king graven images, while the "Duty of Preferential Reproduction" replaced "Thou shalt not kill."
Resisters of such evil movements often receive too little attention in histories of this kind. And indeed, Rosen gives religious opponents of eugenics - - mostly evangelical Protestants and Catholics - - far shorter shrift than she does religious boosters. G.K. Chesterton offered the most scathing assessment of eugenics, she tells us. Unfortunately, Rosen devotes only two paragraphs to his critique. I would like to have seen more.
Pope Pius XI's encyclical from December 31, 1930, was highly critical of eugenics sterilization and marriage bans, and complained that eugenicists had forgotten "men are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for heaven and eternity." In 1932, entering the fray from the left, Reinhold Niebuhr added his considerable influence to the opposition, publishing Moral Man and Immoral Society, which pointedly challenged liberal Protestants' uncritical embrace of science and eugenics as the primary sources of solutions to social problems.
Within the next few years, the tide shifted, and eugenics in America ebbed. Once World War II was over, and we had clear revelations of the extent to which eugenics theory had undergirded the Holocaust, eugenics became thoroughly discredited.
All the time I was reading Rosen's Preaching Eugenics - - learning the extent to which religious leaders supported a movement that, in a most unchristian way, victimized the weakest and most vulnerable - - I kept wondering: Did these supporters of eugenics ever repent? Many of these advocates lived well beyond World War II. It would have been very interesting to learn what these mostly well-intentioned religious leaders thought about their past advocacy in later years.
Another thought kept popping into my mind while I read the book. Rosen describes a "clear pattern" of religious leaders' supporting eugenics "precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets."
Recent years have seen a rebirth of eugenic thought, with advocacy for eugenic abortion, human cloning, and the drive to learn how to "enhance" the human genome. This phenomenon seems to be repeating itself in the contemporary divisions among churches over social issues such as abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and therapeutic cloning - - agendas that, like eugenics, undercut belief in the sanctity of human life.
Considering the history of liberal religion's embrace of eugenics, this "new eugenics" once again threatens the vulnerable with the pernicious notion that some human lives have greater moral value than others. Christine Rosen's Preaching Eugenics could not be more relevant.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His next book, Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World, will be published in the fall. This first appeared in the Weekly Standard and is reprinted with permission.