Feature
Choosing Love & Making Life
Sex, Love, Marriage & the Culture of Death
by David Mills
I do not think many of those who argue so hard for abortion really like the idea of killing the unborn, though there are some, particularly among the sad, suffering fringes of radical feminism, whose hatred of life is so deep that it drives them to something near nihilism. The culture of death begins not in a love of death but in a culture of pseudo-life: in the desire for life and its fruits, but life sought in the wrong ways and usually with the wrong people.
In particular, it begins in man’s natural and universal desire for sexual connection, and in man’s insistence on making connections he is not allowed to make, which he makes mostly because the proper connections cost too much. Fallen men want life and its fruits because they are made in the image of Him who created life, but they want life and its fruits on their terms because they have rejected the ways He has said that life is to be found.
I am assuming here the traditional Christian understanding of marriage and of chastity, and that rejecting these things harms those who reject them and many other people as well. Other views of marriage, even those held by Christians who believe them to be “pastoral” adjustments needed to adapt Christianity’s ideals to the real world, are, I think, expressions of the culture of death.
The culture of death is not simply one in which babies are aborted and old people put to sleep like stray dogs. It is not just a culture that kills in obvious ways. It is one that kills life in much less obvious ways. It is one in which sexual life is willfully made sterile, not just of children but of all that grows from chastity, not least the home. The teenagers enjoying each other in a college dorm room, the man on a business trip picking up a woman at the bar, the woman reading Cosmopolitan, all advance the culture of death as surely as the abortionist.
Almost all of them want what life offers, but they do not want it in the way it is offered. They do not want to pay in the currency by which life and its fruits are bought. They try to steal the fruit, and that theft is the source of the culture of death. Abortion is only the fine you have to pay when you get caught stealing. Other penalties may be demanded of you as well—divorce, depression, loneliness, mistrust, and venereal diseases among them—and other people may have to pay them with you, not least your children.
The end of the culture of death is not the bright, happy world advertised in the movies and in the earnest articles of pro-choice journalists, in which sex is free and every child is a wanted child. It is not so much an emptier world, because so many fewer people live in it, though it is much emptier than it should be. It is a silent world, in which people live alienated from one another because they have not created life, because they have not loved each other by paying for life what life requires, but snatched what they wanted. There is no honor among thieves, and they cannot trust each other enough to form a community or make a culture of life, even the life they want.
However, as the line from Jurassic Park has it, “life will find a way.” Even in a culture of death, people strive for life. People who are only living together expect each other to be faithful; people who have slept around want to be married; people who have been divorced want a marriage that will last; homosexual people want to have children; women who have aborted their children regret the loss. Things are not as bad as they might be, because people strive for life, though in cases like these they strive partly in vain.
Extreme Sex
As I say, the culture of death begins in a real desire for life, for things that are undoubtedly good. Let me take an extreme case. It shows both how desperate people can be in their search for life and its fruits and what people will feel justified in doing once a few people are allowed to steal those fruits. It shows where the culture of death leads, even though many of that culture’s current apologists still describe it as if it were only a modification of the Christian vision for marriage—modified to allow fornication when young, divorce when older, and abortion when necessary, and even to offer marriage to homosexual people.
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David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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more on marriage from the online archives
21.1—January/February 2008
John Chrysostom’s Discovery of the Blessings & Mysteries of Marriage by Mike Aquilina
32.1—January/February 2019
Divine Love & the Love of Man & Woman Surpass Mere Consent by Anthony Esolen
more from the online archives
30.3—May/June 2017
on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart
22.6—July/August 2009
on the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life by Leon J. Podles
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