In this Slate post on race science, William Saletan tried to convince his liberal readers to buy into the notion that, on the whole, black people are genetically inferior to white people.

At the time this post was written (in 2007) I was sixteen years old. I was probably wading in rhetoric like this, a little less eloquent, as I hung around ascendant New Atheists at high school debate tournaments. No spin, no emoting, no superstition — just the facts, Jack. For a certain type of kid at a certain age it’s an intoxicating affect. Saletan adopted that kind of listless submission to ‘the science’ — if the data show that blacks are inferior to whites, well, what can you do…

It’s interesting to me, looking back, that the next rhetorical turn he took — knowing he would lose his liberal readers with this take — was to suggest that anyone who doesn’t respond to the facts is as stupid as a Christian. Check it out:

“If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating “supposedly superior intellects,” “eliminating the weak,” “paralyzing the hope of reform,” jeopardizing “the doctrine of brotherhood,” and undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.””

Bryan was not exactly revolutionary when it came to race. But he wasn’t wrong in this particular instance. America pioneered a eugenics program that would come to be the inspiration and envy of similar Nazi programs. People were forcibly sterilized, immigration quotas were instituted, refugees refused sanctuary, and of course, the brutal scourge of Nazi genocide scarred history permanently. Woven throughout the narrative of these events is the exact same style of rhetoric Saletan deploys here: good, right-thinking people should not let superstition interfere with progress.

What’s curious to me is that in this new age of scientism, Christian ‘superstition’ — our ethics, our value commitments, our axiomatic beliefs about the value of human life and dignity — is again becoming the hallmark of our ridiculousness. None of this is to say that evil hasn’t ever been done in the name of God, of course it has, but that isn’t what’s being lampooned here. Rather, the Christian commitment to the equal dignity of all people is conflated with piggish ignorance of science, which is synonymous with progress.

Saletan’s jab also relied upon a strange turn of events. Today, when you think of Christians who adamantly insist evolution is false and must never be taught in schools, etc., you probably think of a certain set of Christians who are mostly concerned that the undoing of the literal truth of the Genesis creation story will lead to women wearing pants and an array of sexual improprieties. Because of the co-opting of conservative Christianity by the free-market voter bloc, the connection between creation (and each person’s bearing of the imago Dei) and equality has gradually come undone. On the other hand, the Christians who, as Saletan alluded, “seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity”, are the ‘good guy’ Christians in this equation, the liberal ones.

But Christianity softening down into a subtler account of its ethic of equal dignity is not a victory for anybody. In the case of the march of eugenic scientism, Christianity was one of the agonistes. Sophie Scholl, unofficial patron saint of young female Christian dissenters (I’m in love with her) was an antagonist to the pathological grafting of scientific-parallel ideologies into ethics. She believed in the inalienability of equal human dignity. Christianity should still be that voice of dissent, as we enter into another age of dilettante scientism, with all its attendant facets.

Because the shape of things has, to some extent, changed — but the threat is all the same. Nowadays when we talk about the straight facts on the science of racial inequality, and we’re asked to put aside our silly Christian superstitions, we’re probably not about to encounter the kind of eugenic arguments we would have a few decades ago. But when we’re asked to formulate, in Saletan’s words, a “subtler account of creation and human dignity,” we’re being asked to put aside a strong account of human dignity in favor of a more factual and data-based one. In many cases this means giving up on an axiomatic commitment to equal dignity in favor of a steely, rational acceptance of the ‘reality’: people are unequal, it’s there in your bones. Put aside your childish things, your egalitarian projects, your programs predicated on the belief that in each person there is infinite worth.

Saletan was wrong about creation and evolution in the Christian frame; he was thinking of a particular kind of Evangelical because he wanted to make his liberal readers a particular kind of uncomfortable. But he was also wrong about the solution to the problem he identified: a subtler account of human dignity went along with scientism, yes, and the result was heinous. The trick for Christians of this era will be to push back on the new scientism — on the truism that some people are just worth less, say, in market terms — while living in a world that identifies a total commitment to human dignity as a ridiculous superstition. But it’s what we have to do.