Eugenics is troubling as a public policy issue not because it’s false but because how much of the science that informs it is probably true. The great moral test of the 21st century is whether humanity is willing to say no to a lot of the truly troubling stuff which is now upon us.
There are things that can be called eugenics which are basically unobjectionable from a Christian perspective. Arranged marriages, for instance, or interrogating closely what makes a suitable couple. Then there are eugenic laws or systems which are natural but objectionable, like the caste system in India, the point of which is to produce people who fit types a society is seen to need. And then there is unnatural and objectionable, where we would put IVF. The only thing I can think of that might be unnatural and unobjectionable is maybe gene editing to deal with certain congenital disorders.
International competition over genetics technology is likely to shape public debates about this stuff, and in the interest of our adversaries or competitors not developing an edge, we need to find a way to talk clearly, but moderately about this stuff. Now that Russia is no longer communist they have abandoned Soviet junk science and denialism about this stuff, but that doesn’t mean they won’t push it here in the interest of trying to get an edge. In general the Chinese have very few of the scruples Christian civilization does toward it. And in the case of Israel, they’re very interested in it but also troubled by the effect of widespread genetic testing on the social cohesion of the Israeli state.
Widespread availability of genetic testing is already bringing back to the fore a lot of ideas that have been, in the scope of historical time, fairly recently dismissed. If you talk to Chabad people, for instance, some of them are in fact very interested in the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. And given the importance of heredity in Jewish law, and their specific mandate to find lost Jews and bring them back into the fold, of course they would be. None of this is objectionable at all, except to the extent there is sometimes deception involved.
The Tory perspective can be very objectionable. Francis Galton’s work was well-understood at the time to have implications for governance, one reason Winston Churchill took an interest. There are people who think the work of Darwin and Galton was about, more or less, breeding a class of people to run the empire. And the perspective of a guy like Richard Dawkins, or other atheistic Tories, is something to be deeply skeptical of on these grounds. The firebreak of geneticists who claim this is all pseudoscience, a perspective articulated in its best-known form by Stephen Jay Gould, is not going to hold. The only thing that can is a religious worldview.
There is a harmony between the Mormon and Tory perspectives as well, and this has a lot to do with Trump’s recent statements about universal IVF. Mormons are also very interested in heredity and in some pretty troubling ways. There’s a fascinating book, Moroni and the Swastika, about the history of Mormonism in Germany prior to and including the Third Reich, that raises some interesting questions. There’s a striking contrast between the great hostility with which Mormons were treated in 19th century Germany, compared with the time of Nazi rule. Friedrich Wilhelm IV denied the LDS Church official status.
Mormonism is a Yankee cult, which might be one reason it shares an interest in the most pathological Yankee science of eugenics. If you look at the histories of political involvement in early families in the colonial era, most New England families were strongly against king and established church, and some in the 1640s even returned to the old country to fight for Cromwell. You can think of Mormonism as a continuation of that trajectory, toward pure Masonic confusion and complete abandonment of the Christian faith. Mormonism wears the trappings of Christianity in the same way that communist regimes refer to themselves as democratic republics.
The Mormon-eugenics link has been present as long as the two have existed together. Eugenicists like Mormons, and there are features about the Mormon religion that lend themselves to interest in this stuff. Mary Varney Rorty at Stanford, an institution closely associated with the eugenics movement, has written about this. The Doctrine of Eternal Progression, deeply heretical from the standpoint of orthodox Christian belief, is different in key ways from what Christians mean by theosis. A few of the implications of it are that suitable vessels must be created for the soul, thus only the unfit are exempt from the general and fairly strong admonition that adherents marry.
Mormon converts to Catholicism are baptized as a matter of course, which is almost never done for Protestant converts. Mormon baptisms are not valid. Where this gets really tricky is the issue, which we have seen in places like Missouri, of LDS infiltration of strip-mall evangelical churches. These institutions are the Wild West, there is virtually no governance or oversight of any kind, though their baptisms are assumed to be valid. It’s hard to think of anything more evil than creating confusion about this.
When it comes to matters of human heredity, a Catholic or Orthodox Christian has a lot more in common with a Muslim when it comes to how their religion bears on matters of public interest than they do with a Mormon, mostly because of the sophisticated traditions of Islamic law.
Where the rubber meets the road as something other than a religious question is when it comes to healthcare and large troves of data having to do with human heredity. More or less the same public policy questions as apply to anything else apply here too: do you want this stuff in private hands? Do you want it in the government’s hands? Do you want it in a foreign government’s hands, or your own? Most of the time these technologies have a Pandora’s Box quality—someone will open it, and if this stuff is in private hands and there have been problems with that, the government will move in.
23andMe has already had a couple of big hacks recently. Another relevant company that might be a little problematic is Ancestry.com, which is Mormon and known to hide things. One minor contretemps that I remain fascinated by is the 2012 claim by Ancestry.com that Barack Obama was related to John Punch, the first African bonded for life by a Virginia court, but through his white mother. A black historians’ association took issue with some of it, but not the basic claim. I find myself wondering what that was really about, was it about connecting Obama to an African-American history he was widely seen to be somewhat distant from? Was it Deseret threatening him? You can see how this stuff has major implications for how power is exercised.
I think it’s very important for Catholics to play a role in this stuff and notice what’s going on. Conservatism in America involves Mormons controlling large business interests and media properties (The Blaze, for instance), there are evangelical businessmen doing business with China, and Tories who have little commitment to a Christian worldview where this stuff is concerned. After Trump, it’s a little unclear how it’s going to shake out.
But there are strong reasons for distrusting the LDS perspective, as a matter of belief and economic interests. They aren’t all equally bad, the Romneys are better than the Huntsmans when it comes to patriotism, for instance. But there are Mormon landowners in Las Vegas, creating a harmony with casino interests, and their role in Silicon Valley in this moment is cause for a fair amount of skepticism. And there’s also the issue of misconduct in the LDS Church not being reported, or being inadequately handled, because of the prominence of Mormons in the security services.