Why Christians must challenge the culture of death

It is twilight on a cold winter’s day in Cappadocia, a province in the Roman Empire. The year? Sometime in the 360s. The crisp feel of the air threatens snow, and a young woman is walking briskly, with purpose, through the mostly abandoned town street to the local rubbish heap.

But her goal is not to take out the trash. What she has in mind, rather, is a matter of life and death.

These rubbish heaps — the equivalent of our modern recycling centers — were not just places to take out the trash, the broken crockery, or various other scraps that have outlived their usefulness. In addition to collecting refuse, these were also designated locations for abandoning unwanted infants. Most often, these were girls.

At a time of famine, in particular, why keep around one more mouth to feed? And what use are girls anyway, when you have to pay a dowry when they get married? They are nothing but a resource drain.

This practice of "exposing" infants was not unique to Cappadocia. We speak of it, though, because we know the story of this woman. Her name was Macrina, and in the middle of the fourth century, while quite young, she decided to dedicate her life to Christ. As part of this mission, she never married but began rescuing abandoned infants, mostly girls, from rubbish heaps and adopting them as her own.

Is it not pro-life also, after all, to care for grown men and women who are hurting, who are outcasts, whom death is otherwise ready to claim as her own?

We know about her ministry because two of her younger brothers, Gregory and Basil, became famous church fathers. Gregory, furthermore, wrote "The Life of Saint Macrina," telling of his sister’s profound influence on his own ministry.

Macrina’s work of mercy has rightly been a common example that Christians today bring up when talking about the ways that the earliest Christians were firmly pro-life in a culture that wasn’t.

Rescuing abandoned babies and caring for them is certainly one obvious and important way to be counterculturally pro-life, but is it the only one? Can we claim to be pro-life if this is all we are doing?

Here is another example to consider, one perhaps more surprising to our 21st-century sensibilities.

Traveling through the edge of an unfamiliar town, a man stops to have a conversation with a woman he has never met. She seems to be in distress, although she doesn’t say it directly. Yet he is able to understand her, to listen, and to respect her in a way no one ever has.

We hear on other occasions how this same man visits the home of two single sisters and their chronically ill brother, outcasts in a society where such a household of three single adults would have been an anomaly to set tongues wagging. On one such visit, coming at the summons of the sisters to find their brother dead and in a tomb for three days, he will miraculously raise him from the dead.

What mercy is this?

Of course, the man in question is not just a man — he is Jesus, God incarnate, who was born and lived as a man for 30-odd years before going to the cross to atone for all the sins of mankind.

During his earthly ministry, if we read closely in the Gospels, we find that he spent a lot of time ministering to the single, the sick, the broken in various ways. Not once did he have the opportunity to rescue a baby from a rubbish heap — perhaps because the Israelites did not adopt this pagan practice — yet we cannot deny that he was pro-life in all that he did.

Is it not pro-life also, after all, to care for grown men and women who are hurting, who are outcasts, whom death is otherwise ready to claim as her own?

I had occasion to think about the Christian's comprehensively pro-life ethic as I was writing my new book, "Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity." My overall argument is that the devaluing of mothers and children in our post-Christian society bears remarkable similarities to the attacks on the worth of women and children in the pre-Christian pagan world.

Every single human being is precious in God’s eyes because she is made in God’s very image.

Attacks on the lives of the vulnerable — whether through direct harm to their lives (e.g., through abortion today or abortion, infanticide, and wartime genocide in antiquity) or through indirect harm latent in verbal expressions of their worthlessness — are a symptom of a larger culture that does not respect persons.

In such a culture, anyone could be deemed worthless or useless at some point and judged worthy only of death, as is the case increasingly in Canada right now, where the Medical Assistance in Dying Act keeps expanding.

In the Roman world — the code of Caesar, we could call it — the preciousness of any person was not guaranteed but was in the eye of the beholder. If Caesar said, and sometimes he did, that a group of people ought to be wiped out, his will was done.

Christianity, by contrast, brought something revolutionary into the ancient world — a world so comfortable with casual cruelty toward the weak of all ages and life stages. In the midst of a culture of death — a culture that viewed all people as disposable, should the right circumstances present themselves — there was in sharp contrast the manifesto by which Jesus and his followers lived: that every single human being is precious in God’s eyes because she is made in God’s very image.

So I worry today that whenever we focus our own rhetoric on rescuing the unborn alone — a worthy cause, to be sure! — we miss this larger picture of what Christ called his followers to do in preserving and promoting life and flourishing, thereby challenging the culture of death.

A recent study maps euthanasia that was offered as a medical service to patients with eating disorders — adults who were struggling with a disorder, but instead of being offered healing, they were encouraged to choose death.

What a travesty for Christians to do nothing as we hear slogans that chant, “Abortion is health care,” and likewise as we see a sick man in a hospital offered euthanasia as an alternative to lifesaving medication.

But in both cases, we must see the larger picture: Poverty has been in the recent years a leading cause of abortion, and that is why Dobbs did not reduce abortions, just as it has been a significant contributing cause for those who choose euthanasia.

The kind of “choice” that the pro-choice camp offers to pregnant women or sick adults unable to pay medical bills is no choice at all; it is but a travesty.

But this too is nothing new.

In Macrina’s Cappadocia, the parents who exposed their baby girls to die on the village trash heap, unless someone rescued them, also made that choice because of poverty and famine. They too felt they had no choice.

But Christ always offered this choice — the choice of life in him, a life everlasting, which begins in the here and now.

As believers, being comprehensively pro-life today means proclaiming and living out this good news to all around, rich or poor, healthy or sick, young or old.