America’s Coy Assaults on Children
Children are weak. Physically, emotionally, and mentally they have not yet matured and strengthened themselves. This is precisely what makes them children. Because of this weakness, a feature inherent to that stage of life, children have been protected by good and well-ordered (often Christian) societies and taken advantage of by wicked and disordered (often pagan) societies.
Because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known; and because they have filled this place with the blood of innocents, and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind— therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when this place shall no more be called Topheth, or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.
Jeremiah 19:4-6
The Bible makes plain that the pagan gods of Canaan demanded child sacrifice. They lusted for the flesh of children, and their devotees were ready and willing to offer it up. In our own day and place, children are being offered up and having their blood shed, too. But we have methods for concealing it.
In the case of abortion, in which we have slaughtered almost 1/5 the current population of the United States in the last 50 years, the most common method is to present a child as a non-person. “This is a fetus. It is a part of my body. I get the say over my body.” By denying the humanity of the person you’re paying to have poisoned, crushed, or dismembered, you’re hoping to evade moral responsibility for the act.
In the case of our widespread sexualization of children, seen in drag shows for kids and trans-themed plot lines in kids’ TV shows and sexually explicit books and other media in public schools and libraries, the method is to present that sexualization as being done for the good of the children. “We need to protect trans kids and queer kids!” By making it seem as though a given sexual perversion is an inherently good part of a child’s identity, you’re making the enablement of that perversion appear to be a morally positive act. Modern America sees the sexualization of kids as virtuous.
In both scenarios, abortion and the sexual exploitation of children, the children themselves are an object that is subordinated to someone else’s desires or agenda. Abortion exists because people sometimes don’t want babies and are willing to murder them to make them go away. The sexualization of children exists because some people enjoy gratifying themselves sexually using children as material for that gratification. In twenty-first century America, the weakness and vulnerability of children make them prey, rather than precious. Much of the ancient world also took advantage of the weakness of kids but were simply less coy and duplicitous about it. When the ancient Greeks left the weakest of their babies exposed to die (if interested, see p. 113 here) or practiced pederasty (with caution, if interested see here, especially the second paragraph), they didn’t obscure it with language games quite the way we do.
The West cloaks its abuse of children.
Our Christian conscience appears to be showing.
Sexual Manipulation
Those at the top of our educational and governmental systems want us to allow boys and men who pretend to be females to go into girls’ restrooms despite the the resulting assaults that will obviously follow. They want schools to enable boys and girls to pretend they are not their real sex and to conceal that pretense from parents. Why? What has made the push for these particular policies so fervent to those who want us to adopt them? Why the urgency?
Children are more emotionally and intellectually impressionable and therefore easier to manipulate, and they are less physically and mentally able to defend themselves against that manipulation. Because they are impressionable and weaker than adults we have historically not sent them to fight our wars for us, to arrest our criminals for us, to sign up for credit cards or get married or elect their own medical treatment. Our society reflected our correct accounting for the vulnerable nature of children: We shielded them. But now that vulnerability is being made use of. It is being mined for the sexual gratification others can achieve from it. Kids are less equipped to protest their own exploitation, which is why schools and libraries around the country can recommend to children and make available for them pornographic images like those in the book “Gender Queer” (a “graphic memoir” which won the Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020 despite illustrations of sexual acts, including one of adult-on-child). Kids don’t know they’re being sexually beguiled, maneuvered towards someone else’s desire for them. It is comparatively easy, especially when given authority and a great deal of time, to get a child to do and believe things. And to those who deny that God made us and that we owe Him a certain mode of life and conduct, getting children to act and think in a way they find sexually exciting cannot be objectively morally wrong and may not be that problematic. Schools that celebrate sexual deviancy are downstream of schools that inculcate Darwinian evolution.
Christians have been too naive about the intentions of those who normalize transgenderism and homosexuality in childhood settings. It is not merely a principled desire for a more kind and gracious society that propels people to use childhood environments to conventionalize homosexual behavior and crossdressing. Benign tolerance is not the fuel in these engines. Something far more volatile and combustible is supplying the frenzy of pride celebrations LGBTQ materials in schools, daycares, and kids’ shows. These perverse behaviors are being pressed onto children because they are sexual behaviors, and many of the people sexually intrigued by them see children as easy material for their own indulgence.
Contempt for Infants
Despite a vague sentimentality about babies, the West generally and the United States specifically demonstrates a lifestyle of contempt and disregard for them. Americans have aborted more than 63,000,000 infants since 1973’s Roe v. Wade ruling. We stylize ourselves as a nation eager to stand up for and to help the vulnerable or disadvantaged, but there is virtually no type of human being more vulnerable than a baby, and our behaviors show deep disdain for them. In 2018, we aborted 1 baby for every 7 we delivered. We don’t hear about these murders on the news, there is no trial to follow and no pictures of a grieving family. These are the weakest and most voiceless people in America, and we murder them by the millions.
Similarly revealing, we are currently having only about 1.7 babies per woman, well below replacement rate, and less than half the number we were having in 1958 (3.5). And while many of us believe it’s more expensive than ever to have children, it’s truer to say that our standard of living expectations are higher than ever before, and having children at that standard costs more than having children at a more historically normal standard of living. At the end of the nineteenth century, the average American family had 400 square feet of residence per person, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century the average American family had 800 square feet of residence per person. Our houses are larger than ever before, and we are filling them with fewer children than ever before. We have chosen space over descendants, bathrooms over babies.
Nations and individuals both reveal what they truly value more through their actions than their mere words. Despite our cultural elements that still romanticize babies in theory, America’s bloodshed in abortion and low rate of actually having babies are better indicators of how much we value infants in the real world, where they require diaper changes and feedings and protection and instruction. By those metrics, we don’t like babies, and we make that dislike known.
Cherish Children
A rightly ordered society attempting to obey the God who actually exists will see in babies and children something of awesome value and of great vulnerability. It will protect them from the perversions of selfish adults. It will safeguard their infancy and love to see babies born and raised up. This is the society we should aspire to be. America must repent of its attempt to obscure and conceal the harm it is doing to children, and seek to love them and the God who made them. We need to confess our underhanded violence towards kids and treat them as the gifts they are.
We must be a harbor for the children God blesses us with.