Abortion is the Sacrament of Trashworld
This week the State of Ohio voted by a nearly ten-point margin to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right. Ohio is not a far-left blue state like California or New York, it is a conservative red state that Donald Trump won by almost the same margin in 2020. The results of this ballot amendment have shocked many in the pro-life movement.
It should not.
For decades Pro-Life, Inc. and most of conservative evangelicalism has pushed this single issue in isolation from all the rest of modern American life. They have operated as though everything else in American life can remain the same so long as we stop murdering babies. This has always been nonsense.
All of our modern way of life is structured around the murder of tiny children. Consumerist, managerial, liberal society requires all of humanity to be deracinated, stripped of particular, historic ways of life, and every single person reduced to bare individuals. The order that God created for humanity, to have marriage, family, and children, the very necessities for a civilization to function and perpetuate itself is now a consumer lifestyle choice, among a myriad of others. There is no marriage as nearly all of human existence has known it. Now it is merely a legal compact for two adults to live and share property together, to be dissolved whenever there is no longer mutual consent.
Abortion allows women to be unshackled from their telos, their divinely-ordained, unique purpose—to bear and rear children. Now, they can be bare economic units consuming whatever they produce, and free to pursue whatever way of life they desire, even to become “men.” The basis of our entire society is the freedom to become whatever you want, created realities be damned. You don’t want to be uniquely bestowed with the power to bring new human life into the world? Then we can kill that life whenever it is created in your body.
Abortion is the sacrament of this total freedom and atomized individualism. It is the barbaric ritual-killing, blood must be shed so you can be free to enjoy brunch and swiping right. The entirety of American society, and especially what the American views as its highest good, requires abortion be held sacrosanct.
The mainstream evangelical Christian, the bulwark that gives the Pro-Life movement its energy and foot soldiers does not view American society this way at all. It believes that the consumerist, liberal paradise is just fine, so long as we don’t chop up babies. They believe we can still have our feminism, our “strong, independent women,” and a country that is reduced to an economic zone, so long as abortion is banned.
The end of Roe v. Wade has revealed what folly this is. The rot within American society is deep. Much, much deeper than most are willing to understand. You could see this even as early as 2015, when Donald Trump was asked about criminalizing abortion and punishing women who sought to murder their children. Every major figure within Pro-Life, Inc. raced to condemn Trump as quickly as possible. Their entire strategy was built around the comical fantasy that women who seek to have their child dismembered in the womb were victims who had no idea what they were doing.
They embraced the feminist frame, blaming all abortion squarely upon men. Whatever they did, they would not confront feminism or the underlying economic and social conditions that require the industrial-scale slaughter of babies. No, they dare not touch these things, because they are the idols that we tolerate within the church. We have bought the lie that women and men are exactly the same except for a few bits of hardware. We are terrified of saying that most women should be wives and mothers and not pursue careers. That would limit freedom, and well, we cannot have that.
But until Christians are willing to confront the revolutionary restructuring of human society over the last hundred years, industrialized infanticide is here to stay. You can put up as many billboards of beautiful smiling infants that say “choose life” as you want, but the social, economic, and spiritual forces that drive the slaughter of millions of babies are not going to go away. Only when feminism and radical individualism are seen as satanic ideologies will we ever gain any ground.
But our current way of life, which I have called “trashworld” in
The Boniface Option, is both doomed for destruction and must be destroyed. No civilization can exist like this forever. Not in the temporal sense nor the spiritual. God has created a world with order, just as He created a world with gravity. Nearly all of mankind throughout history could not live the way we do, even if they wanted to, because they lacked the hyper-efficient global economy that produces the unfathomable wealth and standard of living we currently enjoy.
This affluence—which we foolishly believe is the baseline for human existence—is what allows us to indulge in civilization-destroying monstrosity. The natural order still exists. Gravity still exists. And the wealth we enjoy allows us to stand over the edge of the cliff like Wile E. Coyote, suspended in mid-air safe so long as we do not look down.
Looking down, however, is inevitable.
And a society like ours will not continue on forever. There will be judgment.
The question is whether the beginning of the unraveling of a great civilization like ours will provoke repentance, first in evangelical pulpits and churches, and then throughout the nation, or if God will allow what we deserve to befall us.
Our hope should be in the grace of God, that He will move powerfully to fundamentally transform our entire way of life. It should not be in “one, weird legislative trick” to keep Trashworld going but just without baby murder. The ax must go to the root and not glance about the edges. If the revolutionary change to our way of life that has occurred in the last hundred years is to be turned back, it must be by an equally powerful counter-revolution, a counter-revolution led by the people of God.
