Our Allies in the War to Come
by Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine:
As the Great Wall of Chinese communism begins to show signs of crumbling into a long overdue dilapidation, a billion people will be readier than they have ever been to hear the Good News of Christ. At the same time they will meet the immense force of the anti-evangelist, the advertiser, the marketer of western lusts and madness. Whatever good ideas the west has had to give have long been given already, or are so bound up with the Christian faith that you cannot have one without the other. That is regardless of what secularists want so pathetically to believe, they with their touching superstitions of universal and steady human progress; as if a quicker internet search engine meant a wiser and more thoughtful man. What the west mainly gives now is pornographic in the broadest sense. Ours is a political economy of whores, by whores, and for whores, bidding fair to wipe all genuinely human cultures off the face of the earth. If you believe I exaggerate, open a high school reader or watch five minutes of television.
God has, however, endowed the Christian evangelist with two tremendously powerful allies. They are nature and culture. Let us look at each in turn. When Cardinal Bernardin proposed his “seamless garment” of social justice, he was right in the seamlessness but wrong in the garment. His garment was stitched together from patches of social policies that were at best to be recommended only for his own place and time. But opposition to baby-murdering is not inherently bound to any specific political program, such as broadening access to food stamps for the poor. I am not saying anything about food stamps. I am saying that, in thinking of things politically and parochially rather than philosophically, Cardinal Bernardin failed to see that abortion flowed seamlessly into other outrages against nature.
It is unnatural for a mother to turn her womb into a killing field. It is also unnatural, a kind of idolatry or blasphemy, for two men or two women to mimic sexual intercourse with one another. It is unnatural, a form of spiritual child abuse every bit as destructive as the physical, to put before the eyes of children the buffet of sexual excitations to which they are introduced by the pornogogues of our schools. It is unnatural willingly to deprive children of a mother or a father. It is unnatural to starve the developing manhood of our boys, or to frustrate or foul the developing womanhood of our girls. No doubt the reader can come up with plenty of his or her own examples of our detestation of nature. These may descend from a Moloch-like grinning at dismembered baby-parts, to things apparently trivial, such as compelling a boy to grope and press a girl on the wrestling mat.
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