It has passed into history as proof of Christian America’s ‘war on science.’ Less remembered is that it’s an example of Christianity standing against eugenics.
A hundred years have elapsed since one of the most famous trials in America — the Scopes “Monkey Trial” — and the liberal establishment has still not understood one of its central lessons.
On July 10, 1925, 24-year-old high school teacher John Scopes was put on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution, a crime under state law. The two opposing attorneys, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, immediately became symbols of an epic battle: science and rationality vs. religion and superstition. Thus, writing recently in the New York Times, historian Michael Kazin calls the trial “a momentous clash between modern science and traditional Christianity.” Opining in the Chronicle of Higher Education, John K. Wilson insists that the event represents “the conflict between politics and academic freedom.”
Liberal commentators always fail to mention, however, an inconvenient fact about the actual textbook at the center of the trial, a fact that helps explain why Tennesseans found it so morally offensive: It presented a defense of eugenics wrapped in pseudo-science and Darwinian biology.
William Hunter’s A Civic Biology (1914) — the best-selling text in its field — argued unapologetically for eugenics as the obvious social implication of Darwinian evolution. Referring to families that produced “feeble-minded” and “criminal persons,” Hunter rendered this judgment:
Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. . . . Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. . . . If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.
A Civic Biology, in fact, reinforced a host of illiberal impulses: racism, white supremacy, and contempt for the poor and those with disabilities. The end goal, Hunter wrote, was to prevent the perpetuation of those who “take from society” but “give nothing in return.” The means: asylums, restrictive marriage laws, and the forced sterilization of undesirables.
Darwin himself had speculated about the desirability of eugenics-based social engineering. “Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind,” he complained in The Descent of Man (1871). “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics — from the Greek for “good birth” — openly argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted for elimination.
And, by the 1920s, targeted they were — by academics, politicians, activists, and scientists. Indeed, the eugenic idea seized the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, promoted sterilization laws and preached the eugenics gospel through lectures, conferences, and research papers.
Progressives led the drive for eugenic policies on all fronts, and the Democratic Party — the party of segregation and the Jim Crow South — became their chief political sponsor. By the end of the 1920s, 33 states passed eugenics laws and carried out thousands of forced sterilizations.
Tennessee never passed a compulsory sterilization law. Dennis Sewall, author of The Political Gene, acknowledges that the rural folk of Tennessee may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian evolution. “But they knew the progressives who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them ‘imbeciles’ and ‘defectives’ and would sterilize them if they got half a chance.”
The pattern of resistance to eugenics was plain: It came from those religious communities — Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish — deeply attached to the authority of the Bible. It is of course true that “Bible belt” states such as Tennessee, known for their religious conservatism, approved of segregation and other racist policies. Nevertheless, those who opposed the eugenic agenda of the social Darwinists believed the Bible was the Word of God, and that men and women were created by him and carried his divine image.
William Jennings Bryan, the prosecuting attorney at the Scopes trial, was a Democrat, a populist, and a political progressive who nonetheless considered himself a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian.
“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals,” he said. “It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.” Bryan objected to the ruthless, militant materialism — “survival of the fittest” — that the advocates of evolution and eugenics seemed to represent. “Let no one think that this acceptance of barbarism as the basic principle of evolution died with Darwin.”
In this, the defenders of the biblical story of man’s origins proved prophetic. Writing a few years before the Scopes trial, Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton predicted an unholy alliance between government and scientific elites. “Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred place of personal freedom,” he wrote, “where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it.”
An authoritarian mindset had indeed taken hold of the cultured elites. In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a progressive and committed eugenicist, wrote the infamous majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote. The eugenics movement was in high gear.
Twenty-first-century progressives, apparently without a twinge of conscience, ignore this side of the story. For them, the Scopes trial proved that religion is the enemy of science, rationality, and intellectual freedom. Just so today: Recent attempts to post the Ten Commandments in public schools are met with derision. “Religiosity is once again being imposed on education,” complains John K. Wilson. “When religious dogma is required in schools, creationism won’t be far behind.”
In fact, it was the attempt by government to indoctrinate children with a secular, materialist worldview that lay near the heart of the controversy. Indeed, in his companion textbook, Hunter reminded teachers that “the child is at the receptive age and is emotionally open to the serious lessons here involved.” Yes, lessons in barbarism, trumpeted in the classroom.
Nevertheless, the progressive outlook — still championed by the Democratic Party — remains stubbornly secular and contemptuous of traditional religion. Complaining about “right-wing” groups that seek to prevent new attempts at ideological indoctrination in public schools, Kazin could hardly be more condescending. He derides Bryan, and his modern counterparts, for believing that “the people” have the right to control the educational system supported by their tax dollars. “Democratic politicians will have to figure out how to work around such wrongheaded notions.”
We already have seen what happens when this suffocating ideology is given a free hand. When the United States indoctrinated its citizens in the dogma of eugenics, the results were catastrophic: a widening and deepening of institutional racism, xenophobic anti-immigration policies, and the coercive sterilization of “the unfit.” And it was all justified in the name of “progress,” supported by the scientific and academic establishments.
“Could any doctrine be more destructive of civilization?” Bryan asked. The answer arrived soon enough: The event that brought all of it to a screeching halt was the Holocaust. It is well known that the Nazis based their 1933 sterilization laws on the work of American eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his efforts to promote “race hygiene.” Hitler’s death camps were the horrific yet logical result of the militant rejection of the God of the Bible.
“If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene,” Bryan warned. “His teachings, and His teachings, alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.”
If the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene had prevailed against the scientific establishment a century ago, we may have been spared the greatest horrors ever unleashed upon the human race. With new and fearsome threats to humanity on the horizon, we could use more of that old time religion.