Update, February 1, 2022: Less than a week after I published this post, Stacy Farina — an evolutionary biologist at Howard University — and her husband Matthew Gibbons published an extensive look through E. O. Wilson’s correspondence with, and active support for, J. Philippe Rushton, one of the most outspoken race scientists of recent decades. If you’re finding this post for the first time, I’d ask you to start by reading what Farina and Gibbons found in Wilson’s archived papers. It is much uglier than I knew when I wrote this, and it really forces a re-evaluation of the ways in which I’d given Wilson the benefit of the doubt — the correspondence reveals he was quite committed to advancing the goals of race science.
I grew up in the Mennonite Church, a sort of next-level Protestant Christian tradition. (In cartoonish brief: Ulrich Zwingli rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church; the spiritual ancestors of Mennonites rebelled against Zwingli.) Mennonites practice adult baptism, holding that only an informed adult can meaningfully choose to follow their beliefs. One thing that people know about Mennonites, if they know anything, is that this doctrine means Mennonites take church membership — who’s an active part of a congregation, who isn’t on the rolls — very seriously.
In “old order” congregations, and the theologically-adjacent Amish church, this manifests as “shunning”, in which a baptized church member who stops adhering to the church’s beliefs is cut out of the social life of the congregation. The degree of that cutting off varies with tradition. It can mean complete separation from fellow congregationalists and family, even to the point of refusing to communicate; it can mean that the “shunned” person simply can’t join in church ceremonies. In the branch of the tradition I grew up in, it meant my family’s pastor — who, to 11-year-old me, was like a beloved uncle who was also the Metatron — drove from rural central Pennsylvania to Chicago to let a daughter of the church know that she’d lost her membership when she moved in with her girlfriend. I still haven’t forgiven him for that.
All of this is to say that I know a little bit about social sanctions. I think about that every time I see my fellow evolutionary biologists grapple with how to approach people who believe our scientific work supports their vision of genetically determined racial supremacy.
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