A Curious and Disturbing Blend of Progressive Christianity and Eugenics

This is adapted from my new book, Negotiating Science and Religion in America, set to meet the waiting world in December.

When today I hear evangelical concern about integrating with culture, I also hear this phrase: "We can't just have the social gospel." Allied is the often unexpressed fear that the gospel doesn't do well when it integrates too comfortably with other cultural forces like science. 

And we'll see how that was accurate with early 20th century theological progressive Walter Rauschenbusch.

With any move to integrate a wider variety of voices, there’s a backlash that creates further division. Certainly Protestants often split in their interaction with American culture. The modernists generally welcomed culture and its contributions to their beliefs, while the fundamentalists perceived in the world as evidence for the Fall. At least that's a useful generalization.

In contrast to this rising fundamentalism of the early 20th century, a new understanding of the Gospel was arising that contained some specific characteristics that could also be described as modernist but also did not correlate entirely with other liberal theology. 

Rauschenbusch, minister at the Second German Baptist Church in close proximity to New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen (now renamed “Clinton”), observed deep human suffering and proclaimed the Christian church’s responsibility to respond. He had already come to national attention with his 1907 Christianity and Social Crisis, but his most profound and enduring contribution remains his 1917 A Theology of the Social Gospel. Though late in the progressive era, it articulated well its characteristic concepts with clearly Christian notes. 

But what is the social gospel? The venerable historian of 19th and early 20th century Christianity Claude Welch commented, 

“The social gospel has recovered the authentic message of the Hebrew prophets’ demand for justice and Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God as a call to new righteousness under the law of love.” Historian Claude Welch

Rauschenbusch formulated the “social gospel” clearly and brilliantly … and therefore controversially. As he phrased it, “The social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified.” An individualistic message of salvation may have its place, but “it has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guild of oppression and extortion.” The progressive era had found its theological voice, which resonates to today.

In his early 1912 book Christianizing the Social Order, Rauschenbusch also transformed evolutionary discourse into a religious zeal that would change society: 

“We now have such scientific knowledge of social laws and forces, of economics, of history that we can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part.” Walter Rauschenbusch

Lest we who champion social justice put Rauschenbusch on the side of the angels, he combined this zeal for a kind of democratic socialism with a racially based Aryanism, or eugenics, 

“the study of methods of improving the quality of human populations by the application of genetic principles. Positive eugenics would seek to do this by selective breeding programmes, a strategy that is generally deemed reprehensible. Negative eugenics aims to eliminate harmful genes (e.g. those causing haemophilia and colour blindness) by counselling any prospective parents who are likely to be carriers.” Oxford Dictionary of Biology's definition of eugenics

Historian of eugenics Thomas Leonard in his book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, commented on this “mishmash of the social gospel, economic reform, Darwinism and anti-Catholicism” with this summary: according to Rauschenbusch, “Cooperation and common property were ‘dyed into the fiber of our breed’ innate to the Anglo-Saxon.”

It’s important to mention that, around this time, most modernists, whether theological or not, adopted eugenics as a rising form of science. And that's what makes Rauschenbusch, for all his important contributions, a cautionary tale.