The Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values | Religion & Politics

A must read essay from Lyz’s Dingus of the Week substack, tracing the racism inherent in “Evangelical Family Values”:

(“Kegels” were born.)

Wait, what?

electroshock therapy

Don’t be gay, Sparky!

The man dubbed “Mr. Marriage” also gave considerable attention to clients’ temperaments. One of his first-generation eugenics colleagues, Roswell Johnson, abetted these efforts. Johnson, who’d previously crafted intelligence tests to identify and weed out the “feebleminded,” developed an extensive personality test for assessing compatibility, an adaptation of which is popularly used by Christian marriage experts today.

I feel it’s safe to say that test isn’t working.

The interplay between secular eugenicists and religious conservatives utterly contradicts the latter’s claims to reject godless culture, which may be why Popenoe’s son thought the allyship between his father and people like Dobson so curious. Reflecting on his parent’s later years in a publication of the secular think-tank Institute of American Values, David Popenoe remarked, “My father was no more religious than ever, but [religious persons] were his new professional and ideological allies and protegees.” But beyond this revealing secular-religious collaboration, such history reveals how fears of racial decay have shaped the conservative imagination of morality. Eugenicist fears of white replacement have rendered marriage non-negotiable, even in cases where marriage requires, in Ward’s words, “a significant amount of performativity.” African Americans who veer off-script are blamed for any social and economic hardships they may experience; and whites who do so are also dehumanized.

The Popenoe-Dobson legacy still reverberates loudly within corners of white evangelical culture, where sexual abuse is still rampant and married women face pressure to quietly endure because of the stigma of divorce. Some married women are shamed for not wanting to have a “quiverfull” of children, especially in circles where ideas of white decline pervade everyday conversation. In some cases, teens and young adults are threatened with disease and lifelong sexual frustration if they do not “save” themselves for heterosexual marriage, which is sold as the be-all, end-all of earthly life. The “abstinence-only” message, rooted as much in fears of race-mixing as STDs, teaches that girls are either pure or utterly wanton—there is no in-between. Some gay evangelical youth and college students are still subjected to conversion therapy, which many medical professional associations have deemed ineffective and harmful.