Death of Culture
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
"The Culture of Death and the Death of Culture:
The Christian Challenge in a Decadent Age"
Golden Anniversary Seminar of the
Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission
March 3, 1997
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
(reworked for publication in The Tie 12/3/02)
RGL
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The twenty-first century presents the human race with unprecedented challenges to human dignity and the sacredness of human life. Respect for human life and an affirmation of human dignity are inseparable. Where human life is not respected as a sacred gift, life itself will be debased and devalued-and eventually it will be negotiated away by the culture of death.
Consider the Culture of Death and the death of culture that we have witnessed over the past half-century. In his book, The End of the Twentieth Century, Historian John Lukacs spoke of the twentieth century as being dominated by the two world wars and their massive fallout. Lukacs, a refugee from eastern Europe, suggests that centuries should not be measured so much by the span of years, but by the events that shape the great patterns of history. He pointed to the two great events which framed the parameters of the twentieth century-the start of World War I in 1914 and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.
This century began with wild hopes and a sense of inevitable progress. The liberal spirit of the age set the tone as the twentieth century dawned. Leaving behind a pre-industrial, pre-modern society, those who saw the dawn of the twentieth century were determined that this would be a century marked by the inevitable and strategic march of human progress.
And yet we know what happened. The century ended with a great sense of moral and cultural uncertainty. Left behind was the debris of failed utopianisms and brutal totalitarian regimes. In the words of C.S. Lewis, "Endings come with either a bang or a whimper." This century seems to have ended with a bit of both.
The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm describes the twentieth century as ‘short’-brutally so. And much like Lukacs, he dates the century essentially from 1918 to 1989. How does he characterize this epoch? He described it as a short century of ‘mega-death.’ More human beings were "killed or allowed to die by human decision than ever before in history."
The great symbols of the twentieth century are not only the two World Wars, but also symbols such as the Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau and Büchenwald. The century is unrecognizable without the symbols of the atom bomb and the gas chambers and ovens and the killing fields of Cambodia. The brutal debris left behind from human social experimentation and utopian visions testifies to the failure of the experiments to push progress beyond human limits in the twentieth century. These symbols in Hobsbawm’s words represent a century built on "the deliberate reversal of civilization."
There are many prophets whose words should be heard as the century comes to an end and as the last fifty years are seen in review. One of the most cogent of these prophets was the National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski. In his work, Out of Control, Brzezinski identified the two "central existential struggles" that forged much of the twentieth century’s bloodletting as fascism and communism.
Brzezinski traces the death toll of Hitler’s Germany. The toll includes the murder of over five million Jews, 800,000 gypsies, two million Poles, and six million Soviet prisoners of war and non-combatants killed or starved to death. Two to three million were killed in the Baltic states in the rest of Eastern Europe. All told, Brzezinski counts about seventeen million bodies left at Hitler’s feet. But Hitler was outdone by Stalin and Mao. Stalin accounts for between twenty and twenty-five million deaths. Twenty-nine million died at the hands of Chinese communism, including those in China under Mao, forced by collectivization or outright extermination. Thus Brzezinski counts between sixty and sixty-five million deaths attributable to Communist regimes and their totalitarian visions.
When we look with some historical perspective at the last fifty years, we understand that it is indeed a culture of death to which we have come. The phrase, "The culture of death" has been in use for several years now by those who have perceived the crisis of the age. It has, perhaps, been popularized most effectively by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, A Gospel of Life. Therein, he observed, "The twentieth century will have been an era of massive attacks on life, an endless series of wars and a continual taking of innocent human life."
In the last half-century, we have seen nothing less than the perfection of death through modern warfare, the exercise of total war, the use of civilians as human shields and pawns, aerial bombardment of civilian communities, chemical warfare, the use of land mines against civilians, and the rise of nuclear weapons with the threat even of the neutron bomb-the first weapon in human history designed to kill human beings while leaving structures standing. We have seen, in this half-century, life denied and life annihilated. And the culture of death has not just come in the form of warfare, as brutal and costly as that has been.
Life has been denied and annihilated, not only on the plains of war, but also in the sanctity of the womb. In the United States, since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, between forty and forty-five million infants have been aborted in the womb. The culture of abortion has unleashed a warfare on the womb unprecedented in its destruction and also in its lack of conscience. There has been a cauterization of the American conscience so that the multitudes do not even understand this issue in moral terms. The unborn child is reduced to nothing more than bio-mass of unwanted tissue in what is euphemistically described as the ‘product of conception.’
The technologies of abortion are growing evermore sophisticated, and they are now so gruesome (and yet so effective) that abortions can now be reduced to the use of a sufficient dosage of birth control pills. Today we also face the abortion pill RU-486-the human pesticide-the taking of which kills the unborn human life with a silent and unseen perfection, which is unprecedented in human history. Clearly, we have lost all ability to maintain moral discourse. We use terms like "partial birth abortion," which, in actuality, is nothing less than the insertion of scissors into the cranial cavity of an unborn infant. The scissors are then opened and a suction tube inserted. The brains are extracted, and the skull is collapsed, and then the unwanted "bio-product" of conception is removed. We know what a transparent lie this is, and yet our moral discourse is so malformed that we cannot speak of such issues in rational terms.
It was just a few years ago that a teenage couple in Delaware was charged with murdering their baby immediately after birth and casting it into a dumpster. Columnist George Will raised the issue of these two homicidal parents when he said, "Don’t young people read newspapers? Don’t they know that, thanks to President Clinton, they could have chosen to have a doctor suck their baby’s brains out, and Delaware would not have chosen to charge them with murder?" He continues, "In Delaware, such punishment (the death penalty) is by lethal injection. Could Delaware choose to execute the two by inserting scissors into the bases of their skulls, opening the scissors, inserting suction tubes, and sucking out their brains? Of course not. The Constitution forbids choosing cruel and unusual punishments." But the lie does not end there.
For we learned shortly thereafter that Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, confessed to lying when he denied, publicly and privately to the President and the Congress, that partial birth abortion was a widely used procedure that mostly transpired as an elected procedure. Fitzsimmons confessed that "in the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along." He continued, "The abortion right folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everybody else."
This is where we are-in the culture of death based also in the culture of the lie. Yet, it is not just abortion. It is also euthanasia-the big lie about "the good death." The so-called Dutch cure that has now found a home in America is not an issue in the ambiguous, uncertain future. It, too, is focused in the very concrete present. It is nothing less than a reversal of the logic of life. Now, we will not only end life just after its conception, we will end life as it comes to its end. We will, in fact, determine it. The creature will seek to be the lord of its own destiny, and so we will seek not only to manipulate its beginning, but also to terminate at the end. We have decided, so it seems, that if we as finite humans cannot be freed from the threat of death itself, we will, at least, be the lords of our own death. We will choose death on our own terms. We will choose death for ourselves-and you just wait-we will be choosing death for others as well.
The so-called "Dutch-cure" has been revealed in terms of the slippery slope from passive to active euthanasia. Regardless of the lies that are told, there is no such thing as a "good cure death." Euthanasia inevitably slides from passive to active when it is the technologies of active euthanasia that are celebrated as new opportunities. They are new opportunities, in fact, to control life and to control death. Active euthanasia is not only a threat to the elderly, the infirmed, the disabled, and the chronically sick, but it will soon be spoken of in terms as a duty to die. And this is already the discourse common in some American circles. Economic and emotional arguments are used to appeal to the duty to die of those who reach the end stage, an awkward stage, or a chronically disabled stage. According to the logic, the infirmed thus remove themselves from being a financial burden and a source of emotional stress to their families and society at large.
Not surprisingly, we see, here, the breakdown of the moral conscience once again. These issues cannot even be discussed in the public square with any sense of truth and authority, of right and or wrong. Everything is reduced not only to matters of technology, but also to the images of victimhood. I was shocked when I read a letter to the editor about the aforementioned Delaware teenagers that said the parents were victims as well as the baby-victims of "limited choices."
Victims of limited choices? I suppose Adam and Eve fit that category as well. We are all "victims" of limited choices. It is only in the utopian panacea of modern progressive liberalism and moral relativism that one would even conceive of a life unlimited in terms of choice. The culture of death continues with the development of genetic engineering. The cloning of a sheep a few years back has set lose a virtual bonanza of cloning opportunities that are being played out before our very eyes. The ethical dimensions of cloning are raised in only the most superficial and dismissive sense. We will be lord not only of the womb and not only of our own death, but we will be lord of our own genetic code, guided only by our own sense of destiny and our own sense of good.
The creature will play the creator, thus distorting the dominion mandate of Genesis into a stewardship which is not ours. When we were told to exercise dominion over all creation, that mandate did not extend to tampering with the genetic code and the cloning of humans. This leads to such issues as the ownership of cloned organisms. We now have genetic patents on certain forms of life. Why not patent certain forms of human life in such a way that you could clone a certain species much the way General Motors releases a new line of cars? We see the specter of host bodies produced in order to make available donor organs.
This is truly the ultimate narcissism. We love ourselves so much that we will give society and human history another one of us. And then another, and yet another. But, not only is it the ultimate narcissism, it is also a biological destruction and a time bomb of unprecedented proportions. Just imagine what will happen when God’s intention with regard to our genetic diversity is reduced by cloning. It is a threat to the survival of the human race. It is, perhaps, the attempted euthanasia, not just of the individual, but of the species.
We have also witnessed the human genome project, which holds much potential for good as it maps the entire genetic code of the human being. But it also holds great peril. It represents an awesome moral challenge. What will we do with what we learn? What will we do with the knowledge of the genetic code not only of the species but of particular individuals? What will be the options politically and culturally sustained in the culture of death?
Baroness Warnock, who lead many of the bio-medical discussions in Great Britain suggests that we should simply give in to those who suggest that we are playing God. We should simply give in and try, by means of genetic manipulation, to eradicate the inferior and encourage the superior. This, of course, has been said before, though it was not spoken not in crisp English so much as in militant German.
James Watson in a recent Times of London piece, suggested that it is high time we face up to the meaning of genetic engineering. Watson, it will be remembered, was one of the two Nobel Prize winning scientists who discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. He promises that there will be an infinite array of issues raised by genetic mapping and engineering, including pre-dispositions to everything from schizophrenia to homosexuality. His British readers were scandalized at his suggestion that mothers who discover that their infant in the womb has a pre-disposition of homosexuality, might well choose to abort. Of course, it was not the genetic manipulation that became the issue, rather it was the target of the manipulation that raised this censorious debate.
The culture of death is the ultimate degeneration of the entire culture of the civilization itself, and it represents nothing less than a total opposition to God and his authority over the spectrum of life and death, indeed over every dimension of morality.
The late Walker Percy-the physician as well as one of America’s chief men of letters-said this in answer to an interviewer’s question:
I am scandalized by the fact that in my own profession-medicine-American doctors have the dubious distinction of being the first generation of doctors in 6,000 years to accept abortion with hardly a murmur. Abortion has been something absolutely disallowed by the medical profession in the entire western world since the oath of Hippocrates. We are talking 2,500 years ago. That’s on the Greek side. For 6,000 years before that in the Jewish tradition. Yet we in the last two generations-judges and doctors-have not only made it legal but have done it willingly. There has been no outcry, not one letter of protest in the august, New England Journal of Medicine. I off hand can think of only one doctor, a Jewish doctor, who keeps saying this is wrong.
This was the impulse that led Percy to write his novel The Thanatos Syndrome indicating the ultimate end result of the culture of death-death itself. In another interview over ten years ago, he was asked the question, "What are the signs of death that you see in America in the l980s?" He answered,
Last night, I was listening to an interview between Bill Moyers and Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the Supreme Court’s decision that legalizes abortion. Obviously, Blackmun is a decent man, a thoughtful man, who was trying to do the right thing. Yet, what did he do? He helped to legalize the murder of 30 million unborn human beings. That, by the way, is not a theological, Catholic statement. Any doctor can tell you that an unborn child is fully human. There is no difference in a child five minutes before birth and five minutes after birth. What about a month before birth? Same. How about eight months? How about one day after conception? Sure, it’s a separate organism. Any doctor will tell you that it’s all standard biology: the fetus is a separate genetic structure, a separate immune system, a separate organism, a separate creature. So, we have this great situation where for the most humane reasons we kill more people that the Nazis did in all their death camps. In times like these, that is enough to give a novelist a cause to write.
Just before he died, Percy said that what would come next was what he called "pedothesia," the killing of children who are perceived to have no future.
Of course, we not only speak of the culture of death, but of the death of culture, which is the necessary product and parallel to the culture of death. In the time span of the last fifty years, we see the devolution of our moral discourse and of our moral actions from modern manipulation and death to postmodern chaos and even greater death. John Howard, the former president of the Rockford Institute, gave a speech a few years ago looking back at the end of World War II, and speaking of his own experience he intimated that those fifty years appeared as though it were a "whole civilization ago." What happened at the end of World War II? The West won. Freedom won. Democracy won. And what did they win? They won the opportunity to build, to develop, and to devolve into the culture of death. The West defeated Hitler and Japan, only to institutionalize, in a scientific and therapeutic sense, so much of what was represented by those regimes.
We have seen in the last fifty years a series of decades marked by moral decomposition-decomposition that is difficult to quantify and almost impossible to take into the mind. We have seen the breakdown of the family, largely performed on ideological grounds. We have seen the rise of the divorce culture, which is yields complete destruction of the family structure. As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead says, "Divorce is now part of everyday American life."
We have seen the rise of alternative lifestyles openly intending to reverse centuries of civilization in the name of liberation. We have seen homosexuality, which was forbidden by God through His Word and censured by societies throughout history, now made an openly celebrated part of American culture with successful calls for political equality and special group rights.
We see the revolt against authority: the authority of God, the authority of the state, the authority of the church, the authority of parents, the authority of the Constitution and law, the authority of teachers, the authority of every segment of society, which provides order and protection. We have seen the breakdown of order at every level in such a way that we now have no control over many of our streets and have no control over much of what out children see and hear. We have no control; all in the name of liberation.
We see decadence in the arts, and the celebration of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, who are unusual not because of their unique decadence, but because of their unique popularity and publicity. In the last fifty years, we have seen the artistic community celebrate what was once marginalized and scandalized.
We have seen the breakdown of political system aided and abetted by every branch of government. We have come to the place where there is no common moral discourse. There is no such conversation, and legislation is intentionally, publicly and officially divorced from any moral consequence. We can read statistical indicators such as the volume produced by William Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, and see the inexorable march of our culture’s destruction. We can see that our conversation is reduced to nothing more than "rights talk." Our conversations center merely on what our rights are and should be. We have come to what the philosopher Jeffrey Stout has referred to as the "perfect babble of confusion." Animal rights, for instance, are posited in such a way that the entire structure of creation is offended.
Issue after issue represents not merely a tinkering with the moral code, but the usurpation of the entire moral system. Joseph Epstein, editor of the American Scholar, recently asked if the future has a future? How did this happen? It is all rooted in rebellion and in the decomposition of our moral discourse. Sociologist, Daniel Yankelovich suggested that it all comes down to the clash between individual choice and social and familial obligations-a question of responsibilities or so-called rights.
But in biblical terms, what it means to be human is to be submitted to biblical norms. How did all of this happen? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked the same question, and he answered, "Men have forgotten God, that is how all of this happened." Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamozov, "Without God anything is permissible and everything is now permissible." And yet what is the means of recovery? What are we to do? What should the church do in the midst of the degeneration, devolution and disillusion of the culture? And what should the church be in the midst of the culture of death and the death of the culture?
Very simply put, we are to let light shine in the darkness. A simple and urgent and uncomplicated command is brought into sharp relief when there is so much darkness surrounding us. This means, though, that we must understand ourselves in the midst of this culture as a cognitive minority standing out in our minority status against a majoritarian decadence.
We must let light shine in darkness. This means, in part, that the church must be a culture of life, in the midst of the culture of death and the death of the culture. The church must contend for life-life in the biblical sense-at every level. This means contending for life in the womb and in the nursing home, in the hospital ward and on the streets. Everywhere, we must be those who stand for the culture and sanctity of life, for we know that the culture of life can never be predicated upon the authority of man, but only on the authority of God.
In the same sense, we must also contend for the life of the culture. That is, we must be engaged and not disengaged, even as we are a cognitive minority. Even as a moral minority, our method must not be to turn entirely insular and inward, but instead to engage the culture in such a way that we bear open witness to life. And calling for the life of the culture means that the church must be the people of the truth, representing, bearing witness, and contending for the truth of the living, holy, sovereign, transcendent God. For this self-revealing God has spoken to us through His Word, revealing a pattern of life to us with commandments and principles for living. We must bear witness to the truth of God’s wrath against sin and to the wondering glory of His grace in the redemption of sinners. We must be a people of truth, and this means bearing witness to the life and living hope, which should be our proper mode.
To despair is atheistic. To be optimistic is hubris. We live in hope-biblical hope-because we know in whom our hope is placed, and we know that He is able to keep all that we have committed to Him against that day.
How are we to live in such a society as this? What is the church to be and what are we to do? In the midst of the culture of death and the death of culture we must get our own house in order. We must recover our own moral authority, which can only come when we are submitted to our Savior’s moral authority. And we must share the light.
I am reminded of what the Romanians in 1989 referred to as the "night of the candles". It was that night in Bucharest when those who contended for freedom and for life and for dignity stood against totalitarian oppression and stared down tanks and soldiers, when all they had in their hands were unlit candles. One person lit a candle and the flame passed from one candle to another in the hands of those who stood for life and freedom and dignity, as they stood against those who stood for death and for oppression, for manipulation and totalitarian regimes. The culture of life stood against the culture of death and passed the light from candle to candle. There is an apt metaphor for us. Let us pass the light from candle to candle and let us pass it well.
Originally published May 05, 2004.
