An Anarchist Defense of Six-Day Creationism

I consider myself a "Bible-believing Christian." I believe the first verse of the Bible: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). I want to defend my belief in the Creator by challenging belief in the creature (Romans 1:25; Isaiah 33:22; 1 Samuel 8:7). Most people seem to worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator. I agree with the Apostles, who said "We must obey God rather than man" (Acts 5:29). And when that idea is held consistently, without compromise, you'll be called an "anarchist."

The reason I'm an "anarchist" is because I am a Bible-believing Christian even when the Bible teaches "pacifism."

"Everybody knows" that Jesus commanded His disciples to be "pacifists." He commands us to

I have been told "People who are willing to wear the uniform protect your right to be a pacifist." This is a psychotic belief, detached from reality. During my lifetime, the federal government of the United States has murdered, maimed, or made homeless tens of millions of innocent, non-combatant, non-white civilians around the world. Trillions of dollars have been stolen and wasted in this effort. Americans and Brits who believe they are more evolved than the rest of the world hear no alarms when someone suggests invading a nation full of brown people, and maybe killing a few million, and causing a few million more to die of starvation and disease. And it's always illegal to question war in a time of war. So, no, soldiers do not protect my freedoms.

People who want to be respected by Presidents, Generals, Political Science Professors, and Defense Industry CEOs claim Jesus -- especially in His "Sermon on the Mount" (Matthew 5-7) -- was only talking about the "personal" or "spiritual" side of life, but His commandments are not to be followed by those who are in positions of "public responsibility." "Private" vs. "public." As a result, since I was born, the government of the United States has killed, crippled, or made homeless TENS of MILLIONS of innocent non-combatant civilians around the world. The prophets of the Old Testament would say that "The United States" is the modern parallel to Babylon or Assyria of old. The U.S. government is the enemy of God and humanity.

"The Public Sector" claims to be a "monopoly of violence." Believing that "a friend of the world is the enemy of God" (James 4:4), I don't care if I'm not respected by the “military-industrial-congressional complex” (as Dwight Eisenhower at one point called it).

The word "pacifism" comes from the Latin word for "peace" -- pax (genitive pacis). It does not come from the word "passive." When someone is attempting to commit an act of violence, I am active in overcoming violence, but I overcome evil with good (Romans 12:14-21), not with more violence.

For those who are not Christians, The State (as Hegel said) "is god walking on the earth." This paper attempts to convert you from the worship of a false god to the worship of the True God: The God of the Bible.

Unfortunately, too many who call themselves Christians worship and serve the same god as the military-industrial complex.

So I am a Biblical "anarcho-pacifist." I oppose violence, lawlessness, and chaos. I believe "archists" are the greatest source of lawlessness, violence, and chaos on planet earth, not pacifist anarchists.

What I want to prove to you is that the "Theory of Evolution" is actually a religion which was invented to justify archism.

When I say evolution is a religion, I mean it is not purely "scientific." It has never been the case that someone who believed the Bible discovered "facts" that made it "rationally" or "scientifically" impossible to believe that the world is as young as the Bible says it is, and was forced by the "facts" to reject the Bible. There are no such "facts."

Rather, those who rejected the Bible did so because they didn't want God telling them what to do (law). So they invented a new history of the cosmos to replace the history recorded in the Bible. This revisionist history left God out of the picture, and left Man free to be his own god. Man became his own law-giver and salvation-bringer (messiah).

There are many people known as "scientists" who come very close to admitting what I just said. They unanimously agree that they don't believe the religion of the Bible.

The new religion did not emerge from Darwin's head full-blown out of nothing in 1859, when he published his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The ancient Greeks had a similar religion. The "Renaissance" meant a "re-birth" of pre-Christian ideas.

Darwin has become something of a mythic character. George Gaylord Simpson, one of the highest of Evolutionism's high priests, who ministered in the parish of Harvard University, has pontificated that Darwin

Darwin did no such thing. Even Darwin himself would have denied that accomplishment. He had serious doubts about his own theory. In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that the idea of natural selection producing the eye “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” Harvard palaeontologist Stephen J Gould declared in 1980 that neo-Darwinism is "effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy."

"Orthodoxy" is just "peer pressure," the desire to be one of "the cool kids." Darwinian Orthodoxy is also the desire to find something -- anything -- to replace the Bible. Anything will do, but it's nice to be able to couch it with an aura of scientific respectability. Scientific "orthodoxy."

1925-2025:
A Century of Mass Ignorance and Mass Death

2025 marks the 100th Anniversary of a famous American court trial in Dayton, Tennessee: "The Scopes Trial," also known as "The Monkey Trial." You may have seen the somewhat-fictionalized account of the trial in the movie Inherit the Wind.

The trial was not really about monkeys. It was about who gets to control public schools: imbeciles who vote or progressive elites.

Are You an Imbecile?

Two years after the trial in Dayton, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a mentally retarded woman, without her knowledge or consent that this was the operation being performed on her. While she had a daughter of normal intelligence, this had no bearing on the case in the joint opinion of eight of the nine members of the Court. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the Court’s opinion: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The State has a right to prevent the births of imbeciles. This is because the goal of government is to create a master race. This idea, governing America in the 1920's, was adopted by Nazi Germany in the 1930's.

Let's consider a few of the famous facts of the trial . . . and not one of them is true. But public school graduates don't know the difference:

William Jennings Bryan is portrayed by Hollywood as a fundamentalist buffoon. Although Bryan defended some "fundamental" theological doctrines of Christianity (virgin birth, deity of Christ, etc.), he was a liberal Democrat. In fact, a progressive democrat. Some political experts say he was the most left-wing candidate for President ever put forward by the two major parties. He was the Democrat Party candidate for President three times: 1896, 1900, and 1908. At the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago, his famous “Cross of Gold” speech (July 8) won him the nomination at the age of 36, and is still considered one of the most important political speeches in American history.

He was an opponent of racism, eugenics, and Nazism. Wikipedia says that "Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, Bryan was often called "the Great Commoner."

This was the wisdom of high school biology textbooks, circa 1925. The ACLU came to its defense. This information had to be brought to the children of Tennessee, the ACLU decided.

The Scopes "Monkey Trial" was not about monkeys, except those who graduate from public schools. The trial was about Democracy, Racism, Eugenics, and Nazism.

This paper is about evolution, but it's not about "science." That's because evolution is not really about science. What Americans believe about "The Bible and Modern Science" is not based on science. If Isaac Newton, generally regarded as a "great scientist," could travel through time from 1700 to 2025, he would be horrified at what Americans say "science" is saying. He would be horrified at what public schools, the mainstream media, and government says "science" says.

If Isaac Newton were here today, he would be a six-day creationist. And he would be an anarchist.

And then combine that evidence with things you already know, and re-think everything.

I asked ChatGPT what kind of reactions I might expect from a reader who hears that I'm a six-day creationist.

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, December 25th 1642. Five years later, in 1647, the church-state of Massachusetts formed its public school system through a law which is known today as "The Old Deluder Satan Act." That same year, the Bishop Ussher began a work on the origin of the creeds. He the published a treatise on the calendar in 1648.

Isaac Newton reviewed Ussher's calculations and concluded that the year of Creation was four years later, 4000 B.C. (Newton would say the word "later" is inappropriate, as there were no years before 4000 B.C.). Isaac Newton died on March 20th 1726. James Hutton was born six weeks later, on June 3. "The Great Awakening" began that year, and would influence the America Revolution, which John Adams said began in 1761.

Consider the field of Geology. Charles Lyell {1797-1875} was a friend of Darwin. Before he published his famous book on geology in 1830, which championed the idea of "uniformitarianism" (rather than "catastrophism"), he was a lawyer. He was influenced by James Hutton {1726-1797}, who was in turn influenced by Buffon. All three were intelligent lawyers and business speculators. They promoted "uniformitarianism" rather than "catastrophism." They said in effect, "We don't have to believe the Bible, with its history of creation and global flood. We can put our faith in long eons of time." They didn't actually "prove" scientifically that long eons of time have actually occurred. They didn't "scientifically" prove that Noah's flood never occurred. Nor did they "prove" that catastrophic events like the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 could not possibly account for the world's geologic formations. None of them "proved" that the world was billions of years old; they just said "It's possible," and that was enough for them to hang their religious hat on.

Evolution cannot be "proven" "scientifically." Not by scientists. Not even by lawyers.

Today's dominant paradigm was created by "philosophers," lawyers, and other propagandists before it was adopted by "scientists."

None of the men listed above produced any evidence that would have compelled Isaac Newton to abandon his belief that the world was created in 4000 B.C. Evolution was adopted because it met a religious need -- or an anti-religious need -- not because they were forced by scientific facts to accept it.

What is "Religion?"

James 1:27 says that true religion is protecting widows and orphans. Jesus and the prophets reject the idea that true religion is temple liturgies and sacraments; true religion is loving God and loving your neighbor. A false religion rejects God and seeks to rule over your neighbor. Evolution is a false religion.

You have been brainwashed for 13, 17, or 20+ years in evolutionist schools to say, "No, evolution is not a religion; evolution is science."

If you dig deeper than your public school indoctrination, you will gain a new perspective. You have never heard all of the arguments and historical evidence presented in this paper. I must ask you to suspend judgment for the time being, and internalize the evidence presented. I know I'm asking a lot. I'm trying to condense 17 years of learning (that you might have received in Christian schools) into an hour or two. I'm not expecting to completely persuade you, but simply plant a seed.

For example, I cannot persuade you that the Bible is the Word of God if you don't already believe that. But that's where I start, and that's the foundation of this paper.

"What does the Bible say?"

For 1700 years, Christians believed that Genesis (and the rest of the Bible) taught that God created the universe in six 24-hour days, not more than 10,000 years ago.

Today, a lot of theologians and preachers will tell you that Genesis doesn't require us to believe that God created the world in six days. "Genesis is about religion, not science," they tell us. "It's poetry, not science."

Why do today's preachers tell us Genesis means something different than what the first 1700 years of Christians believed it said?

Because today's preachers do not want to be ridiculed by the dominant paradigm. They want to be accepted by "scientists" and the university-military-industrial complex.

Before the age of Darwin and Enlightenment, Christians believed in six-day creation. Let me cite two.

Bishop Ussher

James Ussher, Bishop, (1581-1656) was head of the Church of Ireland. He is known (if he is known at all) for his Chronology of the Bible, which established a date for creation of 4004 B.C.

Amateur Evolutionists think of Ussher as a clown. The date of 4004 B.C. is both ridiculed and hated. The biologist Karl Pearson (1857-1936) recalled "the joy we young men then felt when we saw that wretched date BC 4004 replaced by a long vista of millions of years of development." "Wretched" is not a word used by "objective" and "dispassionate" scientists.

But some evolutionists are wiser. They recognize that Ussher was a great mind, a true scholar.

Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, while totally disagreeing with Ussher's chronology, nevertheless wrote:

Isaac Newton

Yes, Isaac Newton. THE Isaac Newton. Encyclopedia Britannica calls Newton "the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century." National Geographic notes that Newton "was born especially tiny [about 10 weeks premature] but grew into a massive intellect and still looms large...."

Isaac Newton believed the universe was created around 4000 years before Christ. Newton wrote more words about the Bible and Theology than he did on natural science. Most Christians don't know this.

I am not a scientific genius like Isaac Newton, nor a brilliant Bible scholar like Bishop Ussher. My question is simple. Why should I believe evolutionists like Darwin and Pearson who felt that the worldview and work of Christians like Ussher and Newton was "wretched?" Why should I not stand on the shoulders of Bible-believing giants?

And since I'm committed to the belief that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, I'm a six-day creationist.

"Covenant Creation"

Just a note about a modern interpretation of Genesis made popular by a Professor at Wheaton College, an ostensibly Christian institution. This view holds that Genesis is just another example of myths and fables of the Ancient Near East (ANE).

I believe the Bible, especially the Old Testament, repeatedly condemns any attempt to synthesize Biblical teaching with the idolatrous teachings of the Gentiles (the other nations outside Israel).

But this modern "Christian" view claims that Moses (or the author of Genesis) violated these commands and imported pagan religious views into Genesis.

This theory holds that Genesis is not about the creation of the material universe, but only about the creation of "the covenant community" of Israel, or more specifically Israel's temple religion at the time of Moses.

The god of the Bible is just Israel's god, a local god, like the local gods of Babylon, Sumer, and Akkadia.

In my opinion, this view was constructed to appeal to Enlightenment minds who find the date BC 4004 to be "wretched." It is an attempt to harmonize the Bible and "modern science."

Was the creation account in Genesis a propositional/verbal revelation from God to Adam? Did Adam pass this knowledge on to his son Seth? Did God tell Seth?

The true history of mankind was known to all mankind. God's supernatural activity in Israel was known to the nations outside of Israel. If YHWH = "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," then the Pharaoh of Egypt did not know less about the God of the Bible than Rahab the Canaanite prostitute, who told the Israeli spies:

Rahab used the name "YHWH" or "Jehovah," the specific name of the God of Abraham and Israel, not just a generic god. Non-Israelite religions were just the evolutionary product of human reason or human immorality. The religion of Israel was revealed to them by God.

Can we read the truth in the pages of the Bible, or must we get the truth from evolutionists like Darwin and Lyell and the bloggers listed above?

Now we come to the combination of Biblical Creationism and Anarchism. Why would an anarchist lean toward creationism?

Evolution is the religion of archists.

That claim is strange because we (modern Americans) don't fully understand why evolution became so popular so quickly in the post-enlightenment age.

Evolution justifies rejecting God as Creator and Lord. Evolution justifies rejecting the pacifism of Jesus. It justifies rejecting monogamous heterosexual marriage.

Mass Formation Psychosis

The home page of this domain was written as a reaction to the covid-19 hysteria of 2020. The thesis is that just as COVID hysteria was a psychosis, it was also a scam. Scammers manipulated the masses, creating a mass psychosis.

What follows is taken from that page, which begins to explain how so many respected doctors, scientists, journalists, and government officials could have prescribed public health policies which caused more economic, mental, and physical suffering than the disease they claimed to be fighting.

Racism As Mass Psychosis

I personally know some white supremacists. I've sat at a table with them for a Bible study. They treat not-white races the same way you do, assuming you treat them with some measure of dignity and justice. In 2025, there are only a handful of "white supremacists" in America, and they are no threat to anyone. They are not plotting nor could they execute a conspiracy to enslave blacks under their control. They have goofy views, e.g., that God wants the races to be separate, and therefore condemns miscegenation (marriage between two races). Today's "white supremacists" are quaint and powerless.

It was not always so. Consider two famous white supremacists and the influence they have had on our world. Both were born on the same day in 1809.

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln didn't even try to hide his racism. Why should he? His racist views were widely held in his day.

Lincoln also believed that hundreds of thousands of human beings -- of all races -- could be murdered in order for him to retain his political power over their state governments. But Lincoln himself did not kill all those people. They killed themselves, suffering from a form of "Mass Formation Psychosis" -- a belief in the reality of something that does not have a reality: the legitimate right of some people to rule over others. In a word "civil government."

Political power -- archism -- transforms quaint, goofy racists into mass murderers.

Charles Darwin

Darwin was born across the pond in England on the same day as Lincoln: February 12, 1809. According to Uncommon Descent, Darwin, who not only "listened to the science," but helped create many of modern science's most cherished psychoses, said:

Of course, most people today recognize racism as a form of "mass formation psychosis." It is a belief that is not connected to reality. It is a belief that was widely held because of social pressure. It is a belief that was promoted by all the "smart" people. "Listen to the science" and recognize the superiority of the civilized whites over the uncivilized colored savages. Or so we were told.

"Wait a minute; are you saying that Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and Anthony Fauci could be mistaken?"

Yes. And millions -- even billions -- of people could believe things that aren't true.

But the rest of this article is mostly about one specific belief unconnected to reality, but a belief nevertheless held by the masses: it's called "statism." It is a religious belief in the legitimacy of those who claim to possess a monopoly on violence: "The State" or "civil government." All of the psychoses listed above are related to the concept of "The State" and the problem of Political Authority.

This is not an "essay," it's a "Reader's Guide." An "essay" would write out the whole argument. This "Reader's Guide" just lists the resources one would have to read in order to understand the argument.

This Reader's Guide is primarily about mass belief in The State in an impersonal evolving universe, and not about mass belief in the government's "public health policy" regarding COVID-19.

Self-Deception

I'm proud to say I was a friend of the late Greg L. Bahnsen. I recorded hundreds of his sermons onto cassettes which are now part of The Bahnsen Project. He tutored me one-on-one in the quixotic quest for ordination in the OPC. He earned his Ph.D. under Dallas Willard in philosophy, in the field of epistemology:

Bahnsen argued that the human mind has the amazing capacity to sincerely and truly believe something to be true even though one knows it is false.
This capacity is called self-deception. (That link is a "Reader's Digest" presentation of the Thesis.)
The human mind is also capable of passionately believing something that one denies believing in at all.
This is a fascinating cross between the fields of ethics and epistemology.

This is an intensely Biblical thesis. The desire to be as god (Genesis 3:5) motivates "science" as well as "theology" as well as crime as well as "public health" as well as "political science."

COVID hysteria was generated by fear (on the part of the compliant) and the quest for power and profits (on the part of those "in charge").

Three More Examples of Mass Hysteria, Mass Psychosis, or Mass Deception

1. Nazism

Can millions and millions of people all come to believe something that is false? They can, and they do. With a little help from our compassionate overlords and the little media-dog that sits obediently in the government's lap.

2. AIDS-HIV - The Invention of the AIDS virus

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, discusses this example of mass deception, although the extent of the "mass" deception was not as widespread at the time as COVID today or nazism 80 years ago. Powerful bureaucrats and crony capitalists can crush real science. They invent rumors to protect their profits and their political positions. Talking heads on TV can repeat rumors that destroy the careers of esteemed scientists like Peter Duesberg.

3. The Bible as Myth

There are many sincere Christians who have doubts about whether the Bible can be trusted.
There are many people who hate Christianity who tell these sincere Christians that the Bible cannot be trusted.
People who say we can't trust the Bible live in a fantasy world. They've been deceived, and now they try to deceive others to give themselves intellectual company.

Most of the arguments against the Bible share common traits with one of the most common: "The Telephone Game" argument.

At a party, the first participant in "the Telephone Game" will whisper a sentence to the person in the next chair, who whispers the message to the person in the next chair, and so on around the circle. The final person in the "phone chain" reveals the message, which is compared with the first participant's real message. The two are found to be totally different, and everybody laughs.

As the argument goes, this is like the transmission of the Bible over the centuries. Nobody involved in copying the Holy Scriptures took it all that seriously, they whimsically changed words, sentences, or paragraphs to suit their fancy, and the Bible we have today bears no resemblance whatsoever to what Moses, Isaiah, Matthew (or whoever started the chain) had in mind.

This argument can be made to sound very educated and sophisticated, but it is pathetic and juvenile. Millions of people believe it.

In 1912, Frederic Kenyon was knighted Sir Frederic Kenyon for his service as Director and Head Librarian of the British Museum. He describes how the Jews meticulously copied the Old Testament:

In Kenyon's day, the oldest copy of the Old Testament was a copy from the 10th century after Christ. But in 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and they contained a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, dating over one thousand years earlier than that 10th century copy. The results astonished the scholarly world. Gleason Archer, in comparing the manuscript variations of the Hebrew text with pre-Christian literature such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, states that it is amazing that the Hebrew text does not have the phenomenon of discrepancy and MS change of other literature of the same age: "Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A. D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible" with the exception of minor variations in spelling, on a par with the British "colour" and the American "color." "Even those Dead Sea fragments of Deuteronomy and Samuel which point to a different manuscript family from that which underlies our received Hebrew text do not indicate any differences in doctrine or teaching. They do not affect the message of revelation in the slightest."

In other words, the Old Testament we have today is virtually letter-for-letter the same Old Testament Jesus had in His day. And the copy of Isaiah that Jesus read from (Luke 4) was virtually letter-for-letter the same as the one Isaiah himself wrote. Ditto for the Proverbs of Solomon, the Psalms of David, and the books of Moses.

If you want to claim that Christianity is a psychosis, don't claim that Jews copied the Bible in a haphazard and inaccurate way. Better to allege that they all suffered from a form of OCD mental illness that caused them to painstakingly and accurately copy their Holy Book for centuries without error. That's closer to reality.

All this about the Bible being filled with corruptions and changes is the polar opposite of reality. There is no ancient manuscript evidence to support this view; all the evidence is against this view.

This proves that atheists live in a world of fantasy. Some atheists believe the Bible is unreliable because that's what they've been taught, and they want to be respected by those who told them. But there are some atheists who are bad people and are just making this stuff up. The ones who start these rumors about the Bible have a completely different conception of history than historical reality, and a completely different view of religious people than reality. If an atheist -- knowing even one-tenth as much about the Biblical manuscripts as the Director and Head Librarian of the British Museum -- makes up the story that the Bible is untrustworthy and unreliably transmitted through the centuries, then he is a liar who probably hates God and doesn't want to love his neighbor, refrain from stealing, or be faithful to his wife. You would be wise not to listen to such people.

There are 300 million people in America. How many of them accept the "telephone game" version of the history of the Bible? How many of them believe something that is 180° opposite reality?

On the opposite side of the spectrum from Richard Dawkins and other atheists who contend that the Bible is an indecipherable mish-mash of repeatedly edited and mis-copied ancient texts are champions of the Bible, including Neo-conservatives, conservative "Constitutionalists," all the way to "Christian Reconstructionists," who say the Bible contains principles of Constitutional and Republican Civil Government. Atheists contend that the Bible (if it's possible at all to interpret it and discover a coherent message) endorses slavery, war, and "theocracy" (by which they mean some kind of tyranny by clergy). Some conservatives come close to agreeing with these atheists. But the Bible is actually opposed to war and slavery. Here is an example of an article from Forbes magazine that speaks of "The hierarchical society affirmed by Scripture." It's not clear from the article what a "hierarchical society" actually is, but it presumably includes Donald Trump at the head of a "civil government," with a "strong national defense" and "secure borders."

It was a conservative "hierarchical society" that put Jesus to death. Any group of people who actually attempt to create a society following Biblical precepts will eventually be destroyed by the nearest "civil government." History is splattered with the blood of those who have tried, and their legacy has been stripped from textbooks. People who take the Bible seriously are branded as "radicals" by conservatives and as "insurrectionists" by liberals.

It is beyond the scope of this website to give a detailed defense of these propositions:

In short, the Bible teaches pacifism. No human being anywhere on planet earth in 2025 can quote a verse from the Bible which justifies that person in taking vengeance or waging war against enemies "foreign or domestic." The idea that the Bible approves of war in our day is a form of "Mass Formation Psychosis." Everyone believes that the Bible supports war and strong governments, but it's not true. "Everybody knows" that Jesus commands His followers to be pacifists, but His advice is "primitive" or "utopian" or "unrealistic," and conservatives find a way to get around the commands of Christ.

The Bible actually opposes violence, and this is why God's Prophets are always martyred by the "monopoly of violence" known as "civil government." Jesus said His followers are not to be "archists" like "the kings of the gentiles" (Mark 10:42-45). Therefore, contrary to what every "good Christian" is taught in Sunday School,

Because you're a victim of educational malpractice in Bible-free schools, and because you're infected with a "mass formation psychosis," you can't wrap your head around the claim that the Bible is an "anarchist manifesto." But deep down you may suspect this is true, and this is why every civil government in human history eventually bans the Bible. Even the U.S. Government, which originally prided itself on being a "Christian Nation," prohibits your local public school teachers from uttering this sentence in front of the children: "God says 'Thou shalt not steal.'" On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower warned about "The Military-Industrial Complex." On June 17, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court banned voluntary Bible reading in public schools. Since then, the U.S. Government has killed, crippled, or made homeless tens of millions of innocent non-combatant non-white civilians around the world. The once-Christian nation has become an atheistic nation with the most evil and dangerous government on the planet.

If atheists in one generation oppose the Bible and the Constitution, conservatives in the next generation will be where the atheists were the previous generation, fighting to "conserve" what atheists have left us.

War is Nazism. "Survival of the fittest" means survival of the largest military-industrial complex.

Volume after volume has poured from the publishing houses describing every phase of the Hitler regime, but their writers are so timidly afraid of being classed as anti-evolutionary "fundamentalists" by the high-priests of Evolutionism that one may search through their books by the hundreds and scarcely find a mention of evolution or Charles Darwin.

Nevertheless, the rise of war and fascism in the 20th century is inescapably attributable to the rise of Evolutionism; and the rise of Evolutionism is attributable to the propaganda machines of the Emperors who loved the Theory of Evolution precisely because it was useful in justifying their total war against Eden.

But then, perhaps the connections are familiar enough: Richard Hofstadter's book, Social Darwinism and American Thought,[14] records the great chorus of voices which united in praising the word of Darwin for the light it bestows on how nations, businesses, and relations between economic classes should be governed. Wallbank and Taylor's text, Civilization Past and Present,[15] evidences their conclusion that Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest" "became a vogue that swept western thought in the late nineteenth century. It . . . became a convenient doctrine for justifying various economic and political theories." Nietzsche, for example,

Ashley Montagu comments on an inflammatory book by Freiderich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War:

Mussolini was strengthened in his belief that violence was basic to social transformation by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Mussolini's attitude was completely dominated by Evolutionism. In public utterances he repeatedly used the Darwinian catchwords while he mocked at perpetual peace: it would only hinder the evolutionary process.

Likewise Hitler based his politics on Darwin. Jews must be segregated, he urged in Mein Kampf, to avoid mixed marriages; were they to occur, all nature's efforts "to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile."

6. The "Theory of Evolution" is also an example of mass hysteria, mass self-deception. Or even better, mass psychosis, which is "a detachment from reality." In this case, a detachment from God's reality.

Most people believe that the textual record of the Bible is a "telephone game" of gaps and mistakes, but they also believe that the fossil record of the evolution of life is a robust and detailed history of the evolution of life on earth over billions of years. Their view of the Bible is psychotic, as is their view of evolution.

Charles Darwin moaned about the absence of fossil proof of his theory of evolution, hoping someday the proof would be found. It never has been.

Think of the confusion evolution would have produced if it really were happening:

It doesn't exist. It's all a myth. The GEICO caveman does not live in anyone's neighborhood.

If evolution were true, it would also be a lot easier to believe the people at PETA: "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."
— Ingrid Newkirk, President, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
But the lines are clearly drawn. Evolution is a lie.

But the purpose of this Reader's Guide is not to weigh "scientific evidence." This Guide is not about biology or archaeology. The purpose is to weigh the evidence showing that evolutionism is a religion or a mass deception. The evidence for this is overwhelming, but you certainly never heard this evidence during your government-regulated education.

Darwin and the early promoters of evolution recognized that science was not on their side. But they hated God (Theonomy) and worshiped self (autonomy). They deceived themselves as they deceived the masses.

Self-deception has many motivations. It is not our purpose here to breakdown all the psychological motivations that exist for promoting or believing in evolution. Every individual has a slightly different motivation. Fear of God's Judgment is certainly one motivation, as many evolutionists have openly admitted, though they wouldn't call it "fear" (for that would presuppose the reality of God's Judgment), but rather "revulsion" or some other term of derision or condemnation.

It's not about "science." Nobody was forced to abandon creationism and accept evolution by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence. It was a choice. It's been a Long War Against God.

What follows is an overview of the argument that "evolution" is a product of mass hysteria, mass psychosis, or mass self-deception. The theory of evolution is:

When I realized that in order to be "Bible-believing Christian" I had to be a six-day creationist, I quickly realized that in order to be a "Bible-believing Christian" I also had to be an anarchist. This is because I realized that the "theory of evolution" was a rationalization for those who wanted to be Archists. They wanted to impose an evolutionist theocracy on everyone. (The word "Theocracy" means "God Rules." The evolutionist wants to be his own god.)

So I realized that in order to be a "Bible-believing Christian," I had to believe in "Creationist Anarcho-Theocracy."

The argument against "evolution" on this page is based on a Christian "fundamentalist" and anarchist presupposition.

Most people don't expect an "anarchist" to be defending "fundamentalism" and "Theocracy," and opposing "evolution." That's because most people today -- even the most intelligent -- are victims of educational malpractice. They don't recognize the Theory of Evolution as a sacrament of statism, the worship of political power.

Liberty and Libertarianism

What is "liberty?" Libertarians define it as "freedom from aggression by others."

"Liberty" cannot exist in a "libertine" society. If everyone believes he is his own god, nothing stops him from aggressing against you, stealing your property, stealing your wife, or even stealing your life. The "libertine" is FREE! He can do whatever he wants. Nobody can tell him what to do, or what not to do. (See Jean-Paul Sartre, below.)

Down below we will look at the concept of "Theocracy." The word means "God governs." The theory of evolution says there is no God. The Bible says this was Satan's temptation in the Garden of Eden: "You shall be as gods" (Genesis 3:5). Libertines love the theory of evolution, because in the absence of a Creator, the libertine gets to be his own god, "knowing" or determining "good" and "evil" for himself. The Apostle Paul described it as "worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). This sums up the entire field of evolutionary thought.

The biggest threat to your liberty, as we will see, is the evolutionist who believes he is his own god, and nobody can tell him not to aggress against you. The modern evolutionist believes he ("Political Man," evolved man) now "guides" (controls) evolution. That means he controls you. Evolution is now no longer "natural" selection, but political selection, with the oligarchy-establishment in the driver's seat. [See "Davos and Transhumanism," below.]

Anarchism

I write as an "anarchist."
I could write as a "Christian," but that doesn't tell anyone as much about me as the label "anarchist" -- even though "anarchist" is somewhat confusing. "Christian" is a much bigger target. It could mean anything. Joe Biden and Dorothy Day both claimed to be "Catholics." And "catholic" is a circle within "Christian."
"Anarchist" narrows it down: I'm anti-State. I'm anti-State because I'm anti-violence. I'm anti-violence because I'm a follower of the Prince of Peace.

The first confusing aspect about "anarchism" is the widespread belief that "Christian Anarchist" is a contradiction in terms. This is easily clarified:

The word "anarchist" comes from two Greek words meaning "not an archist." What is an "archist?" Jesus says "the kings of the gentiles" love to be "archists," but followers of Christ are not to be. See Mark 10:42-45.

An "archist" is someone who likes to control and rule over others, imposing his own will on others by threats of violence. To be an "archist" is to violate God's Commandments, which can be summed up as:

You were not taught this in Sunday School. All archists -- all "governments" -- eventually ban the teaching of the Bible, as the United States has done.

Fundamentalism

"Fundamentalism" is the belief that the Bible is the Word of God the Creator, and we should just believe that whatever the Bible says is true, regardless of what any created being says.

"Whatever the Bible says" is a tricky phrase. But not too tricky. Jesus said "I am the door" (John 10:7-9). This does not mean that Jesus is a plank of wood that swings on brass hinges. There are literary devices used in the Bible, and no "fundamentalist" denies this.

"The Fundamentals" were a series of doctrinal booklets published around 1910. They were an apologetic response to "modernism," or "liberalism," which denied "fundamental" doctrines like the deity of Christ and His virgin birth; doctrines which "liberals" agree were taught and believed by the "pre-scientific" authors of the Bible, but cannot be believed by "modern man."

Someone who claims to be a "fundamentalist," or claims to believe that God wrote the Bible, may not agree that God wrote an "anarchist manifesto." So "fundamentalist" simply describes a formal commitment to the Bible as the Word of God. Among such people could be numbered: Augustine, Calvin, Gov. John Winthrop ("City on a hill"), Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Kuyper (Prime Minister of the Netherlands), and J. Gresham Machen.

H. L. Mencken -- no fan of fundies -- wrote an obituary for one of the leading "fundamentalists" of the day, J. Gresham Machen. In that obituary, Mencken disagrees with Machen's fundamentalism, but claims that fundamentalism is more logical than liberalism, which doesn't even have a claim at being a logical religion. Liberals claim to be Christian but don't even agree with all the fundamentals of the Christian religion. Why do they bother going to church or dressing up like clergymen? At least fundamentalists are trying to be consistent with principles with which Mencken and other liberals don't agree. Mencken's obituary, "Dr. Fundamentalis," appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun (January 18, 1937), 2nd Section, p. 15, is

When Princeton Theological Seminary (home of fundamentalists like B.B. Warfield) abandoned the fundamentals in favor of liberalism, Machen left Princeton and formed the Westminster Theological Seminary. Machen was booted out of the liberal Presbyterian church and founded the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. These events were front-page news in the New York Times, back in a day when Americans still cared a little about true religion and the press was not as frequently criticized for "liberal bias." It's a different world today.

The writers of the Bible were "fundamentalists." They believed what they wrote. Fundamentalists believe what the Bible teaches. Liberals don't.

If you want to be a "Christian," you have to be a "fundamentalist." Otherwise, you're just making up your own religion and cloaking it with the label "Christian."

The issue is authority. Some people are willing to let the Word of God be their authority. Other people want to be their own authority. Some choose several authorities from the Authority Smörgåsbord, but it is still they themselves who decide which "authority" will be on their plate. Atheistic anarchists say allowing the God of the Bible to be one's ultimate Authority is inconsistent with the principle of being your own god. That's a logical position. The Christian Anarchist worships and serves the Creator as Ultimate Archist rather than any creature (Romans 1:25).

A popular argument against the authority of the Bible is the "Telephone Game" argument: that the text of the Bible has been repeatedly changed over the last few thousand years, and we really have no way of knowing what the Prophets or the Apostles actually wrote.

The truth is 180° in the opposite direction. Biblical copyists were OCD about copying the Bible accurately. They did not have a "liberal" attitude toward the text. And the great irony is that they accurately copied a book which portrayed them as faithless rebellious sinners. They had every reason to change the text to make themselves (or their nation) look better, but the text has remained unchanged over the centuries.

These arguments against the Bible presuppose in advance that evolution is true, and the Bible is merely the product of evolutionary forces. Evolution is believed to be true because it relieves us of any obligation to obey the Bible.

Note: being an "archist" like "the kings of the gentiles" is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus (see above). America was founded by fundamentalist archists. The Puritans believed the Bible was the Word of God, but also believed that Aristotle and Plato should be followed in civil matters. This position is logically contradictory and politically unstable. Atheistic anarchists oppose Christian civilization based on antinomian depravity, but one can favor Christian civilization but oppose the coercive imposition of someone's version of Christian civilization by archists in "civil government."

Higher criticism of the Bible was an important tool in the humanists' war against Christian civilization. See

Theocracy

We're told "theocracy" means "government by clergy." Wrong. That would be "ecclesiocracy." "Theocracy" means "God governs," or "God rules."

"Theocracy" is the flip-side of "Christian anarchism." To say "God governs" is to say "the Creator governs, not any created being." "Theocracy" in a Christian sense means "no mere man is an archist." From the evolutionary perspective, MAN is god. In an evolutionist Theocracy, the most powerful creature rules. And the most powerful creature usually is "The State."

Jesus is the King of kings, the Lord of lords, and the God of gods. All creaturely kings and all creaturely lords and all creaturely gods (whether human or demonic) are false gods, false lords, and false kings. Trump is a false king. Moloch was a false god. ("Moloch" means "king.") No creature is a legitimate king or lord.

Our Creator, Jesus, is the only lord, god, king we should worship and serve. Not like evolutionists,

According to the Bible, "Civil Government" is a false god. Archism -- being a government, or voting for a government -- is idolatry.

"Fundamentalism" is the individual granting authority to God and His Word. "Theocracy" is a society coming under the authority of God and His Word. A Biblically consistent Theocracy is an "Anarcho-Theocracy."

Nobody in 1776 believed in "secular [non-theistic] government." America's Founders tragically believed that God required human beings to form "civil governments," and forming and maintaining a civil government was a religious obligation.

America was once a "Christocracy." Benjamin Rush signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Presidential administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison -- each of whom came from a different political party. And of what party was Rush?

The modern cult of Materialistic Scientism will not allow the Bible to be taught in state-run schools the way Benjamin Rush would teach it. The Declaration of Independence (America's "birth certificate") is a Theocratic document. It is currently illegal to teach students in a public school that the Declaration of Independence is actually true. America was a Christian nation. (If any "nation" can be "Christian.")

Nobody living through the Trump-Biden regime believes in Fundamentalist Anarcho-Christocracy (except me, it seems).

De-Programming: "Listen to the Science"

In this year of coronavirus, mask- and lockdown-dissidents are told to shut up, "listen to the Science" and get in line.

"Listen to the Science" actually means "Listen to my preferred or socially dominant cult of Scientism." There are many cults that make up the religion of Scientism, with one cult culturally dominant for a while, then another cult (or multiple cults) replacing it. In our day, the coronavirus cult is one of the dominant cults of Scientism. Also the environmentalist cult.

The vast majority of us attended parochial schools sponsored by the archist cult of Scientism.

We've been brainwashed to reject the Bible by atheist (Christocracy-denying) archist fundamentalists.

One of the biggest obstacles to a fundamentalist acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God is the issue of "Evolution vs. Creation." This is just "creature-ism vs. Creator-ism" (Romans 1:25).

Evolution and Archism

Nobody in 1859 (when Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published) rejected Creator-ism and embraced evolutionary creature-ism because they were forced to by the overwhelming weight of "scientific facts."

No atheist in any university wanted to defend theories of evolution which were popular in ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, or China. They wanted something a little more "modern" and "scientific"-sounding.

Darwin's book filled the bill. At least for now. It would have to do. Everyone knew it was riddled with scientific holes. But nobody wanted to obey the Bible. There had to be a substitute.

Note especially the recollection of George Bernard Shaw: "The world jumped at Darwin."

"Jump" is not a verb one expects to find in the philosophy of science or any dispassionate discussion of "The Scientific Method."

It's not a battle between "religion and science," but a battle between two religions: Christianity and Liberalism, or the Religion of Christ vs. The Religion of Secular Humanism.

In the early 1800's, anyone who advocated the abolition of slavery was told to "Listen to the Science!" There were "scientific" "experts" who said Negroes were inferior to whites and could never be assimilated into white society. Abraham Lincoln believed this. Charles Darwin believed this. A lot of white people believed this.

Some people say Darwin wasn't a racist because he advocated being kind to the help, and not mistreating inferior races.

In 1859, when Darwin's book was published -- one year before the beginning of the U.S. Civil War -- a lot of people believed in the inferiority of less-"Favoured Races."

A "scientific" justification for racial inferiority was a "scientific" justification for racial subordination.

Racism motivated acceptance of "The Science" of evolution the same way
"Trump Derangement Syndrome" motivates acceptance of "The Science" of lockdowns and covid "models" which inaccurately project millions of deaths.

Sentencing 130 million poor people around the world to starvation and justifying that by claiming to "protect" less than 1% of the population who were going to die later that same year anyway is not a rational "public health policy." That's not pure, dispassionate, objective epidemiology. That's the adrenaline rush that an archist gets when exercising political control and influencing an upcoming Presidential election.

The human mind has the amazing capacity to sincerely believe something one knows is false.
It is also capable of passionately believing something that one denies believing in at all.
This capacity is called self-deception, as we observed above.
The desire to be as god (Genesis 3:5) motivates "science" as well as "theology."

Bad science is not always motivated by bad theology. Sometimes it's just the pressure of the "old boys'" guild. There is scientific peer pressure as well as international/governmental peer pressure. Governments can force scientists to limit their inquiry or promote false theories, either as a self-conscious tool of political repression, or out of hysteria or self-deception:

"The Science" told Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) that Alternating Current (AC) was impossible because it violated the laws of physics. "Listen to The Science," Tesla was told. "The Science" would have sentenced the human race to a battery-powered (DC) world.
Tesla said the speed of light was not a constant. That's a "scientific revolution" that has not yet been permitted by the Guild to happen.

The U.S. military invasion of the Philippines began in 1899. This was perhaps a watershed year in America's transition from a Theocratic Christian Republic into a Progressive Atheist Empire. Evolutionism + archism = imperialism. A Secular Empire is the opposite of a "City upon a Hill."

The millions who starve because of a supply-chain destroyed by unwarranted COVID lockdowns are victims of the ideas entertained by quiet epidemiologists and exploited by power-hungry political archists. The tens of millions who have been killed, crippled, or made homeless during my lifetime by a thousand U.S. military bases around the world are victims of the ideas of evolutionary biologists appropriated by the Military-Industrial Complex. Consequential ideas are often lies. Human beings are complex, as are the societies they create. John Calvin began his Institutes of the Christian Religion by noting that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of man (self-knowledge) are intimately connected, and knowing ourselves and our motivations and deceptions is very hard work.

Thomas Henry Huxley was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" because of his vigorous public propagation of Darwin's theory. He was also the patriarch of one of the Great dynasties of the world: The Huxleys. One of T.H. Huxley's grandsons was Aldous Huxley. He was sometimes honest about his motivations for accepting evolution. He said that evolution, which denied a Creator, and therefore denied design, and therefore denied meaning, provided atheists with a justification to "seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves...." He went further:

I would argue that the desire to cheat on your wife is an archist desire to rule over a member of an inferior sex.

From the French Revolution to the Sexual Revolution, and well before that, evolution meant Worshipping the Creature Rather Than the Creator throughout these centuries. It wasn't just Darwin and biology. It was Louis XIV (1638-1715) (“L’État, c’est moi” ), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814).

Eugenics: Racism + Archism

In addition to slavery, another form of racism is "eugenics." The evolutionary archist seeks to impose his own will (that inferior races not reproduce) on members of those un-Favoured Races. Margaret Sanger was Darwin's Killer Angel. Adolph Hitler was Darwin's Killer Angel.

From 1859 to 1938 (when the previously-lauded Hitler went out of fascion -- excuse me, fashion), evolutionism meant eugenics, and more importantly, Progressivism. Progressivism was Darwinism, racism, statism, fascism and archism all rolled up into a global cultural eugenics movement.

Archists need to de-sanctify human life in order to rule over it, and destroy it if necessary. But the Harvard-educated archists who are in control of these eugenic and imperialistic programs will live to enjoy their lives of domination.

Resource #11: The Messianic Character of American Education. Today's public schools are acknowledged even by liberals to be the established church. "Sidney E. Mead, in his important book, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (1963), has argued perceptively that the public school system is America’s only established church." Scientific secular education is utterly religious. It was messianic. This secular religion, inculcated in the youth, would save civilization. Educators were our Saviors. At least they thought so.

The "New Deal" was progressive. As Hegel might have put it, Progressivism was eugenics walking on the earth:

From Darwin To Hitler: The Origins of Scientific Racism

Charles Burris

The Origins of Scientific Racism
Author(s): John P. Jackson, Jr. and Nadine M. Weidman
Source: The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education , Winter, 2005/2006, No. 50 (Winter, 2005/2006), pp. 66-79

Fascinating exploration of pseudo-scientific intellectual ideas from Darwinism and the problems of heredity, the impact of Francis Galton, the Teutonic Germ Theory, the rise of Nordicism and the supremacy of Nordics, Anglo-Saxon superiority, the rise of Eugenics and race in the United States, and how these ideas impacted National Socialist Germany.

The Eugenics movement drew their greatest enthusiastic support and funding — extensive funding from America’s upper-most philanthropic sources such as from the Carnegie Institute and the Harriman railroad fortune. The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Dr. Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz. Cereal magnate J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton.

Top tier social scientists, especially economists, gave their full sanction to the Eugenics project. Several feminist reformers advocated an agenda of eugenic legal reform. The National Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters were among the variety of state and local feminist organizations that at some point lobbied for eugenic reforms. One of the most prominent feminists to champion the eugenics agenda was Margaret Sanger, the leader of the American birth control movement. Margaret Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent unwanted children from being born into a disadvantaged life, and incorporated the language of eugenics to advance the movement. Sanger also sought to discourage the reproduction of persons who, it was believed, would pass on mental disease or serious physical defects. Ideas truly have consequences.

Margaret Sanger Interview on PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich

In his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004), Richard Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. Darwinism played a key role in the rise not only of eugenics (a movement wanting to control human reproduction to improve the human species), but also on euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination. This was especially important in Germany, since Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman

The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought, by Richard Weikart

Darwinian Evolutionary Theory and Constructions of Race in Nazi Germany: A Literary and Cultural Analysis of Darwin’s Works and Nazi Rhetoric, by Emily M. Wollmuth

The Nazi Connection Eugenics, American Racism, And German National Socialism, by Stefan Kühl

The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann

Nazi Nexus : America’s corporate connections to Hitler’s Holocaust, by Edwin Black

Racism (Amazon book list)

The Murdering State (Amazon book list)

Roe v. Wade and Racism

The Scopes Trial

Most Christians -- and even most liberals -- are ignorant about the real issues in the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, who opposed the teaching of evolution, was not what most folks today would call a fundamentalist. He was more of a liberal. In a narrow sense, Bryan was theologically conservative, and defended the deity of Christ, but he was politically liberal -- a Progressive. He opposed evolution because he believed it led to the oppression of the poor and the un-Favoured Races. He was, of course, completely correct about this, even though, from a Christian fundamentalist perspective, he was wrong about history and the creation of the world. William Jennings Bryan was not a six-day creationist. He was anti-eugenics. He was anti-genocide. He stood up for non-archists.

But William Jennings Bryan's progressive defense of the little guy was out-gunned by archists who saw Progressivism as their archist religion.

Progressivism: The Scientific Religion of Archism

More must reading:
Resource #13: Appendix A of Gary North's commentary on Genesis, "From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty," is a critique of the most important sleight-of-mind, bait-and-switch scam in modern thought: Darwinism's transformation of "man, the unplanned speck" into "man, the planning god." It lies at the heart of modernism. Humanists use a two-step argument to get to their fundamental principle: the sovereignty of archist man.

North's Appendix contains the names of Progressive Era scientific planners you've never heard of. They were famous and well-respected during The Progressive Era. Their progeny rule us today. North says this Appendix is "the most important academic article of my career." It shows in great detail, with exhaustive footnotes, the real meaning of Darwinian Progressivism. Evolution is nothing less than the religion of archism. If you read nothing else in this "Reader's Guide," read that. If you lean "libertarian" and you're a "theistic evolutionist," this essay should "red pill" you.

Progressivism gave rise to "The Administrative State." During the Progressive Era, which might be dated from 1887, when the Interstate Commerce Commission was formed, to 1930, liberal elites believed in "scientific socialism." The Administrative State

The French and Russian revolutions were explicitly religious revolutions. See the impressive work by the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (1980). See also Marx's Religion of Revolution. Billington begins with the French Revolution and ends with Lenin. It is by far the most detailed account of the conspiratorial and occult religious origins of revolution. The revolution of Administrative Law is the religion of science and rationalism, while violent revolution is the religion of chaos (irrationalism). Humanism/Autonomy is constantly fluctuating between rationalism and occult irrationalism. Cornelius Van Til spent his career exposing this humanist dialecticism. This is why the irrational occult chaos of BlackLivesMatter burning cities is supported by all the rational, Harvard-educated fancy-suit elites in the industrial "complexes" listed above.

Update

The Scopes Trial of 1925: What Really Happened

Most Americans have only the vaguest awareness of the Scopes trial. They do not know why it was important.

It has become known as the "monkey trial." But it was not about monkeys in the evolutionary chain that produced man. It was about control of the tax-funded schools by the voters.

In the early 1920's, William Jennings Bryan began a campaign to get Darwinian evolution out of tax-funded schools, grades 1 through 12. This challenged the crucial monopoly of humanists in America: control over the public schools. They mounted a campaign against Bryan's campaign against them.

The political conflict culminated in a five-day trial in tiny Dayton, Tennessee in July of 1925.

Does all this seem incredible? I have written a mini-book on the Scopes trial. It has the footnotes to support my version of the story. Download it here.

Video: The Scopes Evolution Trial of 1925, Lesson 2

The issue was representation: Bryan vs. Darrow. The trial was a major public event. It asked Americans: "Which side are you on?" It asked them to choose sides.

Forgotten is this fact: William Jennings Bryan's brother Charles had been the Democratic Party's nominee for Vice President in 1924. That was the influence of Bryan's name. Charles also controlled his brother's huge and profitable mailing list.

This was a showdown like no other in the 1920's: religious, cultural, social, political, and educational. It was a battle for political control over the academic content of the public schools, grades 1-12. It was therefore a battle for the future of America.

There were two well-known representatives doing battle. It was not like Prohibition, which had no representatives. People could hear this battle on the radio. This had never happened before . . . anywhere.

The battle still rages culturally. It was settled in the public schools only in the early 1980's. Evolution was not taught in biology courses in my day: the 1950's. Both sides in the 1925 showdown were in the shadows. Then the next showdown took place. The creationists lost.

This settled the political issue: the voters cannot legally determine what is taught in government schools. The educrats won. Democracy as a concept lost. That was the issue in 1925. It is still the issue today.

Another Update: Liberals and Conservatives

Why is that in the 1800's "liberal" Christians were more likely than "conservative" Christians to believe that racism was unChristian and Darwin's un-Favoured Races were entitled to the same ethical and legal treatment as whites?

Joel McDurmon has discussed the prevalence of racism among "conservative" theologians in the South. Oberlin College is an example of a Northern Presbyterianism that was more passionate about abolitionism than Calvinism. Calvinists, arguing more from Roman Law than Hebrew Law, were statists. Opponents of statism bought into (because they could not refute) the teaching of the Calvinists that the Bible -- particularly the Old Testament -- endorsed war, the State, and slavery. Those with libertarian leanings simply downplayed the Old Testament and became "New Testament Christians."

This would have been prevented had Christians in the 1700's and 1800's realized that the Protestant Reformers were wrong about the State, and that the Bible -- even the Old Testament -- in fact, especially the Old Testament -- is an Anarchist Manifesto.

Davos and Trans-humanism

"Davos" is a group of archists, archist wanna-bes, and archist admirers, who meet regularly in Switzerland. "Transhumanism" means man taking control of evolution to bring about a synthesis between human beings and computers.

There was recently a speech at a Davos meeting in which the speaker succinctly stated the thesis of this website: that evolution is a religion which seeks to move archists from dependent spectators of the impersonal laws of nature, to active god-like creators. From unguided "natural" selection (as Darwin described) to archist-planned and guided selection.

Evolution is a religion. Man is the new god. And as Hegel noted, autonomous man tends to worship the most visible accomplishment of man, the State. "The State is god walking on the earth."

Davos plans have been brought to light by a comedian named J.P. Sears. His video is here:

Gary North says the importance of the Scopes Trial was not evolution vs. creation, but populist control of public schools vs. control of schools by elites.

This certainly was an important issue, but not the most important lesson we can learn from the trial and the forces that orchestrated it.

The word "Populist" is used synonymously with "democratic." "Democracy" comes from two Greek words meaning "the people rule." In this case, "democratic" means "families get to determine how their children are educated." Un-democratic in this case means "experts" in distant bureaucratic agencies decide how your children will be educated. Thomas Jefferson contrasted "democratic" with "aristocratic."

The Significance of the Scopes Trial

On July 10, 1925, the culturally most important trial in American history began: Tennessee vs. John Scopes. It was the first trial to be covered on the radio. Hundreds of reporters showed up in Dayton, Tennessee, from all over the world. The monkey trial became a media circus.

The trial ended on July 24. William Jennings Bryan died in Dayton on July 26. With this, the American fundamentalist movement went into political hibernation for half a century, coming out of its sleep fifty-one years later in the Ford-Carter Presidential race.

There is a great deal of confusion about the details of the trial, but not its fundamental point: the legitimacy of teaching Darwinism in tax-funded schools, kindergarten through high school. On this point, all sides agree: the trial was a showdown between Darwinism and fundamentalism.

What is not recognized is the far greater importance of the far more important underlying agreement, an agreement that had steadily increased for half a century by 1925 and still prevails: the legitimacy of tax-supported education.

What I write here is a summary of a lengthy, heavily footnoted chapter in my 1996 book, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. That book is on-line for free. So is the chapter: “Darwinism, Democracy, and the Public Schools.”

The origins of the trial are generally unknown. It was begun as a public relations stunt by a group of Dayton businessmen. They had heard of the challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) regarding a test case for the Tennessee law against teaching evolution in the public schools. They thought that if they could get someone in Dayton to confess to having taught evolution in the local high school, the town would get a lot of free publicity. We can hardly fault their assessment of the potential for free publicity — monetarily free, that is.

Scopes agreed to be the official victim. The irony is this: he was not sure that he had actually taught from the sections of the biology textbook that taught Darwinism. Had he been put on the witness stand and asked by the defense if he had taught evolution, he would have had to say he did not recall. He was never put on the stand.

Also forgotten is the content of the textbook in question. The Wikipedia encyclopedia entry has refreshed our memories. The textbook, like most evolution textbooks of the era, was committed to eugenics and a theory of racial superiority. The textbook declared:

This was the wisdom of high school biology textbooks, circa 1925. The ACLU came to its defense. This information had to be brought to the children of Tennessee, the ACLU decided.

The city’s merchants did very well from the influx of media people who could not resist seeing William Jennings Bryan take on Clarence Darrow.

The ACLU’s strategy was to lose the case, appeal it, get it confirmed at the appellate court level, and appeal it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which they believed would overturn it. And why not? This was the Court that, two years later, determined that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a mentally retarded woman, without her knowledge or consent that this was the operation being performed on her. While she had a daughter of normal intelligence, this had no bearing on the case in the joint opinion of eight of the nine members of the Court. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the Court’s opinion: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Bryan offered to pay Scopes’ fine. Both sides wanted conviction. Darrow threw the case. He told the jury it had to convict, which it promptly did.

The ACLU hit an iceberg. The Dayton decision was overturned by the appellate court on a legal technicality. The case could not reach the Supreme Court’s docket. Sometimes judges are more clever than ACLU attorneys expect.

Beginning with the publication of his book, In His Image in 1921, Bryan began calling for state laws against the teaching of Darwinism in tax-funded schools. What is not widely understood was his motivation. It was ethical, not academic. Bryan understood what Darwin had written and what his cousin Francis Galton had written. Galton developed the “science” of eugenics. Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871) referred to Galton’s book favorably. Also, Bryan could read the full title of Darwin’s original book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Bryan was a populist. He was a radical. In terms of his political opinions, he was the most radical major party candidate for President in American history, i.e., further out on the fringes of political opinion compared with the views of his rivals. Clarence Darrow had no advantage with respect to championing far-left political causes.

Bryan had read what Darwin had written, and he was appalled. He recognized that a ruthless hostility to charity was the dark side of Darwinism. Had Darwin’s theory been irrelevant, he said, it would have been harmless. Bryan wrote: “This hypothesis, however, does incalculable harm. It teaches that Christianity impairs the race physically. That was the first implication at which I revolted. It led me to review the doctrine and reject it entirely.” In Chapter 4, Bryan went on the attack. He cited the notorious passage in Darwin’s Descent of Man:

He could have continued to quote from the passage until the end of the paragraph: “It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed” (p. 502). It is significant that Darwin at this point footnoted Galton’s 1865 Macmillan’s magazine article and his book, Hereditary Genius.

Beginning that year, Bryan began to campaign in favor of state laws against teaching evolution in tax-funded schools. He did not target universities. He knew better. That battle had been lost decades before. He targeted high schools. A dozen states had introduced such bills. Tennessee passed one.

The Establishment recognized the threat. It saw that its monopoly over the curriculum of the public schools was its single most important political lever. So did Bryan. Bryan was targeting the brain of the Beast. He had to be stopped.

Across America, newspapers and magazines of the intellectual classes began the attack. I survey this in my chapter, citing from them liberally — one of the few things liberal that I do. The invective was remarkable. They hated Bryan, and they hated his fundamentalist constituency even more.

Yet the Democrats had nominated his brother for Vice President less than a year earlier. His brother had developed the first political mailing list in history, and the Democrats wanted access to it.

Bryan wrote in a 1922 New York Times article (requested by the Times, so as to begin the attack in response):

This surely was a legitimate question, one which has yet to be answered in terms of a theory of strict academic neutrality. But Paxton Hibben, in his 1929 biography of Bryan (Introduction by Charles A. Beard), dismissed this argument as “a specious sort of logic. . . . [Tax-funded] schools, he reasoned, were the indirect creations of the mass of citizens. If this were true, those same citizens could control what was taught in them.” If this were true: the subjunctive mood announced Paxton’s rejection of Bryan’s premise.

The most famous reporter at the trial was H. L. Mencken. That Mencken was drawn to Dayton like a moth to a flame is not surprising. He hated fundamentalism. He also loved a good show, which the trial proved to be. But there was something else. He was a dedicated follower of Nietzsche. In 1920, Mencken’s translation of Nietzsche’s 1895 book, The Antichrist, was published. Bryan had specifically targeted Nietzsche in In His Image. “Darwinism leads to a denial of God. Nietzsche carried Darwinism to its logical conclusion.” Mencken was determined to get Bryan if he could.

Two months before the trial, Mencken approached Darrow to suggest that Darrow take the case. In a 2004 article posted on the University of Missouri (Kansas City) website, Douglas Linder describes this little-known background.

Both sides accepted the legitimacy of the principle of tax-funded education. Both sides were determined to exercise power over the curriculum. But there was a fundamental difference in strategies. Bryan wanted a level playing field. The evolutionists wanted a monopoly. Bryan’s defeat did not get the laws changed in the three states that had passed anti-evolution laws. It did get the issue sealed in a tomb for the rest of the country.

The evolutionists made it clear during the war on Bryan that democracy did not involve the transfer of authority over public school curriculums to political representatives of the people.

The New York Times (Feb. 2, 1922) ran an editorial that did not shy away from the implications for democracy posed by an anti-evolution bill before the Kentucky legislature. The Times repudiated democracy. It invoked the ever-popular flat-earth analogy. “Kentucky Rivals Illinois” began with an attack on someone in Illinois named Wilbur G. Voliva, who did believe in the flat earth. Next, it switched to Kentucky. “Stern reason totters on her seat when asked to realize that in this day and country people with powers to decide educational questions should hold and enunciate opinions such as these.” To banish the teaching of evolution is the equivalent of banishing the teaching of the multiplication table.

Three days later, the Times followed with another editorial, appropriately titled, “Democracy and Evolution.” It began: “It has been recently argued by a distinguished educational authority that the successes of education in the United States are due, in part at least, ‘to its being kept in close and constant touch with the people themselves.’ What is happening in Kentucky does not give support to this view.” The Progressives’ rhetoric of democracy was nowhere to be found in the Times' articles on Bryan and creationism, for the editors suspected that Bryan had the votes. For the Progressives, democracy was a tool of social change, not an unbreakable principle of civil government; a slogan, not a moral imperative. Though often cloaked in religious terms, democracy was merely a means to an end. What was this end? Control over other people’s money and, if possible, the minds of their children.

In the Sunday supplement for February 5, John M. Clarke was given an opportunity to comment on the Kentucky case. He was the Director of the State Museum at Albany. His rhetoric returned to the important theme of the weakness of democracy in the face of ignorant voters. I cite the piece at length because readers are unlikely to have a copy of this article readily at hand, and when it comes to rhetoric, summaries rarely do justice to the power of words. It began:

The issue was democratic control over tax-funded education. Mr. Clark was against any such notion.

Here it was again: the flat earth. It has been a favorite rhetorical device used against biblical creationists for a long time. The claim that pre-Columbus medieval scholars regarded the earth as flat, it turns out, is entirely mythical — a myth fostered in modern times. Jeffrey Burton Russell, the distinguished medieval historian, has disposed of this beloved myth. The story was first promoted by American novelist Washington Irving. The modernists who have invoked this myth have not done their homework.

Because Bryan was a great believer in tax-funded education, he entered the fray as just one more politician trying to get his ideas fostered in the schools at the expense of other voters. He professed educational neutrality. His opponents professed science. He lost the case in the courtroom of public opinion.

Bryan won the case and lost the war. The international media buried him, as they had buried no other figure in his day. His death a few days later in Dayton sealed the burial.

A year later, liberals captured both the Northern Presbyterian Church and the Northern Baptists. Bryan had a leader in the Northern Presbyterian Church, running for moderator and barely losing in 1923. The tide turned in 1926. In the mainline denominations, the conservatives began to lose influence.

In a famous 1960 article in Church History, “The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935,” Robert Handy dated the beginning of the decline in church membership from the Scopes trial. Handy taught at liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1980, Joel Carpenter wrote a very different article in the same journal: “Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism.” He pointed out that Handy had confined his study to the mainline denominations. In 1926, he said, an increase in membership and church growth began in the independent fundamentalist and charismatic churches. The fundamentalists began to withdraw from the mainline churches. What Handy saw as decline, Carpenter saw as growth. Both phenomena began in response to the Scopes trial.

Fundamentalists began to withdraw from national politics and mainstream culture. The roaring twenties were not favorable times for fundamentalists. Their alliance with the Progressives began to break down. This alliance had gotten the eighteenth amendment passed. By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the fundamentalists had begun their Long March into the hinterlands. Only in the 1976 Presidential election did they begin to re-surface. In 1980, they came out in force for Reagan. Two events mark this transformation, neither of which receives any attention by historians: the “Washington for Jesus” rally in the spring of 1980 and the “National Affairs Briefing Conference” in Dallas in September.

The Scopes trial was a media circus. The play and movie that made it famous three decades later, Inherit the Wind, was an effective piece of propaganda. The website of the law school of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, offers a good introduction to the story of this trial. But this version has a hard time competing with the textbook versions and the documentaries.

The victors write the textbooks. These textbooks are not assigned in Bryan College, located in Dayton, Tennessee — or if they are, they are not believed.

The Scopes Evolution Trial of 1925: What Really Happened, Part 2

The issue was representation: Bryan vs. Darrow. The trial was a major public event. It asked Americans: "Which side are you on?" It asked them to choose sides.

The Real Scopes Trial, and My Free Book Exposing It

The Scopes "Monkey Trial" of July, 1925, was promoted at the time as "the trial of the century." Amazingly, this turned out to be true.

In the tiny town of Dayton, Tennessee, the nation's most controversial lawyer and the nation's most controversial politician met in the courthouse to settle a crucial legal issue. The textbooks have covered up this issue ever since. The trial did not settle this issue, but it drove American fundamentalism underground in American politics for the next 50 years.

There was another issue -- more social than legal. It. too, was settled in that courthouse for the next 14 years.

Before we get to these, let's consider a few of the famous facts of the trial . . . and not one of them is true.

What was the Scopes trial really all about? This: a defense of democracy by Bryan and an attack on democracy by Clarence Darrow, the ACLU, and H. L. Mencken.

It was also about the government's plan to create a genetic master race -- an idea that Bryan was determined to stop.

With these words, the Great Commoner, three times the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States,⁽²⁾ former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson,⁽³⁾ and the most famous ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.,⁽⁴⁾ launched in the New York Times an attack on Darwinism and on the liberal clergymen who held Darwin's views on human evolution.

Bryan's New York Times article was a warning shot to Presbyterian liberals, although he did not identify his own denomination as a source of the problem. Over two decades of relative public peace within the Church were about to be brought to a close. A new era of doctrinal, personal, and rhetorical confrontation was about to begin. It would last for a decade and a half, and would end with the exodus of the most doctrinally Calvinistic members of the denomination and the creation of two new ecclesiastical organizations by those members: the Orthodox Presbyterian Church⁽⁵⁾ in 1936 and the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1938.

As we shall see, however, Bryan's challenge to theological liberals was peripheral to his challenge to the American Establishment in the broadest sense. This battle would soon extend far beyond the narrow confines of the institutional Church.

As a politician, he should have been suspicious of any request by the editors of the New York Times to give him free space on page 1 of Section VII of the Sunday edition. He should have asked himself: "What's the catch?" The offer was bait, and he bit. He had little choice: to have refused would have played into the editors' hands. "We gave him a chance to respond, but he did not." Three years later, the hook attached to this bait led to the destruction of his reputation and the beginning of a half-century rout of the fundamentalist movement in America.

The editors had an agenda. It was initially defensive, for Bryan had an offensive agenda. His agenda had only recently been manifested by political events. Politics, not theology as such, was what caught the Times' attention. Publishing Bryan's essay also offered the added benefit of being able to sell Bryan's publisher advertising space for Bryan's recently published book, In His Image.

Bryan in 1921 had been invited to deliver the annual Sprunt lectures at the "other" Union: Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, Virginia, a conservative Southern Presbyterian seminary.⁽⁶⁾ The previous year, Machen had delivered the lectures that became The Origin of Paul's Religion. In October, Bryan delivered his lectures, which were published as In His Image.⁽⁷⁾ Chapter 4, "The Origin of Man," was subsequently published as a separate book, The Menace of Darwinism.⁽⁸⁾

The revival of confrontational rhetoric came from outside the Presbyterian Church. Political modernists initiated it. Theological modernists inside the Church merely followed the lead of their colleagues on the outside. Modern readers may be amazed at the level of vituperation. It is important to understand that basic to the strategy of the liberals has been the promulgation of a lie, still repeated: "The conservatives were guilty of excessive rhetoric." Theological conservatives were subsequently blamed by modernists and their spiritual heirs, who have written the history books, for what the modernists in fact adopted as a primary tactic: a level of confrontational rhetoric beyond the limits of acceptable public discourse, i.e., acceptable to liberals when used by conservatives, which the conservatives in fact did not use. What prompted this revival of rhetoric was a political issue that went to the very heart of the American experiment in the separation of Church and State: control over the content of public education.

Between 1921 and 1929, 37 anti-evolution bills were introduced into state legislatures.⁽⁹⁾ These bills forbade the teaching of evolution in taxpayer-funded schools. In 1917, this demand had been made before the Kentucky legislature, and in 1921, a rider to this effect was attached to an appropriations bill in South Carolina.⁽¹⁰⁾ Kentucky began to debate such a law in early January, 1922. Bryan addressed a joint session of the legislature on January 19, devoting the second half of his speech to the question of teaching Darwinism in the public schools and universities supported by government funds. Representative George Ellis introduced such a bill a few days later.⁽¹¹⁾ Soon, Bryan received invitations to speak before the legislatures of Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Florida.⁽¹²⁾

This threat of the removal of tax subsidies for Darwinian evolution was regarded by modernists as a sword of Damocles over their collective heads. At the public university level, this was indeed a major threat. At the public school level, this threat was not yet a major threat, for American high schools rarely taught Darwinism. High school textbooks did not discuss Darwin's thesis to any appreciable degree, nor did they promote creationism. This was still true in the centenary of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1959. Hermann J. Muller, Nobel laureate in physiology, complained in The Humanist in 1959, "One Hundred Years Without Darwin Are Enough."⁽¹³⁾ We must bring the truths of Darwinism to the little child, he said.⁽¹⁴⁾ But the public school textbook publishers in the United States are too fearful of losing sales to promote Darwinism. "Are we then to allow the urge for profits to keep our children and, through them, all our people benighted and a hundred years out of date in their world view?"⁽¹⁵⁾ What was true in 1959 was even more true in 1922.

The modernists knew that the vast majority of the nation did not accept Darwinian evolution in 1922. This is why they greatly feared democracy on this issue, and feared Bryan above all, for he still could rally large numbers of the Democratic Party's troops, millions of whom who were in the pews of conservative churches on Sunday morning.

On February 2, the Times ran a story, "Darwinian Theory Stirs Up Kentucky." Support for the bill was evenly divided in the state, the Times asserted, with rural areas favoring it and cities against it. The battle had been going on for months, the story reported; then Bryan came to speak. The ex-commissioner of education told the press: "Such legislation belongs to the dark ages." He asked rhetorically: Why not teach the flat earth or a stationary earth?⁽¹⁶⁾ These two themes--medievalism and the flat earth--were to be invoked repeatedly in the attacks that followed.

On the same page, the Times reprinted a letter from Columbia University's president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Butler served as president of Columbia from 1901 to 1945. He had been the founder of the Industrial Education Association, which later established Columbia Teachers College, the most influential teachers institution in the United States. He served as Chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 until 1945. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.⁽¹⁷⁾ In short, he was a major figure in American education. He had written his letter to the president of the University of Kentucky, who had issued a national plea for assistance.

Butler's rhetoric never dealt seriously with Bryan's argument, namely, that the voters of a state can legitimately determine what their tax money is spent for. Butler's rhetoric was entirely specious. "The bill, as you describe it, seems to me to lack vigor and completeness. It should, I think, be amended before passage to include in its prohibition the use of any book in which the word evolution is defined, used or referred to in any way. It might even be desirable to include a prohibition of books that use any of the letters by which the word evolution could be spelled, since in this way some unscrupulous person might, by ingenious effort, evade the salutary provisions of the law." He then compared the bill with Soviet tyranny: "I take it for granted that the introducer of the bill is in close communion with the rulers of Soviet Russia, since he is faithfully reproducing one of their fundamental policies." This was all rhetoric and no logic.

The next day, the Times ran an editorial that did not shy away from the implications for democracy posed by the bill. The Times repudiated democracy. It invoked the flat-earth analogy. "Kentucky Rivals Illinois" began with an attack on someone in Illinois named Wilbur G. Voliva, who did believe in the flat earth. Next, it switched to Kentucky. "Stern reason totters on her seat when asked to realize that in this day and country people with powers to decide educational questions should hold and enunciate opinions such as these." To banish the teaching of evolution is the equivalent of banishing the teaching of the multiplication table.⁽¹⁸⁾

Three days later, the Times followed with another editorial, appropriately titled, "Democracy and Evolution." It began: "It has been recently argued by a distinguished educational authority that the successes of education in the United States are due, in part at least, `to its being kept in close and constant touch with the people themselves.' What is happening in Kentucky does not give support to this view."⁽¹⁹⁾ The Progressives' rhetoric of democracy was nowhere to be found in the Times' articles on Bryan and creationism, for the editors suspected that Bryan had the votes. For the Progressives, democracy was a tool of social change, not an unbreakable principle of civil government; a slogan, not a moral imperative. Though often cloaked in religious terms, democracy was merely a means to an end. What was this end? Control over other people's money and, if possible, the minds of their children.

Then the writer got to the theological heart of the matter: the divinization of man by default. Two theologians had sent telegrams to the president of the University of Kentucky complaining that Bryan's views dishonor God and man. "This will pain Mr. Bryan, who seems to hold that it is dishonorable to man as well as to God that man should have been created mediately out of the dust of the earth." But Bryan's creationist point was only that it dishonors God to identify hypothetically impersonal forces of nature--the only forces Darwin and his heirs believe in prior to the advent of purposeful man--as the source of creation.

This was only the beginning. In the Sunday supplement for February 5, John M. Clarke was given an opportunity to comment on the Kentucky case. He was the Director of the State Museum at Albany. His rhetoric returned to the important theme of the weakness of democracy in the face of ignorant voters. I cite the piece at length because readers are unlikely to have a copy of this article readily at hand, and when it comes to rhetoric, summaries rarely do justice to the power of words. It began:

He identified as the source of this bill "the distinguished Chautauqua savant, William Jennings Bryan," a sneer at both Chautauqua and Bryan. Chautauqua was the major lecture circuit for the nation. Founded by a pair of Methodists in 1874, Chautauqua soon became America's most successful early experiment in adult education prior to World War I. By 1918, 300,000 people were enrolled in 10,000 local circles, receiving an informal but structured education.⁽²⁰⁾ It had been run by the theological modernist, William Rainey Harper, from 1883 to 1897. (Beginning in 1892, he also organized the Rockefellers' University of Chicago.)⁽²¹⁾ Chautauqua openly promoted the science of evolution.⁽²²⁾ So, Clarke's sneer against Chautauqua was social, not ideological.

Invoking Old Testament language, Clarke predicted that the legislators "will smite the enemy hip and thigh." Why not amend the state's constitution and make the idea of evolution illegal? Again, he returned to the theme of the threat of democracy:

Here it was again: the flat earth. It has been a favorite rhetorical device used against biblical creationists for a long time. The claim that pre-Columbus medieval scholars regarded the earth as flat, it turns out, is entirely mythical--a myth fostered in modern times. Jeffrey Burton Russell, the distinguished medieval historian, has disposed of this beloved myth of the flat earth.⁽²³⁾ The modernists who have invoked this myth have not done their homework.

They have also not done their homework on medieval science in general, which was extremely sophisticated. This has been proven by the French historian of science and theoretical physicist, Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), whose ten volumes on the subject are exhaustive: Le système du monde. The first five volumes were in print in 1917; the second five volumes appeared in 1954-59. In between, the French academic community and publishing world suppressed their publication because they undermined one of the most cherished myths of the Enlightenment, namely, that medieval science was "medieval." The story of this exercise in humanist academic censorship has been written by his biographer, physicist and historian Stanley Jaki.⁽²⁴⁾ Even today, the only favorable references to Duhem that I have ever seen, other than in Jaki's writings, are two brief sentences in Robert Nisbet's History of the Idea of Progress (1980).⁽²⁵⁾

The theological issue for Clarke was, ultimately, the divinization of man by default, and the divinization of nature: capital N. "It may be that the conception of the continuity and unity of life from its starting point on earth up to the climax it has reached in man does magnify the place of humanity in the scheme of Nature. The doctrine of evolution predicates this, teaches that out of the struggles of the ages man has stepped forth as the supreme result, not a finished product, far from that, but with always the glory of a growing hope for something better beyond. It would seem as though no more inspiring thought could be imparted to youth. . . ." Here was a vision of autonomous man's progress, and Bryan was calling this into question. Bryan believed in progress, and democratic progress above all; he just did not believe in man's autonomy.

Then it was back to the rhetoric of contempt for the masses, and the elevation of the scientific elite. "It would seem reasonable to assume that the demonstration of the fundamental doctrine of all Nature, inorganic as well as organic, might well be left to those who have brought to bear upon it the highest intellectual refinements. But it is a pleasing thought to fancy the erudite Nebraskan in academic cap and--gown, of course; we almost said bells, inspiring the Democratic majority of Kentucky to vote that Evolution isn't so! and to penalize any one who dares say it is! It is by such means as this that civilization advances and America assures her own high place among the cultured nations of the world."⁽²⁶⁾ The allusion to cap and bells--the clown's costume in the medieval world--was not all that clever, but it surely revealed Clarke's contempt for Bryan, his democratic politics, and his Christianity.

On February 9, another Times editorial cited the Louisville Courier-Journal as having identified Bryan as the initiator behind the bill. Bryan had raised up "ignorant fanatics" who had "intimidated" legislators. The Times warned: "Kentucky is not the only State in the Union, by any means, for whose village theologians the name of Darwin is still one with which to scare children. . . ." A nice rhetorical flourish: "village theologians." Here was a theme that carried through subsequent Times editorials to the media's coverage of the Scopes trial three years later to the screenplay of Inherit the Wind: rural Americans as ignorant fanatics, and the readers of urban newspapers as intelligent people. The Times identified the Courier-Journal as the spokesman for "intelligent Kentuckians."⁽²⁷⁾

In his essay, Bryan thanked the editor for having invited him to contribute. He need not have bothered. If ever there was a set-up, it was this.

After surveying at some length why he did not believe that Darwin's hypothesis was scientifically correct (Darwin's theory of sexual selection, already a scientific embarrassment in Bryan's day, was one reason),⁽²⁸⁾ he got to the heart of the matter from his point of view: democratic politics. "The Bible has in many places been excluded from the schools on the ground that religion should not be taught by those paid by public taxation. If this doctrine is sound, what right have the enemies of religion to teach irreligion in the public schools? If the Bible cannot be taught, why should Christian taxpayers permit the teaching of guesses that make the Bible a lie?" This surely was a legitimate question, one which has yet to be answered in terms of a theory of strict academic neutrality. But Paxton Hibben, in his 1929 biography of Bryan (Introduction by Charles A. Beard), dismissed this argument as "a specious sort of logic. . . . [Government-funded] schools, he reasoned, were the indirect creations of the mass of citizens. If this were true, those same citizens could control what was taught in them."⁽²⁹⁾ If this were true: the subjunctive mood announced Paxton's rejection of Bryan's premise--spoken on behalf humanist educators, from Horace Mann in Massachusetts to this week's multi-million dollar battle over selecting state-approved high school textbooks. When it comes to a threat to their self-accredited monopoly over public education, humanists can spot a "specious" argument at 300 yards. They reply, in rigorous logical fashion, "Citizens are morally and legally obligated to pay us to teach their children whatever we want to teach them, especially if they should disagree with what we teach."

Christians fund denominational colleges, Bryan pointed out. They pay to have their view of religion taught. He then raised a suggestion that, more than any other, was as welcome to the modernists, both political and theological, as a looking into a mirror was to Bela Lugosi's Dracula: "If atheists want to teach atheism, why do they not built [build] their own schools and employ their own teachers?" This was the heart of the matter, and remains so. He repeated this argument in his Preface to The Menace of Darwinism (p. 6). The thought of self-funding has always been abhorrent to liberals. Accepting rich men's money, yes; access to tithers' money and taxpayers' money, yes; but liberals avoid self-funding at all costs because it costs so much.⁽³⁰⁾

A year later, in a speech to West Virginia lawmakers, Bryan argued that scientists had no rightful claim on the taxpayers' money. It is not an infringement on freedom of speech for a state legislature to refuse to fund ideas that taxpayers oppose. He then uttered the words, more than any other words, that describe why education has been a political battle zone for two centuries around the world: "The hand that writes the pay check rules the school."⁽³¹⁾ It was this doctrine, more than any other, which professional educators had to destroy through court action, since they found it embarrassing to oppose it publicly, given liberalism's official commitment to democracy. Clarence Darrow's defense strategy at the Scopes trial in 1925 was to get the jury to declare Scopes guilty, so that the defense lawyers could appeal the decision to a higher court and get it reversed. This same strategy undergirded the secularization of American public education after 1960--which at last overturned the state laws that made possible the Scopes decision.

The supreme judicial issue was this: control over other people's money. Bryan's attack was a direct shot at the heart of the modernist worldview and program, both political modernism and theological. The central assertion of modernism, from Lester Frank Ward's Dynamic Sociology (1883) to the present, is this: the moral authority and legal right an educated elite that understands the processes of Darwinian evolution to commandeer the instruments of political coercion, as well as public funds gained through the threat of State coercion, in order to guide scientifically the evolution of the social order. This was American Progressivism's main agreed-upon doctrine. It was also the non-negotiable demand of theological liberals, who applied modernism's doctrine of the commandeering of State assets to Church assets, irrespective of the theological confessions of laymen whose money funded the Church. The divisions that arose within modernism were many, but they all had to do with the political battle over the distribution of the loot.

If Bryan was successful in this political project, modernism could lose the war. Modernists understood, just as Unitarian Horace Mann had understood in the 1830's, that the public school system is America's only established Church.⁽³²⁾ "Perhaps the most striking power that the churches surrendered under religious freedom was control over public education," writes Church historian Sidney Mead.⁽³³⁾ Bryan was threatening to reclaim this power and reclaim America's future by means of the method that Ward had said is the best way to control other people's thinking: by excluding certain ideas from discussion in the public schools.⁽³⁴⁾ Ward called this the method of exclusion (his italics). "This, however, is the essence of what is here meant by education, which may be regarded as a systematic process for the manufacture of correct opinions."⁽³⁵⁾ Bryan assumed that in what he called a fair fight, the Christians would win. By excluding both creationism and Darwinism from the public schools, he believed that the Christians would win the debate. This was naive on his part, for the assumption of educational neutrality with respect to the Bible is inherently anti-theistic, but the modernists were determined not to permit Bryan's test.

The debate over Darwinism in the public schools was an aspect of the politics of plunder. The politics of plunder came early in America, and it came at the very heart of the Puritan society: the State's establishment of Church and school. Here was where the flow of ideas would be controlled through control over the flow of funds. The New England Puritans had imposed this control system by 1647. Ward had merely extended the Puritans' strategy in the name of Darwinism. New England in 1635 made local church attendance compulsory, and in 1638 legislated compulsory financial support of these churches.⁽³⁶⁾ In 1642, the General Court of New Haven established a local school; Hartford followed this example and allocated funds for its school.⁽³⁷⁾ In 1647, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law mandating that every town of 50 or more inhabitants establish a school, and that tax money be used to pay for these schools if parents refused.⁽³⁸⁾ Connecticut imitated this statute in 1650.⁽³⁹⁾ Residents, in short, were threatened with civil violence if they refused to support Church and school with their money and their persons, whether or not they believed in what was being taught. They had to attend Church, and their children had to attend school, or the State would impose negative sanctions. While the compulsory local church attendance laws were not systematically enforced in New England after 1650,⁽⁴⁰⁾ the other elements of coercion remained. With the coming of disestablishment laws from 1776 through the 1820's, the churches were cut out of the distribution of the loot, but increases in both the level of funding and the level of coercion associated with the public schools in the nineteenth century more than offset this minimal ecclesiastical deliverance from civil bondage.

America's schools followed the theological path which the churches of New England travelled. The schools began as Calvinist strongholds; the New England Primer is representative. The First Great Awakening and the American Revolution moved them from Puritanism into pietistic nationalism; the Second Great Awakening reinforced this. In Massachusetts in the 1830's, Horace Mann moved them into Unitarianism. In Bryan's day, the war was fought between an implicit common-ground Unitarian theism, disguised as Protestant culture, and Darwinian modernism. Bryan, in the name of the Bible, was trying to retain the traditional classroom theism of Unitarianism; his opponents were trying to move the schools into secularism. The doctrine of evolution was the touchstone on both sides of the battle.

To seek to replace what is taught in taxpayer-supported schools is to seek to replace the existing Establishment. An Establishment understands this threat. It fully understood in 1922. The American Establishment in the 1920's was modernist: theological, political, or both. It was evolutionist in its view of the origin of man. Bryan had to be stopped. In 1925, he was stopped. But the trap was set in early 1922.

The barrage of ink began again. On March 2, this headline announced a story on the annual convention of the National Education Association, the teachers' union: "Paint W. J. Bryan as a `Medievalist.'" He had adopted, the convention was told, "methods of the Dark Ages. . . ." Columbia University economist E. R. A. Seligman again invoked the flat earth analogy: "Now, if we are going back to childhood, let's go all the way. Let's teach that the earth is flat and that the sun moves around it." He then recommended the creation of an exhibit that features the dinosaur and other extinct animals as proofs of evolution. (A decade later, Seligman served as Editor-in-Chief of the influential Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.)

Dr. Frank Spaulding, dean of Yale's graduate school of education, brought up the crucial issue of sanctions. To resort to politics in order to keep the doctrine of evolution from spreading reveals a "wavering faith." (Rhetorical question: Is this also true of today's Darwinians, who have used the Supreme Court to remove every trace of creationism from public school curricula? Real question: Or is it a matter of sanctions, without which no worldview can become operational?) Then he invoked Briggs' ancient argument: the true Christians are the liberals. True Christianity is open to the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Bryan's methods are wrong. "Such methods lead away from the true spirit of the Bible."⁽⁴¹⁾

So much for the "creation in the public schools" debate, a familiar one in our own day. There was to be no debate. The issues have not changed: control over tax money by the educational establishment, the public's suspicion of the good judgment of that establishment, the theoretical possibility of neutral education, the presuppositions of science, and Christian dreams of reforming tax-supported education. In short, so much for one more familiar battlefield of the politics of plunder.

It is now time to dig up one of the best-suppressed stories in American history. This, you will not find in the textbooks. It will not take much brainpower to figure out why.

Henry Fairfield Osborn's response to Bryan was prominently featured on page 2 of the March 5 Sunday supplement. It is important to understand who he was and what (and who) he represented. He was one of America's earliest trained evolutionists, having studied under Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog").⁽⁴²⁾ In 1922, he was president of the Museum of Natural History in New York. He was professor of zoology at Columbia University. More important, he was a leading eugenicist, dedicated to the proposition that the scientific breeding of men is both possible and desirable. He had been a co-founder of the pro-eugenics Galton Society in 1918.⁽⁴³⁾ Galton, the origintor of eugenics, was Darwin's cousin. He had been knighted in 1908 and in 1909 had been awarded the Copley Medal, the highest honor of Britain's prestigious Royal Society.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Another co-founder was his lawyer friend, Madison Grant,⁽⁴⁵⁾ author of the then-famous (and now infamous) book, The Passing of the Great Race, published by Scribner's in 1916,⁽⁴⁶⁾ which by 1921 was in its fourth edition. It was a defense of the Nordic master race theory. Osborn wrote the prefaces to the first and second printings, which were retained in subsequent editions. This was reciprocated by Grant, who identified Osborn as one of the two men whose works he relied upon most heavily. The other was economist William Z. Ripley, who wrote The Races of Europe (1899).⁽⁴⁷⁾

Osborn's Preface to the 1916 first edition made plain his own views: in European history, "race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and traits that are the springs of politics and government."⁽⁴⁸⁾ Grant's book is a "racial history of Europe," which, Osborn insisted, "There is no gainsaying that this is the correct scientific method of approaching the problem of the past."⁽⁴⁹⁾ He called this methodology "modern eugenics."⁽⁵⁰⁾ The book is about the "conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism. . . ."⁽⁵¹⁾ In the second printing (1917), he made himself perfectly clear: ". . . the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. Not that members of other races are not doing their part, many of them are, but in no other human stock which has come to this country is there displayed the unanimity of heart, mind and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe."⁽⁵²⁾ With the passing of the great race, the whole world faces a crisis: ". . . these strains of the real human aristocracy once lost are lost forever."⁽⁵³⁾

In Chapter 4, "The Competition of Races," Grant warned against the reduced birth rate of successful, wealthy races. It leads to "race suicide" when the encouragement of "indiscriminate reproduction" is heeded by the "undesirable elements."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Altruism, philanthropy, and sentimentalism are a threat because they "intervene with the noblest purpose and forbid nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding," which leads to "the multiplication of inferior types."⁽⁵⁵⁾ He then made his point clear: "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race."⁽⁵⁶⁾

There is now scientific hope in this regard: "A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit--in other words, social failures--would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism."⁽⁵⁷⁾

This book became a best-seller in the United States when Adolph Hitler was a corporal in the German Army. Chronology here is important.

Grant, in turn, wrote the Introduction for fellow eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard's book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, published by Scribner's in 1921, the year that Scribner's published the fourth edition of Grant's book, one year before the company published Stoddard's The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman. (Scribner's was systematically cashing in on a rising tide of color: green.) In his Introduction, Grant informed his readers, "The backbone of western civilization is racially Nordic. . . . If this great race, with its capacity for leadership and fighting, should ultimately pass, with it would pass that which we call civilization. It would be succeeded by an unstable and bastardized population where worth and merit would have no inherent right to leadership and among which a new and darker age would blot out our racial inheritance" (pp. xxix-xxx). Wherever they looked, backward or forward, eugenicists saw a dark age. Christianity gave us the old one; Asians, Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, and Negroes threaten to give us a new one. The Nordic race is just barely hanging on for dear life: ". . . competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal, whether the latter be the lowly immigrant from southern or eastern Europe or whether he be the more obviously dangerous Oriental against whose standards of living the white man cannot compete" (pp. xxx-xxxi). German translations of Grant and Stoddard were read widely years before the Nazis came to power in 1933.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Eugenics was a widely received faith among American Progressives after 1900. Walter Truett Anderson has described the origins of eugenics in the United States from the early years of the century. "America's gates swung open for eugenics. Lavish support came forth from the wealthy families and the great foundations. [Charles] Davenport established a research center--the Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution--with a grant from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and later added a Eugenics Record Office with grants from the Harriman and Rockefeller families."⁽⁵⁹⁾ Davenport's Station was set up in 1904.⁽⁶⁰⁾ The Eugenics Record Office was established in 1910 with money from Mary Harriman, Averell's sister. Over the next decade, she put at least $500,000 into the project.⁽⁶¹⁾ John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated money to it.⁽⁶²⁾ He also gave money to start the American Eugenics Society,⁽⁶³⁾ which was co-founded by Osborn.⁽⁶⁴⁾ It was organized in 1923. It published A Eugenics Catechism in 1926, which included this insight: "Q. Does eugenics contradict the Bible? A. The Bible has much to say about eugenics. It tells us that men do not gather grapes from thorns and figs from thistles. . . ."⁽⁶⁵⁾

The eugenics idea had political consequences. In 1907, Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in America.⁽⁶⁶⁾ States passed laws against marriages between people who were "eugenically unfit." By the late 1920's, 28 states had passed compulsory sterilization laws; some 15,000 Americans had been sterilized before 1930. This figure rose by another 15,000 over the next decade.⁽⁶⁷⁾ (In 22 states, Federally restricted versions of these laws still existed in the mid-1980's.)⁽⁶⁸⁾ This was also the era of laws against interracial marriage; 30 states passed such laws between 1915 and 1930.⁽⁶⁹⁾ (These laws no longer exist.)

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell (1927), upheld Virginia's model sterilization law, which was carried out on 19-year-old Carrie Buck. By a vote of 8 to 1, the Court upheld this before the girl was sterilized; her guardian had opposed the action. The Court included Progressives William Howard Taft and Louis Brandeis, who voted to uphold. The lone dissenter was Pierce Butler, a conservative, who wrote no opinion.⁽⁷⁰⁾ The Court's opinion, written by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, announced: "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."⁽⁷¹⁾ Holmes was the justice most closely associated with the ideal of evolutionary law, whose book, The Common Law (1881), had articulated this ideal. Here was political modernism in action: the State as biological predestinator.⁽⁷²⁾

There was no vocal opposition. Writes Kevles: "Buck v. Bell generally stimulated either favorable, cautious, or--most commonly--no comment. Few if any newspapers took notice of the impact of the decision on civil liberties in the United States."⁽⁷³⁾ Carrie's daughter Vivian, who died young of an intestinal disorder, went through second grade. Her teachers regarded her as very bright.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Virginia also sterilized Carrie's sister Doris in 1928. She found out about this 52 years later. The physicians had told her that the operation was to remove her appendix. When she found out, she broke down and cried. "My husband and me wanted children desperately. We were crazy about them. I never knew what they'd done to me."⁽⁷⁵⁾ Obviously, the woman was a hopeless imbecile; she should have said, "My husband and I," and she used an indefinite pronoun reference: "they." No children for her! The U.S. Supreme Court, the state of Virginia, and Progressive Darwinian science agreed: "The Bucks stop here."

The United States became the model for pre-Nazi German racial hygienists after World War I.⁽⁷⁶⁾ The Nazis merely applied on a massive scale a program that their liberal predecessors had recommended. A decade before Hitler came to power, G. K. Chesterton predicted what was coming in Germany. He explained why in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922). He called eugenics "terrorism by tenth-rate professors."⁽⁷⁷⁾ The influence of the eugenics movement in Germany accelerated after Hitler came to power in 1933. Sterilization had been illegal in Germany prior to Hitler; he changed the law in July, 1933.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Two million people were ordered sterilized by the Nazi's Eugenics Courts as eugenically unfit, 1933 to 1945.⁽⁷⁹⁾

In 1939, the year of the "Duty to be Healthy," the Nazi program of sterilization went to the next phase: "mercy killings" of mentally and physically handicapped people who were incarcerated in hospitals and mental asylums. One estimate is that some 200,000 people were killed in this way during World War II. Physicians superintended the massacre.⁽⁸⁰⁾ Proctor writes: "For several years [prior to 1939], German health officials had campaigned to stigmatize the mentally and physically handicapped as people with `lives unworthy of living.' Films like `Erbrank' (`The Genetically Diseased') portrayed well-groomed, white-coated psychiatrists patronizing ill-kempt patients cast as human refuse. . . . Propaganda efforts of this sort were important, for though the operation was both secret and illegal (a euthanasia law was drafted but never approved), there was an obvious need to deflect potential opposition--especially from the churches."⁽⁸¹⁾ The Nazis understood in 1939 what the humanist media in the United States had understood in 1922: churches could have become a major threat to their genetic ideal and program of forced sterilization for genetic purposes. As it turned out in both countries, however, churches remained mute on the issue.

In 1921, Osborn had used the Museum to host the Second International Congress of Eugenics.⁽⁸²⁾ At that Congress, he had announced: "The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its people. As science has enlightened government in the prevention and spread of disease, it must also enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feeble-mindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases."⁽⁸³⁾ Sanctions must be applied.

Osborn in 1922 was safely inside Rockefeller's charmed circle. He became one of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s advisors on conservation issues after he and Madison Grant created the Save-the-Redwoods League in 1919, which Rockefeller supported.⁽⁸⁴⁾ When Junior would bring his boys to visit the Museum of Natural History, Osborn would sometimes personally conduct their tour.⁽⁸⁵⁾ The Osborn family's connection to the Rockefellers went back to the days of John D., Sr.⁽⁸⁶⁾ Junior put Frederick Osborn, Henry's nephew, on the board of the Rockefeller Institute in 1938. It was through Frederick that the Rockefellers were drawn away from eugenics and into the population control movement.⁽⁸⁷⁾ (Liberalism's faith in population control has replaced its earlier faith, equally confident, in the now-politically incorrect eugenics movement as a means of reducing the number of those who, in Grant's words, "are themselves of no value to the community." Between 1965 and 1976, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations poured $250 million into population control projects.)⁽⁸⁸⁾

The Times' editors adopted a version of the "good cop, bad cop" prisoner interrogation technique: a seemingly mild-mannered sterilizer began the public disemboweling of Bryan, and a hard-nosed sterilizer completed the operation.

Osborn's rebuttal to Bryan was rhetorically dispassionate. This made it unique among the Times' anti-Bryan articles. Instead of citing evolutionary dogma for Bryan, Osborn emphasized dead religious thinkers who supposedly had accepted evolution. One surely had: the nineteenth-century eccentric (and chaplain to Queen Victoria) Charles Kingsley. He is more famous as the author of Water Babies than for his theology. Kingsley had written a letter to F. D. Maurice proclaiming his commitment to evolution. The orthodoxy of his theology can be judged by another letter that he wrote to Maurice in 1863 to describe his new discovery that "souls secrete their bodies, as snails do shells. . . ."⁽⁸⁹⁾ Kingsley's social theories were racist to the core. After visiting Ireland during a famine, he wrote: "I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."⁽⁹⁰⁾

Osborn also cited Augustine at some length on how nature should teach us truth. He was unaware of, or deliberately ignored, the fact that Augustine wrote in the City of God: "For as it is not yet six thousand years since the first man, who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth?"⁽⁹¹⁾ Then he told Bryan that evolution is one kind of truth, religion another kind. If Bryan had entertained any doubts about his critics' opposition to the Bible's account of creation, Osborn's article would have cured him. But one citation was calculated to do real harm: Osborn's reference to the influence in his life of Princeton University's James McCosh, who had indeed been an evolutionist. Invoking the beloved McCosh was a good tactic in dealing with a conservative Presbyterian. Bryan, however, regarded theistic evolution as "an anesthetic which deadens the pain while the patient's religion is being gradually removed . . . a way-station on the highway that leads from Christian faith to No-God-Land."⁽⁹²⁾

On the whole, Osborn's essay was mild-mannered and polite. That was bait. Then came a hook. His article ran over to page 14, where it occupied a few inches in the middle of the page. Filling page 14 was a large headline and a long article by Princeton University's E. G. Conklin. The headline was prophetic of liberal rhetoric yet to come: "Bryan and Evolution. Why His Statements Are Erroneous and Misleading--Theology Amusing If Not Pathetic."

Dr. Conklin was one of the prominent biologists of the day.⁽⁹³⁾ He was quite familiar with Grant's Passing of the Great Race, having footnoted it in 1921 as his only source in a chapter on "Modern Races and Man."⁽⁹⁴⁾ It did not seem to bother him that Grant was a lawyer with no formal training in biology, genetics, anthropology, or any other natural science. Conklin followed this with references to Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color in his chapter, "Hybridization of Races."⁽⁹⁵⁾ He also cited Osborn's Contemporary Evolution of Man.⁽⁹⁶⁾

Conklin was a defender of what he called the religion of evolution.⁽⁹⁷⁾ As he said, "the greatest and most practical work of religion is to further the evolution of a better race."⁽⁹⁸⁾ "To a large extent mankind holds the power of controlling its destiny on this planet."⁽⁹⁹⁾ (Problem: when we say that man must control man's destiny, this means that some men must do the controlling, while others must be controlled.) He concluded his book with a section insisting that "the religion of evolution is nothing new, but is the old religion of Confucius and Plato and Moses and especially Christ which strives to develop a better and nobler human race and to establish the kingdom of God on earth."⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ It was an inspirational thought, how Moses and Jesus always seemed to be on the side of modernism, inside or outside the Church, despite modernism's denial of the literal truth of the Bible's account of Moses and Jesus--or perhaps because of this discrepancy.

As part of this kingdom-building effort, Conklin believed that the State should either segregate or sterilize citizens suffering from inherited defects, who presumably carry unfavorable genes.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Society needs intelligent guidance, he said. He then adopted the passive voice, which evaded the famous question posed by Lenin: "Who, whom?" "In time, under intelligent guidance, the worst qualities of the race might be weeded out and the best qualities preserved. This is the goal toward which intelligent effort should be directed. This should be the supreme duty of society and of all who love their fellow man."⁽¹⁰²⁾ He ended this book with a quotation from the founder of the idea of eugenics, Galton.

In his Times article, Bryan had referred to the hypothesis of evolution as a guess. Conklin responded that it was a guess in the way that the law of gravitation is a guess. Then, in a tone more suitable for pre-Heisenberg science, let alone pre-Kuhn,⁽¹⁰³⁾ he announced that this guess "is supported by all the evidence available, which continually receives additional support from new discoveries and which is not contradicted by any scientific evidence. . . . In the face of all these facts, Mr. Bryan and his kind hurl their medieval theology. It would be amusing if it were not so pathetic." (The next time that all the evidence supports any proposed scientific hypothesis will be the first.) "Bryan and his kind" were surely not Conklin and his kind: theologians of State-enforced sterilization. "Bryan and his kind" were pathetic.

Osborn and Conklin were representative of scientific opinion in their day. Osborn in 1928 wrote a Foreword to Creation by Evolution: A Consensus, an anthology published by Macmillan.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ Conklin in that volume waxed eloquent about the superiority of the facts of evolutionary development over "prescientific" concepts of acts of creation--"vastly more wonderful," in fact.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ He attacked fundamentalists. This appeared in his concluding remarks in a chapter on embryology, which is evidence that theology was never far from his mind.

These men were dedicated eugenicists. When, after World War II, it became clear just how seriously the Nazis had taken these ideas, eugenics fell completely out of favor with the public. This decline had begun in the mid-1930's, for obvious political reasons.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ In 1940, the Carnegie Institution shut down the Eugenics Record Office.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ The surviving founders of the supposed academic discipline of eugenics just stopped talking about it. They were not penalized retroactively in any way for having advocated the monstrous policy of forced sterilization. There were no negative sanctions applied. Osborn became the founder of the Conservation Foundation in 1947, which Rockefeller's son Laurance helped launch.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ He died in 1969, no longer quoted as an authority, but with his reputation intact. Yet in 1922, he and Conklin were used by the Times to launch the scientific and rhetorical assault against American fundamentalism. To this day, their representative victim, Bryan, is regarded as a scientific ignoramus. But Bryan's view of creation never led to the forced sterilization of anyone.

Bryan recognized that a ruthless hostility to charity was the dark side of Darwinism. Had Darwin's theory been irrelevant, he said, it would have been harmless. "This hypothesis, however, does incalculable harm. It teaches that Christianity impairs the race physically. That was the first implication at which I revolted. It led me to review the doctrine and reject it entirely."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ He cited the notorious (and morally inescapable) passage in Darwin's Descent of Man: "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man."⁽¹¹⁰⁾ He could have continued to quote from the passage until the end of the paragraph: "It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."⁽¹¹¹⁾ It is significant that Darwin at this point footnoted Francis Galton's famous 1865 Macmillan's magazine article and his book, Hereditary Genius.

Darwin in the next paragraph wrote that sympathy, "the noblest part of our nature," leads men to do these racially debilitating things.⁽¹¹²⁾ Bryan replied: "Can that doctrine be accepted as scientific when its author admits that we cannot apply it `without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature'? On the contrary, civilization is measured by the moral revolt against the cruel doctrine developed by Darwin."⁽¹¹³⁾

Darwin was taken very seriously by many Progressives on the matter of charity. In her book, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Margaret Sanger criticized the inherent cruelty of charity. She insisted that organized efforts to help the poor are the "surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents."⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Such charity must be stopped, she insisted. The fertility of the working class must be regulated in order to reduce the production of "benign imbeciles, who encourage the defective and diseased elements of humanity in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning."⁽¹¹⁵⁾ Swarming (like insects), spawning (like fish): here was marvelous zoological rhetoric from the lionized founder of Planned Parenthood. "If we must have welfare, give it to the rich, not the poor," she concluded.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ "More children from the fit, less from the unfit: that is the chief issue of birth control."⁽¹¹⁷⁾

Bryan's challenge to the science of evolution seemed to threaten the continuation of the Nordic aristocracy in America by obstinately denying the theoretical basis of eugenics and proclaiming that all men are made in God's image. The dedicated eugenicists who were called in by the Times in 1922 to refute him were defenders of both Darwin and Galton; they wanted to push Darwinism to its logical conclusion. Over the next two decades, they did. So did Adolph Hitler, beginning eleven years later. When Hitler's experiment in applied Darwinism failed politically, Bryan's critics very quietly took this section of Descent of Man, as well as their own public careers in defense of eugenic sterilization, and dropped them down the Orwellian memory hole, where the data still rest in peace alongside the long-forgotten moral critique by Bryan, who had opposed Darwin on principle on this, the only known practical application of Darwin's thesis. Bryan is still pictured as a scientific buffoon in the history textbooks, and his detractors are still pictured as the fearless defenders of autonomous science. And what of the 30,000 Americans who were forcibly sterilized in the name of Darwinian science? Long dead, long forgotten, and therefore no longer a potential embarrassment.

In the same March 5 issue, a true master of supercilious rhetoric published his response in the form of a review of Bryan's In His Image. Here, in one paragraph, is the finest statement of the older modernism's view of the relationship between religion and science that I have ever read. Any modern reader who wonders why theological conservatives in the 1920's regarded theological modernism as a threat to everything they believed in need only consider the following:

On March 14, Bryan replied in a letter to the editor. He referred only to Osborn and Conklin. "They dodge the real question and refuse to state how much of the Bible they regard as consistent with Darwin's hypothesis. But as far as evidence can be drawn from what they do say, it is evident that they regard the discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a greater event than the birth of Christ."⁽¹¹⁹⁾

The next day, the editors responded, and in this response, we see the arrogance of urban men who know they possess great influence because they buy ink by the truck load. They had contempt for small-town Protestant America: "Nominally addressing The Times, Mr. Bryan really, of course, was advertising himself as a purveyor of exactly such ideas as he knew would be received with most favor in the towns where his lectures are regarded as wonderful expressions of wisdom, piety, and virtue."⁽¹²⁰⁾ Dayton, Tennessee, was such a town.

Two days after the defeat of the Kentucky bill and two days before Bryan's letter to the editor was published came another shot at him in the Times, as we shall see.⁽¹²¹⁾ But first, we must consider Bryan's political career: what he believed and what he accomplished.

Bryan faithfully served the rural Populists in the Democratic Party as a kind of stoneless David for three decades, from 1896 to 1925, although his political career had begun earlier. He had moved the Democratic Party from the pro-gold standard, low-tariff, balanced budget, limited government political party it had been prior to 1897--the party of Grover Cleveland--to the Populist-Progressive party that it became under Woodrow Wilson.

Bryan was the greatest master of political rhetoric of his generation. In 1907, 300,000 people paid to hear him. He could earn $25,000 in a summer of lectures⁽¹²²⁾ in an era in which the average urban worker earned well under $1,000 a year.⁽¹²³⁾ His "cross of gold" speech against the supposed evils of the traditional gold standard, delivered at the 1896 Democratic national convention, remains the most important political speech in American history. It launched his national career, enabling him and his brother Charles, the first master of the political mailing list, to transform the American political system by creating a Democratic Progressive party, which would be countered by Teddy Roosevelt after 1901 in his creation of a Republican Progressive party. Yet Bryan could not win. No matter what battle he entered, he always lost. Even when his Progressive political reform programs won out, which many did, others were given credit for these victories.⁽¹²⁴⁾ It was ominous that he had decided to launch an attack on modernists and evolutionists.

It is one of the peculiar ironies of history that Bryan became the spokesman for conservative American Protestantism, 1921-25--almost as surprising as the fact that he was a Presbyterian. Politically, he was a radical; theologically, he was ill-equipped. His parents were members of a Baptist church. He had wanted to be a Baptist preacher from his youth, but he was afraid of water. He witnessed his first Baptist immersion at age six and never got over it. This is why he joined the Presbyterian Church at age fourteen.⁽¹²⁵⁾ What is significant is that he joined the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.⁽¹²⁶⁾ It was revivalistic and four-point Calvinist.

His political radicalism seemed antithetical to his theology. Political columnist and historian Garry Wills has called his campaigns the most leftist ever conducted by any major party Presidential candidate in American history.⁽¹²⁷⁾ In the 1920's, Bryan criticized American churches for their indifference toward profiteering, business monopolies, and industrial injustice.⁽¹²⁸⁾ His view of business he called "applied Christianity" in a 1919 address of that title. In that same year, he declared that "we should drive all the profiteers out of the Presbyterian Church so that when they go to the penitentiary, they will not go as Presbyterians."⁽¹²⁹⁾ In a 1920 speech on state constitutional reform, Bryan denied that he was a socialist. He then called for a new Nebraska constitution that would "authorize the state, the counties and the cities to take over and operate any industry they please. . . . The right of the community is superior to the right of any individual."⁽¹³⁰⁾ He distrusted the bureaucracy in Washington, so he advocated that these controls on business be imposed by state and local governments.⁽¹³¹⁾ In terms of his political beliefs, Bryan was an advocate of the social gospel. He corresponded in a friendly manner with such social gospel leaders as Washington Gladden, Shailer Mathews, Charles Stelzle, and Progressive economist Richard T. Ely.⁽¹³²⁾ In 1919, he praised the Federal Council of Churches with these words: "It is, in my judgment, the greatest religious organization in our nation."⁽¹³³⁾

He was a believer in pure democracy and majoritarian wisdom. He believed that democracy "is a religion, and when you hear a good democratic speech it is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference between them."⁽¹³⁴⁾ He insisted that "the love of mankind is the basis of both,"⁽¹³⁵⁾ an Arminian view of the gospel. To defend this religious vision, Bryan offered as clear a statement of religious humanism as anything ever issued by the American Humanist Association: "Have faith in mankind. . . . Mankind deserves to be trusted. . . . If you speak to the multitude and they do not respond, do not despise them, but rather examine what you have said. . . . The heart of mankind is sound; the sense of justice is universal. Trust it, appeal to it, do not violate it."⁽¹³⁶⁾ Levine has summarized Bryan's political beliefs: "During the very years when Bryan stood before religious gatherings denouncing evolution he also went before political rallies to plead for progressive labor legislation, liberal tax laws, government aid to farmers, public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, federal development of water resources, minimum wages for labor, minimum prices for agriculture, maximum profits for middlemen, and government guarantee of bank deposits."⁽¹³⁷⁾ Yet by 1922 he was fast becoming the most visible defender of theologically conservative Protestantism in the United States.

Bryan, more than any other figure in American history, had unleashed the forces of the politics of plunder. He had appealed to the rural masses and had cried out against the Eastern Establishment. He had brought the culture wars of the Populist Party into the mainstream. But three times he had lost, and in the persons of Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, the Eastern Establishment had its revenge, both on him and on the Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party. The shift from Whig politics to Progressivism had undermined "Clevelandism," but it had also undermined Populism. Only in 1933, after the election of Franklin Roosevelt, would Progressivism and Populism at last fuse nationally. Whiggism died with Cleveland, but it was Bryan who had killed it; Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson had participated only as pall-bearers at the funeral.

Bryan called on modernists to resign voluntarily from the ministry, since they did not believe in the tenets of Christianity. This had been a familiar, though incredibly naive, theme of the conservatives ever since the 1892 General Assembly,⁽¹³⁸⁾ and would remain so. Machen used it repeatedly. Not one of those who took this line was ready publicly to identify the modernists for what they were, judicially speaking: covenantally disinherited sons who were attempting to steal the lawful inheritance of the true sons of the covenant. Such language would have been regarded as rhetorically inappropriate by the vast majority of those whose inheritance was at risk. Instead, conservatives adopted different forms of confrontational rhetoric--less judicial but nonetheless inflammatory. The Church would not tolerate such verbal challenges after 1925. That is to say, the victorious modernists who visibly gained control in 1926⁽¹³⁹⁾ would not tolerate rhetoric aimed against them. Because they held all the largest spears after 1926, they did not need rhetoric to achieve their goal. Their goal was power, and no later than 1926, they had definitively attained it in the General Assembly. Over the next decade, they would progressively apply what they had definitively achieved.

Bryan's leadership on the anti-evolution front placed him in a peculiar position. He was not a six-day creationist. That is to say, he was typical of all Presbyterian conservatives; he had abandoned the Westminster Confession on this point (IV:1). His position became public knowledge in 1925 when Darrow cross-examined him during the Scopes trial. Late in the exchange, Darrow asked him if he believed that the world was created in six days. Bryan startled his audience: "Not six days of twenty-four hours."⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ The creation might have lasted millions of years, but he did not want to commit himself on this point, he told Darrow.⁽¹⁴¹⁾

Bryan was not alone in this desire. Even Machen held to some sort of theistic evolution scheme. He revealed his views in private letters; in public he refused to comment on this subject.⁽¹⁴²⁾ Most Presbyterian conservative leaders had been studiously avoiding a fight with evolutionists for at least six decades. They had all abandoned the Confession's explicit words. This greatly hampered them. Bryan received little public support on this issue from conservative Presbyterian leaders.⁽¹⁴³⁾

It was fundamentalists outside the Presbyterian Church who supported Bryan in this battle. Because of this, he gained a reputation after 1921 for being a fundamentalist, which in fact he was, rather than a Calvinistic Presbyterian, which he was not. He was Arminian to the core. His view of God's election was framed in political terms. He said that the best description of the doctrine of election he had ever heard was offered by a Georgia Presbyterian preacher. "It's just this way--the voting is going on all the time; the Lord is voting for you and the devil is voting against you, and whichever way you vote, that's the way the election goes."⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ This was the state of Presbyterian theological conservatism in the fourth phase of the Presbyterian conflict.

In retrospect, the Scopes trial was a strange event. First, it was a widely covered media event: 200 reporters, 65 telegraph operators, and a Chicago station's radio broadcasts of the trial--the first American trial ever broadcast by radio.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ Second, the jury was excluded from the trial's technical debates.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ Third, neither Bryan nor the American Civil Liberties Union wanted it to be conducted as a criminal trial. Bryan offered in advance to pay any fine imposed on Scopes.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ After the trial, Scopes, who never testified at the trial, told one reporter that he had not been present in the classroom on the day that evolution was covered in the textbook, and that he had feared being put on the witness stand, where he would have had to admit this.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾

Bryan died in Dayton on Sunday, July 26, five days after the trial ended. That morning he had led a local Southern Methodist congregation in prayer.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ Its minister conducted the final services,⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ which was appropriate; Bryan had been far closer to John Wesley's Arminianism than to Presbyterianism's Calvinism. His reputation had been destroyed during the trial and posthumously by H. L. Mencken, who was the author of The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908). Mencken, following Nietzsche, was a promoter of the pre-Progressive social Darwinism: the survival of the fittest individual. He had written: "There must be a complete surrender to the law of natural selection--that invariable natural law which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish. All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak."⁽¹⁵¹⁾ Nietzsche's philosophy was an extension of Darwinism, and Bryan opposed both, as he wrote in In His Image.⁽¹⁵²⁾ This is not how the public remembers the Scopes trial, however. As usual, the winners wrote the press releases and the screenplay.

The effect of the trial devastated fundamentalism as a cultural force. Henry M. Morris, a dispensationalist, six-day creationist, and the founder of the modern Creation Science movement, writes: "One of the most disappointing aspects of the Scopes trial was its intimidating effect on Christians. Multitudes of nominal Christians capitulated to theistic evolution, and even those who retained their belief in creation retreated from the arena of conflict, using the fiction that it was somehow unspiritual to be involved in such controversies and urging each other to concentrate instead on `soul-winning,' and `personal Christianity,' with a great emphasis also on the soon return of Christ. The schools and government and society in general were, to all intents and purposes, simply abandoned to secular humanist control, and they have been firmly under that control ever since."⁽¹⁵³⁾

A year after Bryan died, Northern Baptist fundamentalist leader William Bell Riley wrote a book, Inspiration or Evolution? Riley had long been one of the major spokesmen for American fundamentalism, and this mantle of authority increased after Bryan's death. He was the main spokesman for the World's Christian Fundamentals Association until it faded in 1930.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ Riley delivered the memorial address at the Great Commoner's funeral.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ His biographer calls him "the chief executive of the fundamentalist movement. . . ."⁽¹⁵⁶⁾

In 1917, he wrote The Menace of Modernism, in which he pointed out the obvious: theological modernists had allies in the academic community. He fully understood this aspect of the modernists' strategy of subversion--perhaps better than any fundamentalist leader of his day. He also understood the uses of rhetoric. He once wrote that conservative ministers had about as much chance of being invited to speak at a state university as to be heard in a Turkish harem.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾

In the Foreword to Inspiration or Evolution?, Riley echoed Bryan's 1922 warning about evolution in the public schools, which was not surprising, since he had been preaching the same theme since 1922.⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ "But the public schools of America and the denominational schools are alike dependent for personal and financial patronage upon tax payers, millions of whom are the best citizens of America. This book is addressed particularly to this class, and is intended as `A call to arms!' If we silently and indolently endorse the destructive doctrines to which this volume calls attention, we will deserve the fate that is certain to befall both Church and State. The munitions of war for the Christian citizen are his voice and vote. He who does not employ both to preserve the democracy of America and the integrity of her true churches is a traitor to both country and Christ."⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ He fully understood that Bryan had been correct, that control over education by the taxpayers was crucial to rolling back the theory of evolution.

But it was not just public education that was under siege; it was Christian education, especially higher education. The book reprinted a speech he had delivered in 1921 at the Third Annual Conference on Christian Fundamentals. He identified William Rainey Harper as having been the chief propnent of theological modernism in higher education. Harper, he said, had been the main figure in the creation of an "Academic Octopus."⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ Harper had been the academic director of the Chautaqua program, and he became the first president of the Rockefellers' University of Chicago. Riley recognized the crucial role of the Rockefellers in American higher education. It was with a million-dollar grant in 1902 that the process began. "With this bait he saw the fish begin to rise from every denominational pool, and on October 1, 1905, he increased the wabbler by $10,000,000.00. This grant stirred every pond."⁽¹⁶¹⁾ In 1907, he added another $43 million. Riley identified the key agency: Rockefeller Senior's General Education Board, chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1903.⁽¹⁶²⁾ Here is how the deed was done, according to Riley:

This was an exaggeration; no college surrenders that degree of sovereignty. Faculties are made up of people who guard their autonomy in the classroom. But there was a surrender: the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of a more standardized curriculum, as well as professional academic standards for new faculty members. Also, there was the lure of further money. The Rockefeller money would be seen as a down payment. There was a price to pay for additional funding.

Riley saw in 1921 what a pair of pro-Rockefeller biographers admitted openly in 1988: "It would be difficult to overstate the value of the work the GEB did in the ensuing half century. Ironically, it seems largely forgotten today. . . . To understand the GEB, one must see it as an agency of change, one of such remarkable accomplishments that it is scarcely an exaggeration to refer to it as revolutionary."⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ One of its major accomplishments was "reforming college administration and developing professional standards for graduate education throughout the United States. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ Furthermore, "the work was done very quietly, with great circumspection and skill, for the good reason that, like any agent of change, the GEB was up against some form of established opposition in each of its successive missions. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ By the time it was voluntarily shut down in 1960, the year Junior died, it had expended $324 million on its many projects.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ Some $208 million had gone into higher education.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ But setting standards for lower-level schools was also part of the plan. The GEB was the main factor behind the creation of the public school system in the South, through the funding of one professorship in education in every major state university in the South, and through lobbying in every state capitol. From a few hundred schools in 1900, the South's public school system grew to thousands in the 1920's.⁽¹⁶⁹⁾

For seven decades, we have needed a detailed study of the origin of higher education's accreditation octopus, but as yet such a book has not been published. Riley was on target. His suggestion that the GEB was the source of the secularization of Christian higher education has not been followed, either by the tenured recipients who are still profiting from the system of accreditation or the victims, who still send their best and brightest into the system for final certification.

Bryan launched the final phase of his long public career with his attack on Darwinism as a false religion. In His Image (1922) could have been ignored by the media and the Establishment had Bryan not understood the political implications of his confession. He understood that the public schools were the established Church in the United States, and that the teaching of Darwinism had to be stopped in public school classrooms. He understood this as surely as Darwinists today understand that creationism must not be taught in public school classrooms. He believed that because public schools are funded by taxes, voters have final authority over what is taught there. (He was incorrect; the U.S. Supreme Court has this authority, short of a Constitutional amendment to the contrary.) Bryan realized that if voters continued to defer to the educational experts, including scientific experts, the schools would remain in the hands of the educated elite that produces the textbooks. Bryan had devoted his public career to challenging elites. He ended his career just as he had started, but on a far more fundamental issue than the gold standard vs. free silver. This issue was at the heart of the debate between biblically revealed religion and modernism: the question of origins.

The Establishment recognized the severity of this challenge from the moment that Bryan's speech before the Kentucky legislature led to a bill to outlaw the teaching of evolution in taxpayer-supported schools. Gaining and maintaining control over these schools had been the most important tactic of Unitarianism and then modernism since the days of Horace Mann.⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Bryan was threatening the most sacred cow in liberalism's pantheon of sacred cows. In January and February of 1922, the New York Times published one rhetorically savage article after another in order to lay the foundation of what would become America's most important religious battle in the 1920's. This battle ended in July of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. With it ended also the conservatives' influence in both the Presbyterian Church and the Northern Baptist Church.

Bryan in 1922 wanted his followers to gain control over the allocation of political plunder. He had been campaigning on this platform for three decades. He understood that modernist Progressives were now in control of the political process nationally. He was taking the fight to the hustings, where he had always had his greatest influence. Yet Bryan had delivered the Democratic Party into the hands of the Progressives. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, he now strove to reverse what his oratory and his brother's mailing lists had conjured. By challenging the modernists' right to override local democracy through the imposition of compulsory Darwinism in the public schools, he was invoking the last flickering traces of the Protestants' ideal of Christendom. He was invoking point four of the covenant--economic sanctions--in the name of point five: succession.

Bryan's opponents recognized this threat and feared it. They had a major tactical problem. His arguments rested forthrightly on an official principle of American democracy, namely, that he who pays the tax-collecting piper should call the political tune: "No taxation without representation!" Bryan was a staunch defender of Progressivism's principle that the State has both the moral authority and moral obligation to confiscate wealth from one group in order to give it to another group. But he had always been more of a Populist than a Progressive. He believed that the State should confiscate the wealth of a minority -- the rich -- in the name of the majority, not in order to fund some elite group, and surely not a humanistic elite of Bible-scorning educational bureaucrats, with the hard-earned money of God-fearing Americans. He appealed to majority rule. This was a powerful appeal.

To refute him, his opponents had to downplay the obvious: they were taxing the political majority -- Christians -- in order to educate all children in terms of religious principles at odds with what most parents believed. They were not merely stealing money; they were stealing hearts and minds as well. (The Progressives' power religion tactic was re-stated clearly half a century later by an American general in Vietnam: "When you've got them by the -----, their hearts and minds will follow.") So, unable to defend their compulsory education program in terms of the democratic principle of majority rule, these professed democrats resorted to the negative sanction of ridicule and misrepresentation: flat earth, medievalism, etc. The rhetorical standard which they established in the public press would soon be adopted by their allies inside the Presbyterian Church against Bryan and his ecclesiastical allies. Inside the Church, as well as outside, the crucial issue was sanctions.

Judging by a representative sample of textbooks, America’s high-school students get little exposure to the history of eugenics and scientific racism. One reason might be that the relationship of these movements to Progressivism is too close for comfort.

Article

Eugenics and scientific racism in the United States emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and lasted through the 1930s. It claimed that heredity was the fundamental determinant of an individual’s ability to contribute to society. Eugenics claimed the scientific ability to classify individuals and groups as “fit” or “unfit.” The unfit were defined by race, mental and physical disabilities, country of origin, and poverty. Eugenics was widely accepted by academics, politicians, intellectuals, government, the U.S. Supreme Court, and especially progressives, who supported eugenics-inspired policies as policy instruments to be utilized by an interventionist administrative state to establish a healthy and productive society. Those who questioned the “settled science” of eugenics were dismissed as “deniers,” much like those who question the “settled science” of climate change are today dismissed as “deniers.”

Eugenics and slavery share much common ground in their inherent racist view of blacks; however, the inherent racist perspective of eugenics was broader in that the set of those considered unfit included individuals and groups beyond those who were black. Eugenics provided the scientific foundation for involuntary sterilization policies in thirty-two states, supported the racist immigration policies in the first part of the twentieth century, and supported a variety of de jure and de facto policies designed to limit those defined as “unfit” to less than full-citizenship status. More troubling, eugenics and eugenics-inspired policies in the United States were admired by Adolf Hitler. American and German eugenicists interacted and exchanged views up to the late 1930s, and sterilization laws, immigration restrictions based on race or ethnicity, and efforts to prevent full citizenship to the unfit in the United States became the model for the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Stefan Kühl (1994) was the first to document in detail the American–German eugenics connection. In Hitler’s American Model (2017), James Whitman extended this research to illustrate how U.S. policies influenced Nazi race law in the 1930s and the Nuremberg Laws in particular. The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (2017) by Dinesh D’Souza is the most recent effort to bring public attention to eugenics and the American–German connection.

The widespread acceptance of eugenics in the United States, especially by progressives, is a troubling part of U.S. history unknown to many Americans, and the role model America provided for Nazi race law is even more troubling. The conventional wisdom in the United States places blame for scientific racism on Germany, but the opposite is an inconvenient truth that continues to receive little public attention. The fall of the Third Reich revealed the logical outcome of eugenics. Eugenics disappeared almost overnight from public discourse and became an embarrassment to many who had supported it and its policy implications.

I have covered eugenics and related topics in my lectures on the history of economic ideas for many years and have been surprised at two reactions from students: first, many students find eugenics and related topics the most interesting part of the course, and, second, with only a few exceptions the students have never heard of eugenics in the United States and, especially, its relationship to Nazi Germany. This lack of awareness suggests a question and the catalyst for this paper: To what degree are high school students exposed to the history of eugenics?

One would expect that with the current political focus on discrimination and racism, eugenics would be an important topic in U.S. history and related courses at the high school level. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As I show in this paper, high school history textbooks essentially ignore the topic. Although our high school textbooks are impressive in presentation, length, and number of topics covered, eugenics and its influence on public policy in the United States and its relationship to Nazi Germany are ignored and when mentioned are presented as an incidental part of U.S. history.

I first discuss how eugenics emerged from a combination of the political economy of population growth initiated by Thomas Malthus (1798) and subsequent developments in human biology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Next I discuss how the United States became the center of eugenic research and policy, the relationship between eugenics and the progressive movement, and the degree to which eugenics in the United States influenced Germany and the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Then I look in particular at nine high school textbooks and other textbook materials to determine the degree to which eugenics is covered in high school. In the concluding section, I offer conjectures to account for the omission and the missed opportunities to educate students resulting from the omission.

Eugenics: Economics, Biology, and the Ideology of Catastrophe

Eugenics-inspired public policy was the outcome of combining two ideas. The first was an economic idea about population growth offered by Thomas Malthus (1798), and the second was a biological idea about human development and behavior offered a century later by Francis Galton (1883), who labeled the biological idea “eugenics” by combining the two Greek words eu, “well,” and genics, “born”: “well born.”

Malthus was not the first to discuss the conflict between the demand for resources to support life and the supply of resources, but he formulated the conflict in such a manner that it had the simplicity of a well-designed “talking point.” According to Malthus, the capacity to reproduce exceeds the capacity to produce food because whereas the former grows geometrically, the latter grows arithmetically; hence, the positive checks that operate on the death rate and the preventive checks that operate on the birth rate are constantly in play, with famine being the ultimate check on population growth. Not only was the idea simple, but it also appeared timely.

Rapid population growth occurred in the early nineteenth century, and the Irish famine from 1845 to 1852 seemed consistent with Malthus’s political economy. The idea became a part of the classical growth model, influenced public policy by making the Poor Laws in England more restrictive, was used as a general argument against any extensive safety net provided by the government, and became a theme in popular literature. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge responds to a request for a donation to the poor: “If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” (Dickens 1843, 11).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the Malthusian predictions were increasingly contradicted by reality. Population increased, but economic growth and increased productivity supported the growing population with an increasing real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita worldwide.[1] Nonetheless, Malthus had already opened Pandora’s Box in two ways.

First, concern with population growth combined with the ideology of catastrophe (Bruckner 2012; 2013) had a profound influence on public policy, ranging from the welfare state and unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance to immigration. The ideology of catastrophe is a type of “madness of the crowds” used by advocates of a policy agenda to invoke fear of impending catastrophe unless action is taken immediately and to silence any dissenting views.[2] Second, the Malthusian concern with the quantity of population relative to the resource base could easily be extended to a concern about the quality of population relative to the resource base in terms of the efficiency and productivity of the population.

In On the Origin of the Species (1859), Charles Darwin attributed to Malthus his theory of natural selection and evolution toward improving the quality of any species (introduction). Herbert Spencer (1864) incorporated Darwin in his treatise on biology and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” arguing that societies based on the individual in the context of competitive institutions were the strongest and the fittest.[3]

The anxiety first over the quantity of population and then over the quality of population found scientific support in the emerging biology of the human being and human behavior that attempted to identify inherited traits that predicted human behavior. In England, Frances Galton (1883) applied the concept of heredity introduced by Gregor Mendel in the 1860s to human behavior and studied whether different characteristics of human beings and how they influenced behavior were passed on to subsequent generations. In Galton’s view, the quality of the human in terms of contributing to society was not accidental, and because this quality was based on heredity, human behavior could be managed and shaped into producing a better society. Galton called this new science “eugenics.”

Racist views predate eugenics, of course, but eugenics provided the scientific foundation for these racist views and rationalized them as something more than an emotional dislike of others who differ because of color, religion, culture, country of origin, economic standing, mental and physical disability, and so on. Eugenics essentially elevated racism to a virtue in that breeding out the unfit was defined as an expression of concern for improving society.

Eugenics in the United States, Progressives, and the German Connection

The United States became the world’s center for eugenics by the end of the nineteenth century and more than any other country institutionalized scientific racism in its treatment of blacks; immigrants from Asia, eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean; the mentally and physically disabled; and any group deemed to have low potential to contribute to a healthy and productive economy. Eugenics was widely studied as “settled science” at America’s most prestigious educational and research institutions; supported by the Supreme Court (Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 [1927]); widely accepted by prominent politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and prominent academics such as Irving Fisher; and ultimately responsible for the forced sterilization of large numbers of those determined to be “unfit” with the first compulsory sterilization law passed in Indiana in 1907 (Lombardo 2011). Eugenics inspired other public policies to reduce the unfit population—restricted immigration from countries deemed racially inferior, laws against interracial marriage, and de jure and de facto rules to limit citizenship to individuals deemed unfit, such as blacks, low-income individuals, and Jews.

What accounts for the widespread acceptance of eugenics in the United States? Two considerations are important—changing demographics and the emergence of the Progressive movement.

First, significant demographic changes brought large numbers of people deemed racially inferior into competition for resources. After the Civil War, there was considerable fear, especially in the South, that newly freed blacks would integrate into the economic, political, and social life of the nation. Increased immigration at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century raised similar concerns. Immigrants from Asia, eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean were generally regarded as eugenically unfit. Both demographic events raised concern they would dilute the quality of the population and, if left unchecked, would amount to “racial suicide.”

This view of impending racial catastrophe was captured in The Passing of the Great Race (Grant 1916) and The Rising Tide of Color against the White World Supremacy (Stoddard 1921). Both books and authors played an important role in spreading the message of eugenics—heredity determined one’s ability to contribute to society, and heredity was unchangeable by environment. Madison Grant helped establish the American Eugenics Society (1929–72) to promote eugenics research and provide education programs. Hitler regarded Grant’s book as the “bible” (Kühl 1994, 85) for the coming eugenic cleansing of Germany, and Grant wrote the introduction to Lothrop Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color against the White World Supremacy.

Second, the emerging Progressive movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century elevated eugenics as the foundation for government policy instruments to achieve a healthier and productive society.[4] Birth control, sterilization of the unfit, restrictions on immigration, restrictions on interracial marriage, as well as progressivism’s willingness to ignore anti-Semitism and willingness to keep blacks confined to second-class citizenship status were accepted policies to achieve a better society. Equally important, eugenic-inspired policies and attitudes might not have prevailed to the degree they did without the Progressive movement’s emphasis on science, social planning, and control.

Eugenics and progressivism were made for each other. Eugenics provided the science to categorize individuals as “fit” or “unfit” and thereby was meant to provide a path to a healthier and more productive society. Progressives rejected the invisible hand of the market as the path to a healthy and productive society and instead embraced the visible hand of an interventionist administrative state that based policy on science and experts as the more sure path. Eugenics-inspired policies had to wait for the politics of the large interventionist administrative state (Leonard 2005, 217).

Eugenics and eugenics-inspired policies were an important part of the Progressive movement and show that progressives were not enlightened reformers who protected the weak. In fact, they were just the opposite. Thomas C. Leonard (2003; 2005; 2016) shows how reform-minded economists in the Progressive Era utilized eugenics to rationalize labor and immigration policy. According to Leonard, “Reform-minded economists of the Progressive Era defended exclusionary labor and immigration legislation on the grounds that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers, whom they labeled ‘parasites,’ ‘the unemployable,’ ‘low wage races’ and the ‘industrial residuum’” (2005, 207–8). Minimum-wage legislation was proposed because it paid unfit individuals more than their productivity and thus left them unemployable and less likely to reproduce. Leonard (2016) concludes that progressives were the “illiberal reformers” in the first decades of the twentieth century rather than the enlightened reformers that modern progressives portray them to be.[5] America’s most well-known economist up to that time illustrates this point. Irving Fisher was an “illiberal” reformer who embraced eugenics to counter “race degeneration” and “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit” as a logical extension of his mathematical view of the world (Cox 2005). Fisher was among the founding members of the American Eugenics Society, serving as its president from 1922 to 1926.

The women’s movement aspect of the Progressive Era likewise illustrates the same point. A number of articles in the Birth Control Review (1917–40)[6] reveal racial attitudes common at the time. The Birth Control Review was the journal of the American Birth Control League, founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921 and renamed Planned Parenthood in 1942. Sanger was an advocate of the Malthusian view and eugenics who viewed these perspectives as a foundation to establishing a nation of “thoroughbreds” (Lamb 2015). Attempts (e.g., Kelly 2015) to separate Sanger from the scientific racism of eugenics are not convincing (as argued, e.g., in Mosher 1997; Black 2003, chap. 7; and Schweikart and Allen 2014, 551). Sanger, the Birth Control Review, and the American Birth Control League on the surface appeared focused primarily on birth control but in reality were closely aligned with the broader eugenics movement. Birth control was viewed as only one of many methods society could utilize to reduce the unfit proportion of the population.

Two Birth Control Review articles illustrate Sanger’s broad eugenics perspective and the American–German eugenics interaction by the early 1930s.

Sanger’s article “A Plan for Peace” (1932) proposed a broad plan to reduce the number of the unfit population. She advised the nation to “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race”; “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring”; “give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization”; “take an inventory . . . [of ] illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends, classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct” (107–8).

Ernst Rüdin’s article “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” (1933), originally published in Germany, focused on the voluntary sterilization of “mental defectives” and recommended a program of propaganda for the general acceptance of sterilization. Rüdinemphasized that the propaganda should be “gradual” and first directed to medical providers. “Individual objections to sterilization need really not be feared where careful explanations and advise are given, consent would, however, be obtained more generally if the operation were offered free of cost to those in poor circumstances” (103). Despite the article’s focus on voluntary sterilization, Rüdin argued that ultimately “there is absolutely no question of using compulsion” (103). He was expressing views that had already been stated many times in the Birth Control Review. The April 1933 issue also included a short summary of developments in Germany regarding sterilization (Hodson 1933, 106).

Rüdin was unlike any other contributor to the Birth Control Review in that he was an internationally recognized German eugenics researcher as well as a strong supporter of Hitler and his policies. He became an official part of the Nazi government’s effort in 1933 “for improvement of the race of the German people” (Kühl 1994, 94), helped form the Nazi government’s forced-sterilization program, and supported the “euthanasia” program in the 1940s, which was directed at the killing of children and mental patients (Joseph and Wetzel 2013). In 1905, Rüdin and others had established the Racial Hygiene Society in Germany. In 1933, the society came under control of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, at which point Minister Wilhelm Frick appointed Rüdin president of the society to work directly with the ministry (Kühl 1994, 94).

Rüdin’s article in Birth Control Review in 1933 and his interest in German sterilization developments represent only one of many examples of the American– German interaction on eugenics. Kühl (1994) argues that historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s and the American Eugenics Society attempted to revise the history of eugenics during the Progressive Era by claiming American eugenics was different from the crude and extreme eugenics of Germany. The evidence suggests otherwise. The eugenics in the United States and the eugenics in Germany in the 1930s is a distinction without much of a difference. America as a nation needs to accept the historical fact that American eugenicists contributed to Germany’s effort to create a society of only fit individuals in what ultimately led down the road to Auschwitz. American eugenics and progressives such as Sanger contributed to building that road even if they ultimately came to reject the logical extension of eugenics in the Third Reich.

Whitman (2017) builds on Kühl’s work and focuses on how eugenics and eugenics-inspired policy in the United States influenced the Nuremburg Laws of 1935: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Whitman takes to task those who deny or minimize such a relationship by claiming that American eugenics policy was not directed toward Jews and that the Nuremburg Laws said nothing about segregation. Whitman dismisses both arguments and emphasizes that the common dominator between America and Germany was the pursuit of a racially purer and healthier society based on the “science” of eugenics via the administrative state. Law was important in the Third Reich even if the objective was the elimination of entire groups of people. Germany wanted to achieve this objective legally[7] and in this regard turned its attention to America’s laws on immigration and mixed marriages as well as to the de jure and de facto U.S. policies that denied blacks and other racially impure groups full citizenship.

Whitman’s research and other research (e.g., Leonard 2009) indicate that the “scientific racism” embedded in eugenics and the progressives’ willingness to embrace eugenics and eugenics-inspired policy reveal the dark side of progressivism. Whitman ends his book with the following comment: “All of these works paint a darker picture of early twentieth-century American intellectual and political life than we might wish. So does this book” (2017, 200).

These are uncomfortable historical facts for the Progressive movement in general and suggest a lack of intellectual balance in, first, how progressives portray their own history; second, how they ignore failures of the administrative state; and third, how they portray nineteenth-century classical liberalism or what is called today the conservative perspective.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that eugenics was an important part of the Progressive movement, progressives continue to ignore their dark history, continue to portray themselves as reformers concerned with the nation’s general welfare, and continue to claim that their policies based on the administrative state and supported by experts have enhanced and will continue to enhance the nation’s general welfare.

Not only are progressives unwilling to confront their own history, but they are also unwilling to recognize the inherent flaw of the administrative interventionist state supported by experts. Progressives offer the administrative state as the solution to economic and social problems but show a remarkable unwillingness to consider the downside of the administrative state revealed by history. This is clearly the case with regard to the Great Depression and the Great Recession,[8] wherein government policy failure played a major role in the economic and financial distress. Eugenics is an even clearer example of government failure. An inherent flaw with the progressive view of the administrative state is the reliance on experts and state power to force individuals to “do the right thing” as determined by the experts. This approach is prone to the same fascism espoused by Hitler and Benito Mussolini (Schapiro 1945). A balanced discussion of progressivism involves considering both the benefits and the costs of the administrative state.

Not only are progressives unwilling to confront their own past or recognize inherent flaws revealed by history in their advocacy of the administrative state, but they also ironically dismiss conservatives as fascists,Nazis, and racists who are insensitive to the weak. In reality, these characterizations applied to progressives and the Progressive movement in the first part of the twentieth century. The progressives in fact were “illiberal” reformers who imposed significant harm on the weak in American society and were willing to exclude large numbers of people from society because so-called experts determined them to be unfit. In contrast to the progressive view, nineteenth-century liberalism offered an enlightened perspective that recognized differences in individuals but had no problem permitting all to compete and take advantage of their comparative advantage in the market place—classical liberalism was inherently nondiscriminatory regarding race, religion, gender, and even sexual orientation in its openness to competition.[9]

In sum, all Americans should face the facts that America was the epicenter of eugenics study; eugenics was an important part of the Progressive movement; and Germany looked to American eugenics as amodel for race-based law.Given this reality, it is worthwhile to see how eugenics is presented to high school students in the United States.

Eugenics and High School History Textbooks

To determine to what degree eugenics is presented to high school students, I examined nine high school textbooks used in U.S. history courses.[10] Each of these textbooks is about eight hundred to one thousand pages long, written by an individual or individuals with advanced degrees who claim to provide a comprehensive overview of U.S. history and policy, and published by a leading textbook publisher. According to the American Textbook Council (2018), Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin are the three major K–12 textbook publishers. Eight of the nine textbooks are associated with these publishers.

Three considerations suggest these nine books are a meaningful representative sample of high school history textbooks that provides insight into the degree U.S. students are exposed to scientific racism.

First, there is a difference between high-school-level and college-level textbooks in terms of the level of their exposure to individuals. Virtually every individual in the United States is required to complete a course in U.S. history in high school. High school is the basic educational foundation for the U.S. population, whereas college is not.

Second, the nine textbooks are written by historians with advanced degrees and in some cases extensive publication records and by any reasonable standard reflect topics covered in history courses at the high school level. The textbooks range in publication dates from 1998 to 2007, and even though published more than a decade ago, they still offer a perspective of the degree to which the history of eugenics in the United States is presented to high school students. Textbooks are expensive to publish, and once the textbook outline in the first edition has been established, it becomes somewhat invariant with respect to time; hence, revisions do not occur frequently, and when they do, they are more likely to include new topics rather than revised material up to the time of the revision.[11] In addition, the American Textbook Council (2018) points out that the three major publishers of high school textbooks since 2010 are repackaging earlier textbooks, their emphasis shifting toward more low-content teaching materials emphasizing progressive perspectives.

Third, the nine books are published by the textbook publishers that dominate the high school textbook market in social sciences in the United States. They share a common presentation format; are expensive because of color, visual presentation, and editorial layout; and claim to present a balanced and comprehensive perspective of U.S. history.[12]

I determined the degree to which each of these textbooks devotes attention to eugenics based on two criteria: whether certain headings are included in the index (eugenics, Margaret Sanger, Progressive movement, sterilization, and Buck v. Bell) and the narrative about each of these topics in the textbook.

Sterilization and Buck v. Bell are especially important because they are interrelated, were part of the legal model for German race law, and represent the worst public policies to emerge from eugenics. Sterilization was a logical policy outcome of eugenics. An estimated 60,000 to 70,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States. Paul Lombardo’s “Sterilization Legislation Chart, 2017” (2017) indicates that at least 65,370 individuals were forcibly sterilized across thirty-two states from 1907 to 1937. The actual number is likely higher considering that the distinction between forced and voluntary sterilization is a distinction without much of a difference. Buck v. Bell (an eight to one decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Homes) provided the legal authority for forced sterilization and by any reasonable standard is one of the two worst decisions ever made by the Supreme Court (the other being the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision [60 U.S. 393 (1857)]; see Sullivan 2015). The Nazi defense at the Nuremberg trials cited Buck v. Bell as justification for Germany’s sterilization program administered by Ernst Rüdin.

One caveat should be noted. Even if a reviewed textbook does not include an index heading to eugenics or sterilization, I found a few cases in which the terms are mentioned in the book’s narrative. They are the exception, however. If a specific heading is not included in the index, that is because the authors or the publishers apparently did not regard the topic as relatively important.

Eugenics is referenced in four of the nine textbooks. Out of Many, American Odyssey, The American Vision, and American History devote a paragraph or so to eugenics and most often mention it in the context of immigration policy. None of the reviewed textbooks includes a broad-based discussion of eugenics in the United States.

Margaret Sanger is referenced in six of the nine books and presented as a progressive reformer and advocate of women’s reproductive rights. None of the six textbooks mentions, however, that she was a leading advocate of eugenics or of the racist perspective frequently found in the Birth Control Review.[13]

All but one of the nine textbooks include a relatively long discussion of the Progressive movement. All emphasize the positive contributions made by the Progressive movement; however, a number of textbooks mention its racist attitudes but with the caveat that America was racist in general at the time and that the racism of eugenics did not apply to all progressives. For example, History of a Free Nation states, “Like most white Americans at that time, most progressives believed that nonwhite races were inferior” (642); Out of Many states only that “the more extreme [progressives] . . . embraced the new pseudo-science of eugenics” (620); American Odyssey states, “Few white progressives thought to challenge the racism rampant in American society because they themselves had deeply negative attitudes toward all minority groups” (281); and American History briefly discusses eugenics, sterilization, and immigration restrictions but indicates that these policies had the “support of [only] some of the nation’s leading progressives” (586, emphasis added).

None of the nine books contains an index heading to sterilization despite the fact that thirty-two states had sterilization laws and that sterilization continued well into the twentieth century. American Odyssey mentions forced sterilization as part of the discussion on eugenics but alleges that “some people advocated a eugenics movement, an effort to improve the human race by controlling breeding. The eugenics movement successfully convinced some state legislatures to allow forced sterilization of criminals and individuals who were diagnosed as having severe mental disabilities” (284, emphasis added).

In sum, even though several textbooks include a passing reference to eugenics and sterilization, they do not identify eugenics as a major part of progressivism or the active support of many progressives for the policies advocated by Sanger’s “Plan for Peace.”

None of the nine books indexes Buck v. Bell, whereas eight of the nine textbooks index Dred Scott v. Sandford, and one textbook mentions the case in the narrative. This distinction is remarkable, especially because these textbooks place much emphasis on racism and discrimination in the United States.

The American–German eugenics relationship is not an index heading, and I found no acknowledgment of this interrelationship in the textbooks. A number of the books mention the Holocaust as part of World War II and the Nuremburg Laws, but these references provide no mention of the connection between American eugenics and German eugenics or of the influence that American eugenics and race law had on German race law.

Overall, a high school student reading any of these nine widely used textbooks would be unaware of the following facts: scientific racism was a prominent feature of U.S. history from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s; eugenics was a prominent feature of the Progressive movement; Margaret Sanger played an important role in popularizing and rationalizing eugenics and eugenics-inspired policies; forced sterilization was practiced in a majority of states and supported by the U.S. Supreme Court; and American eugenicists contributed in a meaningful manner to the road Nazi Germany took that ended in Auschwitz. The brief mentions of eugenics and sterilization in a few books are the exception, but even in these cases any student would come away with no meaningful knowledge of the importance of eugenics in U.S. history and government policy. It is possible that some newer textbooks have corrected this problem, but this is unlikely. Unfortunately, I do not have complete access to them, but a review of six recent textbooks available on Amazon provides no evidence to change these findings.[14]

I am surprised and saddened by these findings. A number of the textbooks at least mention the racism of the Progressive movement but attribute that racism to the general racism in the United States of the period, and although a few textbooks mention eugenics and sterilization, they appear to limit its influence to only some progressives. Despite these exceptions, the evidence suggests these widely used textbooks fail to convey the significant role of eugenics in U.S. history and the Progressive movement.

Eugenics has not been entirely ignored in the educational institutions; for example, the nonprofit organization Facing History and Ourselves distributes teaching materials to assist teachers.[15] Compared to the textbooks I examined, the organization’s lesson plans on eugenics are comprehensive in terms of the historical aspects of eugenics, and the references to eugenics, the Progressive movement, Buck v. Bell, sterilization, and the American–German eugenics relationship are impressive. The Facing History and Ourselves materials on eugenics are a step in the right direction; however, they are presented as a collection of topics, each with a short discussion and not well interrelated with other topics. As a result, they cannot serve as a substitute for an overall perspective of eugenics. They do not provide a perspective on the role of eugenics in the Progressive movement, how abortion emerged from the Birth Control League, the eugenic racist views of the Birth Control Review, and America’s significant role in providing a model for Nazi race law. In addition, the usefulness of the topics for the classroom depends on high school teachers’ ability and willingness to incorporate the topics in the classroom. Judged by the nine textbooks and the dominance of progressives in U.S. educational institutions, it is difficult to be optimistic.

Accounting for the Failure to Confront History and Opportunities Thus Lost

Why is eugenics not a significant part of U.S. history, as revealed by these prominent high school textbooks? The following six conjectures are offered to account for the omission.

First, the authors are unaware of eugenics. This conjecture is included here only to cover all possibilities but by any standard is difficult to accept. The authors are educated historians who by any reasonable standard possess a detailed knowledge of the historical events in the United States and world over the past several hundred years. It is difficult to accept that they are unaware of the general outlines of the history of eugenics; in fact, in several cases the textbooks acknowledge the existence of eugenics, scientific racism, and sterilization, but their authors chose to devote only passing attention to these subjects and thus to minimize their importance.

Second, the authors are aware of eugenics but regard it as a relatively unimportant topic relative to other topics. The authors might argue they have only so much space in a textbook and need to prioritize what is treated in detail, treated in passing, or not included. This reasoning is again difficult to accept. Each of the reviewed textbooks is lengthy, some more than one thousand pages long, suggesting that there is room to devote at least a few pages to eugenics. It is hard to accept that a historian regards as relatively unimportant the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the United States under mandatory laws in force in the majority of states; widespread calls for eliminating the “unfit” via force of one kind or another; calls for what amounts to at best benign concentration camps; the relationship between eugenics and progressivism; or the relationship between the United States and Germany significantly with respect to eugenics. It is especially difficult to accept considering how much attention public education devotes to discrimination and slavery. It is remarkable that none of the textbooks includes Buck v. Bell in its index, whereas all but one of them include Dred Scott. There is obvious common ground between racism against blacks in the United States and the “scientific racism” of eugenics, much of which was directed toward blacks. If discrimination and slavery are deemed important on the stage of U.S. history, then eugenics also deserves some space in the spotlight.

Third, the authors are aware of the history and aware of its importance, but eugenics is like the “crazy uncle” in the progressive family. They are aware of the crazy uncle but uncomfortable discussing the subject in the open. Giving only passing references or no reference to the crazy uncle is more convenient than revealing the inconvenient truth of eugenics in the United States. A variant of this third conjecture is that these textbook authors believe that the Progressive movement’s overall contributions to America more than offset the crazy uncle’s racism and that drawing attention to the crazy uncle distracts students from these positive contributions. Marshall Steinbaum and Bernard Wiesenberger’s (2017) clearly offer this perspective in their critical review of Leonard’s book on eugenics, Illiberal Reformers (2016) (see note 5).

Fourth, Paul Lombardo in private correspondence made the point that state and local school boards play a major role in selecting textbooks and perhaps would rather not discuss the inconvenient truth that their state may have been one of the thirty-two that passed sterilization laws from 1907 to 1937. California led the country in the sterilization program and now accounts for the largest market for high school history textbooks. Textbooks are sensitive to the political environment, so authors are risk averse regarding the inclusion of any material that selection committees might find objectionable. In this regard, Lombardo’s (2017) sterilization legislation chart reveals an important element of the eugenics movement. Republican governors and Republican legislators appear to have represented a higher proportion of supporters than Democrats; however, many Republicans, then as now, are progressives in their reliance on experts and support of a large and interventionist administrative state.

Fifth, progressives dominate U.S. education from the lowest to the highest levels. The common element among progressives, including many Republicans, is the faith in an administrative state supported by experts to guide society to a high level of performance and social justice. Eugenics is the inconvenient truth of the downside of the progressive view and the dangers of permitting so much power in the hands of so few. In this environment, bad ideas can easily become public policy. As such, there is a bias against a balanced presentation of the progressive perspective, especially when a balanced presentation would weaken the case for the progressives’ reliance on the administrative state and reveal the darker side of progressivism.

Sixth, eugenics, scientific racism, sterilization, and the American Birth Control League (now Planned Parenthood) are closely related. The Birth Control Review contains outright racist articles, including a contribution from Ernst Rüdin, who played a major role in Hitler’s sterilization program. The claim that Margaret Sanger was a racist is difficult to reject. Planned Parenthood and abortion are now important progressive institutions and agendas, respectively. Defenders of abortion have attempted to repackage Sanger and claim there is no link between abortion and the eugenics of the progressive movement.

This perspective is astonishing considering the general objective and history of eugenics. Eugenics has always been about influencing the composition of the population to increase the fit/unfit population ratio. Eugenic policies were designed to isolate the unfit (Sanger’s “farms”); to impose rules to limit the unfit population’s full citizenship status; to limit the unfit population through immigration rules; and to lower the birth rate of the unfit through sterilization and birth control. Abortion was not a main feature of the pre–World War II Progressive movement for a variety of reasons. It was an even less important feature of Nazi eugenics (David, Fleischhacker, and H¨uhn 1988). At the same time, however, to claim abortion is not capable of achieving eugenics’ objectives lacks logic, and the willingness to claim that the abortion movement and Planned Parenthood were independent of eugenics and the birth-control movement is remarkable given the existing documented history. Medical technology, medications, Planned Parenthood, social acceptance of abortion by a large percentage of the population and the Supreme Court have elevated abortion as an effective instrument of population control with a eugenic perspective to increase the fit/unfit population ratio. In sum, abortion is closely linked to the objectives of the eugenics movement. The fact that blacks are far more likely as a percent of their population base to have an abortion (e.g., Riley, 2018) makes it difficult to reject the hypothesis that abortion and eugenics are closely linked in terms of purpose. Advances in genetics increase the probability that abortion will increasingly be used to reduce the “unfit” population defined by the woman and her medical provider but influenced by the administrative state through subsidization, information campaigns, and genetic counseling. In this regard, it is worth reading Rüdin’s article published in the Birth Control Review in 1933.

Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent concurring opinion (Thomas 2019) in two Indiana abortion laws recognizes the link and illustrates the sensitivity to any attempt to point out the obvious facts that abortion can be a policy instrument to increase the fit/ unfit population ratio and that abortion law emerged from the eugenics-inspired birthcontrol movement. The hostile reaction to the obvious (e.g., Cohen 2019; Rosenberg 2019) is remarkable in the context of a balanced reading of Justice Thomas’s opinion. The critics “protest too much” and in my opinion fail to consider Thomas’s opinion in the broad context of the history of eugenics and the objectives of eugenics. A careful reading of the opinion in the context of the history of eugenics suggests that the critics are misreading Thomas rather than that Thomas is misreading history, as these critics claim.

Justice Thomas’s opinion is worthy for three reasons: (1) It presents an important history lesson the country needs in the current debate over abortion and is evidence that eugenics and eugenic-inspired policies are again becoming accepted (Wertz 1998; Zigerell forthcoming). (2) It makes the historically correct observation that abortion law grew out of the eugenics movement and does have the potential to be a policy instrument for a eugenics agenda. (3) It is a long overdue effort by a justice of the Supreme Court to mitigate the shame of Buck v. Bell. Not only has Buck v. Bell never been overturned, but the case, along with another decision, is cited in Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113 [1973], at 154) to support the Court’s opinion that the right to privacy is not absolute. The Roe v. Wade opinion’s willingness to cite this shameful decision shows the Supreme Court’s lack of sensitivity to the great harm eugenics imposed on society by Buck v. Bell both in the United States and Germany.

Of the six conjectures, the first and second are not credible. The next four are important and offer insight into why eugenics is not a part of the U.S. history presented to high school students. The United States has been steadily moving toward an administrative state structure in which unelected experts play a major role in initiating and implementing public policy. This outcome is not one propelled just by Democrats because there are many Republican progressives who support an administrative state and accept the importance of experts in designing policy. As such, the political correctness so in favor in the United States at this time is not open to a dark history so directly tied to the Progressive movement and so clearly illustrating the adverse impact the administrative state can have on those without political and economic power.

Irrespective of the explanation for omitting eugenics, the omission rules out opportunities to produce an informed public.

First and most obvious, students end up with an incomplete and misleading view of U.S. history, which in turn denies them a foundation to participate in the democratic process. The road from Malthus to Auschwitz had many architects, and unfortunately the United States was a major one. This inconvenient truth is denied to high school students.

Second, a study of eugenics in U.S. history would provide an opportunity to illustrate to students the danger of relying on the “impending crisis,” “the ideology of catastrophe,” and the “settled science” arguments for any agenda. These commonly utilized political arguments increase the probability that disastrous ideas become policy, especially in the context of a large and interventionist administrative state. If textbooks can find space to show how Dred Scott was bad policy that hastened the coming of the Civil War, how can anyone rationalize the omission of Buck v. Bell in those same textbooks?

Third, the history of eugenics in the United States provides perspective on the current debate between socialism and capitalism—that is, the debate whether the collective or the individualistic approach to managing the country is best. It clearly demonstrates the downside of the collectivist approach and of relying on experts, which is the foundation of the various forms of socialism. U.S. history textbooks have no difficulty pointing out the problems of the individualist approach with the many examples of “greed” in the market system but are reluctant to reveal government policy failures such as eugenics. Students need to understand that government policy failure has been at least as much a part of U.S. history as market failure has. Failure to address the costs of the administrative state amounts to nothing less than intellectual dishonesty.

Fourth and last, inclusion of eugenics in school textbooks would provide an important lesson to students on the power of an idea to influence human history, a lesson so eloquently made by John Maynard Keynes in the last paragraph of The General Theory: “[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. . . . I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately. . . . [B]ut, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil” (1936, chap. 24).

Eugenics, eugenics-inspired policies such as sterilization, and “scientific racism” are bad ideas that in the context of the administrative state brought great harm to large numbers of human beings in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. Ironically, Keynes was a strong advocate of eugenics and the administrative state.

In closing, the question needs to be asked whether any effort will be made to correct the lack of attention and misrepresentation of scientific racism in the United States, as appears to be the case in high school history. It is easy to be pessimistic, especially given the reaction to Justice Thomas’s opinion and the influence that progressives and teacher unions have over U.S. educational institutions. At the same time, increasing attention is being directed to the history of eugenics, to the close association between eugenics and the progressive movement and to the influence the U.S. eugenics movement had on Nazi Germany. The potential exists for this information to influence public-school teachers who are motivated to present a realistic view of U.S. history, and, even more important, if the movement toward charter schools and vouchers continues, the environment for a balanced presentation of U.S. history would be enhanced. This paper is offered in that hope.

Notes

[1] Bradford DeLong (1998) presents estimates of world GDP from one million B.C. to 1998. Despite Malthus’s warning, world per capita GDP grew after the start of industrialization and has continued to increase.

[2] There is no difference between the enthusiasm for eugenics and the current enthusiasm for climate change in regard to the ideology of catastrophe—both illustrate how advocates utilize impending catastrophe to advance their agenda and silence dissenting views as “deniers” of “settled science.”

[3] Many progressives claim Spencer as the source of the “social Darwinism” feature of classical and nineteenth-century liberal economics; however, this is incorrect and is a myth used by progressives to misrepresent classical economics. The term, in fact, was introduced by Richard Hofstadter ([1944] 1955) as a criticism of classical economics and was not part of classical thought (Leonard 2009).

[4] Historians date the 1920s as the end of the Progressive movement, but in terms of the essence of progressivism the movement continued with the New Deal interventionist policies of the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s and with the slow but steady move toward the administrative state in the postwar period. In fact, the label progressive is increasingly used to describe the liberal perspective.

[5] Marshall Steinbaum and Bernard Weisberger (2017) provide a critical review of Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers, relegating it to “motivated history” that reveals nothing new, fails to appreciate the intellectual evolution of the Progressive movement and the context from which it emerged, and fails to appreciate the Progressive movement’s intellectual contribution to elevate the role of the administrative state supported by expert economists to improve the general welfare. In sharp contrast, Phillip Magness (2017) reviewed Steinbaum and Weisberger’s “review essay” and found that it fell “short of reasonable scholarly standards,” failed to confront Leonard’s evidence, and failed to address Leonard’s main point about the administrative state; in sum, he says, the “review essay” amounts to mainly an endorsement of the Progressive movement’s contribution to general welfare.

Steinbaum and Weisberger’s review essay does in fact fall short of reasonable scholarly standards, and its main contribution is to serve as an illustration of progressives’ insensitivity to the collateral damage inflicted by an interventionist administrative state on those without economic and political power.

Bradley Bateman’s review of Illiberal Reformers criticized Leonard for not devoting attention to economists who were not eugenicists, but it nonetheless found Leonard’s contribution important. According to Bateman, “The story of progressivism will never be told exactly the same way again. . . . There is a dark side to progressive thinking that must be fully acknowledged and reckoned with” (2017, 718).

[7] The Wannsee Protocol (1942) emphasized the complete elimination of Jews from German living space “in a legal manner.” The dramatization of the Wannsee Conference in the 2001 movie Conspiracy emphasizes the Germans’ desire to base the Holocaust on a legal foundation.

[8] Progressives continue to present the Great Depression as an example of market failure mitigated by the administrative state, when in fact research suggests that government policy failures played a major role in causing and prolonging the Great Depression (e.g., Miller and Rose 1983; Cargill and Mayer 1998, 2006; Bernanke 2002; Cargill 2011). The same argument can be made for the progressive view of the Great Recession.

[9] Critics dismiss classical economics as the “dismal science” and an attack on the weak; however, this phrase and its implication are misrepresentations of the intellectual content of classical economics (as clarified, e.g., in Persky 1990 and Levy 2001; 2005).

[10] The nine books were provided to me by Jennifer Jurosky, a social science teacher at North Tahoe High School, Tahoe City, California, in connection to a project on teaching economics in Washoe County High Schools (Cargill, Jurosky, and Wendel 2008).

[11] Adam Shoda, a faculty member at Galena High School in Reno, Nevada, informed me that the 2007 edition of The Americans (number 9) is still used for history classes.

[12] I also reviewed Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s book A Patriot’s History of the United States (2014) for this paper but did not include in the sample of textbooks because it would likely not appeal to high school selection committees because of its emphasis on the exceptionalism of the United States.

[13] Schweikart and Allen conclude that “Sanger revealed herself as a full-fledged racist” and reference the “proeugenics” articles published in the Birth Control Review (2014, 551). Despite these references, even they do not present a broad discussion of eugenics.

[14] One reader of an earlier version of this paper suggested using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature to see whether other history textbooks reference eugenics. Taking up this suggestion, I “looked inside” five U.S. history books written by Howard Zinn ([1980] 2003), Steve Wiegand (2014), Lily Rothman (2016), George Lee (2017), and Sterling Education (2019) and used Google Books’ search feature to “look inside” a book by Wilfred McClay (2019). Five of the six textbooks are recent publications. Eugenics is not mentioned in five of the six books and only once in McClay. Even there it is not discussed but only mentioned in passing as part of a quote from a textbook used by the biology teacher John Scopes in State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (1925). Sterilization and Buck v. Bell are not mentioned in any of the six books. These results are consistent with the review of the nine textbooks; however, the results are limited because they depend on the search engines and because some of the books are not designed specifically for high school history.

References

Bateman, Bradley W. 2017. Book Review: Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. History of Political Economy 49, no. 4: 717–21.

Bruckner, Pascal. 2012. The Ideology of Catastrophe. Wall Street Journal, April 10.

Cargill, Thomas F. 2011. Meltzer’s History of the Federal Reserve: A Review Essay. International Finance 14, no. 1: 183–207.

Cargill, Thomas F., Jennifer Jurosky, and Jeanne Wendel. 2008. Implementing Economics Standards: A Pilot Transition Program. Journal of Economic Education 39, no. 2: 126–34.

Cargill, Thomas F., and Thomas Mayer. 1998. The Great Depression and History Textbooks. The History Teacher, August, 441–58.

———. 2006. The Effects of Changes in Reserve Requirements during the 1930s: The Evidence from Nonmember Banks. Journal of Economic History 66, no. 2 (June): 417–32.

Cox, Annie. 2005. “Breed Out the Unfit and Breed in the Fit”: Irving Fisher, Economics, and the Science of Heredity. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64, no. 3 (July): 793–826.

Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of the Species. A Pennsylvania State University Electronic Classics Series Publication.

David, Henry P., Jochen Fleischhacker, and Charlotte Hohn. 1988. Abortion and Eugenics in Nazi Germany. Population and Development Review 14, no. 1 (March): 81–112.

Hodson, Cora B. S. 1933. An Instrument in Race Progress. Birth Control Review, April, 105–6.

Joseph, Jay, and Norbert A. Wetzel. 2013. Ernst Rüdin: Hitler’s Racial Hygiene Mastermind. Journal of the History of Biology 46: 1–30.

Leonard, Thomas C. 2003. More Merciful and Not Less Effective: Eugenics and Progressive-Era American Economics. History of Political Economy 64, no. 3: 757–91.

———. 2005. Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall, 207–24.

———. 2009. Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 71: 37–51.

Levy, David M. 2001. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Debating Racial Quackery. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 23 (March): 5–35.

———. 2017. Sterilization Legislation Chart, 2017. Unpublished. Copy in author’s files.

Magness, Phillip W. 2017. The Progressive Legacy Rolls On: A Critique of Steinbaum and Weisberger on Illiberal Reformers. Econ Journal Watch, January, 20–34.

Miller, Stephen L., and Stephen A. Rose. 2003. The Great Depression: A Textbook Case of Problems with American History Textbooks. Theory and Research in Social Education 11 (Spring): 25–39.

Mosher, Steven. 1997. The Repackaging of Margaret Sanger. Wall Street Journal, May 5.

Persky, Joseph. 1990. Retrospectives: A Dismal Romantic. Journal of Economic Perspectives 4 (Fall): 165–72.

Riley, Jason L. 2018. Let’s Talk about the Black Abortion Rate. Wall Street Journal, July 10.

Rosenberg, Ili. 2019. Clarence Thomas Tried to Link Abortion to Eugenics: Seven Historians Told the Post He’s Wrong. Washington Post, May 30.

Rothman, Lily. 2016. Everything You Need to Know to Ace American History in One Big Fat Notebook. New York: Workman.

Rüdin, Ernst. 1933. Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need. Birth Control Review, April, 102–4.

Sanger, Margaret. 1932. A Plan for Peace. Birth Control Review, April, 107–08.

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Thomas F. Cargill is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of the article “Eugenics in High School History: Failure to Confront the Past” in the Summer 2020 issue of The Independent Review

Evolution and Genocide

In 1892 the Supreme Court of the United States proudly boasted the the U.S. was legally, officially, constitutionally, "organically," a "Christian nation." But today, a century later, the U.S. is throughly secular and evolutionist. And as a result. the U.S. is a genocidal empire.

Genocide is the murder of a race, or species. Genocide is built into the theory of evolution, especially when Man the Archist hijacks the evolutionary worldview and no longer relies on "natural" selection, but graduates to political selection.

The modern world laughs at the Bible. "Myths and legends." "Full of errors." The Biblical account of the creation of the universe in six days not more than 10,000 years ago is laughed at by most (but not all) scientists. In place of the Garden of Eden, modern scientists and politicians have given us smog and smut, Hiroshima and homelessness.

The 20th century saw the triumph of secularism. Three centuries ago, all the great nations of Western Civilization were openly Christian nations. Today these same nations are openly atheistic ("secular"). God and His Law have no authority. No longer is man seen as created in the Image of God. He is just a random mutation; a meaningless conglomeration of chemicals. Social customs -- even the once-scientific understanding that human beings are "male" and "female" -- are also seen as meaningless and arbitrary.

The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre put it well: "If I am god, then my neighbor is the devil." Research led by Prof. R.J. Rummel at the University of Hawaii has calculated that nearly 200 million human beings have been deliberately killed by "their" (secular) governments in this century alone. An equal number of human beings have been murdered by the other guy's government ("war"). A greater percentage of the human race has been murdered - by governments - than any previous century.[1]

Followers of secularism have learned their lessons. They are not afraid to kill their families, their own children, even themselves. Drugs, sex, gangs, and alcohol bring escape from a meaningless, atheistic world.

Followers of Christ may not have learned their lessons, but at least they know Who the Teacher is. True Christians take the Bible seriously. They believe its record of human history; they obey its laws. They work for the full social embodiment of Biblical Creationism as seen in the words of the Prophet Micah:

We can call this the "Vine & Fig Tree" vision. "The Mountain of the Lord" is a reference to the Garden of Eden: Micah's use of it here speaks of the re-creation of the world into a Garden-Temple; a future age of peace, secure property, and restored Edenic conditions.

We can also call this perspective "Patriarchy." Feminists hate the word, but anyone who would believe in a literal Garden of Eden would probably also try to convince men to become sons of the Patriarch Abraham (Galatians 3:7,29) and to organize society Patriarchally (by families) rather than politically (by conquest). This is in fact the agenda of "Vine & Fig Tree." Patria vs. Polis.

In sharp contrast to this "Vine & Fig Tree" perspective which we find in the Bible, we have the "Survival of the Fittest," embraced by Fascism, Socialism, Communism, and the nationalism, militarism, materialism, and cutthroat, State-buttressed "competition" of what is sometimes called "capitalism."

Let's be consistent. If you believe something about the Bible, then be consistent. It's the Creator of the universe speaking, or it's a joke.

Some evolutionists have been honest and consistent with their evolutionary assumptions. They adopted the evolutionary religion because they wanted to commit adultery or seize political power, and they saw the religion of Christianity as a roadblock to their ambitions.

"Vine & Fig Tree" imagery pervades the Bible. Christianity is a religion of service, not conquest. Who can seriously maintain that the Ethical World-View of Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Jesus is the same as that of Darwin, Hitler, Marx, Mussolini, or Rockefeller?

But Jesus says if we are not for Him, we are against Him (Matthew 12:30). If we are not seeking to establish a Biblical culture, we are unwittingly working for the establishment of a totalitarian, homosexual, racist genocidal empire. We are enemies of Jesus.

Many people do not think of themselves as being enemies of Jesus just because they believe in Evolutionism. They have been told that this theory is "scientific." Doesn't Jesus want us to be "scientific"?

Before the "Enlightenment," scientists were Christian. In fact, science can be said to exist only in Biblical cultures. Isaac Newton wrote more books about the Bible than he did on physics. They believed science was possible because the creation was a product of an orderly God. The question we ask for now is, Why did scientists all of a sudden abandon Biblical Creationism and embrace the theory of evolution?

Here's the answer in a nutshell: It wasn't "the facts." When evolution swept the world, there were no "facts" to support it.[2] It was supported by a faith - a faith against God; a desire to get out from under His Law as recorded in the Bible.

Origin of a "New" Religion

Fable: In 1831 a divinity school drop-out began formulating the tenets of a bizarre new religion that, playing on the hopes and fears of the post-Christian world, and embraced by dictators and industrialists around the world, would eventually become the largest pseudo-scientific religious cult in the modern age. Without his degree in theology, and lacking a degree in any natural science, he set sail to gather anecdotes from nature to illustrate his new religion.

His timing was perfect. Men and nations were rebelling against the Christianity of the Catholics and the Reformers. A "re-birth" of Greco-Roman Caesarism - a pagan view of nature, and an elitist, stratified view of social classes - left men and women panting for some new religion that would spell freedom from responsibility under God and yet still present an aura of "scientific respectability."

At last the creed was formulated. Drawing from various ancient religions - from that of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Emperors of Babylon and China, the philosopher-kings of Greece, and the Caesars of Rome - our seminary drop-out finally published his Confession of Faith. On November 24, 1859, the first edition was released and by sundown every single copy had been zealously purchased by devoted throngs of pre-publication converts.

Fact: The Seminary drop-out was Charles Darwin; the book was The Origin of Species; the rest is history.

Sure, we took some liberties with the story - but only in that we presented the facts in a perspective somewhat unlike the one most of us are taught in the State's schools.

It is clear (and we have demonstrated it elsewhere) that - far from being "proven" - the difficulties in Darwin's thesis were - to use Joseph Hooker's word - "appalling"; the task of finding "evidence" to "prove" the theory was, to quote Dobzhansky, "the paramount task which biologists faced in the closing decades of the 19th century."[3] It is thus also clear that the devout fervor which surrounded the publication of Darwin's work was not "scientific," but religious to the core.

Or perhaps we might say, "anti-religious." For most men of the 19th century, "religion" was just another word for "Christianity."

Granted, many who embraced Darwin rejected much in the institutional church which is itself "anti-Christian." We join the Evolutionists in opposing "the Church." But many evolutionists also self-consciously opposed the Bible. They had knowledge - perhaps a vague premonition, perhaps a studied understanding - that the Bible was utterly opposed to the kind of lawless, self-centered, materialistic lives they wanted to lead. Darwin "liberated" them. We oppose them. We reject the hidden agenda of these "Social Darwinists."

Motivation for Embracing Evolution: Darwin's Reception

It is not our purpose to prove that all who believe in Evolution are Nazis. As we said above, many reject "Christianity" because of what is done in the name of Christ by "christians" who do not really want Micah's prophecy to come true. What is important to understand is that the great majority of those who shouted "Hosanna" to Darwin were motivated by racism, greed, class hatred, militarism, and a thirst for political power - to say nothing of their "private" (sexual) lives. The broad cultural acceptance which Darwin received[4] was generated by people who hold ideas which are diametrically opposed to the Bible's "Vine & Fig Tree" imagery, and, hopefully, to the ideals which you yourself hold. Recognizing what motivated an acceptance of Evolutionism may help you see why you should reject Fascist Evolutionism and embrace Radical Creationism.

RACISM Few people are aware that one of the reasons William Jennings Bryan opposed the teaching of Evolution in public schools was that he feared the teaching of racism. This is because few people are aware of how racist non-Christian scientists had become by 1859.[5] John S. Haller, Jr., has demonstrated that virtually all 19th-century evolutionists believed in the evolutionary superiority of the white race and the inferiority of others, especially the Negro race.[6] There may have been some evolutionists who opposed the slave trade, but they generally held - with Darwin himself - that the Negro was a backward race, doomed to become extinct in future evolutionary competition with the more favored races.

Racism is an easy justification for war. We will see this below; we can see it in the words of Darwin himself:

Still, ostensibly non-racist Bible-bashers continue telling us that "Evolution was immediately accepted by scientists of the day as true" and that we too should reject Biblical Patriarchy and bow before the shrine of Darwin. But if scientists had not been motivated by racism, Evolutionism might not have been so unanimously acclaimed.

ANTI-FAMILIAL SEX In the Bible, the Family is the central unit of social organization. The discipline and self-sacrifice required by Biblical Laws governing the Family produces competence, social energy, and an ability to deal with frustrations without resorting to violence.[9]

In stark contrast to this view of life, marriage, and the sexes, is a view which legitimizes and even extols the idea of immediate sexual gratification, using anyone [10] of either sex[11] to achieve desired pleasures. Prostitution, homosexuality, promiscuity, pedophilia, and incest are not forbidden in the modern world. And in a world which is evolving toward the unknown, empowered by the unthinking, there is no basis for forbidding anything. "All is permitted," as Dostoyevsky observed.

The Marquis de Sade declared that if sexual gratification could be obtained either by dominating and torturing another, or by being so abused, then it is good to do so. His writings preceded Darwin's by 50 years, but many who embraced Darwin found therein a "scientific" justification for sadism, masochism, and other forms of deviance from Christian Family forms. As Darwin noted,

What seemed best to the Marquis de Sade was power over others. Whips and chains excite some; still others, perhaps in a graphic and ritual display of the "truth" of Evolutionism, gain sexual gratification through intercourse with animals. As we move from Anti-Family Sex to a third motivation for rejecting the Bible and embracing Evolutionism, ask yourself the question, "What would my life be like if those practicing these kinds of 'alternative life styles' were to gain political power over me and my Family?" "What will the next generation act like if these people write their school text-books?"[12]

FASCISM The desire for sexual "liberation" and the quest for God-like power over others are admitted to be the prime motivations for belief in the non-Christian religion of Meaningless Cosmic Evolutionism. Aldous Huxley, grandson of "Darwin's bulldog," Sir Thomas Huxley, has frankly confessed,

Himmelfarb is right in saying that such conclusions are arrived at by "an obvious process of analogy and deduction." In her lifetime it may have been true that the connections between Evolutionism and totalitarianism are "too familiar to require exposition here." They are not familiar in 2025.

The self-centered "ME-generation" of the late 20th century is utterly disconnected from the ideological movements of the early 20th century. The State's schools have sent Secular Humanism's voluminous failures[13] down the Orwellian "Memory Hole."

Ashley Montagu comments on an inflammatory book by Freiderich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War:

If Marx was not "converted" by the preaching of Darwin, he was certainly "sanctified" by it. Jacques Barzun[16] notes that

Marx wished to dedicate his book Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin declined the offer, thinking it would have an adverse effect on the popularity of his own books.

He had little to worry about. While Modernism was sweeping the Bible under the rug, Evolutionism literally swept the globe. And its chief propagandists were Hitler, Mussolini, and their totalitarian ilk, who, early in their "careers," were well-respected by the United States aristocracy because they were "scientific" social reformers who defended "law and order."[17] Nazism may have been (temporarily) forced underground, but the anti-Christian world-and-life-view it so successfully propagated remains the centerpiece of the Dominant Culture.[18] The Christian Patriarch can have no part in it.[19]

"CAPITALISM" Social Darwinism in Economics is perhaps more familiar to some. Wrongly called "laissez-faire capitalism," it actually means using the State to put your competitors out of business; ethics must not stand in the way of the "Survival of the Fittest."

The railroad magnate James J. Hill, manipulating to get more railways under his control, said that "the fortunes of railroad companies are determined by the law of the survival of the fittest." (To his credit, Hill did not rely on government subsidies to build his rail empire.)

Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune in the State-protected steel industry, describes his conversion to Evolutionism upon reading Darwin and Herbert Spencer:

John D. Rockefeller, who, like so many, attempted to seduce Christians into Evolutionist harlotry, propagated his religion in Christian Sunday School classes. His "testimony" was inspiring:

Needless to say, the "God" of John D. Rockefeller and Adolph Hitler is not the God of Micah and Jesus.

George Gaylord Simpson, one of the highest of Evolutionism's high priests, who ministered in the parish of Harvard University, has pontificated that Darwin

This is a lie. Many other evolutionists have admitted that Darwin did no such thing.

If we are "normal" or "average" Americans, then we have been taught this lie. We are continually bombarded with lies about Man as god and the State as Savior. And we believe these lies. Only if we are radical creationists are we cleansing our minds of lies and becoming effective in standing against the violence, fascism, and racism of the Modern World. We are surrounded by the dead and dying, victims of Darwin and the Secular Humanists, and yet we think that we will not be touched and that God will not hold us accountable.

Cosmic meaninglessness is a lie.
Political totalitarianism is a lie.
Sexual "freedom" is a lie.
War is a lie.

"The Truth shall make you free."

We have noted the shift from "natural selection" to "political selection." But most politicians are sock-puppets and empty-headed bumps on logs. Instead of speaking of "political selection" we might speak of "Gatesian Selection" or "Sorosian Selection," because non-political figures like Bill Gates and George Soros exercise disproportionate power over ordinary politicians in deciding who will live and who will die -- far more power than is wielded by an "elected representative" who represents a typical congressional district of 700,000 people, and was elected by one-tenth that number.

Secular Humanists have deliberately killed an average of 10,000 or more people per day during the 20th century. Nearly half a billion people have been murdered by non-Christian governments in the 20th century. This number does not count the number of people who aren't allowed to see their first birthday. In America 4,000 pre-born people are killed every day, with possibly double that number in China and the "former" Soviet Union — each. Adding these murders, and the total approaches 10,000 murders per hour.[1]

Cousteau the "Humanitarian"

Item: In its front-page article on the passing of famed French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, the June 26th [1997] New York Times stated that the "outspoken Mr. Cousteau was often at odds with other leaders of the environment movement. He not only lent a sympathetic ear to technological fixes for pollution problems, but he also refused to put the interests of animals above those of people. 'I'm not an ecologist for the animals,' he often said, 'I'm an ecologist for the people.'"

Correction: Cousteau put the interests of people so high that he concluded many needed to be eliminated so that others could survive. In an interview appearing in the November 1991 UNESCO Courier, Cousteau bared his humanitarianism and his anxiety toward certain "technological fixes":

Our society is turning toward more and more needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer . . . . Should we eliminate suffering, diseases? The idea is beautiful, but perhaps not a benefit for the long term. We should not allow our dread of diseases to endanger the future of our species.
This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it. [Emphasis added.]

Cousteau, you see, viewed overpopulation as the greatest problem facing humanity. But even the fates of those fortunate enough to continue living on our crowded planet would be shaped by coercive utopians like Cousteau. In the 1980s, in order to prevent nuclear war, Cousteau proposed "the compulsory exchange of children at a relatively low age, 7 to 8 or 8 to 9" to live for one year in the enemy country. "I don't see how a nation could press the button . . . when they know that 3 million of their children are over there. I mean, the mothers would not tolerate that," he reasoned to the June 13, 1985 Los Angeles Times. What could be more humanitarian than that?

THE NEW AMERICAN - Vol. 13, No. 16 — Copyright 1997, American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated
P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913
Homepage: http://www.jbs.org/tna.htm
Subscriptions: $39.00/year (26 issues) -1-800-727-TRUE

When the United Nations and other Secular Humanist organizations decide who will live and who has "the right to die," will you be the one whose "rights" are "protected?"

Another human hater: Finland's Pentti Linkola
"By sacrificing perhaps billions [we] might possibly save a million," he remarks.
As one who believes another world war would be a "happy occasion for the planet," Linkola likens the current global situation to a sinking ship with only one remaining lifeboat. "Those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot." while "those who love and respect life will take the ship’s ax and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat," he declares.
To chop the metaphorical hands from the gunwales, this outspoken opponent of Amnesty International and the Vatican advises an end to third-world aid, the introduction of mandatory abortions, and the creation of a totalitarian state with strict environmental laws enforced by a ruthless "green police."

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
"May we live long and die out," is the rallying cry for this Oregon-based environmental faction dedicated to bringing the human experiment to an abrupt halt. However, unlike Linkola, these "deep" ecologists suggest non-coercive means to eliminate our toxic presence from the planet.

Environmentalism = "Biocentrism" = Nazism

Abortion

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 50 million abortions are performed around the world every year. That's an average of 136,986.3 abortions every single day. That's 5707.7 pre-born children killed per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Summary - The State of World Population 2000

Jesus came to bring the "salvation" described by the Old Testament prophets, which preeminently meant a decentralized spread of peace and wholeness across the globe, free of secular militarism and Humanistic empires. God's will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. The Prophet Micah said people would one day put God's Law into practice, beat their swords into plowshares, and be free from the despotic genocidal tendencies of would-be gods, sitting peacefully under their "Vine & Fig Tree." Don't wait for heaven; The end of evolutionism is NOW! Check out

NOTES

(1) Death by Government, published by Rutgers University in 1995. The figure does not include murder by non-governmental agents. In the United States alone, over 30 million children have been murdered by their parents since 1973. The rates in China are higher. The average Russian woman has had nine abortions. [Back to Text]

(2) Even secularists admit this. Prof. Philip Johnson of the Law School at Berkeley argues that if the facts are put on trial (and the jury is not from Los Angeles!) Darwin would be convicted. See his book, Darwin on Trial, 1985. Or judge for yourself. Read just one Creationist book. Scientific Creationism is a good start. The facts simply do not support the anti-Biblical position. [Back to Text]

(3) Hooker was a famous scientist who lived in Darwin's day. Dobzhansky was a modern scientist, widely acknowledged as one of the leading defenders of Evolutionism. [Back to Text]

(4) and still maintains: "What? You believe in Genesis?! Everybody knows that Evolution is a scientific fact!!" [Back to Text]

(5) In the middle ages, scientists were Christians. Isaac Newton wrote more books about the Bible than he did about physics. But after the "Renaissance" (the re-birth of paganism among philosophers) and the "Enlightenment" (the acceptance of paganism by politicians), Christian influence declined. [Back to Text]

(6) Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. [Back to Text]

(7) Have we forgotten the full title of Darwin's book [of course we have]: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Memory is so convenient. A diploma is bliss. [Back to Text]

(8) Or so we are led to believe by politicians who claim to solve social problems by their magic legislative wands. [Back to Text]

(9) J.D. Unwin, "Monogamy as a Condition of Social Energy," The Hibbert Journal, XXV:663-77; George Gilder, Sexual Suicide, NY: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1973. [Back to Text]

(12) Yes, ask this question quickly, for the next generation is already buying their guns. [Back to Text]

(17) Catholics and Mormons have their theological differences, but they will work together against abortion. American "capitalists" and German "socialists" had their differences, but they could work together against the Authority of the Bible and for a "modern," "scientific" world. At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazi scientists were given false identities and brought into the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex. (Christopher Simpson, Blowback, 1987.) America has been characterized by a fascist economy fueled by a Darwinian ideology. As our ideology become sheer nihilism, it remains to be seen how our fascist state will evolve. [Back to Text]

(18) While Feminists bow before the altar of "Freedom from Biblical Patriarchy," Nazis hide behind it, snickering at these "weaker vessels." [Back to Text]

(19) Members of "mainstream" Christian denominations are bugged by the occasional presence of teams of Mormon missionaries at their door; at the turn of the century, missionaries for the religion of Evolution were in your face like pollen. Jehovah's Witnesses are persecuted by most governments, barely tolerated by the rest; Darwin's witnesses are accredited and funded, because their doctrines buttress the power of the State. But perhaps a military metaphor is more appropriate than a religious one: these are soldiers, spies, and agents of disinformation. We cannot serve two captains (Matthew 6:24; Hebrews 2:10). [Back to Text]

Ideas Continue To Have Consequences

For almost five decades I have been fascinated with the origins of ideas, particularly ideologies and cosmologies, both religious and secular. It is a theme I have elaborated upon numerous times at LRC:

And while I have had numerous guides in my quest through this linguistic labyrinth, perhaps the most insightful has been Murray N. Rothbard.

In the last decades of Rothbard’s life, he developed an important interpretative framework in understanding American history. This was prodded on by his careful study of the emerging “new political history” which was reinterpreting the dynamics of the ebb and flow of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious groups. This bold synthesis became the central focus of some of his greatest scholarly endeavors, particularly when it came to understanding progressivism as a secularized version of this postmillennial religious zeal.

In his brilliant book, The Progressive Era, (which I believe to be his greatest work) Rothbard provided the Rosetta Stone to understanding the origins of the welfare state in America: the role of postmillennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals and activists born in the crucial decade surrounding the Civil War who, because of the seductive allure and influence of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and elitist social control.

Most Americans are Anarcho-Creationists

My parents were "theistic evolutionists." They taught me to believe that scientists had "proven" that life on earth evolved over billions of years. But, they added, "God did it." Then in high school I learned that evolutionists did not want God in the picture. They wanted us to believe that Mother Nature did it. And "Mother" is, like "Our Father who art in heaven," too personal. Evolutionists wanted the cold, impersonal, meaningless forces of physics and chemistry to have done it. With God out of the picture, it would be easier to rape and steal without a nagging conscience.

Is the universe a meaningless, random event?
Or does life have meaning - a meaning that reflects
the design and morality of a personal Creator?
Here is the answer of one evolutionist:
     “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.
      Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence.
      Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their [purpose] that the world should be meaningless.
      The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves....
      For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy [worldview] of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.”
(Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, Chatto & Windus: London, 1946, pp. 270, 273)

The "Military-Industrial Complex" loves the dogma of evolution. It allows them to "seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves...."

"Theistic evolution" is a contradiction in terms. "Evolution" was invented to get rid of God entirely. Gary North writes:

Notice that little phrase, "by law." If a public school teacher teaches children what my parents taught me -- that "God did it" -- that teacher could lose her job. It is illegal to teach "theistic evolution" or "intelligent design" in government-controlled schools. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools cannot even present "both sides" and give atheism and theism "equal time."

Controlling Federal Court decisions even prohibit teaching a semi-secular concept of "intelligent design" in government-controlled schools. Not "God." Certainly not "Our Father." Just "Intelligence." Maybe with a capital "I."

"Straight Darwinism" -- atheistic evolution -- is the only legal option in the once-Christian United States. Theistic evolution must be censored. Children must be shielded from this dangerous religious cult.

And yet most parents -- "insurrectionists" and "domestic terrorists" -- defy the law and believe it anyway.

Evolutionists and secularists often claim that America's Founding Fathers and the authors of the U.S. Constitution were "deists." But today's thought-police say that teaching "deism" is "unconstitutional."

(Headline correction: As far as I know, I'm the only self-conscious "anarcho-creationist" on planet earth.)