Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism with Dr. Richard Weikart

Hank Unplugged: Essential Christian Conversations

The Christian Research Institute

Education, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

5 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2022

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Was Charles Darwin a racist? Does it even matter? The answer to both questions is a resound yes. According to Richard Weikart, Darwinian evolution influenced Hitler and the Nazis propagated evolutionary theory. Inspired by Darwin, the Nazis viewed the “Nordic race” as superior to other races and set about advancing human evolution by ridding the world of “inferior” races and individuals. But this isn’t just a problem from the past, which is why Richard Weikart joined Hank Hanegraaff for this harmful history lesson of Darwinian racism to remind us that “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

For more information on receiving Dr. Richard Weikart’s book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism for your partnering gift please click here. https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-darwinian-racism-how-darwinism-influenced-hitler-nazism-and-white-nationalism/

Topics discussed include: Groupthink and the collective embrace of eugenics (0:20); was Charles Darwin a racist? (5:20); how Darwinism influenced eugenics (6:30); was racism fundamental to Darwin’s theory of evolution? (10:25); given what he said about women and different races, why hasn’t woke culture turned on Charles Darwin? (14:05); the impact of Ernst Haeckel’s drawings on education and evolution (15:55); what were Adolf Hitler’s religious beliefs? Was Hitler a Christian? (19:25); Karl Marx hated religion—how could some liberal Christians love the ideology of Marx? (22:50); the difference between Marxism and Nazism (24:55); the moral implications of Darwinism (25:55); parallels between Nazi Germany and modern American woke culture (32:45); Hitler and Nordic Racism (36:15); climate change from a historical perspective (38:15); problems with calls to “follow the science” (44:00); what is hard heredity and how did it influence Hitler? (50:00); is Darwin’s evolutionary theory compatible with Christianity? (51:50); Darwinism, Neo-Nazism and White Nationalism (55:40); increasing support for infanticide and suicide as a sign of moral progress—but can you have moral progress without objective morality? (1:01:10); do humans have value without the existence of God? (1:04:40).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And welcome to another Hank Unplug podcast.
0:25.7	We are committed to bringing the most interesting, informative, and inspirational people directly to your earbuds.
0:33.6	And today will be no exception.
0:35.7	I've spent the last couple of weeks immersed in the writings of Dr. Richard Weichhardt.
0:42.7	I'm going to introduce him in just a moment, but as prologue to this podcast,
0:48.7	I want to mention that anyone who spent even a modicum of time looking at the progression of
0:56.8	scientific speculation knows full well that academics are not impervious to groupthink.
1:05.1	And that is particularly true when it comes to tenure, social dynamics, grants, and the like.
1:13.4	But we would be hard-pressed to come up with a better example of herd mentality
1:18.8	than the collective embrace of eugenics.
1:24.6	The moniker eugenics, or what's known as the science of being well-born, was coined way back in 1865 by Sir Francis Galton.
1:37.8	If you don't know about him, he was a prestigious polymath.
1:41.9	He was a sociologist.
1:43.9	He was a psychologist, an anthropologist. He was also
1:48.0	cousin to Charles Darwin. And Darwin actually followed suit. In the descent of man, he made
1:58.3	explicit that his notorious subtitle, the preservation of favored races and the struggle for life,
2:05.6	quite rightly applied to human races.
2:09.5	Apart from eugenics, according to Darwin, there is nothing to prevent the reckless, the otherwise inferior members of society
2:21.3	from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men.
2:28.6	Well, group think, and that's the point I'm trying to make right here,
2:33.8	is group think followed on the heels of Galton and Darwin.
2:38.9	And so with the dawn of the 20th century, eugenics became standard fare in high school biology textbooks.
	...

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