Abortion leaves women no less burdened

For good reason: The poorest 30% of women account for 75% of abortions in the US. 

"Our liberation cannot be bought with the blood of our children" has become a common slogan on placards or T-shirts carried or worn by women at events involving abortion laws. It's powerful because it captures the weakness of so much of the pro-abortion argument. Abortion kills, but also to argue in favour of abortion is to undermine the status of women, to present the unique dignity of each woman as nothing else than that a woman should be like a man in every way including unlovely sexual behaviour.

As Mary Harrington points out in reviewing Erika Bachiochi's The Rights Of Woman: Reclaiming A Lost Vision (2021) the central issue over women's rights, especially in the fraught area of reproduction that society has allowed to bear most heavily on women, is that campaigning should be directed to allowing women to be women, rather than trying to shoehorn one sex into the shape of the other. She writes:

Babies and children take a lot of looking after. How, then, [are] ideals of individual liberty to be balanced with the evidently asymmetrical burdens of human reproduction?

As in many areas of  activism,  "progressives" show a certain laziness intellectually and organisationally in ignoring the difficult duty of rectifying society's disregard of  the toxic economic inequality we see generally, shirking the task of taking on corporate power to enable the flourishing of unions, the sharing of profits with a greater focus on equity, the reduction of real working hours, more holidays, and parental leave. Instead, they use their elite status to impose a set of cultural dogmas that are as false as they are acceptable to their peers in academia, the mainstream media, and corporate and political leaders.

From a Guttmacher Institute statement on a study of reasons women give for abortion, the top is that:

Having a baby would dramatically interfere with their education, work or ability to care for their dependents, or they could not afford a baby at the time. In addition, qualitative data from in-depth interviews portrayed women who had had an abortion as typically feeling that they had no other choice, given their limited resources and existing responsibilities to others.  

The point is that: Under these circumstances there is no way abortion can be called a “choice”. Furthermore, as a response to an article in The BMJ (British Medical Journal) the authors state:

75% of women requesting abortion in the US are in poverty or in the low income bracket. The poorest 12% of women account for almost 50% of abortions and the poorest 30% for 75% of abortions. 

They continue: 

Abortion cannot be a solution for poverty; thereby surreptitiously allowing those in authority to abdicate responsibility of tackling socio-economic inequality. The BMJ has shown commendable leadership and been at the forefront of the campaign to eradicate period poverty but has been much less vocal at the scourge of poverty which suffuses the issue of abortion. Abortion may be a right in the UK but it is clearly not a choice.

To pick up again Harrington's concern that today's feminism is hurting rather than empowering women, she highlights the fact is that going back at least to the late 1700s it has been argued that "motherhood and family life are both ennobling in themselves and compatible with other activities in the wider world". Further:

As the pro-life feminist Clair de Jong put it in 1978, “Accepting the ‘necessity’ of abortion is accepting that pregnant women and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society”.

US President Joe Biden’s recent description of mothers as “locked out of the workforce” by caregiving responsibilities is typical. Mothers are, in effect, illegible to the prevailing conception of personhood — which is based on market participation — except when we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation.

An unborn child is absolutely dependent on its mother, and she cannot be replaced. Within an atomised understanding of what humans are, we have no way of weighing competing interests in such a context. And if personhood relies on us having absolute autonomy over our bodies, we must begrudge any claim, however slight, of a dependent baby still contained in that body — lest its rights-bearing nature conflict with ours.

But women are more likely to show a willingness to accept that a woman's "absolute autonomy" does not reflect reality:  

Polls consistently show us to be ambivalent on this question, across both sexes. More women than men believe life begins at conception, while in this 2017 poll, 41% of UK women supported reducing the gestation limit to 12 weeks or lower, compared to 24% of men.

Harrington speaks on this in a very personal way:

We can only resolve this via positions most people find intuitively repellent, such as the claim that signs of trying to avoid pain aren’t evidence of life. Or even, as the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Peter Singer argues in Practical Ethics, that because “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time,” therefore “they are not persons”. If you’d told me, when I was grieving a pregnancy loss, that I was mourning “little more than cells and electrical activity“ I’d have punched you. And yet we nod along to this idea in other contexts, where doing so supports women’s bodily autonomy.

She adds that because a baby just a few days after conception looks little like an adult can explain why so many lack of willingness to face the reality of a claim from within the womb that demands recognition as an equal. However, the same is true with a newborn and an adult. In addition, peer pressure can override the scientific reality of what is being killed in abortion. 

For Bernard Nathanson, the co-founder of Naral, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and who was once the director of the US's largest freestanding abortion clinic, the development of ultra-sound technology was a game-changer. Ultra-sound "for the first time threw open a window into the womb" and his rejection of the abortion industry.

In Nathanson's own words: 

Although we had a mound (literally) of empirical data attesting to the fact that a living human being had been destroyed in the act of abortion, it was not until after the advent of ultrasound technology that a true paradigm change took place. With ultrasound technology, we could not only know that the fetus was a functioning organism, but we could also estimate its age, watch it swallow and urinate, view it in its sleeping and waking states, and watch it move itself as purposefully as a newborn. 

No matter, science takes a backseat when self-interest is in play. As Harrington puts it:

The atomised vision of personhood is nigh-on unchallenged today. So, many decades into the victory of autonomy over dependence, in the name of feminism, it’s easier to see why even Right-wing young women [at New York University] were unwilling to hear Bachiochi’s arguments. The Right may speak more warmly than the Left about family life, but while we grant personhood and citizenship on the basis of bodily autonomy, what sane woman would seek to deny those goods to her own sex?

The necessity in a woman's life to provide care and cope with dependents has long been a feature of Bachiochi's career in law, including lecturing at Harvard, and in the exploration of sexual economics. Harrington taps into her expertise:  

Nothing, [Bachiochi] suggests, could more viscerally epitomise the conflict between the individualistic logic of the market, and a more communitarian one that values and centres dependency and care, than the question of abortion. A women’s movement that “regards abortion rights as equal citizenship rights”, Bachiochi suggests, has already conceded nearly the entire battle on valuing dependency: it has “surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of that market”.

And this means, in effect, that the central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men. To compete in the workplace without asymmetrical reproductive handicaps; to live without strings. In other words, to be functionally indistinguishable from the most Hobbesian vision of men at their most radically rootless.

And from this vantage-point, even those feminists who resist the claim that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” find their proposition fatally undermined if they support abortion. For if Bachiochi is right, then they are defending the distinction between the sexes while fiercely committed to the medical intervention most critical to collapsing the distinction between the sexes.

Therefore, speaking to her sisters, Harrington asks: 

Can we really protest the degradation of feminism into a campaign to free us from our biology, while digging our heels in to defend a vision of personhood that rests on exactly that? For 21st-century feminism, the question of choice poses some difficult choices.

 On Twitter, Bachiochi posted this note:

NB: I was a pro-choice feminist (& women's studies student at Middlebury College) before coming to see what abortion *is* and what it has wrought for women's equality, so no "on-going strategy" here. "Feminists" always assume pro-life women are but a puppet of some man somewhere.

Her point that society must get away from the whimsical view of feminism and into the nitty-gritty of establishing a social order that defends women's needs and so the family, was made clear by a critical tweet in response to her op-ed in the New York Times in December (2021). It said:

How does forced gestation bode for women's equality? Asking for myself, who was terminated from a job while pregnant and couldn't find employment as a noticeably pregnant woman.

This challenge exemplifies the nature of  Bachiochi's argument that women will make no further progress in society unless society makes provision for the needs of women. And abortion is principally a factor of poverty, which is a route "progressives" decline to take because it means breaking from the rich and powerful elite that they travel with.

💢 Read more of Bachiochi's views here

💢 The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision - details here

💢 Read Life in the womb matters to these women

💢 Read Trauma from abortion - why the surprise?

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.   

Christians have a happy-marriage advantage

Equal in dignity but with different ways of serving the family.    Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

Christians have an advantage toward achieving a happy marriage because they acknowledge how God has created each man and each woman in His own image, especially with regards generous love and fecundity. They know that God gives each man and woman an equal dignity though in a different way, and this complementarity is oriented toward the good of the marriage and the flourishing of family life.

So we observe the equal personal dignity of husband and wife since both are created in the image and likeness of the personal God. However, to avoid a stalemated clash of wills, God offers a pattern for family life that also appears in His orientation of the Church, and that is referred to as "headship", where all conditions being equal, one of the parties is called to exercise a vocation to be decision-maker. Self-sacrificing love and a commitment to the common good are the guiding principles for the exercise of such a vocation.

C S Lewis's The Four Loves has a section that examines headship: 

And as we could easily take the natural mystery [of sex] too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery [of marriage] not seriously enough. Christian writers (notably Milton) have sometimes spoken of the husband’s headship with a complacency to make the blood run cold. We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church—and gave his life for her (Eph 5:25). 

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife received most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is - in her own mere nature - least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism [anointing] of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. 

Phil Monroe, a psychologist who can speak from a Christian perspective, concludes in support of Lewis's insights into the husband's headship, "when we must refuse a loved one or confront them about their flaws, it should be done for their sake, and not our own". 

Furthermore:

There is great power in choosing to set aside personal desire for the sake of another. The same can be said for women who are trying to figure out how to “submit” to “unworthy” husbands.

Note that "headship" does not refer to the type of behaviour where the husband is addicted to "bossing around" his wife. As one female writer put it:

If I am to enter into a marriage one day, I would expect that we at least consider that my thoughts, opinions, and decisions are as important as my husband’s. If not, then you won’t find me at the altar. I am not alone in this — I have a troupe of lovely lady friends who will tell you the same thing.

Rather, she concedes, it is "when fair discussion is exhausted and compromise is impossible, that Lewis suggests that it must be the man who is the 'head' of the family".

But Keri Wyatt Kent questions why a husband and wife need to have someone to break the tie: I [suggest] that God would break the tie, if you continued to seek God’s wisdom, asking to be led by the Spirit to unity. In a way, giving the man the deciding vote keeps God small, and prevents the man from actually having to do what Ephesians 5:21 says: submit to one another. If you know you’ve got the deciding vote, you aren’t really submitting.

If you trust that God is able to lead and give you the right direction, why does one person need to be the tie-breaker? Is it impossible for God to lead both a man and a woman to peace about a decision? Why the man? Can men hear God better than women? Is God incapable of speaking directly to both husband and wife?

Support for this view might be seen in the assent given to the equality of partners: “Children, obey your parents, and honor your father and mother” (Ephesians 6:1-3).

However, Wyatt Kent seems to focus on where power lies, as if the wife would suffer with regards a loss of personal empowerment in the marriage, and by extension in the life of the household.

A different perspective is given by Stella Morabito, who admits to a long struggle in reconciling her own views as a young woman on roles in marriage with that of Christian teaching. 

When responding to the modern arguments about the role of women, I had to ask myself: Does the order of creation as described in the Scriptures signify the inferiority of women? A number of annoying biblical terms haunted me: Woman is the "helpmate" of man (Gen. 2:18); the wife is to "submit" to her husband (Eph. 5:22) and "obey" him (I Pet. 3:4-6); and the woman is the "weaker sex" (I Pet. 3:7).

In our culture there are no two ways about it: All these terms are now pejorative, all these concepts are now reviled. And, to make matters worse, many men habitually exploit those passages for their own worldly and selfish gain. On the surface, this apparent male bias and condescension seemed to be a strong case for "editing" or rewriting Scripture passages that deal with the order of creation of male and female.

I could not deny that God intentionally created humanity as male and female — one species with two halves, each having different functions. I could not deny that Jesus Christ came to us in the form of a human male born of a human female. And I could not doubt that Christ died for the sins of both men and women.

Morabito examines how modern sensibilities have made this area of teaching more provocative:

[Paul] definitely sounds chauvinistic to contemporary ears. We so easily view the idea of headship of the husband as a position of power. This is not only the modern worldly view of headship, but an ancient view as well. However, the Christian view — Paul's view — is neither. The headship of the husband is not a position of worldly power. Rather, it is a function of total surrender to the Cross.

I finally came to terms with Paul's call to submission in marriage when I began to reflect on Christian marriage as a two-partner dance. Leading in a dance is simply a function. Following in a dance — i.e., "submitting" or "obeying" — is merely the reciprocal function. Both the husband and the wife are subject to Christ, as a man and a woman are subject to the music as they dance.

If the husband's role is to lead, and the wife's role is to follow, so what? What's the big deal? How does it make the wife inferior? The husband superior? To claim such things of dance partners would be as nonsensical as stating that an axle is superior to the wheel attached to it. They are simply acting as one unit. In fact, they don't get anywhere unless they act as one unit. The most important element of the dance is that both partners must follow the same music.

Contrary to popular revisionist belief, the writers of the Scriptures do not advise [a wife] to wallow in her suffering and to submit to abuse from a wayward husband who doesn't obey the Word. None of that is part of the solution offered in 1 Peter: that the wife, by example, show her reverence for the Word in order to bring her husband back to the Word (3:1-2). This passage reminds the woman that her first allegiance is always to Christ. She must, figuratively speaking, just keep humming the music of the Gospel to let her husband know he is out of line and out of step. Her tune should remind him that they are both called to total surrender to the Cross.

The wife can't easily do this if she loudly complains about his sins or tries to lead him or push him around the dance floor. The best bet is to remain humble yet active, and firmly determined to let the Holy Spirit lead her thoughts, words, and deeds. Then the husband is most likely to be brought back into the dance. Otherwise, there can be no dance, no Christian marriage.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul prefaces his whole discussion of headship with a statement clearly indicating that neither party has power over the other: "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Eph. 5:21). 

Feminists seek to replace Paul's formula for organic unity with the formula of secular equality. It is an unordered view of equality where there are no specific or reciprocal functions. The result is chaos, where there is really no room for the Cross to be the tempering, binding, and ordering force in marriage. It's a dance where everybody leads and nobody follows. 

[Revisionists] refuse even to entertain the possibility that headship and submission to headship can be reciprocal functions of total surrender to the Cross.  

By virtue of valid baptism, we are — regardless of our sex or other circumstances of birth — united into the One Body of Christ in the world. But how does that translate into the notion that God intended all Christians to have the same function? How does that translate into the absence of any specific God-given order for our creation as male and female — the only basic distinction in the creation of humanity? Revisionists ignore the fact that we are incarnational beings, created as male or female. The task of Christians is to deal with God's creation as He wills, not as we will. Therefore, our bounden duty is to put aside our egos.

When we filter out the modern distortions of Paul's message, his logic becomes obvious and plainly positive. If a man and a woman are to unite as one flesh that submits to Christ, they must perform complementary functions in order to work together as one.

One flesh, one organism, in marriage, but "male and female He created them" in the order of creation. Therefore, husbands must respect their own dignity and not contrive to get their way on trivial matters, but instead serve their family and provide it with authentic leadership that is pleasing to Christ. 

A final thought is this: The vocation of headship does not grant infallibility to the husband. A husband, in good conscience, though in the face of opposition from his wife, who does submit to the husband, may make a decision involving the family that does not achieve the desired goal. Such an outcome is not an argument against Christian headship. Rather it can be viewed as a "What's good luck, what's bad luck?" scenario. Humanly speaking the outcome may be a failure, but with a spiritual lens we see God blessing the family with valuable insights, a character-building experience, and success in enriching family life.  

See also: Women's full equality in the Christian family  

                Complementarity and Spiritual Headship

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What to expect in post-Christian 2022

Professor Chantal Delsol..."we are now living at a breaking point" over "choices concerning the meaning and place of the human person in the universe"

 In the year past, disregarding the Covid 19 public health regulations, did you feel that the powers that shape the character of society were pronouncing a lot of dogma as to how we should behave, that punishment by way of people being "cancelled" was common, and that ill-defined groups were intent on redesigning the overall culture going forward? 

If your answer is yes, then you are one of those who are realising that there is a massive transformation going on in society, deeper than technological change, empowering a revolution, a paradigm shift in the public mindset. The transformation afoot is not a sudden eruption, but a factor of emboldened forces deploying their power with greater intensity in order to bring about a new social order.  

Those with their hand on the wheel form an elite comprised principally of players from academia, the mainstream media, and the political arena. Their program is not offered by way weak influences here and there but it is part of a campaign that is on the offensive, that is very political, and which is mounted with purpose. 

There is a utilitarian foundation to the program; however, though it has a fluidity of manner it is intolerant of any divergence from any of the dogmas its operatives are establishing. It is without any central dogma, but its key players show remarkable intolerance toward those who fail to agree on its rapidly expanding creed.

To comprehend what is happening around the world - not in every nation or society but in most - and most strikingly in the stalwarts of Western civilisation, we can usefully explore the ideas of French political philosopher Chantal Delsol, who last year gave a lecture on the death of Christendom, which is not synonymous with Christianity, but which refers to the radically different social and political order that grew from the principles of the new religion.

Delsol received her PhD in philosophy at the Sorbonne and became a university professor, a member of the French Academy, and winner of many awards, including the Academy of Ethical and Political Sciences Award in 2001.

Her theme in the lecture is that the West is at the end of a 16-century-old civilization, termed Christendom, that Christian culture "formed a world, a world cohesive in all areas of life", and "for two centuries [it has] struggled not to die".

Christianity has built a civilization, which has lived according to its laws and dogmas, as best they can, for 16 centuries.

Christianity as a civilization is the fruit of Catholicism, a holistic religion, defending an organic society, challenging individualism and individual freedom.

The fate of Christianity makes it irremediably inclined to hate modernity, which challenges its first principles: truth, hierarchy, authority and coercion.

Late modernity, which begins after the Second World War, definitely regards the Church as an obsolete institution. During the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the differences have accumulated. The reigning liberalism/libertarianism represents the exact opposite of ecclesial thinking.

Delsol points out that the fading Christian presence does not mean the death of the spiritual, and certainly not the acceptance of atheism:

Of course, the twenty-first century is religious - but it is no longer Christian. Other religions have taken over the scene. There is no great prophecy in predicting that a century will be religious - for all centuries are.

As long as humanity is imperfect and mortal (until the end of time no doubt, despite the fabrications of post-humanism), it will give itself religions, wisdoms, morals.

Only the extreme and fleeting rationalization of the Enlightenment, detached from realities, could believe in the future of atheism [...] since as soon as Christianity fell, all kinds of other gods took its place.

Societies are not made up of a few intellectuals, but of peoples, to whom common sense prompts that there are mysteries behind the door, and who are at least agnostic if they are not believers.

Ideals are reinvented differently, but disenchantment does not mean the reign of atheism and all-powerful rationalism.

Daily experience confirms to us that morality did not disappear with the fall of Christendom; neither civilization nor morality ends with Christendom. They orient themselves differently and follow other paths.

We are not going through a descent into hell or a total loss of what makes humanity, but a paradigm shift that can be considered radical and questionable, but which nevertheless defends other honorable principles.

Though "New Age" was commandeered decades ago by Shirley MacLaine in her books on metaphysics, spirituality, reincarnation and more, Delsol posits that what we are seeing unfold is just such an experience:

I use this expression again. The new age will be the age of wisdom and paganism, necessarily rediscovered after the challenge of transcendence.

I think we have to understand the moment that we are living as a revolution, in the strict sense of the return of the cycle, in both areas of morality and ontology.

The picture presented in this lecture is that of paganism, once overthrown by the upstart Christian religion, reasserting itself, and in fact, reclaiming its former dominant position as the force that shapes the culture.

Since the second half of the 20th century, and significantly since the 1960s, our moral hierarchies have literally been reversed. It is not uncommon, concerning individual behavior and social acts, that in a few years an evil has become a good and vice versa, that the old hated behavior is now praised, that the old admiration is changed and challenged.

In the world of our fathers, colonization was generous and admirable,  torture was part and parcel of war; today, colonization and torture are satanic acts, and very largely, war too.

Homosexuality was banned and despised, and today it is not only justified but praised. Abortion, previously criminalized, is being legitimized and advised.

Divorce, which was almost impossible and then difficult, no longer encounters any obstacle.

Suicide was frowned upon (suicides were not offered a religious funeral), it is considered a possible benefit, and the laws in some countries may help to achieve it.

"The table of mores" of a society reveal its reigning philosophy, its "gods". Even if a society does not define its creed, "any signifying act reveals a sleeping belief".

All behavior engages beliefs that are often buried and secret. The normative reversal that we have before us appears to a large part of the youth to be quite natural, because children are always educated by their time more than by their parents.

We must put a name on this inversion. It translates and tells the story of the end of Christendom. And it will be even easier to understand if we go back to the origins.

Christendom was established by a normative inversion, in the other direction. The fourth century was a break in the paradigm, both in the philosophical sense and in the ethical sense.

The universe of the Christians was the reverse of that of the Romans: they introduced a dualism between temporal and spiritual, here below and beyond, men and God, while the ancient religious world was deeply unified.

The Romans must have felt as if they were entering a torn intellectual and spiritual world. In the space of a few decades a reversal of mores took place. The old morality was replaced by another. In the context of what we now call the societal, in other words mores, there was an inversion of values.

Everything had to be reversed, as Tertullian, a 2nd century Christian theologian, wrote: “It is against all these prejudices that we have to fight, against the institutions, the ancestors, the authority of the thing received, the laws of the rulers, the reasonings of the wise; against antiquity, custom, necessity; against the examples, the wonders, the miracles, whose help strengthened all these adulterous divinities".

Christianity opposed the lax Roman strictures against divorce. Moreover, "abortion and infanticide had always been legitimate among ancient peoples, except among Jews and Egyptians". Romans families kept daughters only when the first born. Christians opposed those practices, and homosexual behaviour as well.

Within the Roman sphere of influence, Christians rose to positions of power in the 4th century following the Edict of Milan of 313. Within very few decades, the reversal of Roman mores had been achieved, though the country people - the paganus - ran at a slower pace. "And Christians called themselves 'modern' - the word modernus appeared at this time." 

Perhaps in our time we are seeing the term "Christian" and "bigot" serve the function of "pagan" - "Paganism is given as superstitious, obsolete and outdated."

It is already a march towards progress: the winner appropriates the meaning of history. The revolutionary period in the 18th century was what can be called the beginning of the end of Christendom. At this time the Westerners begin to overthrow the common civilization.

This process lasted two centuries. [...] Take divorce in France. A law authorizing divorce was promulgated in 1792 during the Revolution. It was repealed in 1816 under the Restoration. But divorce was reestablished in July 1884. A law of the Vichy regime of April 2, 1941, restricted the possibilities. Finally, after the second war, the laws on divorce made it easier and easier, until mutual consent was reached.

Delsol sees a definite "drive to root out the principles of Christianity". However, "the tide has been sweeping for two centuries always in the same direction, and never stopping".

The recent history of abortion laws reflects the same upheavals, strewn with violent reactions in both directions. The demonstrations are screaming. The laws passed arouse cries of joy and cries of horror, and excesses everywhere. Passion is always involved. Women march by screaming that their bodies belong to them. Extremist groups are trying to block the operation of abortion clinics.

The same goes for marriage between two people of the same sex, for assisted reproduction, for assisted suicide.

Christians try to defend traditional morality with non-Christian arguments: they know very well that their dogma would not be heard at all.

They argue from nature, natural law or peripheral reasons which are not necessarily less important. In doing so, they even find unexpected allies, as when today groups of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists devoid of religious convictions join the ranks of Christians in the fight for the defense of fatherhood.

But all this, without any result, ever. Our societies do not care about natural law, and widely believe that this sort of thing does not exist, and that we are the inventors of nature.

Whatever happens, the old principles are going back step by step, sometimes fast and sometimes slowly, but with regularity and certainty. Their Christian defenders struggle only for ethics of conviction or for panache.

Countries that resist total liberation are singled out by others, treated as backward, as if there was an obligation of good taste, good conduct, reason and intelligence, to erase old mores.

We can see that the currents that defend ancient morals, although elected by many voters, have difficulty finding representatives or rather find only extremist representatives [...] The fate of a current condemned by history is to become more and more extremist, to lose its most competent defenders, and finally, by a sort of disastrous process, to end up resembling the description of its adversaries.

The normative inversion that we see at work here, through this quiet and decisive evolution that crosses the 19th and 20th centuries, represents almost the exact opposite of what happened in the 4th century. Plutarch's cry, "The great Pan is dead" might have anticipated the end of paganism - at least that is how Christians then interpreted it to their advantage. Pan, or Priapus, is the God of sex and violence.

The present cultural environment reflects the completion of the circle of life, Delsol suggests. There is a coherence in the "normative inversion" taking place. It is not a metter of any march of "progress", toward "freedom", for example.

What is inevitable is "the result of a radical transformation of beliefs".  Hearts and minds have absorbed, or been captured by, newly attractive principles.

A normative inversion, especially of this magnitude, rests on the basis of a philosophical inversion. This is quite natural: we do not upset the whole of morality in this way on a simple whim - we do it because the foundations on which the old morality rested have been replaced by others.

Each culture or civilization poses, at an original and decisive moment in its history, primordial ontological choices on which everything else is built and supported - morals and mores, laws and customs. For Christendom, this decisive moment was the time of the first councils, which established the outlines of the first truths on which sixteen centuries of Christianity would live: God, the person, the moral.

There comes a day when faith in first principles breaks down. As far as we are concerned, we are now living at a breaking point where the primordial ontological choices - concerning the meaning and place of man in the universe, the nature of the world or of the gods, are overturned.

If beliefs collapse, laws and mores will continue for some time without further justification and by force of habit alone - but that will not last, and they will eventually collapse under the accusation of illegitimacy.

What founds a civilization is not the truth - as all claim it - it is the belief in a truth. And only this belief guarantees the persistence of the original choices.

Examples of radical transformations include Moses leading the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt into a realm ruled by one god, not a bevy of gods - from polytheism into monotheism. The Hebrews were constantly tempted to revert to the polytheism  - "cosmotheism" - of their neighbours.

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The banishment of the Greek-Roman gods marks a similarly thorough ontological reversal.

Historians of religions have differentiated between two types of religions: cosmotheisms or polytheisms which are natural and obvious, and monotheisms or "secondary religions", [which] appeal to the concepts of revelation, faith, interior wisdom. They are constructions and always require to be reaffirmed, maintained by constant efforts.

[In contrast,] primary religion arises, so to speak, on its own, proliferates without fertilizer, and instantly occupies or re-occupies its place as soon as it is free.

This is what is happening to us today. Cosmotheism has never disappeared from the scene in Western societies shaped by monotheism. Many figures or authors have been inspired by it to varying degrees: alchemy, the cabbalah, Spinoza, freemasonry, Lessing, German romanticism, Goethe, Freud, Nazism, the new age ...

We can be sure that cosmotheism remains there, asleep and always reborn as soon as the secondary religion which replaced it shows signs of weakness.

In his famous 1917 lecture, The Profession and the Vocation of Scientist, Max Weber described how monotheism had dethroned polytheism in the name of universal reason. And how polytheism remains, ousted but lurking, awaiting its revenge.

Christian rule is already being replaced - neither by nothingness nor by the storm, but by well-known, more primitive and rustic forms of history.

Behind collapsed Christianity come Stoic morals, paganism, Asian-type spiritualities. Nietzsche had foreseen this evolution when he wrote: "European China, with a soft Buddhist-Christian belief, and in practice, an Epicurean savoir-vivre".

At the start of the 21st century, the most established and most promising philosophical current is a form of cosmotheism linked to the defense of nature.

We can also speak of pantheism or polytheism. Our Western contemporaries no longer believe in a beyond or in a transcendence. The meaning of life must therefore be found in this life itself, and not above it, where there is nothing. The sacred is found here: in the landscapes, in the life of the earth and in humans themselves.

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, we have changed the paradigm by making a new choice of understanding the world.

Under cosmotheism, man feels at home in the world, which represents the only reality and which contains both the sacred and the profane.

Under monotheism, man feels a stranger in this immanent world and longs for the other world. For the monotheist, this world is only a stopover. For the cosmotheist, he is at home. The post-modern mind is tired of living in a stopover! He needs a home of his own, complete in its meanings.

He becomes a cosmotheist again because he wants to reintegrate this world as a full citizen, and no longer as this "domiciled foreigner". 

The post-modern man wants to do away with distinctions - his favorite adjective is "inclusive". And cosmotheism suits him because it erases the old dualism characteristic of Judeo-Christianity.

It requires escaping the contradictions between the false and the true, between God and the world, between faith and reason ...

Ecology today is a religion, a belief. "Belief": not that the current ecological problem should not be considered scientifically proven; but because these scientific certainties about climate and ecology produce irrational convictions and certainties, in reality religious beliefs, endowed with all manifestations of religion.

Today, ecology has become a liturgy: it is impossible to omit the question, one way or another, in any speech or fragment of speech.

It is a catechism: it is taught to children from kindergarten and repeatedly, to help them acquire good habits of thinking and acting.

It is a consensual dogma - whoever asks questions about it, who dispels the slightest doubt, is considered mad or evil.

But above all, and this is the clear sign of a vigorous belief and certainly not of a rational science: the passion for nature makes us accept all that was challenged by almighty individualism - personal responsibility, debt imposed on descendants, duties towards the community.

It is therefore in the name of this immanent and pagan religion that we are reintegrating the indispensable dimensions of existence, which previously were taken into account and cultivated by Christianity.

The new ecological religion is a form of post-modern pantheism. Nature becomes the object of a cult, more or less proven. Mother earth becomes a kind of pagan goddess, and not only among indigenous Bolivians, among Europeans as well. So much so that Pope Francis speaks today of "our mother the earth", in a Christian sense of course, but leaving open the ambiguity that allows the link with contemporary beliefs.

We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble. Disaffection with dogmas, or with a decreed and certain truth, brings about the triumph of morality.

She is now alone in the world. We see a philanthropy unfold, a love for humanity directly inherited from that of the Gospel, but without the foundations.

Late modernity takes up the Gospel, but stripping it of all transcendence. For contemporary American political scientist Joseph Bottum, today a disfigured Protestant morality without transcendence dominates morality across the Atlantic. Membership of [US Mainline] Protestantism has decreased from 50% to 4% in half a century, and the deadly sins are: intolerance, power, militarism, oppression.

In other words, a degraded Gospel produced the decolonial current - we must add: after having produced communism in its time.

We remember that in pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose morality.

This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce it, and possibly enforces it through insults and ostracism.

Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. She dominates the television sets. She inhabits all the cinematography of this time. She rules in schools and in yards, in families.

When it needs to be straightened out or given a good direction, it is the governing elite that does it.

The European rulers represent in this respect the tabernacle of the clericature.

In short, we have returned to a typical situation of paganism: we have a state morality.

Given the powerful winds of change blowing against it, Delsol bravely faces the key question: "What becomes, what will become of the Church without Christendom?"

The "radical upheaval" under way has led to resignation by many leaders in the Church; "disarmed in every way, [they] cease to claim lost power and even repent of having used and abused it"; [they] are now silent and discreet apostles".

"A humble testimony" is in order - anything else is "propaganda", which is totally in "bad taste". 

[Therefore,] "reduced to the situation of silent witnesses, Christians today are doomed to become soldiers in a lost war. Their fights, especially - and these are the main ones since they concern principles and virtues - fights on societal issues, lead nowhere and moreover have no chance of succeeding.

Christians who protest tirelessly to try to prevent rogue laws on abortion or assisted reproduction can only be successful by first implementing a spiritual revolution.

Convert people to Christianity, to the intrinsic dignity of each embryo, and then you can abolish abortion.

Wanting to do it in the opposite direction would be like trying to impose confession on non-Catholic peoples: terrorist nonsense. Belief and adherence to principles precedes acceptance of laws.

Far from wanting to conquer the world, from now on, like the Jews, we are going to worryabout living and surviving - and that will be enough.

When one cannot be a power, one can be an example, said Camus.

Modernity, in fact, is probably both a rejection of Christian power (challenge to societal laws),

and a revival and adaptation of Christian principles (especially social ones).

In all its dimensions, modernity is established against Christianity as a civilization, and not against Christianity. It only challenges the power of religion and not religion itself, as Tocqueville wrote [of the French Revolution]:

"It was much less as a religious doctrine than as a political institution that Christianity had kindled this furious hatred".

For most of us, the past has become a foreign land - and I will add, unwanted. After the adventures of the last two centuries, [...]  it is no longer Christendom leaving us - it is we who are leaving it. Why?

Delsol's reasons include that we don't want Chrisitianity to be taken as an ideology. Also, "because we have given up the reign of force", our mission must be as witnesses rather than as conquistadors. 

Probably it would be better if we were only silent witnesses, and ultimately secret agents of God, since despite the normative and philosophical inversions, Christianity is still, in its way, the spirit of the place.

Renouncing Christendom is not a painful sacrifice. The experience of our fathers brings us a certainty: our business is not to produce societies where "the Gospel governs the States", but rather, to use the words of Saint-Exupéry, to "walk very slowly towards a fountain”.

It is clear Delsol would not give any weight to the attempts in the United States to develop a Catholic  "integralist" platform as a way of involving Christian principles into civic life.

At the end of her lecture Delsol, considered questions from the audience. The discussion touched upon the need to examine pagan life in Athens and Rome to grasp the spiritual culture appearing most prominently in Western societies.   

However, she believed that the concept of human dignity will remain important, without its assessment of human value being the prerogative solely of the world of politics. 

I think that about human dignity, there is a paradox, because it is a Christian concept, but the world of modernity wants to keep this concept:

The reception of the Holocaust in Europe proves clearly, I think, that the concept of human dignity is very strong. You don’t have any sign of that, though, in China or Vietnam with the Holocaust.

People are indifferent, you see. There is a will to keep it but in another place it is abandoned - abortion for example. There is a paradox - we would like to keep it but also abandon it. But it is a little hope [for Christians] to see that it is important to keep something.

Discussion leader Dr. Dariusz Karłowicz said that what surprised him about much of the controversy in Italy about immigration is that supporters did not based their arguments on human dignity but on utilitarian arguments.

That was absolutely surprising, because the concept of the relative dignity of the pagan world was based on the utilitarian category. If you were good for the polis - you were okay, if not - you disappear.

As to the possibility of stopping the secularisation process in the world, Delsol was adamant that there is no way to reverse what has happened.

I don’t see any chance to stop it [because] everything is based on beliefs. There are no beliefs for this. The young generation doesn’t understand at all our explanations, they don’t have the same beliefs.

Everything is going to be paganism in lots of aspects. You will have a sort of cosmotheism, ecology with religion, some gods will appear, wisdom, epicurean wisdom, stoicism... But everything will be secularised, I think.

A further question was on the role that believers will have in this new world. Delsol replied:

They have to be witnesses. I think that believers can’t argue to speak. I think the speech is finished. We have to live and to live well. We have to be witnesses only. There is no other possibility now, I think.

Clarification was asked for in this way - Has the communicative element in society been destroyed? Are there no arguments that may be shared? Delsol gave her reply firmly:

No, because we have been speaking for centuries and centuries. Now people are tired of hearing us. They don’t believe us, it’s not the time to speak. It’s the time to exist. To act.

This question was asked again from another angle:

One of the features of cosmotheism is the idea of complete unity with the world, which closes us to transcendence. Can we find contemporary philosophy attempts to reopen to transcendence and rediscover monotheism?

The reply was as before:

I think we have to evangelize as in the beginning… to take people one by one and convince them. We can’t do anything now. I don’t know what else we can do. We have to convince, evangelize individually.

Karłowicz agreed with her but he added that from his study of the ancient world it occurs to him that "paganism raises many questions, which it can’t answer itself. So Christianity is a proper answer. It’s not a question of rhetoric that you mentioned, it’s a question of existential experience, the problem which cannot be fulfilled in any other way."

In turn, Delsol agreed with Karłowicz that what is occurring at this point of history is an attempt to transform the whole Western civilisation founded on Christianity. Karłowicz's view was this:

Today's version of the cosmic religion [...] offers the construction of a new fate and civilisation and it [demands] strong dogmatic proof of faith, its moral codex. This new religion considers it's truth as universal and good. And that’s not intended to deal only with gentle testimony, but has a strong ambition to win in the struggle of political and civilisation victory.

And it’s not only about political power, it’s about human souls to be converted to the truth.

However, it remains to be seen whether this post-Christian and post-Enlightenment program will embed itself thoroughly in the culturally dominant societies on the world stage, or whether it will collapse as the Soviet hegemony did in Eastern Europe as the tide of public disillusionment rose.

Secondly, Christians have faced reversals and persecutions over the centuries, weathering the storms by the power of God - "And remember! I will be with you always, yes, even until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

To conclude, in so many ways we see that traditional Christian culture is at an end. To make a new beginning we need to take Chantal Delsol's words to heart when she urges her listeners to "live and live well" - "We have to be witnesses only. There is no other possibility now, I think."

💢 See Rod Dreher's response to Professor Delsol's lecture here.

💢 Useful resources for preparing a Christian response to the new totalitarianism are the books by the prescient Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Society (2017), and Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020).

💢 Go here to read the thoughts of the future Pope Benedict on the prospects for the Church given the adverse cultural environment of secular Europe.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

What Catholics believe about Mary

To understand something of what Catholics believe about Mary, listen to this carol and absorb its words. This modern piece is called The Shepherd's Carol - "We stood on the Hills, Lady."

The King's Singers capture beautifully the atmosphere of the first Christmas. Listen and watch.

We find the carol addresses Mary, but the focus is on the Christ: "I am the Lord's servant. May it be done to me as you have said", she told the angel Gabriel. And so we can praise Mary, in all her humility, for accepting the role of mother of God so that Elizabeth could hail her with: "Blessed are you among women!" 

Here is the text of the poem by English-born Tasmanian poet and playwright Clive Sansom (died 1981) that was transformed into song by the music of choral maestro Bob Chilcott.

The Shepherd's Carol

We stood on the hills, Lady,

Our day’s work done,

Watching the frosted meadows

That winter had won.

The evening was calm, Lady,

The air so still,

Silence more lovely than music

Folded the hill.

There was a star, Lady,

Shone in the night,

Larger than Venus it was

And bright, so bright.

Oh, a voice from the sky, Lady,

It seemed to us then

Telling of God being born

In the world of men.

And so we have come, Lady,

Our day’s work done,

Our love, our hopes, ourselves,

We give to your son.

 Another poem that is a favourite for meditative consideration at Christmas is this by T S Eliot:

Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Eliot's work is always complex, but a little study bears great fruit for the heart. I tapped into LitCharts to help understand Eliot's revelation as to how death is also linked to Jesus' birth. There are also many analyses of this poem on YouTube.

Elsewhere we read:

In the last twelve lines we learn that the kings were deeply affected and changed by their experience. The birth of Christ heralds the start of a new order and new truth, and yet the kings have to return to their kingdoms and to ‘an alien people clutching their gods’.

 Go here, low on the web page, to listen to a recitation of this poem.

Enjoy the insights music and voice can offer as we make our spiritual journey through this rich seasonal landscape.

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Jesus is not fiction like Santa Claus

A modern interpretation of a true event                                 From David Lindsley's Birth of Jesus Christ

A Christmas wager is renewed! We'll learn more about that later. But first...

Christmas is a time to go back to the basics about why we celebrate. The key Christian understanding of Christmas is this, that God so loved humanity that he sent his one and only son, who is part of the godhead - the one God - so that we might not perish entrapped in evil but by knowing God and believing in him share abundant life with him for eternity. 

This coming of God to earth was done by taking on the human nature of the man called Jesus, raised in the town of Nazareth, in Israel, so that there was one man with two natures, the human and the divine. Jesus showed in many ways, but mainly by his curing the sick and raising some who had died, that he was God's "anointed one" - in Greek Christos - promised to the Hebrews as their redeemer and saviour. In history, Jesus is unique in that he claimed to be God and demonstrated by his actions that he is God. 

Despite the amazing event that is the first Christmas, and the subsequent demonstration of the love of God, in what seems a remarkably short time, the young members of the Christ-inspired Western civilisation, have forgotten or wish not to acknowledge, that the existence of Jesus is a historical fact, a real person of history, not of legend, a person who every self-respecting person needs to make a judgment as to whether he was a lunatic, a fraud or truly God. When we accept the third of the "trilemma" we are led to freely surrender our will - "not my will but your's be done" - knowing that in return we are offered life in to the full.

Certainty about the historicity of Jesus led John Dickson, an author, historian, and an academic at Oxford University,  to make an unusual wager. He explains:

In 2014, in a rush of blood to the head, I offered a cheeky bet, first on Twitter and then in an article for [Australia's] ABC: I will eat a page out of my Bible if someone can find a full professor of Ancient History, Classics, or New Testament in any real university in the world who argues that Jesus never lived. My Bible has been safe these last seven years. Professors of philosophy, sure. professors of English literature or German language, yes. But no professor in the relevant fields has yet been named.

Maybe such a scholar exists somewhere. There are thousands to choose from. So I have the first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (which recounts Jesus’s birth) primed. I’m willing to rip it out, cut it up, and eat it with my Christmas pudding. But in the meantime, I will be lamenting not just the growing scepticism in Australia toward Christianity but also our declining historical literacy.

He is referring to the results just out of a study on the beliefs of Australians, the findings of which obviously depress him given the knowledge available. Dickson holds a PhD in Ancient History from Australia's Macquarie University and is a Visiting Academic (2016-2022) in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. He is also the presenter of the podcast Undeceptions.

The study by the Church-linked NCLS Research team found:

In late 2021, only half of Australians (49%) view Jesus as a real person who actually lived. Nearly a quarter (23%) of Australians see Jesus as a mythical or fictional character. Around one in three (29%) don't know. 

The age gap in historical literacy was clear: 

Six in 10 Australians aged 65 years and over understand Jesus to be a real person who actually lived. With decreasing age, this figure declines to only four in 10 Australians aged between 18 and 35 years. Nearly the same proportion of this younger age group (36%) said they did not know about Jesus. Similar proportions across age groups (19% to 25%) claimed that Jesus was a mythical or fictional character. 

Women are willing to acknowledge some depth of understanding about Jesus:

Women were more likely than men to say that Jesus was a real person who actually lived (52% vs 46%). Men (27%) were much more likely than women (17%) to assert that Jesus was mythical or fictional. Similar proportions said they did not know (31% women; 27% men).

Dickson responds to the depressing statistics:

This is, obviously, terrible news for Christianity in Australia. One of the unique selling points of the Christian faith — in the minds of believers — is that it centres on real events that occurred in time and space. Christianity is not based on someone’s solitary dream or private vision. It isn’t merely a divine dictation in a holy book that has to be believed with blind faith. Jesus was a real person, “crucified under Pontius Pilate”, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. It seems many Australians really don’t agree.

But, frankly, this new survey is also bad news for historical literacy. This reported majority view is not shared by the overwhelming consensus of university historians specialising in the Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century. If Jesus is a “mythical or fictional character”, that news has not yet reached the standard compendiums of secular historical scholarship.

Take the famous single-volume Oxford Classical Dictionary. Every classicist has it on their bookshelf. It summarises scholarship on all things Greek and Roman in just over 1,700 pages. There is a multiple page entry on the origins of Christianity that begins with an assessment of what may be reliably known about Jesus of Nazareth. Readers will discover that no doubts at all are raised about the basic facts of Jesus’s life and death.

Or take the much larger Cambridge Ancient History in 14 volumes. Volume 10 covers the “Augustan Period”, right about the time that Tiberius, Livia, Pliny the Elder, and — yes — Jesus all lived. It has a sizeable chapter on the birth of Christianity. The entry begins with a couple of pages outlining what is known of Jesus’ life and death, including his preaching of the kingdom of God, his fraternising with sinners, and so on. No doubts are raised about the authenticity of these core elements.

Not wanting to labour the point, but we could also turn to the compendium of Jewish history, the Cambridge History of Judaism in four volumes. Volume 3 covers the “Early Roman Period”. Several different chapters refer to Jesus in passing as an interesting figure of Jewish history. One chapter — 60 pages in length — focuses entirely on Jesus and is written by two leading scholars, neither of whom has qualms dismissing bits of the New Testament when they think the evidence is against it.

The chapter offers a first-rate account of what experts currently think about the historical Jesus. His teaching, fame as a healer, openness to sinners, selection of “the twelve” (apostles), prophetic actions (like cleansing the temple), clashes with elites, and, of course, and his death on a cross are all treated as beyond reasonable doubt. The authors do not tackle the resurrection (unsurprisingly), but they do acknowledge, as a matter of historical fact, that the first disciples of Jesus “were absolutely convinced that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised and was Lord and that numerous of them were certain that he had appeared to them”. 

There is a reason for this consensus. When you apply the normal rules of history to Jesus of Nazareth, this figure is plainly a historical one not a mythical one. The early and diverse sources we have put his existence (and much more) beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps only 49 per cent of Australians reckon “Jesus was a real person”, but I wager [again] that 99 per cent of professional ancient historians — atheist, Christian, Jewish, or whatever — would agree with this minority view.

Given the scepticism about Christian beliefs that erupts every Christmas with articles querying this or that element of the description of Jesus' birth, making little distinction between the essentials such as the miracle of Mary's birth of Jesus without losing her virginity, and the peripheral, such as the account of a star guiding wise foreigners to the place of the nativity, and the general lack of a Christian education to counter that media spin, it is no wonder that the post-Christian young people repeat what they have read or heard.

A linked finding from NCLS Research was that: "Some 22% of Australians reported attending religious services in 2019; falling to 16% in 2020, and returning to 21% in 2021." Though latest figures show an increase in regular attendance from 18 per cent in 2016, they could be affected by the religious activity of non-Christians. 

So Dickson's "cheeky bet" still stands as a challenge to all and sundry to find a reputable scholar in the relevant fields who does not acknowledge the historical reality of Jesus Christ, who was active, according to Luke's account of the life and works of Christ, under the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and  Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. Secular historians Josephus (Jewish) and Tacitus (Roman) add their weight in detailing Jesus' life and crucifixion. 

Enjoy Christmas with the knowledge that the baby we remember at this time was a real person and remains a real person who is both man and God, someone we can talk to, knowing he understands us and has the divine power as our creator to raise us in our weakness and to fill us with his spirit of love.

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Christmas 2021: What's the good news?

Victory for humanity in history will come from outside history                  Photo by Burkay Canatar

The sweep of history tells us that there is no victory to be had, that humanity is never going to live in triumphant enchantment, that all the striving and strife is going to end in defeat. This view is supported by the Christian perspective, that “the world in its present form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31). It also underlies the stance taken in his works by JRR Tolkien, an authority on world literatures, and the writer of  The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

“I am a Christian”, Tolkien wrote, “and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” 

However, any victory for humanity in history will come from outside history, writes Conor Sweeney, an author and academic, in a Christmas-time essay offering solace to all those "tested by a pandemic and escalating social and political upheavals and polarisations that show little sign of abating". He concedes that even in the Church there is little relief.

The good news is this: "I still believe that it remains true that there is an anchor, one existential touchpoint that still has the capacity to ground and transform us when all else seems vanity, corruption, and quicksand."

Sweeney spells it out: 

[...] it’s not an idea but only a relation to a person and an event that can save us. Amidst all the noise and confusion, the only real anchor that remains within our possession that cannot be taken from us, either by ruler or cleric, the only one strong enough to see us through any crisis, is Christ.

He is talking about the Christ of Christmas, God made man:

By “Christ”, I don’t mean the God who is “out there” to whom we might pray or bargain with from time to time for deliverance or for justification for our endeavours. I don’t mean a man who is the best moral example and inspiration there ever was. I don’t mean the Christ of the “system” or the “cause” — an extrinsic Christ who is merely a capstone or afterthought to an anthropology that wants to make “nature” or “substance” determinative; the bourgeois Christ who supports the Empire, who golfs with the Pharaoh, and who underwrites our belief that conquest, security, and wealth are next to godliness; the “woke” Christ, the “ally” who affirms my expressivist search for authenticity and emancipation (and forces everyone else to affirm it).

Rather, I mean Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Crucified, who is only truly encountered and recognised in immersion in the font and the breaking of the bread. I mean that Christ who by baptism and the Eucharist becomes the personal and existential measure of my entire existence, destroying death and casting down the idols that I surround myself with. I mean the Christ who now “lives in me” (Galatians 2:20) so that my existence and my relationships are no longer natural, neutral, secular, or autonomous.

I mean the Christ “who loved me and gave himself for me”, the one who calls me to join him not just in his Resurrection but on the Cross; to join my flesh to his and so to enter into the cosmic battle between good and evil and to have that battleground become the new theatre of my existence. I mean all of this according to a realism in which all of this is really — that is to say, sacramentally — true; true, even when both world and Church go down the toilet. 

The "theatre of my existence" recalls the option each of has in life to live either according to the demands of a mundane self-directed "ego-drama" or to those within a heightened and meaningful "theo-drama". For more on this aspect of the challenge that Christmas offers us, go to this video. 

The breathtaking wonder that Christmas engenders is highlighted in Sweeney's soaring words:

To be sure, the Christ of baptism is also the Cosmic Christ, the source, archetype, and fulfilment of created being and the pinnacle of human wisdom. He is also the Christ of the Beatitudes, who sides with victims, calls out oppression and oppressors, preaches justice and love of the poor, who is thoroughly consistent with the ethical radicalism begun in the Old Covenant.

But all of this flows from and is contingent on who he is as the Son of God who comes do the will of his Father — the Father who wills that “all men be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4) that they be forgiven, sanctified, redeemed so that they may abide in his love. He is the Son whose primary mission is to pour God’s love into our hearts by the Spirit (Romans 5:5). Why? So that we might abide with him eternally in his communion with the Father and the Spirit. This mission of love, accomplished in his Passion and death, is communicated to us by water and Spirit (John 3:5), filling us with a divine love that allows us a share in Christ’s relation to the Father as Son.

The point here is that by baptism we are existentially and sacramentally “attached” to divinity. Animated by a Christological and eschatological current pulsing in our hearts and through our bodies, we set out on a life of conversion, holiness, and mission. But without connection to this current drawing us to its source, any good we may seek to do, even in the name of Christ, will become vanity and idolatry: “If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned” (John 15:6).

And so the Christ of baptism tells us: “abide in my love” (John 15:9); “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). This Christ prays to the Father that “the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). Accordingly, he exhorts us to “worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24), and says “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15), and “the truth will set you free” (John 8:31). He instructs us to “Go and sin no more” (John 8:11). He says that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). 

 In short, without an ongoing personal and existential abiding in and attachment to Christ, how easily the best can become the worst. How easily the Christ of baptism can become the Christ of institution, empire, or zeitgeist. 

To be attentive to the Christ of baptism, however, is to realise that everything that we “do” is just more flailing, more noise, more ideology, or more virtue signalling if it’s not informed, shaped, and purified by the theological perception of and participation in the victory that has already begun in our flesh.

But by this I don’t mean to present baptism as some magical solution to our crisis. In fact, it turns out to be quite the opposite: why, after all, does St. Paul tell us to “put on the whole armour of God” — the “breastplate of righteousness”, the “equipment of the gospel of peace”, the “helmet of salvation”, and the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:13-17)? For baptism compels a reckoning with the deepest and darkest depths and costliness of the long defeat, insofar as through it we join Christ in his epic confrontation with the principalities and powers. If baptism is sharing in Christ’s relation to the Father, it’s also sharing in his battle with the Evil One.

Here we have it in Sweeney's words - where the "good news" of Christmas arises: 

Without a doubt, of course, in the most absolute terms, the gift of the Son is good news. The incarnation, death, and resurrection by which we are elected, adopted, and redeemed, and bought with the price of the death of God’s own Son, has unveiled and shattered evil’s monopoly on life. It directly attacked the social mechanisms and givens of the ancient world with a message of love offered to each and every person. It created what we now take to be the person, the self, or the individual, an infinitely dignified microcosm of the humanum [totality of humanity] destined for eternal life. 

But we are talking about Christmas 2021. Sweeney examines how evil fights back: 

In plotting its revenge, evil, it would appear, is resourceful, for how better to masquerade as truth than to adopt and pervert the vital truths and instincts of Christianity? “The most powerful anti-Christian movement”, states Girard, “is the one that takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be ‘revolutionary’ now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor.”

The new evil is not the bad guy dressed in black with a scar over one eye, but expressive individualism and emotivism in extremis, the progeny of freedom and desire unbound, bathed in the radiant light of the moral imperative of kindness, driven by a strange and perverse mix of capitalist and Marxist modes.

These are the “apocalyptic” conditions within which we must contest. For the Christian, time itself is ultimately apocalyptic, which is why we are forever pilgrims in this world. After all, says Girard ominously, “Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure.” Baptism places us directly into the centre of this paradoxical struggle. Rather than being surprised and overly distressed by crisis, perhaps we should count ourselves all the more blessed by the samples and glimpses of joy and peace that we do receive.

Children, our own or others', are one of the blessings from God that stand centre stage at this holy time. An example is the way that the joy that Christmas encapsulates seems to fill the heart of Ruth Jackson, who last Christmas was agonising over the loss of her first child by miscarriage, but this Christmas is delighting in a baby daughter:

The Bible begins with a poetic picture of creation. The garden of Eden is painted as an idyllic place where God draws close to his people. The subsequent narrative arc hints at the destruction of this creation and the damaged relationship between humanity and God. When we arrive at the final book of the Bible, we see hints of Eden’s restoration (Revelation 22).

Revelation 21:4 epitomises this future hope: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” The God who weeps is portrayed here as so tender that his own hand will wipe the tears from our eyes.

We named our baby girl Eden to serve as a reminder that loss doesn’t have the final word. The name Eden assures us that no matter how broken life seems, there is always hope and ultimate restoration.

When Eden grows and inevitably falls over, I don’t imagine I’ll explain to her why she’s fallen — I’ll likely just pick her up and hold her. Likewise, I’m not sure the Christmas narrative necessarily provides a perfect answer to why we’re suffering, but it does reveal a God who picks us up and holds us close. Who weeps with us, who died for us, and promises that this pain is not forever.  

Read all of Jackson's Christmas musing, "Joy to the world?", here.

Read the full Sweeney article here.

Read, too, this Australian piece on Christmas 2021.  

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War on porn needed. It's a public health crisis!

All so accessible, porn is messing up minds and lives.                                   Photo: Julia M Cameron 

Billie Eilish is the latest to highlight the intense disturbance pornography can cause in young people's minds, in fact, in their life. She said on a radio show she had been addicted to watching porn from the age of 11. It gave her nightmares and spoiled her first dating adventures.

“I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” [the] singer said, saying it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys”.

“I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she added, saying she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive.

The Guardian's report continues:

Eilish, who was homeschooled in Los Angeles and has seven Grammy awards, is known for her often dark lyrics. In the ballad Male Fantasy on her second album Happier Than Ever, she sings about being home alone and distracting herself with pornography as she recalls a broken relationship.

She is now angry at herself for thinking it was OK to watch so much porn.

“The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she said.

An online conference on pornography that we will garner more information from in a moment heard that "women do use porn, but often to explore what might be expected of them sexually". In other words, like Eilish, women try to learn how they can comply with the wishes of their male partner.

 Eilish started out in her career preferring baggy clothes, but has since done photo shoots for fashion magazines drawing attention to her body, which shows how messed up young people's thinking can be about how to express one's identity. 

Age ratings and regulated viewing exist in most Western countries up to the present time. This form of censorship and regulation of what individuals can and cannot do is accepted as necessary for the mental well-being of young people especially. Similarly, we have viewer advisories for TV shows to protect viewers from scenes of death or suffering and a lot more.

It's time that pornography be brought fully under control as evidence mounts as to its links to violence against women and to how it perpetuates the West's "hypersexualised culture [that] victimises girls".

Britannica.com states:

The word pornography, derived from the Greek porni (“prostitute”) and graphein (“to write”), was originally defined as any work of art or literature depicting the life of prostitutes.

It goes on:

Pornography [is] representation of sexual behaviour in books, pictures, statues, films, and other media that is intended to cause sexual excitement. The distinction between pornography (illicit and condemned material) and erotica (which is broadly tolerated) is largely subjective and reflects changing community standards. 

The argument that the participants in the acting part of making pornographic material consent to treatment that is inhumane and unbalanced is deeply flawed. The weakness is that any reasonable person would recognise that what is done in hardcore porn is degrading, violent and abusive. Human dignity demands that no person should endure such treatment. Period. 

British anti-porn campaigner Julie Bindel wrote in the Observer in October:

Tackling porn culture is clearly a key part of tackling sexual violence towards women. I have campaigned to end the sex trade for decades, and am well aware of its role in the sexual exploitation of women.

Bindel reported on an international conference that had just been held online:

Taking On Porn: Developing Resilience and Resistance through Sex Education was organised by Culture Reframed, a US-based NGO founded by the academic and anti-porn activist Gail Dines. Part of it focused on how to help parents to have conversations with their children about what Dines calls the “public health crisis of the digital age”. 

Inspired partly by demand from the UK educational world, the conference is responding to concerns from many parents about “pro-porn” programmes running in some schools since relationship and sex education became mandatory in September 2020.

Dines points to one teacher guide that puts forward the argument, “Porn is entertainment, like a film, not a ‘how to’ guide. However, that doesn’t mean people can’t learn things from porn they might not learn in other places. Just as movies can sometimes contain valuable insights, so can porn.” 

But, as Dines points out, today’s online content is nothing like the now defunct Playboy magazine. In short, it has become more sadistic and extreme. One influential study found that about 90% of the most commonly viewed heterosexual porn scenes contained aggression and violence towards women and girls.

Online pornography has become the primary form of sex education for young people, and the average age for kids to start accessing it is 11. Porn sites get more visits each month than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. 

“Many sex ed teachers feel ill equipped to tackle the issue of porn use among their students,” says Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. For Dines, [...] porn has become the leading form of sex education globally [...]. She believes that pornography acts as a kind of cultural script, which exploits women and at the same time limits their free sexual expression and pleasure. 

Parents have been telling [the NGO] Culture Reframed about how concerned they feel about their children’s viewing of porn, with one saying: “My daughter was bullied into sending a sext by her boyfriend, who then sent it to his friends. Culture Reframed’s online resources not only gave us the ability to help her, but also gave us insights into the ways our hypersexualised culture victimises girls.” 

 Another expert who took part in the conference was Tom Farr, a UK-based campaigner against male violence. Bindel reports his contribution in this way:

“Porn has become the de facto form of sex education for many young men and boys,” says Farr. “They have unfettered access to the most degrading, violent and abusive content imaginable at the click of a button. What are the individual and societal implications of a generation of young people groomed by exposure to hardcore porn?”

The exploitation of women using money as the means of entrapment has the same characteristics as the exploitation of farm workers in many parts of the world; many vulnerable people taken advantage of for the generation of wealth for the few.

Bindel concludes:

Like other feminist campaigners against the sex trade, Dines has been accused of being an anti-sex moralist who wishes to censor sexual expression, but, she says, nothing could be further from the truth. “Any progressive, humanitarian approach should focus on dismantling the porn industry,” says Dines, “and not the continuation of its insidious commercialisation of abuse and misery.”

Create the culture before the crisis

Rebecca Nicholson, a columnist for the Observer and the Guardian continues the conversation about what to do to protect young people from porn, pointing out that it is readily accessible and socially acceptable. She provides this information:

The statistics about the age at which children first see pornography online, and the speed at which watching porn becomes normalised, particularly for teenage boys, make for grim reading. In 2019, the British Board of Film Classification commissioned a survey that suggested 51% of 11 to 13-year-olds had seen pornography online. In the majority of cases, this was accidental, and for younger children, in particular, it was traumatic. The study also revealed a disparity between what parents and children understood about the culture of sexual content: only 25% of the parents surveyed thought their child had seen pornography online, while 63% of those parents’ children said that they had seen it.

 The facts are plain, whether they are palatable or not: pornography is easy to access, and is very likely to be seen by those far below any age restrictions, which are hard, if not impossible, to enforce. Also last week, the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, urged parents to “talk early, and talk often” to children about pornography and sexual harassment. She acknowledged that the conversation can be hard, but advised that parents and carers should “create the culture before the crisis. Children want to talk to their parents and carers about this. We know this because they’ve told us,” she said.

Immediately, therefore, parents should talk to their children about the dangers of watching pornography in order to preserve their balance, to answer questions on what might be the stuff of nightmares, and to prevent dysfunction as dating begins. 

Parents must also limit use of smart devices in their household. In this, it is imperative that parents model their own ability to disengage from the internet and to engage with family members.  

Arising from pushback by pro-porn advocates to what was in effect Eilish's plea for collective action on porn, Nicholson also points out that society does have a role. She writes:

There was a small ripple of backlash to what Eilish had to say, from pro-porn advocates who argued that she was treating all pornography as the same “bad” sort. I’m not sure that she should have had to assess the ethics of types of sexual content at that age, but what matters is that we listen to what she has to say, at 19, about her experiences of easily accessible and socially acceptable viewing of pornography. 

How could a child of 11 or thereabouts make any kind of judgments when seeing shocking things done to women on porn sites? Nicholson appears to add her voice to the clamor for statutory action to limit accessibility online - in the absence of self-imposed checks on access - and to rein in the industry for the sake of the women being abused, even if those women have given consent to that abuse. The similarity of situations to that of violence in the home is compelling.

Ω See also:

High screen use, low life satisfaction

Tech giants sell spiritual opium 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.