The powerful documentary from the Discovery Institute Human Zoos is something every young person needs to see. Before he goes off to college. It’s a film that churches should show, with discussion groups afterward. Ideally, multi-ethnic congregations ought to gather and watch the film together. Then talk about the really stunning questions it raises, such as:

• How was it that people who considered themselves Christians could troop through exhibitions, such as at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and gawk at other groups of people exhibited like animals? Just because they came from more “primitive” cultures, such as the Philippines’?
• How could thousands of church-going New Yorkers, over several sold-out weeks, go to the Bronx Zoo to gawk at Ota Benga, an African pygmy kidnapped from his faraway home, and displayed in a cage with orangutans, as the “missing” link in evolution? (After protests from black clergymen, he was eventually released, but ten years later committed suicide.)
• How exactly did America’s intellectual elites, in the 1920s and 30s, fall in love with eugenics, and back laws in 13 states that forcibly sterilized thousands of Americans — just for flunking culturally biased IQ tests?
• How can the eugenics organization, Planned Parenthood, which sponsored those laws (soon emulated in Nazi Germany), still be a major force today, receiving hundreds of millions in federal funding?

Darwin and the Death of Man

I didn’t use to believe it, but I’ve come to see that the single most powerful force for dissolving religious faith in the West was, and still is, Darwinism.

By that I don’t mean the observation that some species might have originated from others. Or that biological competition plays a crucial role in which species thrived and which disappeared. Those are all straightforward inferences which scientists can draw from observing nature.

No, I mean the dogmatic, untestable, but completely unshakeable faith that Darwinism demands in its central tenet. Blind chance, playing out over unimaginable eons of time, is responsible for everything. First, the emergence of the universe and its laws. Then the spread of the galaxies. The formation of our solar system and the earth. The rise of life in the first place. The growth in sophistication of one life form from another. The development of mammals, then primates, then man, then you and me. (Yes, Darwinism combines natural selection — a law-like process — with random variation. But the source of change is blind chance.)

All of it is simply “stuff that happened,” and it could well have happened some other way. Every one of our human attributes is likewise an accident. It emerged by blind mutation, and survived in us exclusively because it tweaked our ancestors’ chances of living long enough to breed. Your love for your parents, spouse, children, neighbors, country? Every last bit of it boils down in the end to nothing more than … some biological weapon, which helped your distant animal ancestors live longer or breed faster. The human bond of marriage? It’s no different, really, than the mating habits of preying mantises, which end with the female devouring the male.

Adolf Hitler cited Darwin in Mein Kampf as the thinker who opened his eyes to the “real” engine of history — a ruthless struggle among the races, to see which is fittest, and will survive.

A mother’s tenderness toward her baby? It may touch our hearts. But really it amounts to the same thing as a viper’s potent venom. Or a spider’s lethal web. Just another bio-weapon, in the endless war for survival. In practical terms, it means the survival of some clumps of “selfish” DNA. But otherwise it means … nothing.

New Morals to Suit a New and Harsher Creed

Now when you abandon the Faith, Hope, and Charity that accompany belief in a creator God, you don’t just lose the human faculties that once served those virtues. They still remain, like “vestigial” organs. So they go right on working, but attach themselves to new objects. They have to, really.

So we find new objects of Faith. Liberal Christians who swallowed an overdose of Darwin lost faith not just in the plain reading of Genesis, but in the events of the Gospels. When materialistic biblical scholars patiently pored through the New Testament, ruling out in advance any miraculous events or supernatural claims, some Christians duly believed them. But they didn’t want to abandon the happy, uplifting implications of Christian ethics. After all, that was what they’d been raised with. Christianity meant for them not so much a stark series of supernatural claims as … being kind to the weak, having good manners, and generally being civilized.

Imagine a stained glass window of Jesus that has faded over centuries, so His face no longer appears. But the window still paints the room in rosy, pastel colors. So you decide that the real purpose of the window was decorative, all along. It’s just that your generation is now advanced enough to see it. Christianity is just a superior mode of living. It helped us outcompete other tribes, like the Muslims and the Buddhists. It made us … fitter to survive. So things seemed to Westerners in 1900, whose colonial empires ruled most of the world.

Racism: Darwinism’s “Killer App”

In fact, as Human Zoos makes clear, Darwinism fed strongly into the racist views current back then. Prominent Darwinists strove to make the random evolution of man more plausible by pointing to … more “primitive” races. Exhibits meant to sell evolution to the masses routinely pictured Africans as virtual “missing links” between lower primates and … nice, rich, “civilized” white folks in frock coats and bustles. Adolf Hitler cited Darwin in Mein Kampf as the thinker who opened his eyes to the “real” engine of history — a ruthless struggle among the races, to see which is fittest, and will survive.

Instead of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Resurrection of the Body, Darwinized Christians put faith in … social reform. The “Social Gospel,” as they called it. The “real” meaning of Christianity was making society better. A future, more perfect world replaces Heaven as the object of our Hope.

Achieving that meant more “rational” economic systems, such as socialism. It demanded more “rational” breeding, to improve the human strain, as we selectively breed domestic animals. Culling our herd for the sake of the future? Not so much feeding the poor as eliminating them? That was the new face of Charity.

There is nothing especially sacred about any aspect of human life. There’s no metaphysical bond between one race and another. No common descent from Adam and Eve. No Last Judgment coming at which we all, rich and poor, black and white, will cower equally as sinners. Nope.

Cruel to Be Kind

We are none of us unique creations, made in the image of God. We are biological accidents, closer to or further from our subhuman primate ancestors. But some of us want to do the “Christian” thing and make the world a better place. We can do that by observing the “primitive” traits of “lesser” human strains, and helping to breed those attributes out of existence.

H.G. Wells, the gifted science fiction writer who gave us The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, exemplified the world-view of Darwinist progressivism. A socialist and eugenicist, he wanted to engineer the same ideal future that Social Gospel Christians dimly dreamed of. But he offered pragmatic measures. He wrote:

[T]he ethical system which will dominate the world-state will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity – beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge – and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies and habits of men … the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. …

[H]ow will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? How will it deal with the yellow man? How will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilised world, the Jew?

Firm in his new, Darwinian Faith, socialist Hope, and eugenic Charity, Wells had an answer:

[T]hose swarms of black and brown and yellow people who do not come into the needs of efficiency? Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.

Elites Still Think They’re Part of a New and Higher Species

Liberal Christianity has no good defense against such a worldview. As it happened, the Nazis took eugenicist ideas so far, so fast, they rendered them unfashionable. It’s no longer tasteful to openly endorse eliminating entire human ethnic groups. (Though nations such as Iceland can boast about “curing” Down Syndrome by aborting 100 percent of fetuses who fail a DNA test.)

Groups such as Planned Parenthood must speak instead of addressing poverty, reducing crime, and “empowering” women, by slashing into the birth rates of “unwanted” children. But Planned Parenthood still targets poor people, black and brown people. It still pursues a worldly utopia achieved by culling millions out of the human herd. Liberal elites can still speak with sneering disgust of entire groups of people, this time the “Deplorables,” the “backward” religious believers, conservatives, Christians, and other throwbacks who hold back the march of Progress.

If some on the left have their way, the next human zoos will house rural white people in MAGA hats, complete with guns, and bibles, and other attributes of the “missing link” between the primitive and the modern, civilized measure of man. In fact, one street artist in New York City already paved the way, decorating trash cans with images of white, Christian conservatives.

I’ll see you inside the monkey house, my friends.