Relocating the Eugenics Conversation

In the aftermath of World War II, eugenics and the pseudoscientific base used to justify eugenic practices are generally understood to have phased off the scene. As the common understanding goes, the modern civilized world has no place for scientific research or ethical practices that reflect the ideas used by German Nazis to systematically exterminate Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled persons, Jewish persons, and others. The Nuremberg Trials that immediately followed the war (1945–1946) and the rejection of scientific knowledge gained through violent experiments precipitated the rejection of eugenics, and two UNESCO statements on race in 1950 and 1951 built on that momentum to settle the matter globally. Both social and natural scientists accordingly came to broadly agree that theories about hereditary difference between what were termed races that animated Nazi ideology were untenable, based on faulty science.Footnote ¹ Eugenics philosophy and policy became not only unattractive but was deemed evil. And yet all of this occurred after eugenics had long dominated earlier conversations about the future of humanity in academic and public circles.

The earlier twentieth-century eugenics movement had been committed to describing its research subjects in terms of so-called negative and positive aspects, and can be defined in-context as “an international effort to use science and medicine to justify limiting the reproduction—and existence—of individuals deemed to be of an inferior racial stock while promoting the reproduction of those thought to be racially superior.”Footnote ² With postwar discussions about so-called positive or negative eugenicsFootnote ³ being squelched, by the 1960s eugenics seemed to totally disappear. Upon closer examination, however, research today—whether in newly defined fields such as biogenetics or bioethics, or in fields designated as new genetics or even new eugenics—concludes that regardless of how marginal it may have been, “eugenics more correctly waxed and waned than disappeared.”Footnote ⁴

Newer revelations give the extended story, demonstrating that eugenics research and eugenics practices have been very much ongoing. Eugenics not only has endured in the popular public imagination, which some scholars believe has played “a major role in maintaining the myth of innate racial differences,”Footnote ⁵ but has also continued quietly in academic circles and covertly in governmental institutional practices.Footnote ⁶ All of this occurred even amid legal efforts to repair damages caused by forced eugenic practices.Footnote ⁷ This is beyond what is found in today’s purportedly positive eugenic efforts such as the Human Genome Project, with its relevant theological problems, discussed below. Positive eugenics raises just as many serious questions as negative eugenics does, and perhaps more so due to its easy identifiability, often carrying similar racist rationale.Footnote ⁸ And if these horrifying eugenics practices once thought done away with actually never left, an in-depth assessment of the impacts and influence of eugenics’ continuing effects is certainly in order. Yet I have a more modest aim: to trace recent findings from eugenics scholarship focused on mass incarceration in order to highlight the newly galvanized conversation and then supplement it with further insights from religion and theology.

Is mass incarceration rooted in and intertwined with eugenic philosophy? If so, does this entanglement become tighter, more inseparable, and stronger with a later twentieth-century rationale that incorporated the religious and theological with the pseudoscientific? This questioning develops the hypothesis that popular post–World War II assumptions about race, which trickled into criminal justice policy, were fueled by ongoing trust in eugenic philosophy similar to what existed in the prewar period. Genetic scientists continued to reenforce eugenic philosophy, even with research standing on shaky ground in different scientific fields and repeatedly debunked.Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, these assumptions about race correlated with the presence of particular theological emphases that intertwined eugenic and theological logics with inherited ideological institution-building practices, especially within American Evangelicalism during its postwar rise to prominence within American and global Christianity. This all suggests that there may in fact be a much stronger linkage between eugenic philosophy, theology, and mass incarceration.

This inquiry carries distinct relevance especially if the penitentiary is understood in light of its genealogical and conceptual roots as substantially a theological construct rather than a secular entity.Footnote ¹⁰ This would mean that everything about the modern prison’s operations displays the secular state’s ongoing misappropriation of theological tools.Footnote ¹¹ Within that long genealogical story, I focus on the important role that evangelicals played in the more recent mass-incarceration building project. This more recent history is important because it highlights particular assumptions embedded within specifically eugenic ways of thinking that not only permitted but also helped to reenforce the cultural norms and assumptions that directed state decisions about what to do with those deemed not only troubling and criminal, but also dangerous and possibly even irredeemable.

Recent Eugenics Scholarship and Research on Mass Incarceration

Many scholars have studied eugenics as a pre-World War II historical phenomenon, occasionally focused on its resonating effects. But efforts have not always aimed to show the more disturbing ongoing connections. For instance, historian Miroslava Chávez-Garcia has chronicled the racial science that contributed to the early twentieth-century building of California’s juvenile justice apparatus, centered on Fred C. Nelles prison in Whittier, California. The well-known eugenicist Fred C. Nelles developed the prison, initially called Whittier State School, with the goal of redeeming and restoring boys to a “normal life,” teaching them ideal values of citizenship albeit with little hope for the mentally deficient, many being youths of color and some whom Nelles concluded, “cannot be reformed.”Footnote ¹²

Similar to the stated (and generally accepted) purpose of the penitentiary at the time—“not only designed as a prison for punishment of persons who have offended against the law, but also as an institution which intends their reformation, if possible”Footnote ¹³—what Chávez-Garcia’s research reveals is how this eugenic fieldwork in California, with all of its claims of objectivity and focus on the non-reformable, reflected a eugenic ethos that pervaded California’s targeting of young delinquent Mexican children. Her careful historical work into eugenic practices yields insight into those harmed and killed under the state’s watch—including resonances with her own transnational US-Mexican family history—paying attention to an inherited legacy still extant.Footnote ¹⁴

While Chávez-Garcia’s scope of analysis was limited to the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century, scholars Michael Yudell and Alexandra Minna Stern have been more explicit and thoroughgoing in charting the ongoing legacy of eugenics history throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.Footnote ¹⁵ Their work showcases the racial undercurrent in US-based biological science and also in explicit eugenics practices. And more and more findings are noting the prevalence of eugenics in Silicon Valley with early figures David Starr Jordan in the early twentieth century and William Shockley in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁶ Recently, the legal scholar and bioethicist Osagie K. Obasogie uncovered one instance of this legacy in 2020, spurring his effort to repurpose a $2.4 million fund created in 1960 at the University of California, Berkeley, called the Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund. Driven by concern over the continuing use of genetic technologies to exacerbate disparities—a eugenic practice de facto if not de jure—he faulted modern medicine, public health, and other scientific fields for their responsibility in legitimizing eugenic ideologies both past and present.Footnote ¹⁷ This echoes Obasogie’s earlier work exploring how blind people make sense of race in the United States, developing the idea of race as social construct into a more particular understanding of the interactive process of how “vision” or “visual cues” comprise the broader social practices that constitute what is seen as “race.” He argues that these mediated social practices give racial boundaries a strong sense of “visual obviousness.”Footnote ¹⁸ More recently his important co-edited collection of fifty-four chapters explores a range of issues that collectively provide a wider systemic analysis of important bioethical topics (including eugenics), with rationale to move forward in addressing biopolitical issues with more robust ethical considerations.Footnote ¹⁹

An even more trenchant interrogation of contemporary eugenic philosophy comes from legal scholar Laura Appleman, who has been steady in her analysis of what she calls “the long tail of eugenics”—a conceptual tool used to help explain recent incarceration policies.Footnote ²⁰ She argues that policies that generated our nationwide system of segregation and punitive detention arose from “attitudes about eugenics, class, and disability.”Footnote ²¹ With careful historical analysis of how people from perceived deviant classes were treated in the United States and Europe, she notes that from the very beginning of America’s founding as a nation, the “treatment of the disabled was designed to quarantine away those individuals who were seen as ‘irredeemable members of the polity.’”Footnote ²²

Building on hereditary science as “an easy way to formalize and legalize both class and racial difference,” Appleman identifies the growth of asylums in the Progressive Era as evolving with the American eugenics movement to incorporate increased focus on the criminal, the delinquent, and the mentally ill who failed to adequately fit into society.Footnote ²³ Among different “correct therapies” targeting persons deemed categorically “unfit,” “undesirable,” or “unemployable”—including involuntary sterilization laws to prevent reproduction—eugenic ideology directed at these groups became “deeply embedded in American popular culture, with pro-eugenic propaganda presented in movies, classrooms, laboratories, state fairs, and religious institutions, among others.”Footnote ²⁴ The postwar 1950s in turn saw new attention given to the natural environment for its help in treating mentally ill and disabled persons, along with possibilities with psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy, where patients were institutionalized for less time, ultimately leading to a decline in asylum populations.Footnote ²⁵

When in the 1960s and 1970s “the entire system” of confinement and segregation for disabled persons came under scrutiny, a mass closure of asylums and state institutions resulted. According to Appleman this did not mean the end of “the blatantly eugenic policies and principles that motivated their creation,”Footnote ²⁶ since the mentally ill would remain (and do today) largely overrepresented in American prisons and jails. Historian Anne Parsons recently argued that, as a matter of fact, the asylum became the prison due to a broad shift in governance and rapid growth of the criminal legal system.Footnote ²⁷ The persistent segregating and imprisoning of our most vulnerable citizens thus demonstrates, according to Appleman, a “reflexive and deeply ingrained habit”Footnote ²⁸ that exposes the thin line between racial and class-based eugenic practices that built our current unprecedented moment of mass incarceration. She concludes: “Our desire to control those individuals who violate our societal norms—whether through crime, disability, mental illness, or poverty—has led us time and time again to tactics of imprisonment, coercive medical procedures, and institutionalization. The ties between institutionalization, eugenics, and social engineering have led to the imprisonment of a significant percentage of our population, for remarkably similar reasons as we did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We simply do so in different types of carceral institutions.”Footnote ²⁹

Building directly upon Appleman’s efforts,Footnote ³⁰ American carceral governance scholar Jonathan Simon details how the expressed precommitment of Progressive Era Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo (1870–1938) yielded a eugenic view of law and crime policy that resulted in what Simon calls a “judicial realism” that began to govern criminal legal matters in characteristically eugenic ways. Simon finds this realism expressed through homing in on the “dangerous minority” for whom redemption and reform is either impossible or at least unlikely, with weak law enforcement constituting the cultural weak link of the criminal system, and where punishment began to focus on “the criminal” instead of the crime.Footnote ³¹

Simon’s argument concentrates on the eugenic logic present in Cardozo’s famous statement from the 1926 ruling in People v. Defore: “The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered.” Simon interprets this well-known statement in light of its nostalgic description of police and the concern of a criminal on the loose, out lurking in society because he was not apprehended and put away. He sees this as condensed evidence of a eugenic penal policy that demonstrates the essence of a broader eugenic program built to respond to America’s alarming crime problem in the interwar years. This statement was recently reappropriated by Chief Justice John Roberts over eight decades later in his 2009 ruling in Herring v. United States (without direct citation), and yet with further description of the so-called criminal, which Simon understands to be making the eugenic agenda within American crime control even more explicit than it was in Cardozo’s day. Despite having much evidence of allegedly excessive social costs in cases where police violated Fourth Amendment privacy protections, Roberts nevertheless identifies the defendants in such cases who get off (or “go free”) as not only “criminal,” but he also added that this axiom is a rule which when applied bears the cost of allowing guilty individuals to go free who are also quite “possibly dangerous” and as such offers an offense to the “basic concepts of the criminal justice system.”Footnote ³²

Simon builds on Appleman’s claim that crime and mental illness (or, deemed degeneracy due to mental illness)Footnote ³³ came to be seen as the same problem in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that this phenomenon leads directly to “the eugenic template for crime control” in the United States. What then extended from the early twentieth century categories identified by Appleman into the twentieth century’s second half, resulting in mass incarceration, was the presumed and unquestioned view in the Lyndon Johnson administration that “the major threat of crime was anchored in Black communities.” Simon draws upon the work of Elizabeth Hinton and Khalil Gibran Muhammad for the argument that Black people became the primary targets of criminal justice efforts directed at criminal threats, with Black people deemed far more dangerous than other light-skinned immigrants.Footnote ³⁴ Naturally, the racial bias toward Blackness led to the condemnation of other groups by extension, and maintained the ongoing thrust of eugenic thinking for social control as the war on crime kicked into high gear.Footnote ³⁵

Advancing the argument still further in light of Covid-19,Footnote ³⁶ Laura Appleman widens the lens on eugenics—beyond both its trajectory from the founding era to twentieth-century American ideas on deviance and Simon’s argument for an ongoing judicial realism—to include what she terms “pandemic eugenics.” Concerned about the frequent and persistent use of the “eugenics blueprint” to treat captive and vulnerable populations poorly, Appleman developed a call for three concrete action points to eradicate the hidden patterns of eugenic thinking in American culture today: (1) teach the complicated eugenics history at all levels of education; (2) contextualize historical scientific discoveries; and (3) create a permanent commission on ethics and eugenics.Footnote ³⁷ This call to vigilance appropriately acknowledges that eugenics is about actions and practices; but it also draws from thinking, whether in positive or negative forms. Together with continued actions prompted by this thinking, eugenic efforts of the past and present remain based on wide-ranging ideological commitments not only explicitly employed to support eugenic efforts, but also spectrally implied and subtly layered with complicit supporting ideas, including from religion and theology. To consider the development and further reach of these ideas, this article now turns to the prison and Christian theology to establish additional correlative nodes of discovery.

Christianity, Carceral Logic, and Eugenic Philosophy

The unprecedented scale of human caging known today as mass incarceration is novel in the history of civilization. Even Michel Foucault, one of the harshest critics of the modern prison, did not quite foresee the situation growing as it did near and after his untimely 1984 death. Had he, his critical research may have ventured further into the Christian roots of modern carceral logic,Footnote ³⁸ with far deeper analysis than given in his 1975 work, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), in which he deemed the modern prison emerging around 1800.Footnote ³⁹ While investigations into Christian texts from antiquity begin to identify the deep theological roots of the current carceral apparatus,Footnote ⁴⁰ explorations into Christianity’s more recent contributions to the shape of the modern prison reveal the genealogical features of mass incarceration’s emergence not only from twentieth-century eugenic logic but also passing through the rise of Evangelicalism amid its postwar moment of unprecedented affluence.Footnote ⁴¹

Of course this all proceeds against the backdrop of seventeenth and eighteenth century Evangelicalism, a transdenominational Protestant movement emerging during the height of the transatlantic slave trade, an enterprise animated by the logic of what Rebecca Anne Goetz calls, “hereditary heathenism,” which could be counteracted only through baptism.Footnote ⁴² Perverted biblical interpretations appearing during this time yielded the creative innovation of “biblical polygenesis,” contending that the Bible regarded “Black-skinned people as a species separate from the white-skinned,” which historian Mark Noll argues was “an effort to jam the conclusions of the ethnologists into a biblical frame.” Noll further recounts how several late-nineteenth century interpretations read Black people as created in the Genesis account with the other “beasts,” posturing a kind of “deference to Scripture while dwelling mostly on geographical, anthropological, cranial, and other cultural ‘proofs’ for Black inferiority drawn from the surging school of scientific racism.”Footnote ⁴³ The nineteenth century marked a time when evangelicals were becoming increasingly divided over controversial matters related to scripture, tradition, and cultural engagement and continued to build their institutions in the midst of these controversies.

Eugenic Logic, Evangelical Ecclesiology, and Theological Systems

The history of eugenic thinking recounted above, including what is seen in the contemporary world and from religious and theological perspectives within Evangelicalism, raises several matters that warrant careful theological consideration. The theological category of ecclesiology provides assistance in analyzing the situation. Below I consider theological tenets within Evangelicalism, including features from the theological systems of Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology, with various implications of their views for evangelical individualism and its relationship to eugenic thinking.

On the nature of the church and evangelical Christianity, it is not difficult to see how Evangelicalism has been open to the same kind of eugenic logic operative within contemporary American culture, as manifest in Simon’s argument about a eugenic judicial realism. Evangelicalism has always demonstrated an openness to working trans-ecclesially, incorporating a wide collection of ideas, both across traditions and amid strongly held differences in theological beliefs and also while integrating cultural norms and questions for its shape. This meant that as Evangelicalism developed, its theologies morphed and hybridized and its ecclesiology took a back seat to other priorities, leading one theologian to conclude that evangelicals “have never developed or worked from a thoroughgoing ecclesiology.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As such, the lack of a substantial ecclesiology often meant a very thin tradition to work from, giving way in the United States to an individualism that supplants more collective considerations. Yet it is within ecclesial space that persons stand as called out participants in the life of a community of redeemed and transformed individuals. They are assumed to have made the right decisions and thereby—even on some accounts through the power of a transformed individual constitution that goes straight down even to the molecular and genetic levels, in a kind of epigenetic fashionFootnote ¹⁰⁸—demonstrate what can happen through the strong action of personal repentance and faith that accompany conversion.

This individualism focused on the power to make positive moral decisions harkens back to the earlier noted individualism found in the Protestant eugenicist Richard Ely, which gave a basis for John Ryan’s parting with him in the early twentieth century. One hundred years later, Americans have become even more individualistic, with often very little regard for communal life and formation, and much less for personal and corporate accountability, and for collective societal responsibility. Thus, when the Civil Rights freedom struggles and fears of rising crime led to a moral panic in the United States, evangelicals’ support for incarceration amid the moral failure of the nation was bolstered with support from the tenets and emphases operative in their particular theological systems.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Likewise, Colson’s presuppositions about individualism prevented him from acknowledging systemic ills unless they otherwise carried potential threats of outwitting or encumbering both himself and society by even further offsetting the playing field as he saw it—a society of individuals not otherwise imbalanced by a real systemic and structural racism but rather by lacking education and financial advantage, as though these scenarios are unable to be infected by systemic and structural racism. In Colson’s view, systemic historical issues did not need to be addressed, while new potential challenges to the current system should be, thus maintaining a priority and affirmation of the status quo which for modern America, according to sociologist Robert P. Jones, means the status quo of white supremacy.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In addition to a focus on individualism at the expense of systemic analysis or awareness, evangelical theologies also maintain white supremacy through supersessionistic ideologies, which affirm that non-Jewish Gentile believers replaced or superseded the Hebrew people at the coming of Jesus Christ in the first century.Footnote ¹¹¹ Advanced under the name Dispensationalism, this populist sensationalist theology—neither of the expert nor professional, but a lay-theology—helped to exacerbate divisions between science and faith, addressing and incorporating the knowledge of the debunked eugenics science on the basis of a coherent authoritative and equally fundamentalist so-called biblical views of things. This base meant that its theology could trump all science, and thus had little reason to examine evidence or methods since these were already fixed into a system that was purported to reflect what the Bible really said. The populist mentality created an ongoing and increased cognitive dissonance between Dispensationalist believers and the natural world, breeding an anti-intellectualism to support unconscious biases and ill-informed politics. Yet by pointing to the institutions they built as legitimizing objects, Dispensationalists continued to advance their views, and the theology underpinning them that in turn rubber-stamped their thin ethics whatever they happened to be, flowing from the contemporary culture.

This is seen in the ongoing support of racist logics that not only partition different racial groups throughout history and into present settings by connecting content from the Bible’s texts to contemporary events and issues but then also use these modes of biblical rationale as a base to defend racial hierarchies in wider society. For example, the popular preacher Donald Grey Barnhouse preached a sermon over the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1932 that argued for a biblical justification of the inferior social position of African Americans. According to Barnhouse, African Americans still bore the curse of Ham, a mark that God allegedly placed upon them as seen in the Genesis 9 account.Footnote ¹¹² With reference to this passage, the notes from the best-selling Scofield Reference Bible that popularized Premillennial Dispensationalism in the twentieth century state that among the elements of “The Noahic Covenant” are that, “from Ham will descend an inferior and servile posterity.”Footnote ¹¹³

The eschatological schematics at work in the parsing out of events within Premillennial Dispensationalism also highlighted the significance of Hitler’s rise to power and push to exterminate European Jewish people while simultaneously being what Harold J. Ockenga called “an instrument in the hand of God for the driving of the Jews back to Palestine.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ That Nazi’s were deemed to be fulfilling prophecy did not excuse them from evils acts, which were understood as ultimately under divine judgment whereas the fundamentalist responsibility was to wage war against it.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In his careful account of how Dispensationalists imagined eschatological events and peoples in racialized terms, Daniel G. Hummel concludes that the “white racial essentialism” of the day “shaped imaginings of the kingdom far more than did biblical categories.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ And into the latter half of the twentieth century, Tim LaHaye—one of Dispensationalism’s most influential figures who helped establish the New Christian Right in the 1970s and authored the bestselling Left Behind series—carried out his work as a veteran member of the John Birch Society, a group known for its racism, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories,Footnote ¹¹⁷ structuring Dispensationalism for the next century.

In addition to Dispensationalists, the decidedly Calvinist brand of evangelicals maintain a form of what has been called Covenant Theology for their ideological system.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This system identifies special salvific blessings reserved only for the so-called elect or covenant people, and the covenant family, which is the locus where divine favor flows by sovereign grace allotted for the chosen. This understanding maintains the status of the covenant family as Israel in a divinely chosen, spiritual, and thus supersessionist sense. Accordingly, the idea of the covenant family serves as conceptual ground for a kind of default negative-eugenic logic because the particular kind of redemptive blessings reserved only for the elect, and most certainly not for the unredeemable, who are destined to bear only the curse and judgment.

The idea of the elect or the chosen recently emerged in the popular and political arena used by Donald Trump in campaign speeches which had special salience with some Calvinistic communities that supported Trump strongly during his campaign for office. Many in these communities hail from Dutch Calvinist genealogical roots and have had for the last several decades a kitsch phrase within their common parlance—“If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much”—which aligned well with the effort to attach their theology to a racist nationalist movement. Beyond the Presbyterian forms of ecclesial governance largely operative in these communities, one might think that the communities with more nonconformist baptistic free church ecclesiology (for example, Chuck Colson was a Baptist) might resist the notion of the chosen, opting instead for an emphasis on local constitution with adult conversion and adult baptism being experienced by believers individually, although with residual effects for their families to then serve the covenant children with inherent strongly-knit blood ties.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Yet many Baptists (especially Southern Baptists) and Pentecostals (especially among immigrant communities) chose to follow Trump with an aspirational outlook, hoping to be part of his good fortune and superior success.

It made sense for evangelicals to look to an ideal figure to latch onto in hopes of securing beneficence for their communities, and in turn the opposite for other communities. Ever since Billy Graham, evangelicals have sought state political power in pursuit of their ideals; with Donald Trump this was no different.Footnote ¹²⁰ But the assumptions of eugenic logic appear especially in links between, on one hand, a chosenness wherein faith may be experienced individually or else by covenantal family inclusion; on the other hand, a retributive outlook for others who do not experience the privilege of chosenness. In other words, the eugenic logic of this binary finds the redeemed receiving the good results as assigned and due, whereas the unredeemed (or irredeemable) are discarded with nothing good coming. A penal outlook becomes manifest, then, in punitive policies for the non-chosen, or the damned, which coincides with a strong doctrine of eternal conscious punishment,Footnote ¹²¹ not only necessary for developing the kind of punitive apparatus that the United States has created with mass incarceration, but also limiting redemptive and transformative possibilities for, put crudely, the losers.Footnote ¹²² As David Bentley Hart argues, “it’s hard not to suspect that what many of us find intolerable is a concept of God that gives inadequate license to the cruelty of which our own imaginations are capable.”Footnote ¹²³ And thus punishment rendered for crimes committed against the chosen—by those apparently not chosen—are especially fitting amid the kinds of cultural conditions that nurtured America’s ongoing eugenic logic, reenforced by these particular theologies.Footnote ¹²⁴

The question remains, of course, whether the theologies operative during the rise of mass incarceration were merely accidental, complicit bystanders, or were otherwise active contributing factors that programmatically helped effect the mass incarceration building project. Evangelicals like Colson often used various explanations for crime supported by their theological systems. From within these theological systems, crime seemed totally out of control, attested to further by popular media, news reports, and alleged perpetrators whom with few exceptions were not part of the church and therefore not chosen for redemption. A relative confidence in divine providence theologically shielded their complacency toward rising incarceration rates (not dissimilar to earlier Quaker attitudes in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century developments in the modern carceral apparatus), even while fighting political battles and the efforts to build their own institutions amid the other significant building projects happening throughout the United States and Western world in this moment of unprecedented cultural affluence.

And yet the notion of individualism was needed to uphold moral decision making supportive of the freedom of the will—of free moral agency and free markets—while the possibility of transformation for the chosen was held out to favor the evangelical commitment to “the religious experience of the individual.”Footnote ¹²⁵ But the individual is never fully an individual in an exact sense—in isolation or reduced to solitary confinement—but rather always exists as such in a radically contingent and deeply relational manner, with one’s very life both participating and being grounded in a host of other social and environmental relations, as well as in the very divine life.Footnote ¹²⁶ While a recent trend in theology has been to resist the impulses of social trinitarianism for not maintaining a strong enough distinction between the ineffable divine life and created sociality,Footnote ¹²⁷ trinitarianism might conceptually bestow something significant on the human social relations and societal structures, especially with an egality and sociality grounded in love that may yet reflect an “alternative relationality” better than what has been on offer in the seemingly endless spewing of hierarchies and supremacies in recent history.Footnote ¹²⁸

Theologically Reckoning with Eugenics’ Long Tail

Scholar Dennis Durst, who studies American eugenics during the Protestant social reform era from 1860 to 1940, concludes that ongoing research may signify that troubling attitudes about eugenics have continued into the contemporary moment, particularly in dominant views within medicine and social policy. Underneath this would be the ideological and theological underpinnings that enabled eugenics to happen in the first place. He saw theology as a potential antidote, suggesting that “Theological awareness of the solidarity of the human race in a shared transcendent dignity, amid an acknowledgement of the universal experience of genetic imperfection, can lead to a greater humility and acceptance of differences.” Giving one promising example in ongoing research, Durst suggests that “The intersection of theology and disability studies … gives hope of a more sensitive and inclusive vision of society.”Footnote ¹²⁹

It seems reasonable to conclude today that if better theology had been at work during the eugenic era—as seen, for example, in the case of American Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century—eugenics may have had less power culturally. Protestants never sufficiently reckoned with it. Even early on, Warfield was no stalwart standard bearer like the Catholics had in G. K. Chesterton or Dorothy Day. C. S. Lewis could have potentially helped, but as a British Anglican Protestant, evangelicals in the United States were not yet reading him much (although this is speculative).

Yet there have been real limitations that science has always had when defining a particular understanding of human beings, whether through biogenetic research or otherwise. So how can theology help here, both critically and constructively, for moving forward? Theology claims to make use of both theoretical and real conceptual tools, including the best data from empirical and scientific research. But how might a more critical outlook be rendered for the situation with ongoing eugenic thinking, analyzing both historical and contemporary phenomena and perspectives, along with underlying assumptions that could have been addressed much better in recent history and yet may still be more meaningfully addressed today?

Theology has yet to significantly engage with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s materialist analysis of the contemporary situation,Footnote ¹³⁰ which illuminates additional features of how social crises produced by capitalism have generated moral panic about crime—whether actual or alleged—as done by certain kinds of racialized people for which the carceral apparatus has long been the appointed (or anointed) response. This dynamic of racial-carceral-capitalism emerged over the past five centuries, generated through the state’s management of racial categories as part and parcel of processes and practices essential to its very existence. Sometimes, Gilmore notes, “the practices result in ‘protecting’ certain racial groups, and other times they result in sacrificing them. In any event, racialization is a key part of US governance, and the state’s role as the sole determiner of legitimate violence has played a key part in management through racialization.”Footnote ¹³¹ A similar account is offered by sociologist Cecilia Menjívar with regard to how the state also performs these acts through “omission,” or the neglect and abandonment of particular groups that have been stigmatized and socially devalued, displaced, and abandoned—both controlled and simultaneously deprived by the state’s acts of disregard and indifference.Footnote ¹³² To address this with a thoroughgoing approach would mean, for Gilmore, abolishing not necessarily the state nor history but rather “the processes of hierarchy that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”Footnote ¹³³ These processes of rendering groups to “premature death,” in Gilmore’s rendering, is part of an ongoing anti-Blackness that contributed to building the modern world with its centuries-long extractionist, removal, and carceral logics of both Black and Indigenous bodies. There seems to be a consensus growing that the moment requires a reckoning, not by further erasure but rather by centering those who have been more traumatized by these processes, who have been most harmed and continue to remain vulnerable in the contemporary setting.Footnote ¹³⁴

Better theology than what is locked into the systems delineated above holds the capacity to assist in the consideration of how better assumptions about human nature might be given, and faulty assumptions discarded both with reference to ecclesiology and also with regard to theological anthropology. On the former, this concerns how people function and live their lives within their local ecclesial communities experiencing their personal and collective transformation within these contexts. On the latter, a robust theological anthropology takes a critical posture toward notions of genetic determinism in light of considerations from the moral-philosophical concept of free agency. While often not discussed in bioethics, this is among one of the most important philosophical issues related to culpability and punishment, carrying particular relevance for any serious engagement with mass incarceration.Footnote ¹³⁵ It also includes various interpretations or statements about crime and cultural values, along with dignified approaches to persons with special needs and disabilities, or those in other adverse conditions, whether educationally, socioeconomically, politically, or culturally otherwise. Critical engagement from theological anthropology also refuses to isolate academic and scientific disciplines because its approach to reality is neither compartmentalized nor divided, but rather particular and carries a holistic and integrative approach to the entire human experience.

On the other hand, the supposed neutrality of science brings with it the supposed neutrality of the law’s application toward so-called criminals who violate the law, or the cultural norms that the law is intended to reflect. The social situation carries a doomed outcome for the criminalized marginality. Robert Ferguson deems these very people “the failures who do not accept their assigned categories and who have no other means out of it” and therefore are “headed for crime.”Footnote ¹³⁶ But here is where better theology might provide better grounds for considerations of justice and equity. Evangelicals have a terrible history of engagement with carcerality and race, the two often going hand in hand not because the majority of evangelicals necessarily held the views reflected in the movement’s figureheads, but because Evangelicalism is a populist movement represented by figureheads. And theology may yet play a more helpful role than how it has been appropriated for harm.

When looking at how crime has been overdetermined in criminal law and how “a crime is never, in the end, judged for what it truly is[,]” the act of crime becomes time and again “framed and then judged as a crime or offense against society or the state—and therefore as a political crime.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Theologically, however, the state is reconceptualized in light of its penultimate mode of social existence, with various laws that attempt to reflect the ideal, and yet which are relativized as structural frameworks limited to the present age, with no necessary significance whatsoever in the age to come. Because contemporary existence means living between this era and the one to come, between the times, any effort to artificially resolve that tension by adding new structures or by engineering ways to subvert or even change it by stretching out efforts to design, orchestrate, and effect the divine kingdom come are by their nature negated since they deny the eschaton (the end goal of history) as the ultimate realization of a divine gift, irrefutably arriving from the future which then relativizes crime and all current social structures in light of the day when there will be no more injustice; no more tears; no pain; no more legislating, violating, enforcing laws. And there will be no eugenic thinking. There will be nothing to correct or legislate, and no desire to personally subvert structures that simulate justice but never quite deliver.

This also relativizes eugenic efforts to orchestrate the good and eradicate the bad through various control technologies, often proceeding on the grounds of bogus science. While possessing potential capacity to incorporate all forms of knowledge, in principle, theology maintains its critical distinction from and integrity in relation to various other forms of knowledge. How this works out in some cases is what we find with Chuck Colson’s loosely defined worldview theology, trumping other forms of knowledge while forgoing the hard work to understand them or to enter into critical engagement with whatever forms of knowledge may be seen as challenging to theology. Christianity does not necessitate, stipulate, or dictate the architectural engineering or building of a utopian society, and yet carries the idea that all can potentially and will one day be redeemed. The dominant late twentieth-century Evangelicalism in the United States affirmed this message, and with additional social emphases. For example, the anti-abortion agenda of the religious right would especially benefit upper-middle class whites because it is communities of the poor, immigrants, and people of color who often have pressures of social stress amplified when more children are present.Footnote ¹³⁸ The religious right pushed their agenda hard while growing their institutions and yet nevertheless maintaining that redemption would happen spiritually, with the gospel carrying few if any overall social implications. Redemption would also have to be experienced almost exclusively with and by their institutions, which meant that no prescriptive outcomes would be given for an uplifted society. Yet their institutions still would and did certainly grow. Meanwhile no gospel or good news or message of redemption or betterment would be held out for the society’s social structures because there was no humanly engineered vision of a societal utopia of the likes found promised with eugenic philosophy.

Evangelicals embraced this eugenic thinking, along with its set of inherited assumptions, however inadvertently it may have been held. Their demonstrated committed to an ongoing eugenic logic happening not because evangelicals were committed to the science of genetic research, or even scientific research at all. In its earliest manifestations, more explicit eugenics practices were not committed to this kind of open scientific inquiry either. As pseudoscience, eugenic research was grounded in already held assumptions about particular kinds of people, and a cultural worldview about them. These assumptions still operate today, often deeply embedded in theological logics, as pointed out in this article’s previous section, which has often blinded well-intentioned believers to all kinds of new forms of injustice.Footnote ¹³⁹ Efforts like the Human Genome Project have allowed this eugenic perspective for positive and negative outlooks, incorporating the research of scientists and ethicists but while lacking a critical analysis of the underlying assumptions surrounding the project as well as a robust involvement from all citizens in a manner consistent with democratically addressing major issues of morality that affect our citizenry.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This wider engagement will be needed while facing what Marcy Darnovsky refers to as “uncharted moral and political waters.” She explains: “The recent controversy over embryonic stem cell research may be merely an early warning of biopolitical storms already on the horizon. Biotechnology-based products and procedures now under development will pose social and ethical questions unprecedented in human history. Some are close at hand.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Pressing into matters of individual and collective public health prioritizes personal dignity consistent with Karl Barth’s account of health: “the capacity to live as the rational subject of one’s own history, ‘the power to be as man exercised in the powers of the vital functions of soul and body.’”Footnote ¹⁴²

It is not difficult to see the rise of mass incarceration as a major exhibit of how eugenic logic works. American theology has not developed much in response to the phenomenon of mass incarceration or its eugenic logic, and as discussed has often abetted both.Footnote ¹⁴³ For the most part, eugenics went underground to avoid the radar in the postwar period. Meanwhile, theologies that incorporated and supported eugenic thinking operating in both pre- and postwar periods maintained continuity and even grew, developed, and intensified in the postwar period amid flourishing institutions. This served to reenforce status quo racist approaches as mass incarceration emerged as a working out of a persistent eugenic logic and individualism as well as a punitive approach toward those deemed either impossible or else unlikely to be redeemed. Theology nevertheless not only provides critical conceptual categorical frameworks for scrutinizing concepts at work at the intersection of eugenic logic and the theological and cultural history leading up to mass incarceration, but it can also provide constructive approaches to these things.

Reconceptualizing theology from sound theological sources that lead to better actionable ethics may indeed provide the antidote to nationalism, scientism, scientific racism, or eugenic logic, and offer better ways of thinking and acting in light of contemporary challenges that eugenic thinking was intended to address. And while concerns may still exist over whether theology can be part of the solution when it has already been so much part of the problem, especially for its wide-reaching universal claims that often fail to sufficiently understand its particular, regional, and therefore limited nature, with this particular problem of evangelical support of mass incarceration in view, more clear and careful analysis can be given. Theology is the strongest antidote for both bad theology and bad science and whatever structural and political actions might result from them. Theology provides grounds for resistance of the strongest order and has been deployed in the resistance of regimes for centuries.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Take, for example, the wonder of humanity, conceiving of humans as created in the image of God, with full dignity and bodily integrity,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ and not just what has been previously afforded by the state or other conventional social groups, but as self-evident by virtue of humanity’s very nature.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Taken as a gift, the matter renders a respect for humanity’s complicated features and a treasuring of the human will, desire, being, and consciousness, together with the cellular and atomistic features, altogether of a nature uniquely humanity’s own. As such, it invokes additional ways that our understandings may further develop a richer, fuller theological anthropology that mimics the delight of contingency and the gift of beautiful imperfection, which celebrates life and love and compassion and struggle, in light of a day when everything will once and for all be healed and renewed. For now, Christian theological anthropology focuses on the one true human, Jesus of Nazareth, whose life embodies the power of what the fullest and truest description of what our humanity might be. While Colson may have worried about science providing research to seek to humanly engineer this, Jesus has already embodied the perfection being sought and one day will effect it for all on his own terms and by the Holy Spirit’s direct action, as the gospel promises.

When the epistemic reframing of knowledge and reality in the present that would focus on Jesus of Nazareth, similar to Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on weakness, one finds that Jesus was far more concerned for the weak than the strong. From his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5.1–12), Jesus’ pronounced blessing focuses on the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. To the point, in his treatment of the so-called “new eugenics” with its far more recently successful efforts to effect “the core principle” of eugenics, theologian R. Kendall Soulen summarizes a Christian approach to humans in contrast to new eugenics in the following ways: new eugenics “replaces” rather than “redeems” or “heals”; it prefers some existing humans to others instead of affirming the worth and dignity of every human; it selects the last to be “eliminated” rather than “the last shall be first” (Matthew 20.16); and it screens and counts traits rather than affirms the acceptance of every kind before God, who beholds what we are in light of who he calls us to be, consistent with the ancient prophetic biblical tradition.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This vision challenges the dehumanizing tropes brought on by the new eugenics, not only in its approaches to humans, but also with regard to negative eugenics and also to eugenic philosophy more broadly. The Christian response sees and prioritizes the weak, the poor, the troubled, and those seeking refuge, prescribing humility for everyone, and especially those in power, and especially those who have been found on the side of the oppressors or within oppressive institutional structures.

This kind of constructive theological proposal seeks even further forms of wisdom in order to resource the ongoing embodiment of a tradition that carries with it an enduring critical gaze toward other disciplines just as it does toward the systemic and structural forces that undercut a vision of justice for all of humanity, with little time and space for apologetic arguments for eugenic thinking found within the academic disciplines and among other intelligences about different human groups, however these may exist in relationship to the scientific communities with various forms of evidence brandished for their conclusions. And here is also where any account of theological anthropology with its attention to redemption and possibilities for human flourishing must also constructively draw from a doctrine of sin to account for all of this. Any robust theological reckoning with eugenic thinking will mean rendering judgment about the nature of sinful, even evil, action as well as flawed, harmful, thinking in a throwaway culture.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ But this is not the way things were meant to be, nor the way they always will be, necessarily. Such a position and vision require a confrontation, then, and the entering of a struggle to produce meaningful research, acknowledging and accepting the challenge of a continually ongoing and robust engagement with the disciplines, including medical and genetic research, along with social policy and other forms of knowledge both embedded in and influencing our systemic social structures. Such work will always proceed with a demand of full transparency and accountability that pursues a loyalty with capacity to uplift everyone, especially those otherwise left behind, relegated to the margins, and deemed unworthy of what they are truly intended for—for glory—in whatever circumstances they may otherwise be found.