From Christine Rosen:
Certain kinds of religious leader gravitated toward eugenics in the early twentieth century, ministers anxious about the changing culture but also eager to find solutions to its diagnosable ills. Theirs was a practical spirituality. . . . 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.
The troglodytic Catholics and (fundamentalist) Protestants were the only Christians who resisted this evil, and were despised by the progressive bien-pensants for it. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There are some who, out of a laudable effort to resist any eugenic thought, attempt to ignore or deny all genetic difference among humans. That's wrong: if it's true, it's true. The solution is to always keep at the front of our minds, and at the bottom of our hearts, the non-negotiable conviction that human dignity is universally shared, and that human worth does not depend on having been favored by genetics. The man in the wheelchair is worth no less and no more than the marathon runner.
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I seem to have produced some confusion with my post on Buck v. Bell. (1) It was Stephen Jay Gould's opinion I was quoting, not my own, and (2) he was speaking of opposition to the statute in Virginia when the legislature passed it, not of opposition to the Supreme Court decision. What I found interesting in the article was that it focused on the abuse of the young girl involved, abuse that seems to have gone well beyond sterilization, rather than the arguments of the intellectuals.
"Prominent anti-slavery figures like John Newton, John Woolman, John Wesley, and Charles Finney were evangelicals in the modern sense of the word because they interpreted the Bible literally and were theologically orthodox on the central tenets of Christianity." Almost EVERYBODY interpreted the Bible literally and were theologically orthodox in the 1800s. That's a total red herring argument. The slave owners and segregationists ALSO interpreted the Bible literally and were theologically orthodox in the 1800s. The Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Quakers who were abolitionists have no ideological connection to what is now considered fundamentalists. Slave owners, OTOH, do. The fact is that
The Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Quakers who were abolitionists have no ideological connection to what is now considered fundamentalists. Slave owners, OTOH, do. Unhistorical nonsense. One might as easily say that the beliefs of the typical Congregationalist, Presbyterian (PCUSA) or Quaker today have little or no connection with the beliefs held by members of those churches in the mid-19th century. It's frankly hard to imagine someone with, say, John Wesley's beliefs choosing to worship at a liberal/mainline Protestant church today, rather than an evangelical one. And to the extent that modern evangelicals ("fundamentalists," in your terminology) are drawn heavily from the Southern Baptist tradition, they are actually descendants of the poor Southern whites who generally did NOT own slaves. For the true spiritual descendants of the slave owners, a better fit would be the Episcopalians.
But all of this is a bit silly, since trying to draw lines from the religious beliefs of the 1850s and 1860s to those of the 21st century simply doesn't work.
"But all of this is a bit silly, since trying to draw lines from the religious beliefs of the 1850s and 1860s to those of the 21st century simply doesn't work." That didn't stop our fine host from making assertions about fundamentalists and eugenics. That's what got it all started.
That didn't stop our fine host from making assertions about fundamentalists and eugenics. That's what got it all started. The difference is that eugenics was a 20th century movement, much in vogue in this country within living memory. The conflict within American Protestantism between modernists and fundamentalists developed before and simultaneously with the eugenics movement. The modernists (forerunners of today's "mainline" Protestants) overwhelmingly took the view that Progress entailed weeding "undesireables" out of the gene pool. The fundamentalists (forerunners of today's evangelicals), along with the Roman Catholics, took the view that such practices as forced sterilization were barbarism.
By contrast, the slavery debates of the 19th century predate the intra-Protestant conflicts over scripture scholarship, Darwin, etc. The categories of the pre-Civil War era (a time when the most censorious moralizers were probably the Unitarians) therefore don't translate well into 21st century categories.
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