Birth As The “moral Fault Line Of Our Time”

Christmas is about birth, Kevin Williamson reminds us, which is what reminds us most of our physicality. No wonder, he says, birth is also “the great political and moral fault line of our time.”

Consider all of the moral issues that have to do with birth, whether preventing it or negating it: abortion, sex outside of marriage, pornography, today’s much vaunted fantasy of sex with robots. Consider the political and ideological issues: fears of overpopulation, health care, feminism, child poverty, education problems, child-raising controversies, embryonic stem cell research, reproductive engineering, adoption, divorce, marriage, family values.

Williamson says that our confused attitudes about birth tie into our confused attitudes about the body. One can see in his examples the current gnostic revival, which denies the spiritual significance of the physical realm (as in being “spiritual but not religious”) and rejects the body (as in transgenderism and in the transhuman dream of downloading our minds into the internet so that we don’t need our bodies anymore).

Against the gnostic worldview, we have the Nativity–the conception, birth, and infancy of God Himself as a physical, embodied human being–and the Holy Family.

From Kevin D. Williamson, Christmas & Human Body — Word Made Flesh | National Review:

At the Nativity, we are confronted with the one human act in which our physicality is most comprehensively expressed, in all its blood and pain and filth and danger and glory: birth. It is not mere coincidence that the great political and moral fault line of our time (which is more than political and moral) has at its center birth, the event that does not make us what we are but shows us what we are. Denying, as we do, that reality, we deny the reality of who and what we are.

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Photo from Max Pixel, Creative Commons