Euthanasia and paganism go hand in hand

 Gavin Ashenden

November 16, 2024 at 10:00 am

“Disposable in the womb” is being followed by “disposable at the end of life” – when the elderly are no longer economically useful. 

In some ways, there’s never been a better time to be a Catholic. The Catholic Church, beyond so many other communities, has a very clear vision of the dignity of the human person, and the way in which the gift of our humanity is an aspect of the imago Dei.

We are living through a change of both culture and civilisation. We can document the reasons behind the present cultural shift in any number of conceptual ways, but how we understand our humanity is at the centre of the change. Sanctity is being replaced by “disposability”.

It would be easy to see this as a symptom of the throwaway culture; a by-product of wasteful materialism. No doubt in part it is, but it is more than that. And the “more than” goes to the heart of the Catholic insight into who we are. It is the Church, therefore, that has the antidote to this slippage into decadence. For that is what it is: a spiritual and philosophical shift of the most serious kind. 

John Daniel Davidson has recently written a book in which he makes the argument that the most helpful way of looking at the changes we are going through is as a resurgence of paganism. In his book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, he makes the case that we are not travelling inexorably forwards along the much-vaunted trajectory of the progressive, but that we are slipping backwards instead. This is a regressive, not progressive, cultural moment. And the “backwards” that we are slipping into is a very dark place indeed. 

The clue to the link between our present value system and the older, darker pagan cultures is that of the status we give to human life. Christian culture has always insisted that life is a gift from God, that human beings are made in the image of God. But in the pagan mind, human beings become disposable and dispensable.

One of the best ways of exploring the implications of the shift from that imago Dei to disposable would be to glance back at the sexual and slave culture of ancient Rome. Recent excavations have revealed pits under brothels where hundreds of infant bodies were found. The assumption is that the pregnancies suffered by the inhabitants of the brothel produced children who were strangled at birth and then disposed of, flushed down the sewers under the buildings.

But behind the large-scale sexual exploitation lay the phenomenon of slavery. Just as Rome’s economy was founded on slavery, its moral economy was also dependent on sex-slavery and prostitution. Roman slaves could be killed or expelled by their masters for any reason at any time; they could be forced into prostitution, or raped by members of the household. This sexual exploitation stretched as far as the children, both boys and girls. It is estimated that in an empire of about 70 million people, about 10 per cent – some seven to 10 million – were enslaved.

The sexual exploitation of slaves was taken for granted. In the pagan world, slaves and prostitutes, like unwanted infants, were subhuman in society. They had no rights and no one cared what happened to them. Occasionally secular critics complain that the Bible fails to provide a charter for the freedom of slaves, but they completely underestimate the impact of the Christian idea that slaves and their masters were equal before God, and carried the same moral responsibilities.

In his book Dominion, Tom Holland makes a great deal of the fact that Christianity conquered the Roman pagan assumptions of unbounded sex imposed on the powerless by the powerful, with the introduction of the sacralising of human sexual and procreative relations within monogamy. 

Far from subjugating women to being chattels of men, the Church dignified women with equality, a higher purpose and protection in what had been a ruthless world where might was right.

A reverse trajectory of change, from sacred to disposable, is now well under way. “Disposable in the womb” is being followed by “disposable at the end of life” – when the elderly are no longer economically useful. 

In the UK, the relatively new Labour government is trying to bring in legislation to enable assisted suicide, or euthanasia. It promises safeguards, but like the abortion juggernaut, these won’t survive a decade or so of political pressure and special pleading. 

The move away from monogamy, via same-sex marriage and the commodification of surrogacy, further extends the shadow of utilitarian disposability; as do the collective categories of the Left that reduce the significance of what used to be an individual to only a member of the collective. 

Disposability leads to brutality. The vision of which the Catholic Church is custodian – that human beings are sacred and made in the image of God – is not only true, but protects the vulnerable from exploitations that are being intensified with astonishing rapidity. 

Photo: People gather at Stonehenge to celebrate a festival, England. (Credit: Getty.)