I understand that Christianity Today is a reflection of evangelicalism and that in the new media age there are more writers and websites than there are editors but even so it is hard to fathom how CT can publish something so confused, so contrary to basic creedal Christianity. CT serves Christians from a variety of backgrounds, traditions, and confessions but is there any doubt among most of them that all human beings, of whatever race, are created in the image of God. Is there any doubt in any reasonable mind that Carl Henry would have opposed the promulgation of the views of a racist eugenicist in the pages of Christianity Today or via any of its subsidiary websites?

I was alerted by this a tweet about a post on the Christianity Today website titled, “Contraception Saves Lives” and provocatively subtitled, “Reconsidering Margaret Sanger as one who was opposed to abortion but emphatic about the personal and social good of contraception.” The author argues that, in the African context, which she says is closer to that in which Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) originally argued for eugenicsvia birth control, we should reconsider Sanger and appreciate her the way one of her African friends does, as a liberator. Rachel Marie Stone writes:

On my first tour of Zomba Central Hospital in Malawi, Africa, where I lived from 2012-2014, an older nurse-midwife, Lena, told me proudly that she had visited the city of my birth, New York, to study at the Margaret Sanger Center in Lower Manhattan.

“A great woman, Margaret Sanger!” Lena said.

Doubtless the problem of poverty is great and the social conditions to which Sanger reacted may or may not be analogous to those in Malawi but there are good reasons why Lena should re-think her allegiance to Sanger.

1. Sanger, as Stone concedes, was a proponent of eugenics, the theory that the human race needs to be purified of or to prevent growth, as Justice Ginsburg said in a July 7, 2009 interview, “in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” That’s a direct quotation from the mouth of a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court.

We should not pass lightly by this fact. Sanger thought some races deserve to live and others do not. E.g., she wrote in a 1939 letter:

The ministers work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members¹.

Let us assume that Lena fits the category that Sanger used. Does she still think Sanger is a hero?

The connection with eugenics is not a matter of inference. She connected the dots for us in 1921: “The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.”²

We can keep going. She wrote this sort of thing repeatedly. She did not only have her sights set on a particular race but upon a whole economic/social classes:

All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral.³

According to Sanger, the root problem in the human condition is not sin and the solution is not grace. Rather, for her, as for other racists and eugenicists, the problem is too many of the wrong kind of people.

Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.⁴

We all know (or should know) that Adolf Hitler intended to create an Aryan “super race.” What most likely do not know is that, the same year (1924) in which Hitler was sentenced to jail for his part in the failed “Beer Hall Putsch,” Sanger was teaching his eugenic theory to Americans via a new and exciting medium, the radio:

How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds unless we follow the same plan? We must make this country into a garden of children instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with human weeds.⁵

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[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]