Culture of Death vs. Culture of Life

Written by Robert Knight

Thirty-five hundred years ago, God through Moses conveyed the ultimate human choice:

“See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, in that I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways … life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30: 15 and 19).

Fifteen centuries later, as foretold by Moses, Isaiah and other prophets, the Messiah came. As the human Incarnation of God, Jesus Christ healed, did miracles and taught. Then He allowed Himself to be crucified by pagan Rome. He rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and even now offers eternal life to all who receive Him.

He also offers forgiveness for any repented worldly sin, including abortion, which isn’t said often enough.

As we observe Easter, the choice is still between life and death, blessing and cursing. And some still choose death, quite happily and without reservation.

What else can we ascertain from the recent elections in Wisconsin and Chicago and the bizarre situation in Nebraska?

In the Badger State, voters elevated to the state Supreme Court a candidate whose singular focus was making abortion legal up to the moment of birth.

Democrat Janet Protaswiecz’s election flips Wisconsin’s high court from a conservative majority to leftist. She outspent opponent Republican Dan Kelly by 5 to 1 and benefited from the media’s sycophantic support of all things liberal.

Still, given the myriad Democrat-spawned disasters (inflation, open borders, crime, trans madness, the Biden family compromised by Communist China and World War III looming), one might have expected more Wisconsin voters to think twice about turning their top court over to Democrats. But hey, abortion.

It’s all that matters to many.

In Chicago, voters beset by a murderous crime wave rejected a moderate who championed law and order. Instead, to replace the horrendous Lori Lightfoot, they elected another far-left, anti-cop minion of the city’s powerful teachers union. This will guarantee more chaos and death in the Windy City. Plus, awful education policies to dumb down kids into reliable recruits for the Democrats’ Free Stuff Army.

Finally, to complete the Democrats’ trifecta, something remarkable has been going on in Nebraska. The state’s single-body Legislature has been tied up this entire session by one person’s filibuster.

Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh’s cause? Stopping a bill that would protect youths 19 and under from quack doctors who subject them to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, spaying and castration. This is what the left disingenuously calls “gender-affirming care.”

On her high horse, the senator proclaims that “if this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children Is our priority, then I am going to make it painful, painful for everyone.”

Right. Not as painful, to be sure, as for a confused boy whose testicles are cut off or a young girl losing her healthy breasts to a surgical knife, but painful nonetheless.

These are not isolated events but evidence of a growing culture of death that defies respect for life, the integrity of the human body, the family, sexuality and the Creator.

Back in 1978, Russian emigre and Noble laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned us that although communism and socialism are profoundly evil, the West was fast losing its own soul due to its ungodly pursuit of materialism and hedonistic pleasures at the expense of the spiritual.

In his Harvard address, he said: “I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”

The result is a “moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the 19th century.”

And to think, he hadn’t even taken in drag queen story hours for children, men in women’s athletics and sex “transition” clinics.

Seventeen years later, Pope John Paul II wrote that Western society was devolving into a “culture of death.” To liberal ears, it seemed a bit much. But it was prescient.

And it wasn’t just about abortion but a worldview that despises God and His creation and distorts it in pursuit of pleasure. John Paul’s 1998 encyclical “The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae)” accurately predicted that we would “revert to a state of barbarism.”

If the Nebraska state senator’s weird definition of “hate” is any indication, we have done so.

In the face of all this, however, Easter still offers eternal hope. That is something that the most powerful death culture proponent cannot cancel.

We may yet get to the point related by Nikolai Arseniew in his book “Mysticism and the Eastern Church” and retold by the late Brennan Manning in “Reflections for Ragamuffins.”

After the Bolshevik Revolution, a communist gave a lecture, “Religion, the Opium of the People,” in Moscow’s largest hall. Pleased with himself, he invited comment. A young priest stepped forward.

“I’ll give you two minutes,” the communist snarled. The priest replied, “I won’t take very long.” He mounted the platform and in a loud voice declared, “Christ is risen!”

The vast audience roared as one in response, “He is truly risen!”

The death culture is no match for the Easter message of hope — and never will be.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.