Larry Chapp

A shocking new low from @mfjlewis, who is now hiding behind the “It was a joke” dodge. I can’t imagine even contemplating such a joke, even about my worst enemy, in his hour of suffering (and at the very moment when thousands of others have lost, and are losing, their homes)

Doctors who perform abortions or assist suicides are wicked. But let’s stop pretending they are the only or chief villains in this context. They couldn’t do these things if there weren’t people who request abortion and assisted suicide. They couldn’t do them unless a critical mass of the citizens of modern liberal democracies approved of these practices. Let’s stop pretending that those who request and approve of these things are innocent victims who are merely being manipulated by others (doctors, politicians, media, etc.). Modern people have made an idol of individual choice. They have made an idol of pleasure. They have made an idol of bodily and material wellbeing. It is because of their attachment to these idols that they regard restraint, suffering, and unhappiness in this life as the greatest of evils. Hence their approval of abortion and assisted suicide. Those who uphold Christian morality rightly condemn these practices, but too often they are afraid to criticize those guilty of the underlying idolatries that uphold the practices. That is why they keep losing. They attempt to treat the symptom while leaving untouched the underlying spiritual disease. They play the liberal-democratic game of flattering the mob, pretending that the people will reject abortion and assisted suicide if only they realize that evil elites are manipulating them. But the mob knows what it wants, and the elites can manipulate it only because they too know what the mob wants. Those who would uphold Christian morality need to return to the frank but charitable severity of the Fathers and the saints, who sternly warned the people that those who commit acts like abortion and self-euthanasia (and not merely those who assist them in committing them) are guilty of grave sin and in danger of damnation. They need at long last to wake up to the reality that they cannot effectively resist these evils by confining themselves to the soft moral concepts agreeable to the modern liberal democratic sensibility (rights, dignity, equality, victimhood, etc.) – and, indeed, that these evils cannot be defeated without a wholesale re-Christianization of the West.