good” within the child, with their “thoughts, opinions,

faith, and love” gradually forming the child’s character.29

In an expanded edition of his work published in 1861,

Bushnell’s theory of Christian nurture appeared evolutionary

in purpose, with Bushnell framing his familial “law of

organic connection” in Lamarckian terms. Here, Bushnell

argued that the Christian influence of the parents acting

upon the physiological organism of the child would obtain “a

living power […] in successive generations,” a power that

would become “more and more complete through time.” In other

words, the nurture received by one generation would be

passed on to the next with the whole hereditary process

pushing human physiology ever upward toward a more God-like

expression. In response to those who might see his ideas as

undermining revealed religion, Bushnell implored, “What29 Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (1847)(Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), 21.

18

higher ground of supernaturalism can be taken, than that

which supposes a capacity in the incarnate Word, and

Sanctifying Spirit, to penetrate our fallen nature, at a

point so deep as to cover the whole spread of the fall, and

be a grace of life, traveling outward from the earliest,

most latent germs of our human development?”30

Bushnell believed that, like righteousness, sin could

be transmitted across generations, with the impiety of one

generation causing “misery” and “debasement” in a subsequent

one.31 Yet Bushnell had neither a sense of the evolutionary

value of death nor any understanding of racial fitness.32

Henry Ward Beecher, on the other hand, did. His 1885 sermons

collectively published under the title, Evolution and Religion,

marked a decisive shift in the liberal Protestant practice

of using heredity to write evolutionary theologies. If not

the first, then Beecher was certainly the most influential30 Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New York: Charles Scribner, 1861),205.31 Bushnell writes, “the wickedness of parents propagates itself in thecharacter and condition of their children, and […] it ordinarilyrequires three or four generations to ripen the sad harvest of miseryand debasement.” Ibid., 39.32 Bushnell rejected “Darwinism.” William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 45-48.

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nineteenth century American preacher to draw from social

Darwinist ideas in order to associate evolutionary death and

racial fitness with divine agency. Although Beecher was an

abolitionist before and during the war, afterward he

publicly endorsed “second-class citizenship for African

Americans,” while supporting forgiveness for southern whites

and national reconciliation.33 Beecher thus helped to

religiously legitimize a “national identity premised upon

whiteness,”34 wherein white nationalism and racial fitness

increasingly became not only political but theological

concerns. Beecher did this by integrating evolutionary death

into the divine plan.

Adapting Herbert Spencer’s ideas, Beecher viewed the

evolutionary destruction of unfitness as part of a necessary

cultivation that ultimately made life stronger. “Death,”

Beecher insisted, “seems to be the instrument by which life

itself is supplied with improvement and advancement. Death

prepares the way for life.” Theologically, Beecher

33 Edward Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 93.34 Ibid., 7.

20

reconciled death as part of an “unfolding process” whereby

the divine carried “creation up to higher planes and upon

higher lines, reaching more complicated conditions in

structure, in function, in adaptation, with systematic and

harmonious results, so that the whole physical creation is

organizing itself for a sublime march toward perfectness.”35

In other words, death had creative potential; it possessed a

purifying, perfecting, and even consecrating power when it

came to the form, expression, and purpose of life.36

Beecher theologically reconciled the evolutionary

purpose of death by reconceiving the nature of sin through

the register of evolutionary fitness. Arguing for the

obsolescence of the older, Calvinist view of sin (which saw

transgression as being rooted in the “absolute corruption in

the material body of man”37), Beecher saw sin as issuing

from “the conflict going on between the base under-man” –

which he equated with the animal and the “crude, primitive

35 Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion, (New York: Fords, Howard, Hulbert, 1885), 115.36 It is, of course, striking that Beecher accorded such a prominent place for death in the perfection of human life after the deadliest war in American history up to that time.37 Ibid., 16-17.

21

world of matter”38 –and the “spiritual upper-man” –which he

identified with the human capacity for morality and

intelligence.39 “Man” was thus a “dual creature,

subordinately animal, with a superinduced [sic] spiritual

being,”40 while sin was the result of the animalistic half

of man overcoming his moral and intellectual faculties –or

of “the outpouring upon society of the passions, the

appetites, the selfishness, the pride, the cruelty –

everything that belongs to the lower life of man.”41 By

seeing the “spiritual upper-man” as the gradual and still

imperfect product of God acting through the evolutionary

process,42 Beecher was able to negatively correlate

sinfulness with evolutionary development. In this way,

sinfulness and unfitness became more or less the same thing,

with death being a part of God’s plan to weed out the

hopelessly animal so as to ensure his creation’s “sublime

march toward perfectness.”

38 Ibid., 44.39 Ibid., 16-17.40 Ibid., 75.41 Ibid., 104.42 Ibid., 87.

22

In Beecher’s evolutionary theology, fitness was a

function of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties

and their relative development at both the individual and

racial levels.43 Insisting that “barbarism and civilization

designate[d] the human mind undeveloped and highly

developed,”44 Beecher advanced the scientifically racist

claim that the relative differences in fitness between races

was due to their allegedly disparate evolutionary

developments. This meant that whites were inherently fitter

for civilization than more “barbaric” races because their

intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties were more

evolved. Indeed, Beecher depicted African Americans as

“overgrown children” who had no place in American

civilization except as “obedient laborers.”45 Non-white

races were supposedly much closer than whites to humanity’s

animal past, being constitutionally less capable of43 Following Ernst Haeckel, Beecher subscribed to the now discredited scientific idea that the development of an individual organism from embryo to adulthood could be used as a model for conceptualizing the supposedly unequal evolutionary development of human races. For a discussion of Haeckel’s influence on hereditary science, see Staffan Müller Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2012), 92.44 Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 79.45 Blum, Reforging the White Republic, 92, 96-97.

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overcoming the baser impulses that Beecher identified with

sinfulness in so far as they possessed less developed

spiritual natures.

The implications of Beecher’s evolutionary theology for

freed slaves are chilling. In suggesting that overly

animalistic races “go persistently and steadily lower and

lower until they lose the susceptibility and the possibility

of human evolution and moral development,”46 Beecher more or

less removed black Americans from the march of history and

the advance of God’s terrestrial kingdom. Yet Beecher’s

understanding of racial fitness had implications for “unfit”

white Americans as well. If social Darwinism allowed Beecher

to reconceive the nature of sin as evolutionary unfitness,

it also permitted him to view the intergenerational

transmission of sin as a procreative phenomenon that worked

somewhat independently from racial categories that ranked

people according to supposed morphological,

anthropometrical, or linguistic differences. Advancing an

argument that hereditarily recapitulated the Christian

46 Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 93.

24

notion of original sin, Beecher averred, “We are all born

under conditions in which we fall into mistakes and into

infirmities; and out of infirmities into transgressions.”47

Thus, while Beecher saw whites as being more highly evolved

than blacks, his hereditary reconceptualization of human

nature meant that everyone was “born an unconscious animal,”

while the potential spiritual stature of any individual

depended upon a combination between one’s race, on the one

hand, and the interplay of nature and nurture (or

environment and heredity), on the other. Understood as a

distinct (though certainly interrelated) causality apart

from race, heredity allowed Beecher to construct racial

fitness as both a theological and soteriological problem

that was of major consequence for the future of white

America.

It is important to note that Beecher’s belief in

evolution as an instrument of God did not mean that he

thought the latter incapable of working miracles in the

reformation of individuals. Beecher was careful not to

47 Ibid., 16-17.

25

equate God wholly with matter.48 Nonetheless, in reading

divine purpose as the evolutionary struggle between humans’

spiritual and animal natures and in charging religion with

the task of ensuring the race’s evolutionary development

into a more God-like creature, Beecher provided an

ontological framework for reconciling the divine with

hereditary constructions of racial fitness. This framework

would guide modernist Protestant engagements with

evolutionary discourse and provide the theological basis for

Protestant ministers’ public support of eugenic initiatives

like the segregation and compulsory sterilization of

degenerate whites in the early twentieth century. In fact,

pro-eugenic modernist Protestant ministers like Henry

Huntington and Shailer Matthews would bring this ontological

framework to its logical conclusion by collapsing any

distinction between divine agency and the evolutionary

process by which God’s spirit unfolded in human life. As

Matthews would argue in his 1924 work, The Faith of Modernism,

“there can be no no-God land between the opposing forces of

48 Ibid., 97.

26

naturalism and religion,”49 because religion “embodies the

urge of life itself.”50

‘Immanence’ and ‘Sovereignty’ in Modernist Protestantism

Sterilization laws gained political traction in the

early twentieth century United States through the issue of

“white degeneracy,” or more specifically, through the

medical condition known as “feeblemindedness.” At the time,

the latter was a scientific term that referred

simultaneously to low intelligence and diminished moral

fortitude, while it also denoted a distinctly hereditary way

of conceiving socially deviant behavior, including

criminality, sexual perversion, and chronic poverty (i.e.,

“pauperism”). Matt Wray argues that hereditary studies of

“feeblemindedness” as it affected poor, rural whites

provided the discursive framework through which many states

drafted, enacted, and enforced involuntary sterilization

laws in the first several decades of the twentieth century,

49 Shailer Matthews, The Faith of Modernism (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 108.50 Ibid., 86.

27

with American eugenicists and their supporters promoting

compulsory sterilization as a cheap and humane way to fight

against race degeneracy and to thereby regenerate the white

racial body.51 By the end of the twentieth century, over

sixty thousand Americans had been forcibly sterilized in

states that enacted compulsory sterilization laws during

first four decades of the twentieth century. It was during

this time that American eugenicists and their supporters

popularized sterilization as a safe, humane, and cost-

effective method for race regeneration.52

Both the popularization of white degeneracy as a

political problem and the public authorization of negative

51 Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of American Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 73. 52 As Troy L. Kickler, founding director of the North Carolina History Project, observes, “From 1929 to 1940 […] whites comprised more than four-fifths of the sterilizations” carried out in North Carolina. “During the 1960s, when social workers had the authority to recommend sterilizations,” Kickler argues, “the number of African American sterilizations increased dramatically (approximately ninety nine percent).” Troy L. Kickler, “Eugenics Board,” North Carolina History Project, http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/315/entry. Kicklers’ findings for North Carolina support the broader claim that until the 1940s, sterilization was largely conceived as a matter of white racial betterment. As Phillip R. Reilly argues, the Depression brought about a shift in the rationale for compulsory sterilization, with officials becoming less concerned about precluding “genetic defect” and more concerned with protecting parenthood. Phillip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1991), 94-95.

28

eugenics as a solution to this problem were shaped by

modernist evolutionary ontologies of the divine that

sanctified eugenic violence directed toward racial

unfitness. Take, for example, Shailer Matthews’ 1924 work,

The Faith of Modernism, in which Matthews defined modernism as

the “use of scientific, historical, [and] social method in

understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the

needs of living persons.”53 For Matthews, these methods were

at the Christian’s disposal because God revealed himself not

through revelation but through evolution and the natural

order. In Matthew’s Christianized view of species life,

evolution was not an impersonal operation but the unfolding

of God’s will in the universe through the gradual

development of an intelligent, moral, self-conscious life

form that was capable of “personal action.” By “personal

action,” Matthews meant “sovereignty,” a term simultaneously

designating evolutionary fitness and the immanence of God

(or the “infinite,” “undefined Person”) in the human

being.54 Sovereignty also referred to the human53 Matthews, The Faith of Modernism, 35.54 Ibid., 121.

29

personality’s composite of free will, rationality, and

conscience. Mapping an evolutionarily isomorphic

relationship between sovereignty, Christianity, and

democracy, Matthews argued that the task of religion was to

evolve the human personality toward the paradigmatic

expression of personhood, Jesus Christ, in whom the “Person”

of God was most perfectly defined.55 This meant creating an

alliance between religion and science in the fight against

“degeneracy” and other “concrete evils,” thereby ensuring

the evolutionary expansion of the divine in human life and

advancing American civilization. Toward this end, Matthews

argued that the modern church ought to participate in

negative eugenic initiatives by studying “the human

condition of a family” and endeavoring to “prevent the

marriage of those whose children are certain to be subnormal

and criminal” and thus innately incapable of sovereignty.56

Matthews’ notion of sovereignty underscores how

modernist renderings of divine immanence often erased any

contradiction between evolution as a “natural,” “tooth and55 Ibid., 114.56 Ibid., 97.

30

nail” process, on the one hand, and the historicity of a

genteel political order dominated by white, middle-class,

Protestants, on the other. In turn, divine immanence enabled

modernist leaders and writers to sanctify race regeneration

for their audiences as a kind of Christian political

ontology of God’s kingdom on earth. In other words, divine

immanence allowed them to endorse eugenics as an important

evolutionary method for diminishing animalistic impulses and

urges in the life of the race while simultaneously enhancing

the race’s incipient “sovereignty.” In this capacity,

however, divine immanence was not simply an idea or belief,

for in its more powerful mode it functioned as an affective

comportment involving a full range of racially inflected

sentiments about human worth and potential, including hatred

and love, indignation and reverence, violence and kindness,

damnation and benevolence.

The historical significance of the pro-eugenic sermons

submitted to the AES by modernist Protestant ministers like

Rev. Henry Huntington in the late 1920s ought to be read

through this interpretive framework. These sermons were

31

written and delivered by modernist Protestant ministers from

across the country, with most of the sermons submitted to

the AES as part of eugenic sermon contests sponsored by the

AES’s Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen.57 These

sermons do not simply underscore Protestant ministerial

enthusiasm for eugenics as Christine Rosen argues in her

groundbreaking 2004 work, Preaching Eugenics, however.58 They

also demonstrate how a modernist Protestant ontology of

immanence fostered the popularization of negative eugenic

initiatives in America by shaping the discourse of race

regeneration.57 The AES sponsored sermon contests in 1926, 1928, and 1930 that solicited the participation of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant clergymen. The purpose of the contests were explicitly stated in the rules for the 1926 competition: “Since the churches are in a measure a natural selective agency and since a large percentage of the intelligentclasses are church members, it is hoped that [through these contests] the message of eugenics will be heard by thousands of people in the United States who would not otherwise hear it.” Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 120. There is no way to know how many religious leaders actually participated in these contests (although the overwhelming majority of the sermons were written by modernist Protestant ministers). Christine Rosen notes, “One AES official speculated that more than two hundred sermons were preached for the 1926 contest, of which approximately seventy arrived at the offices of the AES for judging.” Ibid., 121. Rosen also observes that contest participants came from across the country and were largely unknown, serving as “leaders of local congregations [who] had a significant impact on the lives of their parishioners.” Ibid., 121-22. The relative anonymity of the contests’ participants underscores how widespread eugenics was as a popular movement. 58 Ibid., 15.

32

Take, for example, an anonymous homily written and

delivered for the 1926 sermon contest sponsored by the AES.

The minister opened his sermon with Revelation 22:1: “And he

showed me a river of water of life, bright as crystal,

proceeding out the throne of God.” After reading the verse

to his congregation, the minister continued by projecting

the history of white America onto the biblical narrative of

redemption. “The first chapter in the Biblical story of the

race is the story of man living in the garden,” the minister

insisted, referring explicitly to the Garden of Eden while

implicitly invoking the halcyon past of frontier America.

“The last chapter [of the race] is the story of the city,”

the minister continued, referencing the Book of Revelation’s

account of New Jerusalem and also invoking the idea that the

story of America was now inextricably caught up with the

modern, industrial city. While exhibiting a certain degree

of trepidation regarding the futurity of the race in a

rapidly industrializing order, the minister conjured the

serene vision of God’s kingdom among humans and the stream

of life upon which this godly city would be founded.

33

Likening this stream to human heredity and endorsing its

protection and purification as a means of developing a

stronger, purer, more sovereign race, the minister struck a

decidedly sober note in revealing to his congregants that

the stream was no theological abstraction, but a real and

living measure of the presence of God in human life. “It is

ourselves,” he insisted. “We are the stream of life.” The

minister obviously intended this to be a forceful statement,

serving both as a call to eugenic responsibility and as

declaration of a kind of divinely ordained biopower. In this

way, the minister sanctified negative eugenics as a

necessary step towards the fulfillment of God’s promise to

his chosen race:

From this stream of life we shall have cut off every

source of pollution and contamination, and the promise

shall be fulfilled that ‘Everything shall live whither

the stream cometh’. And in that day the Master of Life

‘shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be

satisfied’. For He came that ‘men shall have life, and

have it more abundantly.”

34

For this minister, divine immanence was as much a

theological statement about the nature of God as it was an

assertion about the divinity of the racial body. “We are the

stream of life,” the minister declared to his congregants,

thus appealing to a racial body-in-the-abstract or a racial

body-in-common, a body that was shared by the minister and

his congregants yet that transcended all of its individual

expressions. This body, the “stream of life,” was the

sovereign body through which God would reveal himself and

his kingdom on earth.

As previously mentioned, immanence was not simply an

abstract theological idea that collapsed any distinction

between the racial body and God incarnate; it was also a

kind of bristling affective comportment or righteous

indignation against “pollution and contamination,” or

anything that corrupted and precluded God’s kingdom on

earth. Seeking to galvanize his congregants to the cause of

negative eugenics by describing white unfitness as an

ignoble effrontery to this divine political order, the

minister declared, “In the midst of the [kingdom] is the

35

throne of God. Shut out from the [kingdom] are the vicious,

the impure, and the degenerate” and anything that

contaminates the “river of water of life.” 59 It is of course

impossible to know what kind of effect this rhetoric of

impurity and pollution had upon his congregants, but the

fact that the minister attempted to stir his audience in

such a way indicates that immanence and sovereignty could

function as powerful rhetorical devices for moralizing

negative eugenic initiatives.

Today, it has become iconic to think about religious

engagements with evolutionary thought through the more or

less orchestrated clash between modernists and

fundamentalists at the Scopes trial in 1925. In this

traditional rendering, fundamentalists lambasted modernists

for acquiescing to evolutionary science and accepting the

idea that humans had evolved from “monkeys.” Despite this

traditional rendering, it is important to keep in mind that

modernists embraced evolution as part of an onto-political

struggle against the animal. Hereditary renderings of divine59 “Eugenics,” in “1926 Contest” (Philadelphia, PA: American Eugenics Society Papers, American Philosophical Library), np.

36

immanence supported a version of evolution that naturalized

middle-class Protestant ideals for human embodiment, ideals

that modernist ministers frequently upheld as spiritual and

divine-like. In turn, divine immanence made it possible to

consecrate the hereditary elimination of unfitness through

negative eugenic measures as a part of God’s work in

evolving the “spiritual upper-man” and in advancing his

kingdom on earth. Modernist evolutionary theologies were

thus an important way in which eugenic violence was

naturalized and even consecrated for white, middle-class,

church-going Americans. In short, evolutionary renderings of

divine immanence like the ones proposed by Beecher and

Matthews supported Protestant middle-class

conceptualizations of evolutionary fitness, helping make it

possible to understand the latter not as the product of an

animalistic, tooth and nail fight for survival, but as the

result of a race struggling for its incipient divinity.

Conclusion

37

In the conclusion to her 2004 work, Preaching Eugenics,

Christine Rosen questions the religious sincerity of pro-

eugenic Protestant ministers: “Theologically, these men were

creative, deliberately vague, or perhaps even, as their

critics contended, deeply confused.”60 Rosen’s findings

instantiate an established methodology within scholarship on

American eugenics, one that sharply differentiates between

“religious” and “scientific” epistemologies and motivations.

61 While this tradition has made it nearly impossible to

understand how Protestant clergymen could have ever

supported negative eugenic policies out of genuine religious

conviction, it makes it both tenable and convenient to

dismiss the historical complicity between Protestantism and

eugenics as religious confusion, aberration, or anomaly.

I conclude differently. Modernist Protestantism was not

peripheral to the formation of negative eugenic thought and

practice in the United States but an important discursive60 Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 184.61 Amy Laura Hall’s 2008 analysis is an exception. Her work traces connections between mainline Protestantism, pro-natalism, and eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century through normative ideals for human embodiment that intersected religious and scientific practice. Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 213-289.

38

medium through which said thought and practice crystallized

and found popular expression. The question that one must ask

is not whether pro-eugenic Protestant ministers like Rev.

Huntington were sincere in their religious convictions, but

how much modernist Protestantism shaped the popularization of negative

eugenics in the United States. In other words, to what extent did

modernist Protestant ontologies of the divine influence the

popularization of negative eugenic initiatives across a

politically powerful demographic, that is, across white,

middle-class, liberal Protestant, church-going America? This

essay argued that the promulgation of negative eugenic

thought and practice in the United States went hand-in-hand

with the development of evolutionary ontologies of the

divine that ideologically and affectively shaped the way in

which modernist-inclined church-going Americans sanctified

biopolitical violence against “unfit” whites. We need to

reframe the problem. The question is not whether Protestant

ministers were religiously sincere in their support for

eugenics, but, much different, to what extent this divinely

sanctioned racism influenced early support for sterilization

39

laws that would claim more than sixty thousand victims over

the course of the twentieth century.

The public record of modernist Protestantism suggests

that, in many ways, the latter and eugenics were overlapping

movements, with the two converging through evolutionary

ontologies of the divine that conceived race regeneration

and civilizational advance in distinctly theological terms.

Protestant ministerial support for the segregation and

sterilization of “degenerate” whites must be seen as being

continuous with the development of a much longer modernist

tradition of embracing heredity as a means of developing a

more God-like race. In this theological tradition, evolution

was political ontology, while negative eugenics appeared as

a potent weapon in the struggle for God’s kingdom. Negative

eugenics appealed to Protestant clergymen as a method or

technique by which one could “humanely” exact evolutionary

death, eliminate white degeneracy, and, to return to Rev.

Huntington’s vulgar idiom, strengthen Protestant

civilization through the “door of birth.” In turn,

evolutionary renderings of divine immanence ideologically

40

and affectively spiritualized the inherent violence of

negative eugenics.

Works Cited

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Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975.Bushnell, Horace. Christian Nurture. New York: Charles Scribner,1861.Laughlin, Harry H. Bulletin No. 10A: Report of the Committee to Study andto Report on

the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in theAmerican Population: The Scope of the Committee’s Work. ColdSpring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office, 1914.

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