The euthanasia debate in American Protestantism emerged from the aftermath of the Scopes Monkey Trial and was prompted by many of the same characters. The trial, staged in Dayton, Tennessee, over educator John Scopes’ alleged violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act, which barred public school teachers from teaching evolution, was a microcosm of the debate between fundamentalist and modernist clerics in Protestant America.

Both in the United States and the United Kingdom, the topic of “medical aid in dying,” or assisted suicide, has had a strong public resurgence in the last year. Eleven jurisdictions permit the practice in the United States, with bills pending in five others. In the United Kingdom, a bill allowing access to assisted suicide passed the House of Commons with the support of, among 328 others, the current Labor PM Keir Starmer and former Conservative PM Rishi Sunak.

Faith leaders in the states and the UK have put up public opposition to the legalization of assisted suicide, but they have not been unanimous. Catholic prelates have consistently advocated against the practice, but Protestant denominations have not been as reliable in their opposition. Justin Welby, the now former Archbishop of Canterbury, called the British bill “well-intentioned” but criticized it for reducing palliative care budgets and victimizing the vulnerable.

The United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, too, have opposed the practice, although local congregations and jurisdictions have strained against the positions of their denominations. Others, like the United Church of Christ and the formerly Protestant Unitarian Universalists, openly endorse assisted suicide, with the UCC resolving in 2009 that the sick “should have a legal right to request and receive medication from a willing physician to hasten death.” 

The relationship between liberal Protestantism and euthanasia, however, is not a recent phenomenon, another element of a trend of ethical backsliding in the country’s prestige denominations. Rather, the rise of euthanasia in the public consciousness is inextricably linked to the rise of liberal religion. Older readers may remember Jack Kevorkian, the so-called Dr. Death, convicted of murdering a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease in an illegal euthanasia procedure, and the rest of the early “right to die” advocacy of the 1970s and 1980s.

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