A campaign has been launched to remove the name of the former President of the Urantia Brotherhood, Alvin Kulieke, from the Kulieke Theater at Prospect High School in Mount Prospect, Illinois, where he served as the school’s very well-respected first principal. The campaign was launched by a 16-year-old student reporter, Abigail Gilliland, for the school newspaper, The Prospector.

Miss Gilliand was first prompted to condemn the late Mr. Kulieke, due to her discovery of a minstrel show having been performed at the school during his tenure in the 1950s. This is a perfect illustration of the failure of modern education to prepare students to enter imaginatively into the sensibilities and worldviews of the past, even the recent past. Because however peculiar minstrel shows seem to our modern sensibility, they remained a popular form of entertainment for close to one hundred years. We also find it odd that a modern form of entertainment which glorifies criminality, violence, and misogyny (hip-hop music) is deemed perfectly acceptable, but Al Jolson singing “Mammy”– quelle horreur! One can only imagine how appalling the upright teachers and principals of yesteryear would find our modern entertainment.

The second indictment Ms. Gilliland levels against Mr. Kulieke is his early involvement with the Urantia Book, and despite the fact that the Urantia Book is headquartered in nearby Chicago, Miss Gilliand used a biographer of a cult leader in Arizona, who uses Urantia book terms and concepts but is not in any way affiliated with the movement proper, as her “expert source.” Here again is a failure of her teachers to instruct her to simply call or visit the Urantia Foundation itself as this should have been her primary source.

As part of its revelation to our world, the Uranta book carries a detailed narration of our distant past so that we may better understand where we came from and where we are going. According to the book, life does not arise spontaneously but is designed and implanted. Evolution likewise occurs by design specifically in order to create beings who are capable of knowing God and developing immortal souls. In this view, the physical body is nothing more than the substrate in which the potentially immortal soul is born and develops.

This is not to say that genetics are unimportant and according to the book, this is especially true with regard to the development and maintenance of civilization. Had Miss Gilliand actually read the book, she would have discovered that it advocates racial mixing: “Hybridization of superior and dissimilar stocks is the secret of the creation of new and more vigorous strains. And this is true of plants, animals, and the human species.”

Furthermore, the relatively mild form of eugenics advocated by the Urantia Book is nothing compared with the industrial scale elimination of the unborn occurring by way of official policy in the United States today. Over 63 million abortions have been performed since 1973 and this has certainly affected the gene pool to a far greater degree than anything advocated in the Urantia book, which was written in the early years of the last century, decades before “the pill” came into being or abortion became widespread. Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” in 1904, was only advocating polices to encourage young people to marry earlier and have more children, while at the same time discouraging the reproduction of the most anti-social, parasitic criminals, which, if they are incarcerated, are unlikely to reproduce in any case.

“Today the word ‘eugenics’ is often used as a scare tactic due to its use to describe the peculiar experiments performed in Nazi Germany,” said Urantia Corps for Spiritual Progress founder Rebecca Bynum, “but this does not discount the solid genetic research which is now being done. In vitro fertilization, gene therapy, and CRISPR gene editing are just the beginning of a revolution in modern genetics which will enhance the health and vitality of future generations. The knee-jerk condemnation of this research is unnecessary and unwise.

“Yes, the Urantia book uses terms such as ‘better and worse,’ ‘higher and lower,’ ‘superior and inferior,’ which have all but been eliminated from academic discourse when it comes to human beings and culture; however, the average person using common sense knows those terms still apply,” she said.

In conclusion, the Urantia Corps for Spiritual Progress strongly objects to the proposed removal of Alvin Kulieke’s name from the Kulieke Theater at Prospect High School. The hysteria employed by Miss Gilliand implying that Mr. Kulieke advocated for the elimination of the “neurodivergent” is absurd and defamatory and we call on the school administration to reconsider this hasty move based on the inadequate research of a 16-year-old student.