Editor’s note: We are delighted to offer an excerpt from John Zmirak’s new book, No Second Amendment, No First: God, Guns, and the Government (Calamo Press, 2024), reprinted with permission of the publisher.

It is nothing short of startling to consider how the matter (even the definition) of racial justice has changed over the course of two generations — and the role the church has played in promoting that tragic shift.

The civil rights movement was the last true great Christian moment in America. It was the final occasion when we as a society drew on Americans’ common biblical consensus of what man is and how we should treat him: as a dignified child of God, with rights and responsibilities, equally valuable whatever his traits or state in life.  

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s consistent patriotic and biblical rhetoric, grounding legal equality in America’s founding and the Church, helped not just disarm but also shame opponents. While many of his allies and rivals for leadership among black Americans looked to Communism or Islam for help, King knew better. He realized that the civic and religious faith of Americans already rejected racism. All he needed was to show people the implications of what they already believed, not win them over to dismal dialectical materialism or an alien religion founded by a slave owner. It’s a vast blessing for our country that real Christian morals, on this issue, won out over primitive white tribalism and fear. For that fact, we have Rev. King to thank. 

The Darwinian Alternative

Things could have gone very differently. For one thing, American apostles of Darwinism had begun the 20th century weaponizing common racist attitudes to popularize Darwin’s theory, and using both to promote eugenics laws. Charles Darwin’s defenders today portray the naturalist as having enlightened views on race. As one reviewer summed it up, Darwin’s supporters see his theory as “a means to unify the races under a common ancestry.”¹ But their claims don’t hold up. As Darwin scholar Michael Flannery notes,² Darwin wrote Rev. Charles Kingsley on February 6, 1862:

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.³

This wasn’t a momentary lapse on Darwin’s part. Nineteen years later he would write to William Graham: 

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.⁴

The New “Science”

One of Darwin’s earliest converts, his cousin Francis Galton, launched the new “science” of eugenics. Its intent? To speed up the evolution of the human species by encouraging the “fit” to survive and breed, and the “unfit” to be sterilized and die off. 

Later, in the 1920s, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League. It is a pro-life commonplace that the American Birth Control League — later rechristened Planned Parenthood — had ties to eugenicists and racists. But that’s like saying that the NBA has ties to professional sports. In fact, the birth control movement and the eugenics movement were the same movement. As the classic study of Sanger’s crusade, Blessed Are the Barren, documents, Margaret Sanger twice tried to merge her organization with major eugenics groups.  

The same people served on the boards of the American Eugenics Society and Sanger’s organizations for decades. Sanger published many eugenicists in her journal, the Birth Control Review. To take only one example, she regularly published Lothrop Stoddard, a high official of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy Adolf Hitler cited in Mein Kampf as “my bible.”⁵ Sanger invited eugenicists to speak at conferences she organized as well. Thus, she personally approved outrageous and cruel claims about the genetic inferiority of millions of Americans, as well as calls for their forced sterilization and the cut-off of welfare benefits and even private charity to stop the “unfit” from reproducing. 

Sanger’s organization and eugenicists worked closely together on countless projects, ranging from researching the birth control pill (they tested the early, hazardous versions of the Pill on impoverished rural women in Puerto Rico) to passing forced sterilization or castration laws in more than a dozen states. Those laws targeted blacks and other poor people accused of “feeble mindedness” or “shiftlessness” and diagnosed as “unfit” parents for failing culturally biased IQ tests.⁶ The forced-sterilization laws were used to sterilize at least 60,000 Americans and perhaps as many as 200,000.

Human Weeds

Sanger herself campaigned tirelessly for eugenics. She saw birth control and eugenics as inseparable. Sanger gave eugenics pep talks at Ku Klux Klan rallies. She wrote articles carrying titles like “Birth Control and Racial Betterment” and “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control.” She hailed eugenics for making possible “the breeding out of human weeds — the defective and criminal classes.”⁷

In 1934, Sanger issued a call for an “American Baby Code” to incorporate Americans’ childbearing decisions into the New Deal.⁸ It would have required married couples to apply for a permit from the Federal Government before conceiving each new child. The permits would be issued or denied based on eugenic “merit.”

In 1932, Sanger gave a major speech in which she called for a “stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” She concluded the speech by calling on the U.S. government to “apportion farm lands and homestead” to “corral” and “segregate” all the undesirables — “morons, mental defectives, epileptics,” as well as “illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends.” By Sanger’s calculations, this massive concentration camp would house one out of every seven Americans.⁹

Fortunately, Sanger’s vision never came to pass in the United States. But one eugenics expert whom Sanger featured as a speaker at a population conference she organized, Eugen Fischer, had run a concentration camp in German-ruled Southwest Africa before World War I. Fischer murdered, starved, and experimented on helpless native Africans. Adolf Hitler read Fischer’s book on eugenics; it convinced Hitler of the central importance of eugenics. Another longtime official of Planned Parenthood, Garrett Hardin, had a decades-long track record of serving in eugenics organizations. As late as the 1980s, Hardin was calling for mass forced sterilization of Americans as a necessary solution to the “population problem.”

Stoking the Panic

Sanger sought to overcome lingering religious objections to birth control among mainline Protestant elites by stoking the panic that without eugenics laws, “non-Nordics” (i.e., Jews, Southern Europeans, Slavs, and American blacks) would outbreed and overtake the dominance of Anglo-Saxons in America.¹⁰ Strange as it might seem to us today, Sanger made birth control respectable by wrapping it up in racism. 

The ranks of eugenicists included Harvard professors, mainline Protestant clergymen, prominent conservationists, for whom entire animal species are named (Madison Grant — he gave his name to a Caribou he discovered, now on display at New York’s Museum of Natural History) and the heirs of Gilded Age plutocrats. Much of the funding for eugenics organizations came from the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing his opinion that the forced sterilization of a supposedly “feeble-minded” woman in Virginia was constitutional, infamously said that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”¹¹

It took until 2021 for Planned Parenthood to acknowledge, grudgingly, its long-beloved founder’s profoundly racist motivations. Having quite a bit from which to distance themselves, they finally, reluctantly, knocked Sanger from her pedestal.¹²

But Sanger’s actions cannot be erased. The powerful documentary Maafa 21: Black Genocide plumbs the depths of the movement Sanger helped lead.¹³ The film takes its title from the Swahili word for slavery. It contends that the eugenics movement in America began in the panic white racists felt at the end of slavery over what should be done to solve what some called the “Negro problem”:

Notes

1. Edward J. Larson, “Prejudiced Results: Two Views of How Darwin Approached the Race Question,” BookForum, February/March 2009, https://www.bookforum.com/print/1505/two-views-of-how-darwin-approached-the-race-question-3278.
2. Michael Flannery, “Darwin and Race: Three Strikes, He’s Out,” Evolution News, February 10, 2021. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/02/darwin-and-race-three-strikes-hes-out/
3. Charles Darwin to Charles Kingsley, University of Cambridge, Darwin Correspondence Project, February 6, 1862. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3439.xml
4. Charles Darwin to William Graham, University of Cambridge, Darwin Correspondence Project, July 3, 1881. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13230.xml
5. Ian Frazier, “When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist,” The New Yorker, August 19, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist
6. Ajitha Reddy, “The Eugenic Origins of IQ Testing: Implications for Post-Atkins Litigation,” De Paul Law Review, Spring 2008, pp. 668-669, https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=law-review
7. Daniel J. Flynn, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (New York: Crown Forum, 2004), 151.
8. Margaret Sanger, “America Needs a Code for Babies,” American Weekly, March 27, 1934, Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, 128:0312B.
9. Flynn, Intellectual Morons, 152.
10. Robert G. Marshall and Charles A. Donovan, Blessed Are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1991).
11. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
12. See https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history. 
13. Writer/Director Mark Crutcher, Maafa 21: Black Genocide (video), 2009.