Exactly one century ago in 1922, the popular English essayist, mystery-writer, and Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton published “Eugenics and Other Evils,” his polemic against the then-recent rise of the eugenics movement across western Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. Less than two decades later, his arguments would be thoroughly vindicated in the worst way possible, when Nazi Germany took the fundamental logic of eugenics–that humanity should breed itself into a superior race through the elimination of all undesirable elements–to its logical conclusion via the Holocaust.

But in 1922, Chesterton was lambasted as a hopelessly-backwards reactionary due to his ardent opposition to eugenics.^[1]Not helping things is the fact that Chesterton sometimes really was a hopelessly-backwards reactionary; if you ever need to cringe, go read his 1910 screed against women’s suffrage, … Continue reading Who could possibly be opposed to the general improvement of the human race, went the argument? That’s like opposing modern medicine, electricity, and science! It would take the Death Camps to finally make eugenics a dirty word^[2]such that the villain in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is himself a product of the late-20th century “eugenics wars.”.

Yet though the word itself has long fallen out of favor, the ideas under-girding it have persisted like a chronic disease^[3]ironically, one of the very things that eugenics hoped to breed out of us into the present day–the latest iteration of which is something called “replacement theory,” the belief that the inexorable demographic shifts towards some non-white-majority America in the near-future is a self-evidently bad thing, a zero-sum trend that must be resisted at all costs. “You will not replace us” recall, was the murderous mob’s chant at the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charleston, Virginia; it has informed the anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding “anchor babies,” “sh*thole countries,” child cages and Muslim bans; and of course most recently it motivated the mass-murderer who killed 10 black people in a Buffalo, NY grocery store.

These attitudes are not only infuriating, enraging, and depressing, but also baffling–because just last week I attended commencement exercises at a community college in upstate New Jersey where this non-white-majority America already exists, and it is inspiring. I beheld graduates of almost every conceivable skin tone and color in a spirit of festival and celebration; many wore insignia reading “First Generation” along with their honor cords—the first members of their family to ever attend college; others wore the flags of their families’ homelands—the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nigeria; a number of young African American women wore insignia reading “Black Girl Magic”–which, after the shooter in Buffalo targeted black women specifically, felt less like a self-pep-talk and more like an active sort of resistance, a defiant affirmation that there was intrinsic value in their right to exist.

The valedictorian was a poor young Latina single-mother mental-health-survivor ex-convict, and her speech was an absolute barn-burner–the crowd went wild, because she wasn’t just telling her own story, but theirs as well. It was a sermon is what it was, rooted in the ideas of repentance, redemption, and progression, and a refusal to let the world define who she is—principles we claim to preach but which she actually lives.

And I couldn’t help but ask, in that atmosphere of sheer cathartic joy, as I witnessed all those students and their families from low-income, marginalized backgrounds who had not only survived but thrived against every socioeconomic attempt to grind them into the ground: These are the people you fear will replace you? Aren’t these exactly the sorts of resilient people you would want in America? More to the point, these are the people you want to replace? (Because make no mistake, that is the real endgame of “replacement theory.”)^[4]Every accusation is a confession, after all.

Even more to the point: These are the people you think need validation and approval from us?

And I of course couldn’t help but remember 2 Nephi 26:33, “and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile”—the final word in Mormonism against “replacement theory” so-called.

But even more than that, I also can’t help but recall how “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” or how Paul declared “God has chosen the weak things of the world”, or of the time Christ bluntly told the Pharisees—so self-righteous, so self-confident, so condescending and pure—that “the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”

That is, the poor and the humble, the stranger in our midst, the cast-out and despised and afflicted—these are not the ones who must assimilate to your standards, but you are the one who must assimilate to them, if you are to be saved. Remember when the rich man looked up in torment to see the beggar Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, and became the one begging for a drop of water. But how could Lazarus have brought him relief? The rich man was in a hell of his own making.

And when Ezra Taft Benson said that the gospel doesn’t take men out of the ghetto, but takes the ghetto out of men, well, I have my own thoughts on that; for now let me just say that, if the Savior is to be believed (and as demonstrated by the murderer in Buffalo), one can be affluent and privileged and living in a safe neighborhood, and still be in the worst spiritual ghetto of all. This reckless, insane fear of the minority is the ghetto that must be rooted out of you.