As Ross Douthat of The New York Times noted the other day, every now and then there is a scary news story that demands serious attention, even if readers want to avert their eyes.

That is certainly the case with a recent Rachel Aviv feature at The New Yorker than ran with this headline: “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles.”

This is not a religion story. If readers do a few quick searches through the text, they will find no references to words such as “religion,” “faith,” “church” or “Bible.” The word “morality” shows up, but only in a negative context. Hold that thought.

The man at the center of this horror story is Helmut Kentler, a Sexual Revolution hero in post-World War II Germany who sincerely believed, for reasons personal and professional, that it would be a good thing for the government to fund experiments in which lonely, abandoned children were placed in the homes of male pedophiles.

This was not a religious conviction — other than the fact that it was seen as a way of attacking traditional religions.

This raises journalism questions, methinks. The unstated theme running through this stunning New Yorker piece is that the Sexual Revolution has become part of a new civil religion. On the moral and cultural left, sexual liberation helps citizens to escape the chains of the nasty old faiths. Concerning Kentler’s work, Douthat notes:

It seems almost impossible that this really happened. But the past is another country, and Aviv explains with bracing clarity how the context of the 1960s and 1970s made the experiment entirely plausible. The psychological theory of the Sexual Revolution, in which strict sexual rules imposed neurosis while liberation offered wholeness, was embraced with particular fervor in Germany, because the old order was associated not just with prudery but with fascism and Auschwitz.

If traditional sexual taboos had molded the men who built the gas chambers, then no taboos could be permitted to endure. If the old human nature had ended in fascism, then the answer was a new human nature — embodied, in Aviv’s account, by “experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies,” or appeals from Germany’s Green Party to end the “oppression of children’s sexuality,” or Kentler’s bold idea that sex with one’s foster children could be a form of love and care.

All this was part of a wider Western mood, distilled in the slogan of May 1968: It is forbidden to forbid. 

This brings us to the feature’s primary discussion of “morality.”

The trials of twenty-two former Auschwitz officers had revealed a common personality type: ordinary, conservative, sexually inhibited, and preoccupied with bourgeois morality. “I do think that in a society that was more free about sexuality, Auschwitz could not have happened,” the German legal scholar Herbert Jäger said. … In “Sex After Fascism,” the historian Dagmar Herzog describes how, in Germany, conflicts over sexual mores became “an important site for managing the memory of Nazism.” But, she adds, it was also a way “to redirect moral debate away from the problem of complicity in mass murder and toward a narrowed conception of morality as solely concerned with sex.”

Much of Aviv’s story focuses on “Marco,” a victim — now a troubled adult — whose life was dominated by his foster father, an engineer named Fritz Henkel.

This is the backbone of the story. But the brain of the story belongs to the state-funded expert who was pulling the strings in this bizarre dance.

Marco was assigned to live with Henkel, a forty-seven-year-old single man who supplemented his income as a foster father by repairing jukeboxes and other electronics. Marco was Henkel’s eighth foster son in sixteen years. When Henkel began fostering children, in 1973, a teacher noticed that he was “always looking for contact with boys.” Six years later, a caseworker observed that Henkel appeared to be in a “homosexual relationship” with one of his foster sons. When a public prosecutor launched an investigation, Helmut Kentler, who called himself Henkel’s “permanent adviser,” intervened on Henkel’s behalf—a pattern that repeats throughout more than eight hundred pages of case files about Henkel’s home. Kentler was a well-known scholar, the author of several books on sex education and parenting, and he was often quoted in Germany’s leading newspapers and on its TV programs. The newspaper Die Zeit had described him as the “nation’s chief authority on questions of sexual education.” On university letterhead, Kentler issued what he called an “expert opinion,” explaining that he had come to know Henkel through a “research project.” He commended Henkel on his parenting skills and disparaged a psychologist who invaded the privacy of his home, making “wild interpretations.” Sometimes, Kentler wrote, an airplane is not a phallic symbol — it is simply a plane. The criminal investigation was suspended.

Documents linked to this project did have a way of vanishing, as well. Aviv noted, in one one razor-edged passage:

If there were ever files in the city’s archives documenting how Kentler’s project came to be approved — or how, exactly, he located the men who served as foster fathers—they have been lost or destroyed.

It’s clear that Kentler viewed his work with a kind of religious zeal. His career, Aviv noted, was “framed by his belief in the damage wrought by dominant fathers.” After his strict childhood, he decided to study psychology because this was a research field that would allow him, as he once said in a public lecture, to be “an engineer in the realm of the … manipulatable soul.”

Kentler claimed as one of his primary influences a Marxist psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Reich, who argued that, as Aviv puts it, the “free flow of sexual energy was essential to building a new kind of society.” That’s what Kentler was after and he told the Berlin Senate, in a report to his supporters, that his experiments were a “complete success.”

The key assumption here — that traditional morality (and my implication, traditional forms of religious faith) was the fertile soil for Fascism — is mocked, kind of, but never really discussed. I kept wondering if Kentler was, himself, silent on the topic.

Thus, readers are left with a devastating indictment of a bizarre form of anti-religion that seems to have been, for a time, a kind of state-funded faith in sexual liberation as a manipulate and, perhaps, heal souls — at least to offer healing based on a different set of doctrines and sacraments.

Perhaps there is a “religion ghost” in this story?

Just asking.