The scourge of abortion and the Herods of our day

On Dec. 28, the Christian calendar marks the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It commemorates that most horrid biblical episode recorded in Matthew 2:13-18—King Herod’s slaughter of baby boys in the region of Bethlehem. Today, this event is often used as an opportunity for pastors in traditionalist Protestant pulpits to preach against the heinous evil of legalized abortion and its supporting regime, which, like Herod, murderously takes the lives of many innocents. But a high body count of babies is not the only thing Herod and abortion advocates have in common. They both share an undergirding logic and worldview.

To understand the paranoid violence of the Herodian dynasty, one must understand its unstable situation, tasked by the Roman Empire to keep peace in a region seething with political and religious discontent. The Jews and their neighbors were hard to manage, and a half-Edomite-half-Jewish regime did not represent the greatest political legitimacy. The Herods called themselves the King of Jews, and yet they murderously eliminated any threats to their position—including fellow family members. Caesar Augustus himself reportedly quipped that it was safer to be a pig rather than a son in Herod’s household. The New Testament presents a dynasty that kept up appearances for fear of the people but had few qualms with gross immorality, including murder, family-betraying adultery (Matthew 14:3-5), and the reception of blasphemous worship (Acts 12:22). In Matthew 2, King Herod functions like Pharaoh, ordering a genocidal purge of Hebrew baby boys. Herodian ethics trample down the innocent to secure an insubstantial, unrealized, hypothetical future of power and wealth, in desperate terms.

Doubtless, this violent pursuit of Mammon remains a part of what C. S. Lewis called the “Miserific Vision,” the corrupt inverse of the divine Beatific Vision (Matthew 5:8; 1 Corinthians 13:12), and it is this vision that undergirds the structures and champions of abortion today. In this view, mammon secures unlimited pleasure and the satiation of appetites, both of which are threatened by traditional Christian teaching. For instance, traditional Christian ethics assume that having sex implies a commitment to all that results from the act, including new life. The Miserific Vision zealously denies this implied assent, as well as the moral precondition that those that engage in the conjugal act already be husband and wife in a lifelong covenant of matrimony. This is replaced with the harmful fiction of sex without commitments or consequences.

Similarly, while Christians normally look to some kind of productive family to provide for children, abortion advocates eagerly champion for the state and large corporations to fill this role. Instead of a father and mother working together to provide for their own offspring, abortionists point to the plight of single mothers. Such examples of pregnant women without a father “in the picture”—once deemed rare, tragic, and even shameful—have become a moral norm. According to the pro-abortion logic, an unwanted child hampers economic opportunity and career advancement for such women. Women fettered by motherhood threaten Mammon-centric goals. So, the child must die.

More insidiously, this new moral code demands that men should be free to fornicate without consequences. This frees them from not only burdensome responsibility, but also a beneficial drive to provide, a sense of purpose, and other virtues instilled by fatherhood. Such goods are the recipe for free, independent men, which are an existential threat to heavy handed regimes. Despots prosper when men fritter away their time and energy in unproductive fornication instead of a fruitful marriage with the wife of one’s youth (Proverbs 5). Sin is a means of control.

Regardless of Supreme Court decisions and legislation, abortion thrives when people cling to the myths of individualist economic security and consequence-free sex. People believe these lies because our culture celebrates them in her stories, preaches them in her entertainment media, and lauds them on both sides of the political aisle (with religious traditionalists remaining a notable exception). Many powerful people accordingly oppose the pro-life message. Despite laudable progress in legislatures and courts, such pro-infanticide deceptions and their accompanying lusts may prove hard to dislodge.

As a result, Christians may fear that today’s abortion regime cannot be defeated because it plays off of deep-seated, self-serving motivations. However, we have a Ruler who does not hunt down and consume faithful prophets on platters, as did Herodias (Matthew 14:1-12). Instead, He lays down His life to nourish and bring life to His subjects (Matthew 14:13-36). He is a King whose rule is perfectly sovereign and established. He is seated at the right hand of the Father, and His Spirit enters the human heart to transform it, bringing it from darkness to light. King Herod was right to fear the birth of this Promised King, for His coming spells the ultimate defeat of all evil regimes.