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Introduction
Aside from the impassioned support for slavery among many churches of the antebellum South, perhaps the most indelible stain on American Christianity was its early twentieth-century involvement in the movement now labeled the "old eugenics." Christian leaders and organizations sided overwhelmingly with politicians, scientists, social elites, and various progressive groups to champion the application of "scientific" methods designed to improve the nation's gene pool. American Protestant churches often supported eugenics directly from the pulpit-including sponsorship of a sermon contest to reward ministers who promoted eugenic ideals1-and through active involvement in politics and civil society. Large numbers of Christians believed that genetic improvement of the human species was in keeping with God's command that humankind exercise dominion over creation.2 The unholy association of American Christianity with eugenics laboratories and associations was undermined by 1940 through rec-ognition of Nazi atrocities and realization of the extent to which eugenicists would go in attempts to accelerate and enhance what they saw as "natural" evolutionary processes.
The specter of eugenics has reemerged a century later in much different form, presenting even more formidable challenges to Christianity and its belief in the transcendent nature of the human person. Eugenic attitudes are resur-facing not through the influence of state policies, court decisions, or civil soci-ety activism, but rather because markets advancing genetic technologies in an expanding and variably regulated global economy desensitize the population to their moral consequences. The generally favorable disposition of American Christians to the market's moral outcomes, even those that seem to test their reli-gious values, creates a climate in which churches increasingly will be challenged to protect the divine source of human dignity-what German theologian Helmut Thielicke called "alien dignity"-from functional and manipulable views of the person that arise alongside markets for genetic services.3
The entrepreneurial nature of the new "consumer" eugenics also highlights a divide that has formed between American churches and their memberships. Church influence today competes (often poorly) with a maze of social media and entertainment forms that dazzle and sometimes addict even as Christian consumers transact beyond the influence of their formative traditions. Reli-gious norms are being confronted by various social forces and development of a subjectivist ethic at the core of American culture such that public morality, to the extent it exists,...