Abstract

Excerpted From: Jason S. Sexton, Reconceiving Christianity and the Modern Prison: on Evangelicalism's Eugenic Logic and Mass Incarceration, 39 Journal of Law and Religion 85 (January, 2024) (150 Footnotes) (Full Document) 

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. 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.” With postwar discussions about so-called positive or negative eugenics 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.”

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,” but has also continued quietly in academic circles and covertly in governmental institutional practices. All of this occurred even amid legal efforts to repair damages caused by forced eugenic practices. 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. 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. 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. This would mean that everything about the modern prison's operations displays the secular state's ongoing misappropriation of theological tools. 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.

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Eugenic thinking continues to drive actions today. Professing evangelicals have contributed to this thinking amid wider cultural conditions, which leads them--and, by extension, other religious groups' leaders and followers--into a need to discover the normative principles related to their own traditions' enablement of mass incarceration. That particular theological norms and modes of theological reasoning yielded outlooks that reenforced, or perhaps helped give rise to, this mentality can help bring clarity to the present situation. The matter has additional importance for Appleman's proposal, teaching not just the complicated eugenics history at all levels of education but also incorporating religious rationale at work in the history while also contextualizing relevant historical scientific discoveries. In addition to this, a religious and theological literacy would need to feature prominently in the establishment of any sort of permanent commission on ethics and eugenics.

The modern prison and its making from criminal justice policy comprise the greatest example of the inextricability of church and state, which in turn means that religion and theology just may indeed be a lot more responsible for mass incarceration than previously understood. A more modest conclusion about the matter might be that American evangelicals inherited the baton of postwar American populist religion, and with it the ubiquitous eugenic logic present before eugenics went incognito. This would explain why, when it came to discussions of eugenics, although displaying earlier racist sentiments in his work with Prison Fellowship, Chuck Colson would later direct his attention to positive eugenics (as a practice posing a potential threat to society) rather than mass incarceration as a eugenic practice (which had already created a societal threat). As such he displayed total cognitive dissonance on the matter, with no substantial critique of the prison, which was consistent with Evangelicalism's attitude as reflected in Billy Graham's punitive and penal outlook.

On the related matter of whether evangelicals also more widely inherited the pseudoscience or else the more powerful cultural and theological logics that had an already-established posture toward the science that reenforced prejudicial (racial, eugenic, and otherwise) fundamentalist notions already embedded within their theology, a tentative conclusion can be reached. If the former (evangelicals inherited the eugenic pseudoscience), then theology gave a boost to this eugenic thinking, perhaps without it having been realized, with special significance as eugenic pseudoscience went underground. My argument makes no necessary judgment about malicious or evil intent, although further research may reveal that what was intended with a lot of twentieth century theology was intended to deliberately propagate racist eugenic perspectives on humanity. The commitment to an anti-intellectual fundamentalism that created evangelicals' cognitive dissonance toward science that enabled a greater trust in pseudoscience (and conspiracy theories), which in turn enabled stronger eugenic logics that are anti-immigrant, anti-disabled, and anti-criminal (rather than anti-crime) corresponds precisely with the kind of economic system that requires mass incarceration for its existence.