"We Are Repaganizing"

Instapundit shared an important article yesterday: "We Are Repaganizing" by Louise Perry and published in First Things. The basic gist of the article is that much of what we consider "human rights" in the West--opposition to slavery, legal rights and protections for women, laws protecting children (including laws against infanticide and abortion)--are purely products of Christianity and its position that we have a responsibility to protect the weak and the defenseless. This is completely alien to other societies--including the pagan societies in Europe which Christianity supplanted--which hold to the philosophy that "might makes right" societies and had (and have) no problem with slavery, the rape of lower class women, or killing unwanted babies. 

When we accept the Christian emphasis on weakness as a crucial prior, many other moral conclusions follow. Slavery becomes unacceptable, as does the rape of low-status women. To point out the vulnerability of women, children, the poor, the enslaved, and the disabled is to argue in favor of their protection, not their persecution. Dress it up in secular language if you like, talk of “human rights” or of “humanism,” but this system of morality is far from universal.

As an example, the article mentions that one of the ways that archaeologists can identify Roman brothels is by the remains of male babies buried together (the male babies were useless so they were killed--females, however, were raised to become prostitutes). 

    The obvious implication here is that as the West increasingly becomes pagan, we will lose what the West has long considered "human rights," including feminism. As Perry points out, "modern secular feminists familiar only with the caricature of Puritanism presented in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale wholly underestimate the emancipatory effect that Christianity had on women". She also explains that it is really is an either/or proposition.

    In 1939 T. S. Eliot gave a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge in which he described a fork in the road. Western Civilization might continue along the Christian path, he predicted, or it might adopt “modern paganism.” Eliot, a Christian convert, hoped for the former, but he feared that we were already hell-bent on the latter.

    Eliot’s binary is the basis of a 2018 book by the legal historian Steven Smith titled Pagans and Christians in the City. One might reasonably ask why our choices should be limited to these two options, to be pagans or to be Christians. If we fully abandon Christianity, so say the secular reformers, shouldn’t that clear the way for some newer and better guiding philosophy?

    No, says Smith, because paganism never really went away, which makes its return all the easier. ...

    Smith and Eliot do not define paganism narrowly as an interest in entrails or in praying to Jupiter. Rather, they understand it as a fundamentally different outlook on the world, and on the sacred. 

Thus, it is not a choice of picking which mores to keep:

The Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald uses the image of a necklace in describing the nature of moral systems. The system may contain discrete ideas—that feminism is a good thing, say, or that slavery is wrong—but all of these beads are threaded together on a string. “You can’t pick up the individual bead,” he posits, “without lifting the whole necklace.” You do not, I’m afraid, get to pick and choose. 

And, in fact, we already see feminism losing ground to the elites latest fad of transgenderism. Title IX, which requires schools to provide equal access to educational programs to women, including sports, is eroding in the face of transgender athletes.  

    Perry uses abortion as a bell-weather for how far we have progressed into paganism. She notes:

It was the arrival of Christianity that disrupted the Romans’ favored methods of keeping reproduction in check, with laws against infanticide, and then abortion, imposed by Christian emperors from the late fourth century. Christians have always been unusually vehement in their disapproval of the killing of infants, whether born or unborn, and their legal regime prevailed until the mid-twentieth century when we experienced a religious shift that will probably be understood by future historians as a Second Reformation. Christians are no longer in charge, and their prohibition of abortion—unlike their prohibition of infanticide, at least so far—is regarded by most pro-choice secularists as archaic, illogical, and misogynist.

 And while most American voters believe "that abortion is sometimes a necessity, but always sad," "pro-choice activists ... insist that all abortions are good abortions, and ... have rejected the Clinton-era slogan 'safe, legal, and rare' on the grounds that it promotes 'stigma.'" But, as she points out:

The legal status of abortion is at the center of the contemporary culture war because it represents the bleeding edge of dechristianization. When pro-life and pro-choice advocates fight about the nitty-gritty of abortion policy, what they are really fighting about is whether our society ought to remain Christian. Most people who describe themselves as pro-choice have not really thought about what truly abandoning Christianity would mean—that is, truly abandoning Christians’ historically bizarre insistence that “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” But there are a few heralds of repaganization who are willing to be confidently and frighteningly consistent.

 And as she goes on to explain, it is just a short jump from abortion to infanticide. She notes that the idea of infanticide is already gaining ground among intellectuals based on some of the same arguments on why abortion is not "really" taking a life; and Canada is looking to expand its right of suicide to teens.

As Canada slips down its slippery slope, the legalization of infanticide is being discussed quite calmly within its government. In October, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying that parents should be able to arrange the deaths of babies up to one year old who are deemed to have “very grave and severe syndromes.” If infanticide is again legalized—first in Canada and then, inevitably, across the dechristianized world—we will know for sure that Christianity has retreated to the catacombs. And the date will come to be seen, I suspect, as a bright historical line: the moment at which we arrived at T. S. Eliot’s fork in the road and chose the older, darker path.

    While Perry raises good points, I do fault her in one respect: she suggests that the people pushing abortion and infanticide are not evil.  She describes one philosopher pushing infanticide as "a kind and thoughtful person," although admitting that his ideas could lead to evil. This is a misconception of evil. Evil people do not necessarily think of themselves as evil. Often, they think what they are doing is good and necessary. Marxists, for instance, believe that Marxism will usher in a form of utopia and if they have to crack a few (million) eggs in the process, it is a necessary process to rid the world of "evil" and bring about their paradise. BLM activists and other thugs often believe that their victims deserve what happens to them. They are not "evil" in their eyes; they are, instead, the heroes, the enlightened, and may be the nicest people when you meet them in person. They may volunteer at the food bank or visit shut ins. But, in the end, they still want you and your kind to die.

    It is long article but well worth the read.