In CT, (actually Books and Culture a Phillip Jenkins review of what sounds like a really interesting new book, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement

Given such cooperation, it is not surprising to find a convergence of scientific and religious rhetoric in eugenic propaganda during the 1920s. Eugenic themes surfaced frequently in sermons and church tracts, while secular-minded eugenicists borrowed from religious language and idealism, even composing a catechism for the instruction of young people dedicated to race-betterment. Albert Wiggam composed his Ten Eugenic Commandments. Seeing just how easily American churches assimilated these pseudo-scientific doctrines, we must be less shocked by the easy acquiescence of German religious leaders in the 1930s to that nation’s particular brand of racial purification.

By no means all Christians were enchanted with the eugenic dream, which at so many points contradicted traditional views of humanity, no less than of charity. Eugenics clearly fostered determinism at the expense of human free will or moral responsibility. But particular churches had their own difficulties with the new movement. The fact that eugenics was so closely tied to evolutionary assumptions naturally alienated evangelicals and fundamentalists, just as predictably as it appealed to liberals and modernists.

Most Catholics were appalled at the movement’s easy acceptance of sterilization and contraception, and Catholic lobbying resulted in the defeat of many proposed eugenic laws. Rosen shows that this anti-eugenic fervor was not a foregone conclusion, and some modernizing Catholics were prepared to work with the AES. Generally, though, the Catholic Church provided a firm bulwark against eugenic “reform.” When in 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court famously upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck, the lone dissenter was the court’s one Catholic Justice, Pierce Butler. For liberals, such obstructionism proved yet again that the Catholic tradition could never truly be reconciled with secular democracy .As late as 1949, Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power ranted against Catholic willingness to allow defectives and even “monsters” to be born alive, and to be viewed as full human beings.

From Christian Century (a more “liberal” publication), a critical look at the slippery slope mainline Protestant churches are currently navigating regarding embryonic stem cell research, particularly from the United Methodist standpoint. By Amy Laura Hall of Duke, discussed in this blog a couple of weeks ago.

A multimillion-dollar medical industry surrounds the supposedly simple “which of these two entities matters more?” approach. Endorsing ESCR means endorsing an elaborate, systematic, routine industry of embryo production and destruction, an industry not likely to limit itself to therapies for chronic disease. To suggest that we will not also see the emergence of more generally applicable, and more widely lucrative, products defies common sense.