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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Baby Bones

On this Feast of the Holy Innocents, a prayer for children who suffer from the cruelty of the powerful
Screen Shot 2022-12-28 at 4.47.24 PM

Today, December 28, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents in the Western Church. We Orthodox observe it on December 29. This past summer, I was taken into a cave under the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and shown what the Church believes are relics of the Holy Innocents: the bones of dead babies, found in Bethlehem.

I asked our guide how we could be sure these were the bones of some of the infants massacred at the order of King Herod? The story is here, in Matthew 2:16-18:

16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

Jesus escaped the massacre because his mother and father had fled for Egypt. Anyway, the guide said that St. Helena, the Christian mother of Constantine, discovered them on her famous journey to the Holy Land in 325-326. Tradition has it that she bribed a rabbi to tell her where the massacred children's bodies had been buried. I don't know how truthful that is, but that's the tradition, and there has been a church on that site -- revered by the early church as the Messiah's birthplace -- since 330.

In any case, today and tomorrow are the days in which the ancient churches remember those baby boys murdered by power, to protect itself. The pro-life movement considers the Holy Innocents to be patrons of the unborn whose lives were taken so that their mothers, who had power over their life or death, could live as she wanted to live. Today (and every day), those innocent babes now living in glory surely pray for the souls of their mothers and fathers, for their repentance. And maybe we should all ask the Holy Innocents for their prayers, that we all would repent of the way nearly all of us fail children in our world today. This past year, I spoke to someone who works to fight sex trafficking, and he told me the market for children is large. Plus, we have created a Machine in the West today, one that requires robbing little children of their innocence and sexualizing them, for the sake of Progress. It is a vile thing, what Power does to the Powerless.

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Adrian Gaty
Adrian Gaty
Thank you for this. Was just listening to Peterson on Exodus, getting to the part about pharaoh killing all the babies, while in our advent study we read at the same time about Herod killing all the babies. Then you see what drives politics today (in large part, the “right” to kill babies), and you realize how little progress we’ve made in this progressive age. We still live in barbaric times in so many ways.

Y’all might enjoy some more reflections on this illusion of progress at Christmas:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/christmas-classics-and-the-illusion

Thank you again!
schedule 1 year ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    Last I checked politicians these do not go around ordering infant massacres these days, not even utterly wicked ones. Unless maybe you include the "collateral damage" in various wars of choice.
    schedule 1 year ago
      Fran Macadam
      Fran Macadam
      I found that in a previous corporate time that there were economic conservatives who favored abortion as preferable to giving poor single mothers welfare to have them. The cracks were already faltering in the alliance with social and religious conservatives.
      schedule 1 year ago
        Fran Macadam
        Fran Macadam
        The point being, politics reflects the wishes of the economically powerful, who now conveniently ally with the Woke.
        schedule 1 year ago
      Adrian Gaty
      Adrian Gaty
      Do you know that in the time it took you to write that comment, more American babies were torn limb from limb than all the babies Herod killed - that more babies were killed yesterday than the entire population of Bethlehem in Jesus’s day? And that all this is done with the funding, urging, and celebration of the government, who is also rounding up and arresting those peacefully opposed to baby killing?

      You sound like one of those “Twitter is a private company” people. When Twitter, google, your bank, your car dealership, and your grocery store all collaborate to crush your existence for being a TAC commenter, I hope you take comfort in the knowledge that at least it wasn’t the government that did it to you, lol.

      Perhaps in 2023 you will learn that the devil is smarter than you and your pointless distinctions are. Had Herod sent armies of abortionists, phalanxes of false gods, wagonfuls of planned parenthood funding, and corps of demon-possessed pro-choice propagandists to Bethlehem, instead of soldiers, would that have been more pleasing to the Lord?

      Like it or not, you are still living in Biblical times. Wake up and smell the sulfur - and pray!
      schedule 1 year ago
        JON FRAZIER
        JON FRAZIER
        Once again, abortion is not happening at the fiat of any politician. Better reading comprehension please!
        As for the Devil he is blinded by his own hubris- thinking he knows more and better than God. Can there be a greater fool?
        schedule 1 year ago
Frans
Frans
One of the serious negative repercussions of abortion is that individuals who are intended to be around at a particular time to fulfill a particular service in their lifetime aren’t around. By cutting short an individual’s life through abortion we throw a wrench into God’s plans for their life, and for how their life is intended to impact other people and the community as a whole. Could cancer have been cured by now in the absence of this practice, for example? Perhaps. But even on a smaller-scale level: the absence in the life of a child of the brother he should have had, for example, what are the full range of the repercussions on him. Etc., etc., etc.

We, perhaps understandably, underemphasize this aspect of the harms caused by abortion, because the primary harm and cruelty caused to the baby itself looms so large, as well as secondary effects such as on the mother, on a culture that lacks respect for life, etc. But it is a significant negative consequence of abortion in itself.

And this connects quite closely to what Herod or Pharoah intended to accomplish in their heinous decrees. They were motivated by a desire to prevent an individual whose mission they feared from being there to fulfill their mission.

Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that there are individuals in positions of power and influence today who reason along somewhat similar lines? Who advocate for abortion (among other reasons) because they hope to throw a wrench in God’s plans and so prevent or postpone at least some of what they fear would come about if those plans were not interfered with.
schedule 1 year ago
    Fran Macadam
    Fran Macadam
    Of course we have to be honest: murderers, robbers and politicians wouldn't be born either. Remember our evangelical President during elections two decades ago musing how it would be good if we could go back in time and throttle baby Hitler in the crib?
    schedule 1 year ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    Re: One of the serious negative repercussions of abortion is that individuals who are intended to be around at a particular time to fulfill a particular service in their lifetime aren’t around

    I don't think reality works that way-- it's not planned out in minute detail. And you could say something in similar about people not conceiving a particular child at a particular time, and not just because of contraception: A couple that never marries or has sex might have had a child who would cure cancer. And of course this sort of speculation works for negatives too: the child not born might have become an serial killer, the next Stalin, or the guy who gives the orders that starts a nuclear war.
    schedule 1 year ago
      Frans
      Frans
      To be sure, if an individual is called upon by God to marry and have children and intuits as much, but he decides not to do so because he wants to do something else with his life, that could be said to be unfortunate and could have negative repercussions that touch upon himself and others. I think the hand of providence plays a guiding role in the life of each individual, and the more someone counters this through free will choices as opposed to conforming to it through those choices, the more things diverge from how they ideally would go - with potentially far-reaching consequences for himself and others. (It might be worth stressing that God is not in the business of micromanaging anyone’s life, we are talking here about large-scale life-direction sort of choices).

      That being said, God has instituted individual free will and human agency as legitimate parameters for how things function on Earth. When an individual decides not to marry (or not to pursue a particular career, or not to move to a particular place, or not to make some other major life choice) he might make an unfortunate decision, but he has not sinned in the eyes of God per se.

      When a woman decides to kill her baby, however, that is more than an unfortunate choice, it is a serious sin or crime in the eyes of God. And although God is doubtlessly aware that individuals do or could make such choices, such choices do not fit into the legitimate parameters for free will and human agency that he has instituted. Is it then difficult to countenance that the latter sort of actions could interfere with his plans in a different and more serious sort of way than the former? That the whole broad mysterious and dynamic mechanism of divine providence that is designed in such a way as to respect and work with free will and human agency could be interfered with more seriously than in the former sort of case?

      This also connects to questions about the trajectory of individual souls. If some particular child of God is intended to play a key role (whether in curing cancer or in setting free the Hebrew slaves) and his intended parents don’t get together and do their thing, perhaps he’ll be born to other parents in similar circumstances around the same time. If he is conceived and killed (either before or shortly after birth) though, then what? I think according to classical Christian doctrine he would go straight to heaven. Even if you believe in reincarnation, however, there are complications that come up.

      In any case, abortion (and infanticide, euthanasia, etc.) at the very least provides a major additional factor that can seriously interfere with God’s plans.

      Jesus could very well have been killed by Herod’s edict and subsequent efforts, otherwise the angel would not have counseled Joseph to take him to Egypt and remain there until Herod’s death. And Herod was motivated by exactly that possibility to do what he did. It was not really some sort of power play over the weak and innocent that motivated him, nor depravity for its own sake, it was an attempt to prevent an individual he feared from being around to fulfill his mission (Herod was a jew and believed in the prophecies about a messiah).

      I suspect there are modern day Herod’s that are at least somewhat similarly motivated, even if they have no particular individual in mind. Anything that can help to throw a (further) wrench into God’s plans and potentially murder the next great saint or prophet - or even the next great meek child of God who might play some key role in some particular capacity, presents an attractive proposition.

      All of this being said, this is hardly the only thing that makes abortion problematic, nor the biggest one. But it is a side of the issue that deserves to be considered.
      schedule 1 year ago
        JON FRAZIER
        JON FRAZIER
        God's will is ultimately accomplished no matter how contrary we humans are in exercising our free will. Even the Devil's actions must eventually conduce to God's purposes. Such is the sovereignty of God.
        schedule 1 year ago
Fran Macadam
Fran Macadam
Progressive has come to be synonymous with progressively worse.

Better living through degradation?
schedule 1 year ago
    Frans
    Frans
    Part of the problem is that people have too narrow a sense of progress. If we had used material, technological and socio-economic progress as a springboard to real cultural refinement, spiritual advancement, integration of science and religion, etc. to the extent we should have, people wouldn’t be as easily drawn into all this fake progressivism.

    To suggest that the conditions we had in the past were preferable to the conditions we have today because it was easier then than now to be focused on what really matters is more to advocate for easiness than for what really matters.
    schedule 1 year ago