Focus on the Family regularly condemns eugenics as “pure evil” and condemns the “the wicked and immoral practice and study of trying to weed out certain genetic characteristics.” But the $135 million organization never has come clean about its roots in this controversial movement.
Before he founded Focus 47 years ago, James Dobson worked for Paul Popenoe, who founded the American Institute of Family Relations in 1930. Popenoe was a leading eugenics expert who said “fit” families should reproduce more of their kind but “unfit” families should not.
Paul Popenoe
Popenoe later pioneered marriage and family counseling designed to help the fit produce more offspring. To make sure the unfit didn’t do so, he advocated involuntary sterilization. He coauthored a 1929 study, “Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909-1929.” He also said “waste humanity” should be rounded up and sent to rural facilities to perform manual labor.
These ideas caught on, and eventually more than 60,000 Americans — many of them women who were Black, Mexican or Native American — were deemed unfit and forcibly sterilized in 30 states under eugenic laws that survived into the 1960s.
Popenoe was an atheist intent on applying the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to human betterment. His son David found it odd that his father was praised and emulated by leaders of the nascent Christian family values movement, including Tim and Beverly LaHaye, who cited Paul Popenoe in their 1976 manual, The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love. Popenoe also coauthored The Church Looks at Family Life, published by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Broadman Press in 1964.
Dobson repackaged many of Popenoe’s theories as “biblical family values” in his 1970 book, Dare to Discipline, claiming: “The underlying principles expressed herein are not my own innovative insights. … They originated with the inspired biblical writers (and) have been handed down generation after generation to this very day.”
A brief 1970 news article described an upcoming presentation by Popenoe and Dobson: “A two-day seminar in family relations, ‘Helping Parents to Help Youth,’ ” held at Popenoe’s institute.
Popenoe wrote the foreword to Dobson’s Dare to Discipline, but that foreword was stricken from later editions, and ever since, Dobson’s professional bios and his authorized biography, Family Man, make no reference to Popenoe’s work or his influence on Dobson, Focus and family values. (There is one reference to Popenoe on the website of the James Dobson Family Institute, the ministry Dobson founded after leaving Focus.)
Popenoe died in1979, but his “legacy lives on in Dobson and the tenets that Focus advances,” says Amber Cantorna Wylde. The daughter of a Focus executive, she came out as a lesbian and wrote the book, Refocusing My Family recently republished as Out of Focus.
Amber Wylde
“Popenoe’s racist, homophobic, patriarchal idea that healthy white people should be the Super Race not only influenced Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, but it continues to influence millions of evangelicals today due to the global influence that Focus maintains,” she said. “The central idea is that in order avoid ‘race suicide’ and ensure that white Christians stay the dominant race and religion, they should breed as many ‘culture warriors’ as possible.”
Ideas about eugenics — meaning “good in birth” or “good in stock” — have been around nearly forever. Families have long sought to produce healthy babies, but should societies determine who is fit or unfit?
Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” in the 1880s to describe his theories about how “higher races” could further improve themselves. At the same time, Galton was concerned the unfit — poor people and those of non-European races — reproduced at faster rates.
In the U.S., eugenic efforts to boost the fit included Better Baby contests at state fairs, organizations like the American Breeder’s Association, which focused on “superior blood” and “inferior blood,” and Planned Parenthood, founded in 1916 to decrease the number of unwanted, disadvantaged children through abortion.
In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional, but many evangelicals continued to oppose mixed marriages.
Efforts to restrain the unfit included involuntary sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws that made it illegal to marry a person of another race. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional, but many evangelicals continued to oppose mixed marriages.
Focus on the Family continued to counsel against interracial marriage into the 1980s, says Hilde Løvdal Stephens, author of Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home. Focus claimed its counsel was “not because of racial discrimination” but because being in a mixed-race marriage “often leads to marital problems.”
Today, Focus speak out against eugenics selectively, campaigning against abortion while ignoring Popenoe and his legacy.
Focus and its sister organizations seek to eliminate access to abortion across the U.S. New laws in Texas prevented a pregnant mother there from receiving an abortion for her preborn daughter who was diagnosed with a chromosomal disorder that’s usually fatal. She traveled to another state for the procedure.
“To put it bluntly, babies with disabilities are being targeted for elimination,” Focus said. “It’s eugenics and it’s pure evil.”
John Stonestreet
Focus’ most recent article on the subject, “The ‘Eugenics’ Mindset Is Alive and Well,” was written by John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center, which partners and shares offices with Focus. He sees the eugenics mindset in Gen Zers who “are reluctant to have kids due to fears of an impending climate catastrophe.”
“This view is, of course, not new,” wrote Stonestreet. “The concerns that there are too many people on a planet with limited resources and that some of these people are not ‘fit’ to reproduce’ have long driven abortion advocates.”
Stonestreet is concerned that “a growing number of young people say that they are worried about having babies because of population growth and climate change” and have adopted “voluntary sterilization.” (Focus denies humans influence climate change and claims environmentalists follow paganism.)
“The active resistance to bringing children into the world is the inverse of the willingness to take preborn children out of the womb.”
Stonestreet explained:
In fact, in addition to justifying abortion, concerns about overpopulation and climate change are leading to an increase in voluntary sterilizations. Recent research has found that post-Dobbs, the number of 18-to-30-year-old Americans — of both sexes — pursuing ‘permanent contraception’ procedures has jumped drastically. For every 100,000 women, the number of sterilization procedures per month jumped by over 20%. The month immediately following Dobbs, there was over a 50% increase in sterilization procedures for men.
Voluntary sterilization is driven by the same “eugenics” mindset as abortion. The active resistance to bringing children into the world is the inverse of the willingness to take preborn children out of the womb. Both are fundamentally opposed to the gift of life in the name of overpopulation and climate change concerns.
Stonestreet did not respond to a request to discuss his article.
Related article:
There’s a straight line from eugenics to ‘biblical family values’ to white supremacy and the anti-abortion movement | Analysis by Rick Pidcock