Table of Contents
Political Eugenics
I don’t imagine very many people think about what eugenics is too often, and I might even be the first person to coin the phrase “Political Eugenics”. If you aren’t aware of what eugenics is, you’ll get a fairly good look at it by reading this article. I don’t necessarily want to go into the history of the term “eugenics”, as much as I’d like to look at what it is and whether or not it should be used as a political weapon.
Recently I had an interaction with a person on FaceBook who believes Christians shouldn’t vote for Donald Trump because he’s basically the reincarnation of Hitler. OK, they didn’t exactly say that verbatim, but it was inferred because they accuse Trump of being a “eugenicist”, and apparently, so was Hitler. That is so convenient. But what does the Bible have to say about eugenics? That is the question for which a Christian should endeavor to find the answer.
This “Hitler-eugenicist” label gets attached to Trump because he believes that who you have babies with affects the baby. OK, everyone, get your affairs in order and be on the lookout for guillotines on every corner! Yes, that’s right, President Trump thinks that your parent’s genes have something to do with your personal traits, and now he wants to kill you.
That’s quite a leap, isn’t it? Well, that’s what President Trump’s adversaries would like you to believe. In fact, many of them have written articles comparing Trump to Hitler, and then they bring in a Jewish person to interview for the article who agrees with them. And bam! President Trump is suddenly a dangerous, politically inferior man that we must get rid of. This is political eugenics, as you’ll see when we discover what eugenics is. And like everything else, there are two sides to the story.
First, we need to define eugenics before we can determine if it’s always wrong to think in eugenic terms, wouldn’t you agree? Then we can look at what the president thinks, and see if it’s anything new.
Eugenics is a term that was invented in the late 1800’s, and the simplest way to define it is “selective breeding”. However, you can’t stop there and accuse everyone who participates in a form of selective breeding as being on par with Hitler. If you do, then you’d also be implicating probably every monarchy that ever existed, as well as all the wealthy families of Europe’s past. Who knows, maybe it’s still going on there. You can also trace it all the way back to Plato’s writings; I can even go back further than that to show you examples, and I will.
1 – Positive Eugenics
According to one of the articles I read there are two approaches to eugenics; positive, and negative. Positive eugenics encourages people who perceive their personal qualities as desirable. These people then have children with other people they deem to have similar desirable qualities. Is this practice sinful and worthy of its participant’s character assassination?
Let’s get back to that later, after we look at the negative side of eugenics. First though, think about what the outcome might be for two physically good looking people having a baby. Will their baby also be physically good looking? Chances are good that it will be. Are good looking people superior human beings? Some may think so, but beauty is subjective, so their opinion can’t be absolute truth. Now, replace good looking with holiness as a trait that could get passed down from parents to children, and let me know if you think it could be superior to un-holiness.
2 – Negative Eugenics
The negative side of eugenics has to do with deeming certain people or groups as inferior, whether it’s based on race or some physical or mental deficiency. This was the form of eugenics that Hitler used, and people want to tie Trump to. Hitler somehow determined that because people were Jewish they’re inferior. And because they’re inferior, they needed to be exterminated in order to make the human race better as a whole.
Just as a side note, another article I read credited a eugenics-based sterilization program in California for inspiring Hitler. So, the United States is responsible for the Holocaust, right? I mean, that is the correct line of thinking with the use of eugenics, isn’t it? Well, according to the person I was interacting with it seems so.
You may want to ask yourself “if they were practicing eugenics, even negative eugenics in California, and it’s a direct path to mass murder, why doesn’t the US have a recent holocaust of our own?” Why all of the sudden is Donald Trump going to make it happen through his use of positive eugenics?
3 – Are All Eugenics Equal?
Can you see the difference between the two types of eugenics? One looks to increase the population with their version of a desirable baby, and the other wants to get rid of what they define as an undesirable population, with hopes to replace it with something they deem desirable. Do we still see this type of negative eugenics today? You better believe it!
The same article referencing positive and negative eugenics brought up something even more insidious than Hitler, or forced sterilization. There are advances in medicine that can help women determine if their baby has Down syndrome before it’s born. Once they have that information, women can then choose whether or not to have an abortion. Can you imagine? Deciding that your baby is inferior even before it’s born!
If you’ve ever had interaction with someone who has Down syndrome, you’d know the type of love they exude is probably more Christ-like than most of the human population can hope to muster, rendering them superior in my opinion. Just think, in the future people may even be able to abort their babies because its IQ isn’t as high as they’d hoped. Love, it’s hard to come by these days.
4 – Who Practices Negative Eugenics?
One could argue that the Democratic Party is facilitating negative eugenics, and should be characterized as Hitler. They are the ones so enthralled with advanced health care for everyone, especially poor people. Couple this with the fact that the Democratic party believes that it’s OK for women to kill their babies through abortion, and viola; you can now legally practice negative eugenics by convincing poor women to abort their “inferior” babies, because they’ll be too expensive to care for.
And why stop there; you can even encourage rich women to abort their inferior baby because it would be too embarrassing to show up at the country club with a child like that. Easy peasy, just exterminate them before they become a pesky nuisance; extermination is the only goal of eugenics, isn’t it?
On the flip side, President Trump is just basically telling us how choosy he is with whom he wants to have children, and how great he thinks he is because his parents did it. And by the way, he’s not forcing anyone to do that, he’s just saying that’s what he believes. He’s also not trying to convince anyone to kill whom he deems inferior to make our country better, not even your doctor.
5 – Is Eugenics a New Concept?
Positive eugenics is nothing new. Choosy breeding, as I will now call it, has been going on since the beginning of time. As King Solomon has already said, “There’s nothing new under the sun”. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10). In fact, I would dare to say that many of the societal problems we face have to do with our predecessor’s lack of choosy breeding. I can guess what you’re thinking now; “but Paul, how can you possibly say that?” Well as I like to do with all of my posts, I’ll take a look at the Bible and see what God has to say.
6 – Eugenics in the Bible
Let’s go to Genesis 6:1-8. There are lots of people who like to think this passage is talking about angels who came and impregnated women, which created some race of super-humans. Hmmm, so early in the Bible and eugenics is there already? OK, the real story is that there were people on earth that followed God and people on earth that followed men. Evidently, the followers of men produced some fine looking daughters, and the sons of God couldn’t control their desires, and subsequently had babies with them.
Guess what the Bible explains right after the sons of God had children with the daughters of men. God saw that wickedness was great, and they only had evil in their thoughts continually. So, these daughters of men were inferior to the sons of God as they obviously brought in undesirable traits that God didn’t approve of. So, what does God end up doing? Think big here, and keep reading in Genesis 6 to find out.
I guess you could describe God’s actions as a form of negative eugenics if you wanted to pin Him down to a certain political party. I mean, He did kill a lot of people because He didn’t like the way they think, right? Very Hitler-like, wouldn’t you say? I hope you understand I’m being facetious, because I would never characterize God as being like Hitler. I’m just illustrating that conclusions can’t be drawn without knowing the whole story. The point of this Bible story is if the sons of God had practiced choosy breeding (positive eugenics), and stayed with and bore children with the daughters of God, maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t have as many problems as we do today.
And for the second time, you may say “Paul, how can you possibly say that?” Again, let’s go to the Bible and see another example of what happens when the wrong people groups mix together. The story is found in the book of Numbers 25:1-9. In order to get a gist of what’s going on here, you may also want to go read chapters 22-24.
In chapter 25, the intermingling of God’s people and “not” God’s people was characterized as a plague. Nobody bothered trying to nurse those people back to health through an awesome healthcare system either; they were just killed in order to get rid of the infection of inferiority. So we see this same thing happen at least twice in the Old Testament, where not practicing choosy breeding brought on all kinds of problems. In fact, in this story God put an end to the non-choosy breeding before things really got out of hand. I hope your next question is “is there anything in the New Testament that would support this idea of choosy breeding?”
Oh, I’m glad you asked; let’s go to 2 Corinthians 6:14-15. This is a pretty broad concept, to not be “unequally yoked” with an unbeliever. It could be applicable on many levels, but the one I always hear it associated with is marriage. In 2 Corinthians 6:16-18, Paul is quoting a lot of Old Testament, and is making a not so subtle reference to unbelievers as being unclean. You understand that unclean is inferior to clean, right? Not only that, but if we separate ourselves from the “unclean” (inferior) we will be the sons and daughters of God. It’s just an example of eugenics in action; only it’s the positive type. There’s no mention of killing anyone, just separating yourself from those who don’t think like you, to join with people who do.
7 – Eugenics: Who’s Who?
What’s really going on here with the demonization of President Trump is definitely political eugenics. And you guessed it, it’s the negative type. “Oh, Trump, I hate him! I hate the way he thinks!” “I will believe anyone who says negative things about him, and I’ll believe that he’s the next Hitler, because that’s what all those articles say…” (Even though it’s just someone’s opinion) “I’ll use my political-eugenics-derived super-human legs to make giant leaps of imagination to make him appear bad to others as well so we can get rid of him!”
It’s a trick of the Devil; he says “hey look at Trump, he’s just like Hitler…doing eugenics”. Only under his breath he says “choosy breeding”. All the while, democrat politicians are practicing negative eugenics by making the “cure” (abortion) for Down syndrome (or any condition deemed inferior prior to birth) available. This is much more Hitler-like and thus Satanic, than choosy breeding could ever be.
Could we go so far as to say that you’re responsible for negative eugenics, and thus being like Hitler if you vote for a Democrat?
This whole situation brings me back to another Bible story found in John 8:3-9. In this story the Jewish leaders bring a woman caught in adultery to Jesus, to see if He would tell them to do what Moses’ law required. And in classic Jesus form, He made this simple statement “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone first”.
The answer is so simple isn’t it? Before you go around accusing a politician of potentially being a mass murderer, shouldn’t you make sure the alternative politicians aren’t mass murderers themselves?