Convicted for silent prayer, the Culture of Death (& other stories)

I have a few culture updates for you at The Bridgehead:

“Trump’s pivot on abortion is having a ripple effect on the Republican Party”

“The Harris campaign’s sexual agenda”

On The Bridgehead Briefing this week, I covered the “first conviction for a thoughtcrime in modern British history”—a man convicted for praying silently near an abortion clinic, as well as the US presidential election:

You can also check out the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Rumble, or YouTube. My essay this week was first published in The European Conservative:

In the Shadow of the Culture of Death

Across the Western world, the Culture of Death is expanding its borders, casting its grim shadow across an ever-growing population of weak, vulnerable, and disabled peoples. Norway is proposing to expand abortion to include babies up until 18 weeks gestation; Denmark has just done the same. After Poland’s legislators voted down a plan to legalize abortion, the nation’s rogue coalition government simply changed the rules by fiat to facilitate feticide anyway. France made abortion a “constitutional right” earlier this year. The UK government is fast-tracking a vote on assisted suicide, which was rejected by Parliament nine years ago. The list goes on. 

It was predictable that as the West advanced into the post-Christian era, prohibitions on killing human beings rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic would fall away. Westerners no longer have a basis for believing in the ‘sanctity of human life’ because they no longer have a basis for the sanctity of anything. Academics and medical professionals now make the case for the pre-Christian practice of infanticide openly, and explicitly cite residual Christian values as the only reason we have not yet embraced it. As Louise Perry, who is reluctantly “pro-choice,” observed in her First Things essay “We Are Repaganizing”: 

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

The French philosopher Chantal Delsol concurs with this analysis. But they are certainly not the first. Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the greatest Christian journalists of the 20th century, believed that the acceptance of abortion signaled the death of the West. Muggeridge died on November 14, 1990, and he lived long enough to see the Culture of Death take root. He is best-known (to those who still remember him) as a writer, TV personality, and in his later years, an eccentric but brilliant Christian apologist. But Muggeridge was also a pro-life activist and sought to defend the pro-life cause at every opportunity, including speaking at right to life marches in London and across the UK.

Many veterans of the Canadian pro-life movement remember the Muggeridge family as comrades during the early days of the fight against abortion—Malcolm’s son John and his wife Anne Roche, who lived in Toronto, were avid supporters. Two of Malcolm’s grandsons, Peter and Charles, wrote for the pro-life newspaper The Interim. John was an editorial advisor to LifeSiteNews and a senior editor of the New York-based Human Life Review. Kitty Muggeridge, a brilliant writer in her own right, lived in Welland, Ontario with her son and daughter-in-law after Malcolm died until her own death in June 1994.

Malcolm Muggeridge toured around Southern Ontario during the 1970s, giving lectures night after night to packed-out theaters on the sanctity of life and the existential threat of abortion. The second Festival for Life in Ottawa in 1977 featured Muggeridge as a keynote speaker; he also visited St. Catharine’s Right to Life in October 1978, speaking on “The Slippery Slope” at the Thistle Theatre at Brock University, discussing the slide from contraception to abortion on demand. Muggeridge marshalled all of his oratory powers to urge audiences to oppose abortion in whatever ways they could. 

Muggeridge (along with Everett C. Koop) also wrote one of the afterwords to President Ronald Reagan’s slim 1984 book Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation, the only anti-abortion polemic written by a sitting head of state. Muggeridge often condemned abortion on TV and in print, but perhaps the most succinct summary of his views—still so applicable today—was first published in the London Sunday Times. It was reprinted in 1975 in the Human Life Review, and prophesied what de-Christianization would mean for the unborn:

Our Western way of life has come to a parting of the ways; time’s takeover bid for eternity has reached the point at which irrevocable decisions have to be taken. Either we go on with the process of shaping our own destiny without reference to any higher being than Man, deciding ourselves how many children shall be born, when and in what varieties, which lives are worth continuing and which should be put out, from whom spare-parts—kidneys, hearts, genitals, brainboxes, even—shall be taken and to whom allotted. 

Or we draw back, seeking to understand and fall in with our Creator’s purpose for us rather than to pursue our own; in true humility praying, as the founder of our religion and our civilization taught us: Thy will be done.

This is what the abortion controversy is about, and what the euthanasia controversy will be about when, as must inevitably happen soon, it arises. The logical sequel to the destruction of what are called “unwanted children” will be the elimination of what will be called “unwanted lives”—a legislative measure which so far in all human history only the Nazi Government has ventured to enact.

In this sense the abortion controversy is the most vital and relevant of all. For we can survive energy crises, inflation, wars, revolutions and insurrections, as they have been survived in the past; but if we transgress against the very basis of our mortal existence, becoming our own gods in our own universe, then we shall surely and deservedly perish from the earth.

He was right, and he was one of a handful who saw the future with great moral clarity. Muggeridge was one of those prophets cursed to see many of the tragedies he warned of come to pass. The bodies of aborted babies are now pillaged for spare parts, which are used in hideous Frankenstein experiments in our finest universities. Euthanasia victims can be killed in ways that allow for their organs to be harvested and transferred to those with ‘lives worth living.’ Every Western nation is in desperate need of babies; every Western nation kills its own children in staggering numbers and with stunning brutality. 

Muggeridge’s condemnation of the sexual revolution unfolding across the West was made only keener by his own experience as a promiscuous and adulterous young man. He knew the toll such destructive behaviors have on marriages, families, and souls, and he made many of his contemporaries profoundly uncomfortable with his soul-searching writings on life, death, and the murder of the unborn. Despite this, Muggeridge entered old age not with optimism, but with Christian realism:

We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse—and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse—and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistibly growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said—and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that’s happened it’s a great catastrophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn’t build and can’t destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God—the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.

In the meantime, the task of Christians living through death of Christendom is the same as those who faced the evils of the Roman Empire at her tumultuous and bloody birth. The first Christians fought the practices of abortion, infanticide, and abandonment. They insisted on loving the “least of these”—the disabled, the unwanted, and the outcast. As we advance into the post-Christan night and the veneer of civilization wears thin, there must be those who cling resolutely to the belief that every human life is sacred and are willing to sacrifice for this belief. The West is swiftly becoming a dangerous place for the weak and vulnerable, and we must remember the words of that great Christian humanitarian, philanthropist, and abolitionist William Wilberforce: “Let it not be said that I was silent when they needed me.” Muggeridge was not, but he is gone. It is our turn.