We are becoming more and more like each other.

Parts of Europe and Canada have no concept for the future. No one knows what their cultural purpose is anymore.

Most cultures glorify warriors and kings, not those at the bottom. But Christianity took the opposite attitude toward status and placed humility at the center of its theology. The celebration of Christmas makes this even more evident. «God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong» (1 Corinthians 1:27) is a disconcerting and alarming statement for anyone from a non-Christian culture.

Why did Christ become so humble and weak that he allowed himself to be despised and punished from the moment of his birth? Why did he suffer the violence of men, small, weak, and mortal beings? Why did he not repel their wickedness with force? Why did he not reveal his majesty, at least when they seized him to kill him?

This exaltation of Christianity's weakness and humility is something very confusing and incomprehensible to any agnostic, atheist, or pagan.

Christian humanism and the protection of the vulnerable

The moral innovation of Christianity consisted of reconceptualizing smallness and humility and placing it at the center of the social contract, regardless of race, gender, class, or place of birth. With Christianity, the abuse of the weak by the powerful became morally unacceptable.

When a society accepts this Christian emphasis on weakness as a crucial priority, many moral conclusions follow.

The Christian view of weakness offers clear benefits to the weaker sex, which was able for the first time to demand sexual abstinence and respect from men. Feminism has its roots in Christianity.

Under Christian morality, slavery becomes unacceptable, as does the violation of inferiors. Pointing out the vulnerability of women, children, the poor, slaves, and the disabled means defending the need to protect them. We can then speak of «human rights» or «humanism.».

However, this moral system is far from universal. How common were the fundamental principles of Christian humanism in ancient times: that human beings, regardless of gender, place of origin, race, or class, have equal value? It is not difficult to answer that they were not common at all.

Secular humanism is simply Christianity.

Repayment and contemporary ethical challenges

This is the problem for governments that seek to dispense with Christian humanism, busy cutting off the branch that supports them. The very Christian ideas that give them their moral strength have other implications. For example, while feminism is based on the equality of all human beings, despite women being vulnerable because they are weaker and smaller than men, there is another group of human beings who are even weaker. Whether we like it or not, we cannot place the protection of the most vulnerable at the center of our ethical system without concluding that unborn or newborn children should not be killed.

It is clear that human beings find it difficult to abide by moral principles that cause them enormous practical problems, given the widespread practice throughout history of both abortion and infanticide. Christianity established that, despite these practical problems, protecting the weakest is the morally correct thing to do. Even if it is not easy to be a good Christian.

Abortion regulation is at the center of the contemporary culture war because it represents the vanguard of de-Christianization. When pro-life advocates on one side and pro-choice advocates on the other clash over the details of abortion policy, what they are really debating is whether our society should remain Christian. Most of those who consider themselves pro-choice have not really thought through what it would mean to abandon Christianity altogether—that is, to abandon completely the historically strange insistence of Christians that «God chose the weak of the world to shame the powerful.».

But there are some heralds of repaganization who are willing to be radically consistent and who display a frightening forcefulness.

Peter Singer and the extreme logic of secular utilitarianism

One of them is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, from a Jewish family of Austrian origin (like mine). He is considered by many to be one of the most influential living philosophers in the world. He specializes in applied ethics from a utilitarian and secular perspective, and is a great promoter of the repaganization of the West.

Singer believes it would have been better to give our parents the option of killing us when we were still babies if we showed any serious problems, thus satisfying parents' reasonable preferences for one type of child or another.

Peter Singer is one of the few philosophers who dares to write that we must be willing to follow the logic of abortion to its ultimate conclusion, which is that there is no significant moral distinction between abortion and infanticide, and that the killing of some newborn babies should be permitted by law.

“Human newborns have no sense of their own existence over time,” he explains. “Therefore, killing a newborn is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to continue living.” Singer can make such claims because, as a good atheist, he rejects the notion that there is anything special—sacred—about human beings, regardless of their age or cognitive abilities. He argues that the rights of any living being should be evaluated based on their individual abilities, not on their membership in the human species. This is an anti-Christian argument of overwhelming, but terrible, consistency.

It poses a practical problem when it comes to establishing a legal distinction between permissible and impermissible murder of a child. It is the problem that all abortion legislation must face. If the limit is not set at conception, then some point during gestation or development must be found. Why not, Singer asks, take it a little further, until after birth, until the end of the period when the child is not yet aware of its own existence in time?

«Man is nothing special. He is just a part of this world,» said Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right-hand man and chief architect of the Nazi Holocaust. But it is not necessary to resort to Nazism to warn of the risks of de-Christianization.

A world that accepted infanticide on a widespread basis would probably resemble pre-Christian Rome. The «first sexual revolution» arose in Roman slave society, where men enjoyed unrestricted sexual access to the bodies of their social inferiors, including slaves, women, and children. Murdered babies were understood as an acceptable consequence of male (or female) sexual “need.”.

Abortion, infanticide, and the loss of Christian morality in the West

On the contrary, Christianity adapted morality to the profound nature of things, including sex. It taught that, in addition to the raison d'être of sex in life being to generate variation, individuality, and different and unique genetic endowments, sex is also and fundamentally a form of union and rapport between parents. Therefore, separating sex from procreation or its mission of union became incompatible with Christian morality. And, of course, so did rape, pederasty, abortion, and infanticide.

A world that widely accepted infanticide would also resemble the Netherlands, Belgium, or Canada today.

The Netherlands is the only country with an explicit framework for active neonatal euthanasia, which allows the lives of newborns with serious health problems to be ended.

Belgium allows euthanasia for minors of any age. For infants under 1 year of age, there is no explicit protocol as in the Netherlands, but neonatologists and surveys (89% of Flemish doctors in 2020) have supported discussing the legalization of infanticide in serious cases.

The Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program offers medically assisted suicide not only to the terminally ill, but currently pressures people with disabilities and mental illnesses, and even those simply with low economic resources, to use this «service.» «The last will is sacred,» they argue in Canada. Apparently, modern progressivism cares about what is sacred, but not if it is Christian.

The legalization of infanticide has been debated with surprising calm in the Canadian government. In 2022, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians testified before the Special Joint Committee that parents should be able to arrange for the death of their children during their first year of life when they “consider” them to have «severe syndromes.».

Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium continue to slide down the slippery slope of abortion and euthanasia. If infanticide becomes widespread—following the Netherlands, Canada, and Belgium, and then, inevitably, throughout the de-Christianized West—we will know with certainty that Christianity has retreated into the catacombs.

For two thousand years, Christians have kept the jungle at bay by creating Western morality, a clearing in the forest with a view of the sky. If there is no one left to tend the garden, the jungle will reclaim its territory.

Freely adapted from the article: https://firstthings.com/we-are-repaganizing/