The Eugenicist Origins of Evangelical Family Values
Dr. Audrey Clare Farley stops by to discuss her article, "The Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values," which outlines how the family values discourse so prevalent in Evangelical culture has its origins in eugenics. Eugenics was a junk-science movement started in the early 20th century that tried to show the genealogical and biological superiority of Whites over other racial groups. It was used in tragic ways to justify forced sterilizations and other unwanted procedures on Black Americans, other people of color, and others deemed unfit to reprdouce. Dr. Farley explains how James Dobson, found of Focus on the Family, was an assistant to a prominent eugenicist and eventually imbued Evangelical teaching on the family with eugenicist--and racist--ideas.
Audrey Clare Farley is a historian of twentieth-century American fiction and culture. She holds a PhD in English literature and is the author of The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, about a long-forgotten case that helped to modernize the eugenics movement. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and many other outlets
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And I'm joined today by a special guest, somebody that a lot of you were telling me I must have on the other day, and we're lucky enough to have her on, and that is Dr. Audrey Claire Farley, who is a historian of 20th century American fiction and culture.
She holds a PhD in English literature and is the author of The Unfit Heiress, The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, which is about a long forgotten case that helped to modernize the eugenics movement.
She's now working on a manuscript about the 1922 Hall-Mills murder case, which dramatized the fundamentalist modernist controversy within American Protestantism.
Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and many other outlets.
So, Dr. Farley, thank you for joining me and thanks for taking the time on what is somewhat short notice.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
I'm happy to be here.
So we're here today to talk about your piece, which is in Religion and Politics.
It is right up the alley, I think, for both of your books.
And I just hope we can have you back when your new book is out in the world, because it sounds right up our alley.
But the piece for today is titled The Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values, and it is at Religion and Politics.
This is something I've been talking about a lot, which is family values and the sort of dynamics of those, the histories.
of evangelical family values and so on.
Let me first ask you this.
Family values are always a part of evangelical discourse.
They're sort of ubiquitous.
Sophie Bjork-James calls the family the divine institution in evangelical spaces.
As you point out in your work, they popped up again, this whole family values discourse popped up again when Beth Moore left the Southern Baptist Convention.
But in the article we're talking about for today, you provide a provocative history tracing the foundations of the family values discourse in evangelical culture to a lesser known source or a lesser known movement.
You write this.
There is another lesser known source of inspiration for modern white evangelicals and Dobson, James Dobson, who's the founder of Focus on the Family.
And that source is eugenics.
And this specific history helps to explain how procreative heterosexual marriage became enshrined as the single most important moral duty for some evangelicals.
One that believers are enticed to pursue from a young age and then to perform at all costs, including physical and psychological harm.
Most folks out there will have some familiarity with eugenics, but what is eugenics and how is it part of American history?
So eugenics is a movement to improve the quality of the human population, usually through selective breeding practices.
And it really gained popularity in the early 20th century when America's racial demographics were dramatically shifting.
So in the first few decades of the 20th century, African Americans had begun to mass migrate from the rural South to the industrial North.
Immigrants were pouring into the country in record numbers, and authorities became very concerned about the future of the white race.
So they wanted to preserve what they saw as the purity of these white bloodlines, and they restricted immigration, they expanded anti-miscegenation laws, some of which were already on the books in states, those laws forbade marriage between blacks and whites, And they passed laws in many states authorizing the forcible sterilization of, quote, the unfit.
So people that were unfit were people who were poor, disabled, sexually deviant whites.
And eugenicists believed that poverty and criminality and even promiscuity were inherited traits.
Just like blue eyes or brown hair.
So they had this idea that if they could only eradicate these bad traits, these bad seeds, then the white race could be stronger, more pure, and it could better prevail over these inferior races, which were beginning to have a greater presence in the United States.
It's every time.
I mean, I've read about eugenics, studied it, traced the histories.
And every time, though, I encounter these themes, I'm just horrified.
One of, I think, the lesser known aspects of this whole movement, this eugenics movement, is positive eugenics.
And this was, I mean, that's put in quotes, you know, if there's such a thing as positive eugenics.
Paul Popenoe was a big champion of this.
Popenoe is a big part of your article and your work.
I think we'll get to him in a minute, but what is positive eugenics according to Popenoe or anyone else?
Positive eugenics is the other side of the eugenics coin.
Sterilization would be an example of negative eugenics.
It's trying to curb or prevent the reproduction of so-called undesirable people.
Positive eugenics actually was the kind of eugenics that the English intellectual Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics and first got the idea for selective breeding, that was actually the kind of eugenics that he had in mind.
So it was really just getting the right people to reproduce.
So it was a dual project, stopping the reproduction of unfit people and increasing the reproduction of the people that you wanted to reproduce, which was namely able-bodied, middle-class white women.
And just in terms of that whole sort of movement, who is Paul Popeneau?
know.
How does he play into this?
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