The Western Death Wish

We're getting worse.

The culture of death continues apace. Here’s a headline for you: “Canadian family claim Christian grandmother was euthanised against her wishes.” GG, as she was called, did not wish to die by assisted suicide. As a Christian, she believed this was morally wrong. Moreover, it’s reported that, near the end of her life, she was incapable of assenting to assisted suicide, and no one in her family assented. In fact, they explicitly rejected the kind offer to kill their mother/grandmother. Crazy, right? The article linked above quotes the family as follows:

“One of our greatest ethical concerns is that GG had explicitly declined MAID, stating it violated her Christian faith. Once a vulnerable patient explicitly declines this path, the facility should never have targeted her for re-evaluation behind closed doors while her primary advocate was away - especially when the facility had no trouble contacting Brigitte daily for minor, routine care decisions.”

If these allegations are true, there’s a word for the actions of this medical team: murder.

As troubling as this news is, it’s also unsurprising. Canada has been sliding down this slippery slope for some time, and picking up speed as it goes. According to a Dordt University report from Levi Minderhoud and Daniel Zekveld,

Veterans have called the Ministry of Veterans Affairs looking for help and been offered euthanasia instead. Those with suicidal ideation have gone to the hospital for help, only to be encouraged to consider euthanasia. A woman was even asked if she was aware of the option of euthanasia before going into cancer-removing surgery.

PSA: Don’t get sick in Canada.

Around 5% of all deaths in Canada are the result of Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD), or, as we used to call it, assisted suicide. And while the problem is particularly egregious in the Great White North, in the U.S. thirteen states plus Washington D.C. have legalized assisted suicide. Don’t be surprised as the prevalence of MAiD grows throughout the U.S. The financial incentives will be powerful, not only for individuals and their families, but healthcare institutions, particularly those receiving significant government funding. Can you put a price on human life? You’d better believe it. We’re watching this play out in real time.

While we’re on the topic of really dark and disturbing things, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey just signed a bill making it easier to abort a child into the ninth month of pregnancy. You can find the video online in plenty of places. A group of women stands behind her applauding and smiling as she signs the bill. I’d like to say this is shocking, but I’m not shocked anymore. We in the West like to think of ourselves as the civilized defenders of human rights and freedom, but in truth life is very cheap here, and getting cheaper. Jesse and Ashley Ridgway made quite a stink when they announced publicly that they had aborted their child with Down syndrome. I wrote about it here:

And yes, people were outraged, but the choice the Ridgways made is the choice most parents make when their child received a prenatal diagnosis of DS. Life, in and of itself, is increasingly meaningless in our world. No one, no matter how committed to the ideology of abortion, could seriously describe a fetus at eight months of development as a “clump of cells.” But in Massachusetts, you can kill that child if you want to do so.

We can’t call the U.S. a Christian nation with a straight face. I don’t know if we ever could, but today the U.S. is a secular—or more accurately neo-pagan—nation in which about 63% of the population self-identifies as Christian. We’re not as far down this road as Canada or Western Europe, but barring a significant Christian revival in the U.S., that is our trajectory. God help us.

And yes, all of this is insanity, but don’t be surprised when those who reject God behave insanely. Sin leads us to a kind of insanity. It keeps us from seeing the world as it should be. The noetic effect of sin—the ways in which it distorts our thinking—is as real as flesh and bone. If the world seems to have gone insane, the reason is that it is insane. This is no new development. War, slavery, racism, eugenics, atheism… these are all manifestations of the same intellectual disease. The only way we can be healed is by the Holy Spirit. Mindfulness, meditation, Stoicism, psychology, and self-help all fail to reach the problem at the depth of the human heart. Our faith diagnoses the disease (sin) and prescribes the cure (Jesus). And until that day when every knee will bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father, insanity is what we can expect, and what we must confront.

Confronting this insanity will require hard theological work. Here is the predictable pattern: Evangelicals protest the practice of abortion. Progressive Christians come back and say something like, “But what about immigration? What about healthcare? You’re not pro-life! You’re just pro-birth!” Evangelicals respond that the progressives are conflating distinct issues. On and on it goes, with lots of social-media napalm dropped by ragey keyboard warriors. But there are important questions that lie beneath these arguments, and we’re not answering them. What is a human being? Why does human life matter? How do we describe the inherent value of life, rather than simply focusing on its instrumental value? If we can’t get at these questions, we’re going to remain ill-equipped to deal with many of the most important issues of our day. We will not have a ready answer to those who challenge our perspectives.

The bottom has fallen out of Western Christendom. Now we have to do the hard-slogging work of rebuilding the foundations of Western morality. Those are the brutal facts, and we must confront them. Will we rise to the occasion? I don’t know. I hope so. I hope we will at least try.