Is ‘religion’ just eugenics in disguise?

Let’s look at James Dobson, of Focus on the Family

What’s the difference between religion and eugenics? That’s easy. Eugenics is the effort to control human reproduction. Religion is — something else?

In Christianity, it can sure seem like “God” is a lot of rules around sex. The difference from eugenics might not seem so clear, especially when advocates of each tend to intermix. Consider James Dobson.

He was a constant presence in American Evangelical life from the 1970s into the 2010s.

James Dobson founded a famous organization, Focus on the Family, in 1977, that became the voice of God for Evangelical America. It was practically the religion’s ‘Vatican’, setting the cultural and political agenda.

In 2005, an official biography of Dobson was published, Dale Buss’ Family Man: The Biography of Dr. James Dobson. There was a striking omission: no word about the American Institute of Family Relations, a marriage counselling business.

In newspaper archives and archives of the organization, Dobson is seen as an employee of the organization, the Assistant or Associate Director of Education between 1968 and 1977.

Paul Popenoe is also left out of his biography.

It seems like it’d be hard to overlook? Popenoe ran the American Institute of Family Relations, and wrote the introduction to Dobson’s first book, Dare to Discipline. That became a bestseller, and catapulted Dobson to stardom.

Popenoe’s introduction doesn’t disclose that Dobson is his employee.

If the connections won’t be spelled out, exactly, one might be left to infer. If Popenoe was praising Dobson’s ideas then it seemed that he agreed with them. If Dobson had long worked under him, then it might be that Dobson had learned his ideas from Paul Popenoe himself.

But the book was passed off as Evangelical Christian.

Paul Popenoe started out as an Evangelical.

In a 1991 article, his son David Popenoe recalled: “He gave up religion when he was still young (after teaching Sunday school for many years in the Congregational church) and became a secular humanist…”

Popenoe went to Stanford University and got a graduate degree. Stanford didn’t give him any degrees. He’d quit after three years and awarded all his degrees on himself. It was so much quicker. And no one ever checked.

He got into his life’s work, which was advocating for eugenics. Before World War II, the subject was pitched to the public as “science.” It was the idea of arranging human breeding, including sterilizing “undesirable” people.

Eugenics became a major influence on the world.

Pieces are found in many places, like Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. It’s in marriage counseling, owing to Paul Popenoe, since that became his business.

His idea was to match “fit” couples and help them stay together, so they could breed more.

He talked up a white “super-race,” calling for the mentally ill to be sterilized.

Ever a racist, Popenoe viewed people of African descent as “primitive” and called for their sterilization in addition to the mentally ‘unfit’.

In the 1930s, from California, he worked with a German eugenicist Fritz Lenz, later a Nazi. Popenoe supported Nazi sterilization laws

In Popenoe’s own 1934 paper on German sterilization policies, he praises Hitler and quotes Mein Kampf with pleasure.

After World War II, eugenics became toxic.

The horrors of Nazi Germany killed off open talk of “race” purity, “fit” vs. “unfit” people, and state-managed reproduction.

Popenoe then disappeared into the role of a marriage counselor. He had a column in the Ladies Home Journal, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”

Women took in his “scientific” approach to family life. He seemed the voice of ‘science’, telling everyone how to live, as if his advice came from the research of “specialists.”

Christians were very interested.

By the late 1960s, he was mostly working with religious conservatives. As David Popenoe writes:

“Many of his assistants at the Institute were ordained ministers or other devoutly religious people from such denominations as the Baptists and the Mormons (one as Dr. James C. Dobson, now president of Focus on the Family), and a large portion of the hundreds of marriage counselors trained at the Institute even those years were clergymen. My father was no more religious than ever, but these were his new professional and ideological allies and protégées.”

Dobson’s link to Popenoe was “forgotten.”

But a scholar in Norway noticed it. Hilde Løvdal Stephens grew up in a religious community that was attuned to American Evangelicalism. Her 2019 study, Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home, traces the connections between Popenoe and Dobson, the eugenist and the Evangelical.

Into the mid-1970s, they often did seminars together, she found, on “marriage, parenting, and family life.”

Then Dobson branched out on his own, founding Focus on the Family. It was quite a trick—a psychologist being accepted as a religious leader. The religion didn’t even like “psychology,” a word that would typically be negatively-charged. But Dobson was deeply respected.

His ideas on “family” could look like eugenics.

From the talk of sexual “purity” onto “family values,” his “God” seemed just to be a force for regulation on sex and reproduction. Often read as a clergyman, Dobson seemed very Christian—though he mostly only talked about sexual control.

Dobson warred on gays—but Popenoe too was “deeply offended by homosexuality,” notes Wendy Kline in a 2005 study Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom.

Popenoe’s saw a stable family as the key to eliminating gays. He is quoted saying: “It is just about impossible for a homosexual to be the product of warmly loving, sensible parents and a sexually well-adjusted home atmosphere.”

Dobson’s program could end up looking a little Nazi.

The similarities were regularly noted. If the specific connection to Paul Popenoe, Nazi apologist, hadn’t been concealed in Dobson’s later self-presentations, the point might’ve seemed more clear.

Could modern Evangelicalism be called an ideological sibling to Nazism?—an effort to raise up a white population “fit” to rule a nation.

The real Evangelical religion, I muse, was really eugenics. The religion is really little more than sexual control. There’s Bible talk all along the way, but the things that matter are sexual—premarital sex, adultery, divorce, and the all-important homosexuality.

The Bible is vague and difficult, but eugenics is easy to understand.

It means “family” and babies, and enemies to hate: gays and lesbians, divorcees, feminists.

Eugenics provides clarity, and promises rewards. In time, Dobson promised, he’d lead the religion to taking over America.

But sexual control is the heart of Christianity.

Walking into most any church, you’re seen as a breeder, subject to “biblical” restrictions on all erotic expressions, even thought. You’re to take a spouse, ideally from within the church, and then you’re put to work growing humans for whatever empire that denomination serves.

Maybe ‘eugenics’ was the effort to take reproductive control away from Christianity, and center it on ‘science’ instead. After the Nazi disaster, the idea was absorbed back into ‘God’. 🔶

Added: commenter Stefan Gies offers a revision:

“Religion is inverse eugenics. It brings the dumbest people together and lets them produce even dumber offspring.”