The eugenics movement, as Chesterton predicted, became a wretched story of the negation of democratic ideals to serve a utopian vision. “Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred places of personal freedom,” he wrote, “where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it.” Wittingly or not, the eugenic dream unleashed a cataract of deeply rooted fears and hatreds — sanctified this time by a secular priesthood, the scientific community.

In the 1920s, when he was still an agnostic, C. S. Lewis noted in his diary his latest reading: “Began G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils.”
A controversial English Catholic writer, Chesterton published his book in 1922, when the popularity of eugenics was at flood tide. Respectable opinion on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the concept: a scientific approach to selective breeding to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the category of people considered mentally and morally deficient. From U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, eugenics policies — including involuntary sterilization — were hailed as a “progressive” and “compassionate” solution to mounting social problems.
A hundred years ago, Chesterton discerned something altogether different: “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.” For a time, he stood nearly alone in his prophetic assault on the eugenics movement and the pseudo-scientific theory by which it was defended.
“People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late,” Chesterton warned. “I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its dupes.”
Chesterton declared his aim openly, without qualification or compromise: The ideology of eugenics must be destroyed if human freedom is to be preserved. The eugenic idea, he wrote, “is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning.” In the end, it would require the discoveries at the death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau for most of the world to finally reject the horrific logic of eugenics. Yet Chesterton was one of the first to see it coming: when the machinery of the state would invoke the authority of science to deprive individuals — both the “unfit” and the unborn — of their fundamental human rights.
It is hard to overstate the degree to which eugenics captured the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term — from the Greek for “good birth” — argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted. Anticipating public opposition, Galton told scientific gatherings that eugenics “must be introduced into the national conscience like a new religion.” Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, preached the eugenics gospel: They held conferences, published papers, provided research funding, and advocated for sterilization laws.
To many thinkers in the West, the catastrophe of the First World War, in addition to the problems of poverty, crime, and social breakdown, suggested a sickness in the racial stock. Book titles help tell the story: Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1922 — the same year Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils — was supported by Nobel Prize–winning scientists whose stated objective was to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
If queers mocking the Lord’s Supper and a decapitated singing head are the things that France—or at least her officer class—consider to represent her, then things have surely taken a most dark turn. “This is France,” tweeted President Emmanuel Macron. I hope he was exaggerating. As to the lack of intent to cause offense, it is impossible to read the minds of the organizers, but it is hard to believe this claim. Would they ever have contemplated mocking things considered sacred by Jews or Muslims, one wonders? That seems rather unlikely—unless they really are as insensitive and thick as they claim.

The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics will be remembered as an eloquent testimony to the tilt of contemporary Western culture. The drag queen parody of da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the appearance of the severed head of Marie Antoinette performing karaoke said it all: A culture that has given the world the plays of Racine and Molière, the novels of Stendhal and Hugo, the paintings of the Impressionists, and the music of Berlioz and Fauré served the world a dish of blasphemous kitsch and gaudy perversion.
Of course, those responsible denied any intention to offend Christians: “Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief,” organizers said in a statement to The Telegraph. “On the contrary, each of the tableaux in the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony were intended to celebrate community and tolerance.” Organizers further noted that pop culture, from The Simpsons to The Sopranos, has parodied The Last Supper for decades, if not centuries.
Certainly, such parodies are not new is true, confirming the organizers’ intellectual laziness and lack of imagination.
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During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a number of prominent leaders in the emerging church movement asserted that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is tantamount to “cosmic child abuse.” At a time when men and women were finally starting to see the need to condemn every form of abuse that had been tolerated in our culture, the allegation seemed to be a powerful argument with which to drive people away from the longstanding teaching of the Christian church on the sufferings of Christ. The question of the atonement is not, however, settled by aspersions cast by contemporary theologians but by biblical exegesis and theological coherence.
While Jesus frequently taught His disciples about the certainty and necessity of His death on the cross (Matt. 16:21; Mark 8:31; Luke 9:22; 17:25; 22:22), He only explicitly tied those aspects of His death on the cross to its meaning on three occasions—in Mark 10:45, in the Good Shepherd discourse (John 10), and at the institution of the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:19–20). In these places, Jesus taught the substitutionary nature of His death for the forgiveness of the sins of His people.
When we move from the Gospels to the Epistles, an explicit articulation of the substitutionary nature of the death of Christ appears. When one considers the many instances in which the Apostles explain the death of Christ, it is incontrovertible that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is the Apostolic doctrine of the atonement. In what is perhaps the clearest exposition of the death of Christ, the Apostle Paul teaches the vicarious sacrifice of the Savior when he declares, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Likewise, the Apostle Peter explained that Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24).
Behind the Apostolic interpretation of the death of the Savior is the Old Testament teaching on the atonement. The prophet Isaiah, in speaking of the Suffering Servant, foretold of the sufferings that Jesus would undergo in the place of His people: “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). All of Israel’s prophets alluded to the substitutionary nature of the work of the Redeemer when they spoke of the work of redemption. This, of course, also has its foundation in the nature of Old Testament sacrifice.
In his Reformed Dogmatics, Herman Bavinck explains the significance of the old covenant sacrificial system for seeking to understand the sacrifice of Christ: