As we now approach the five-year commemoration of the 2020 launch of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, it brings to mind another anniversary of “scientific consensus” — the eugenics movement a century ago.
In both cases, doctors and scientists joined with state authorities to control the most private and personal elements of people’s lives. And in both cases, resistance came from people of faith.
At their best, scientists have brought medical breakthroughs and technological innovations that have given us healthier, more productive, and more prosperous lives. But the scientific community has shown itself, time and again, to have a dark side as well: a tendency toward fads and politicization, an instinct for crushing dissent, and a penchant for social engineering and societal control.
America’s scientists and academics coalesced around eugenics in the early 20th century, amidst the rise of “progressive” ideology in government and academia. Eugenics, derived from the Greek eugenes (“good in birth”), was the belief that bad genes should be removed from society for the benefit of the human race.
Harvard University led the charge, as described in a 2016 report by Harvard Magazine.
“Harvard administrators, faculty members, and alumni were at the forefront of American eugenics — founding eugenics organizations, writing academic and popular eugenics articles, and lobbying government to enact eugenics laws,” author Adam Cohen wrote. “And for many years, scarcely any significant Harvard voices, if any at all, were raised against it.
“Eugenics attracted considerable support from progressives, reformers, and educated elites as a way of using science to make a better world,” Cohen added.
As detailed in U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 2024 book, Over Ruled, Harvard was not alone. Eugenics was also espoused by the first president of Stanford University, top professors at Yale, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Margaret Sanger, and other prominent figures.
The ideology also found support in venerable, peer-reviewed journals like Science, Scientific American, and Nature. It was not until the discovery of Nazi racial atrocities at the end of World War II that the movement began to slow down and lose prominence. Nonetheless, between 1907 and 1932, more than 30 U.S. states enacted eugenics laws allowing for the forced sterilization of people deemed “defective,” according to the New York Times. An estimated 60,000 sterilizations were carried out across the U.S. under these laws.
A bill passed by New Jersey’s state legislature and signed by then-Gov. Woodrow Wilson in 1911 established a “Board of Examiners of Feeble-minded (including idiots, imbeciles and morons), epileptics, criminals and other defectives” with the authority to order sterilization of those found to be “defective.”
When New Jersey’s state supreme court deemed the law unconstitutional in 1913, eugenicists appealed the case. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Virginia sterilization law in the case of Buck v. Bell.
Writing for the eight-justice majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., stated that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” and that society would benefit if it could “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
One voice who spoke out against this movement was Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton. In his 1922 essay, “Eugenics and Other Evils,” Chesterton condemned this newfound authority assumed by scientists, doctors, and state officials to override basic human rights.
Eugenics “means the control of some men over the marriage and unmarriage of others; and probably means the control of the few over the marriage and unmarriage of the many,” he wrote. “One caste or one profession seeking to rule men in such matters is like a man’s right eye claiming to rule him, or his left leg to run away with him.”
Regarding the assumed right to forcibly sterilize people, he declared: “The state has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is talking nonsense; and it can’t stop.”
Fast forward to 2020, when churches once again found themselves in opposition to the science-state alliance.
Church services, even those held outdoors, were banned in many states and cities, ostensibly to prevent the virus from spreading, although Black Lives Matter protests were permitted and encouraged, with prominent leaders like Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser joining the crowds. Likewise, public health officials deemed racial protests a superior cause, abandoned their exhortations for isolation and social distancing, and urged people to gather in support of BLM.
According to a 2022 study by the Pew Research Center, religious groups in 69 countries around the world defied public health mandates during Covid, including churches in Canada and the United States that refused to close their doors. In 54 countries, religious groups spoke out against health diktats, with many saying that they violated religious freedoms. And “in nearly a quarter” of surveyed countries, including the United States, “governments used physical force, such as arrests and raids” to force religious groups to comply.
Much of the basis for churches’ resistance undoubtedly stemmed from the Judeo-Christian tradition of the sanctity of the individual and the belief that people are created in the image of God.
Or as Chesterton stated: “In the matter of fundamental human rights, nothing can be above Man, except God.”
Ultimately, the Covid lockdowns were found not only to have violated basic civil liberties, but to have caused significant societal harm as well.
A 2022 study on the effects of lockdowns by Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke and colleagues found that while “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”
American public opinion regarding the “scientific consensus” has likewise shifted toward mistrust since the days of Covid mandates.
A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that the percentage of Americans who had “a great deal” of “confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public” declined from 39 to 26 percent between 2020 and 2024. During the same period, the percentage of those who said they had little or no confidence increased from 12 to 23 percent.
A year into the pandemic, a 2021 poll by Harvard’s School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that only 52 percent of respondents said they had “a great deal of trust” in the CDC, and the percentages were even worse for other health agencies, with 41 percent expressing a high level of trust in state health departments, 37 percent in the National Institutes of Health, and 33 percent in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Faith in academia has fallen, as well. A 2023 Gallup poll found that “Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%).”
The election of President Donald Trump, together with GOP control of the House and Senate, were, among other things, a stinging rebuke of climate ideology, for which there was reportedly a “scientific consensus.” And it was also a repudiation of elective and experimental “gender” procedures on minors, which have been actively supported by doctors’ associations including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, under the euphemism of “gender-affirming care.”
Looking back, perhaps a better lesson for the “scientific consensus,” whether it pertains to eugenics, pandemic lockdowns, climate change, or experimental medical procedures, ought to be one of self-awareness and humility, as well as a recognition of its tendencies and limitations.
And perhaps the scientific community, when it takes up the next cause, should also recognize that it is no small thing to infringe on personal autonomy, including religious liberties, even when scientists think it is for our own good.
Kevin Stocklin is a business writer, award-winning documentary film producer, and former Wall Street banker. Among his documentaries are the 2008 film, “We All Fall Down,” about the collapse of America’s housing market, and “The Shadow State,” on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) industry. His work has been published in The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Epoch Times.
