The Price of Silence

Quiz. What do these names have in common?

• Oliver Wendell Holmes
  
• Alexander Graham Bell
  
• Margaret Sanger (mother of Planned Parenthood)
  
• Theodore Roosevelt
  
• Woodrow Wilson
  
• Winston Churchill
  
• H. G. Wells
  
• George Bernard Shaw

Answer: These are just some of the more ardent and vocal supporters of eugenics in the early 1920's.

Eugenics is the idea that through genetic engineering, mankind can create a better society. It was seen as a solution to the problem of poverty, social unrest, crime, and socialist uprising. At that time the knowledge of DNA and genetic research was primitive at best. But they believed that Darwinism had proven that human ills are mainly hereditary defects. And those defects can be weeded out over generations through careful breeding and immigration controls.

Many people are surprised to know that eugenics was largely an American movement before Nazi Germany made it infamous in the 1940's. However, eugenics lives on today in various disquised forms. I will not bore you with a list and proof of this, but to say that the reason eugenics was accepted by so many intelligent people, Nobel Prize winners, and academians is that it is rooted in a worldview that rejects God's rule.

Here is where it gets sticky. Where was the Church? Why was it so silent? Part of the reason is that many in the Church believed in eugenics. (True, not all, but many in the mainline churches did.) In fact, during the early 1920's sermons were even provided to churches to help them propogate the idea of the social benefits of eugenics and helping pass forced sterilization laws of "degenerates and imbeciles." The church already abdicated its role as a voice in the direction of society, and bowed to popular science. The church was (and is) content with its role as a private comfort for its adherants, and a superfical help to society as it is.

The Lord Jesus Christ has a different plan. In his plan the church does not help society hum along peacefully, but rather it is the counter-cultural alternative. The church is a change agent, not adopter. The church is to help facilitate transformation of adherants, and of every aspect of society. Therefore, Christ is Lord of science, government, economics, and life.