Preaching Eugenics

About a year old, but this review is not to be missed:

In Preaching Eugenics, Christine Rosen has produced a first-rate, highly informative study of the American clergy’s involvement in eugenics from the 1880s through the 1920s. Ever since Hitler’s day, eugenics has been linked with Nazism, but Rosen demonstrates how it was first promoted by a clergy that preached the gospel of Progress. Having embraced a “higher criticism” of the Bible that drained Christianity of its supernatural substance, these clergy now gave Christ a Judas-kiss by teaching that His Kingdom would be realized not in Heaven, but on earth, by means of the compulsory sterilization of the “unfit.” One cannot help but reflect that this clergy was the forerunner of today’s Planned Parenthood clergy — who serve as chaplains in abortuaries, publish articles that purport to reconcile the Bible with abortion, and hold annual prayer breakfasts on television to celebrate the carnage.