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Christians who work in politics to end legalized abortion do so because innocent lives are at stake. That would be enough cause in and of itself. However, abortion isn’t just one of the many issues that we should care about. In many ways, abortion, perhaps more than any other single issue, symbolizes our society’s core beliefs. Simply put, Christian societies do not kill their smallest, most vulnerable members. Pagan societies, on the other hand, do.  

In a fascinating recent essay published at First Things, Louise Perry argued that the fight over abortion is really about whether we will remain, in any real sense, a Christian society, or we will re-paganize to the beliefs and values of pre-Christian times. Perry, author of the recent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, isn’t a Christian, though she admits she finds Christianity attractive. Her academic journey seems to have become a spiritual journey, one that has led to a recognition that many of her secular and humanist values are, in fact, remnants of a Christian morality that remade the world. 

Perry opened her article by citing Scottish poet Hollie McNish, who wrote that archaeologists know they’ve found a Greek or Roman brothel when they unearth “a pit of newborn babies’ bones.” Hearing this poem gave Perry the same “painful, squeezing, swooping sensation” she first felt when hearing a graphic description of abortion. She realized something pro-lifers have long argued: Abortion is really a form of legalized infanticide and not so different from the baby-killing of the ancient world. 

Though Perry is still pro-choice in certain cases, she’s clearly uneasy about it. This is in part because she’s a mom, and because she sees how abortion and infanticide exist on a “continuum” that includes other ancient practices like slavery, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and general disregard for the weak and poor. Historically, only one group of people objected to these things. As Perry wrote: 

"The supremely strange thing about Christianity in anthropological terms is that it takes a topsy-turvy attitude toward weakness and strength. To put it crudely, most cultures look at the powerful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing something right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some failing of their own, whether in this life or the last. The smallness and feebleness of women and children is a sign that they must be commanded by men. The suffering of slaves is not an argument against slavery, but an argument against allowing oneself to be enslaved." 

Into this predatory, power-centric pagan world stepped Christ, who defeated the powerful through submission to death—“even death on a cross.” After Christ’s resurrection, His followers began insisting on the innate and equal value of all human beings and began condemning practices like infanticide.  

Christians, of course, have not always lived up to these ideas, but they were unique in holding them. As authors like Tom Holland have argued, these Christian ideals didn’t vanish with the rise of secular humanism. Western progressives owe their moral instincts to protect the weak and vulnerable to the Christian revolution, even if they scoff at the idea of the Christian God.  

And therein lies Perry’s problem. There is no group weaker or more vulnerable than unborn babies. Yet these are precisely the victims that feminists and secular progressives insist we must ignore to advan