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. This, however, was the second wave of pro-euthanasia advocacy in the American context. Before Kevorkian and the human rights appeals of the 1980s, which are still echoed in today’s advocacy, there were the liberal churchmen of the 1920s and 1930s.
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. One of the experts brought in by Scopes’ defense was Charles Francis Potter, who founded the Euthanasia Society of America in 1938.
Potter, originally ordained a Baptist, renounced his ministry and became a Unitarian, marking his theology as a struggle against “supernaturalism” in favor of humanism, an ideology he would sign the founding manifesto of in 1933. His Euthanasia Society of America counted eugenicists like Madison Grant, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and dozens of Unitarian and other liberal churchmen.
For the prelates in the Euthanasia Society, euthanasia, voluntary or involuntary, was the tip of the spear in excising authoritarianism, dogmatism, and superstition from American Christianity. Among this class were Dr. Henry van Dusen, preeminent Presbyterian theologian and president of Union Theological Seminary who executed what the New York Times called a “suicide pact” with his wife to avoid the infirmity of old age, and Harry Emerson Fosdick, favorite preacher of Martin Luther King who left Presbyterianism to avoid being drawn up on heresy charges for radical modernism.
After the Holocaust exposed the anti-Christian perversity of eugenics, the Euthanasia Society of America did not disband but changed its tactics. Rather than allying with the now-discredited eugenics movement, the ESA postured as a premier anti-Catholic organization. ESA members decried Catholicism as “anti-democratic, totalitarian, and un-American.” These liberal euthanasia advocates bristled at Catholic “absolutism” in doctrine and social witness against eugenics. By bringing the Roman Catholic Church to heel, “the cream of the fundamentalists” would be skimmed, breaking the grip Christian orthodoxy held on American society.
A pointed counteroffensive by Roman Catholics and the countercultural change in emphasis from social hygiene to personal rights incapacitated the ESA’s ability to influence public discourse by the 1960s. Nevertheless, the history of early American euthanasia advocacy is relevant for Christians engaging with the issue today.
Euthanasia is not simply another moral issue progressives are too weak to stand up against. Instead, euthanasia is part of a broader modernist ideology that has seeped into American Christianity for the last century. Euthanasia is not just a vicious attack on the weakest and most vulnerable in society, but a crusade against the Christianity that preaches a God who “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”
Comment by Tim Ware on January 16, 2025 at 8:46 am
While I find euthanasia abhorrent, for some it seems the only way to keep off of the never ending merry-go-round of treatments, surgeries, pharmaceuticals, hospitalizations, etc. of health “care.” It can seem like the only way to avoid becoming trapped in medicalization (which is synonymous with profitization).
So while I abhore it, I also realize that the medicalization of death has pushed people to it.
Odd though, because even it you choose euthanasia, you still contribute to the profit model of health “care.”
Comment by Thomas on January 16, 2025 at 10:24 am
Jesus could have committed euthanasia if He wanted. Those who support it aren`t Christians anymore.
Comment by Gordon Hackman on January 18, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Very interesting article. Thanks for writing it. I learned things I didn’t know. It seems that almost from the very beginning, liberal Christianity has really been a part of what Whitaker Chambers called the world’s second oldest religion, whose foundational doctrine is “You shall be as God.”