Al Sharpton seems to get away with every moral infraction. Many people ask how he can live with himself knowing that he was involved in the smearing of six white men when he took up for Tawana Brawley who claimed she had been raped and left with racial slurs written on her body and covered in feces, has been agitating every racial incident in America, has become a racial shakedown artist, and refuses to pay millions of dollars in taxes.

The reason he feels no guilt is because his religion is based on Darwinism – the survival of the fittest. It’s not the survival of the most kind, most moral, or even the most right. It’s about opposing the weak to make way for the strong.

Sharpton sent out this tweet mocking Scott Walker’s comments on evolution:

“Happy Darwin Day from the Galapagos Islands! How do you think Scott Walker is celebrating?”

I wonder if Rev. Sharpton knows the subtitle to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Here it is: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

In the 1925 “Scope’s Trial,” the defendant John Scopes taught from “an approved school text called A Civic Biology by George Hunter.”1 The book is not so much a scientific defense of Darwinism but a rehearsal of “Darwinism’s social implications. In particular, chapter seventeen discusses the application to human society of ‘the laws of selection’ and approves the eugenic policies and scientific racism common in the United States at the time.’ (Scopes, a substitute teacher planted by the ACLU to test Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, was teaching his students from chapter seventeen.) In his Civic Biology, ‘Hunter believed that it would be criminal to hand down ‘handicaps’ to the next generation and regarded families with a history of tuberculosis, epilepsy and feeblemindedness as ‘parasitic on society.’ The remedy, according to Hunter, is to prevent breeding.”2

Hunter describes the “Jukes” and “Kallikak” families as “notorious example[s]” of bad heredity that resulted in feeble-mindedness, criminality, alcoholism, and sexual immorality. According to Hunter, they are “true parasites” on society, “spreading disease, immorality, and crime in all parts of this country.” Here is Hunter’s evolutionary solution:

“If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting success in this country.”3

Hunter believed that of the “five races or varieties of man” that have evolved, “the highest type of all” is “the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”4

Hunter states that “humanity won’t allow” killing off these biological misfits. Why? Unlike animals, human beings are created in the image of God. Murder is prohibited; life is protected (Gen. 9:6) There is nothing in Darwinism that would prohibit killing off the weak and infirm. In fact, the theory of evolution is based on the premise that the strong dominate the weak for a greater end.

William Jennings Bryan, who defended the state of Tennessee in the 1925 Scope’s trial, saw the sinister social and moral implications of evolution. Bryan feared what came to be known in the next decade as “social Darwinism” — the idea that human society is an arena of struggle in which the strongest prevail, the fittest survive, and poor “misfits” must be neglected in the name of progress through “betterment of the race.”((Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 101.))

Bryan was not alone in his understanding of the potential effect of consistent Darwinism. In fact, Bryan’s legal antagonist, Clarence Darrow, agreed with Bryan’s assessment of the potential social implications of Darwinism and fully supported them! Darrow defended the teenage “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. These two self-professed “superiors” killed for sport, to demonstrate their peerless intellects. Darrow argued for leniency for Leopold and Loeb because they were killers by nature:

“Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite, not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for blood.”5

What made them that way? The process of evolution. (“What Nature has done,” Darrow pointed out.) How can the quirks of evolution be punished?

The cheerleader for Darwinism at the time was American journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken. He admired the German philosopher Nietzsche and condemned religion whenever he could.

In 1908, Mencken published The Philosophy of Nietzsche where he argued that Nietzsche “had supplied the philosophy for modern Germany’s ruthless efficiency, in which Mencken took an ethnic pride.”6 Nietzsche proposed that the strong must grow stronger and waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak. In this, he and Ayn Rand would agree.7 Mencken was a Nietzschean “literalist” who applied Darwin to human social struggle.

“[T]he struggle for existence went on among the lions in the jungle and the protozoa in the sea ooze, and . . . the law of natural selection ruled all of animated nature C mind and matter C alike.”8

Mencken understood where evolution would take man. For Mencken, blacks, women, and Jews were to be repressed. “In fact, the oppression of blacks was one sign of the white man=s superiority.”9

Like the economic policies that Sharpton pushes that end up hurting blacks, his worship of Charles Darwin makes any moral argument the “Reverend” tries to make null and void.

1. Philip J. Sampson, 6 Modern Myths About Christianity & Civilization (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2001), 54. [↩]
2. Sampson, 6 Modern Myths About Christianity, 54–55. [↩]
3. George W. Hunter, A Civic Biology (New York: American Book, 1914), 263. [↩]
4. Hunter, A Civic Biology, 196. [↩]
5. Darrow’s Closing Argument in The State of Illinois v. Nathan Leopold & Richard Loeb delivered on August 22, 1924. Darrow points out that Richard Loeb was “enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche.” [↩]
6. Wills, Under God, 104. [↩]
7. Mencken recommended Rand’s first novel We the Living for publication. He called it “a really excellent piece of work. . . . Rand addressed him in correspondence as ‘the greatest representative of a philosophy’ to which she wanted to dedicate her life, ‘individualism,’ and, later, listed him as her favorite columnist.” [↩]
8. H. L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Kennikat reprint of 1908 edition, 1967), 102B3. Quoted in Wills, Under God, 102. [↩]
9. Wills, Under God, 103. [↩]