{"id":32836,"date":"2024-11-13T21:12:57","date_gmt":"2024-11-13T21:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/?p=32836"},"modified":"2024-11-13T21:12:58","modified_gmt":"2024-11-13T21:12:58","slug":"the-4b-movement-is-a-cult-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/the-4b-movement-is-a-cult-of-death\/","title":{"rendered":"The 4B movement is a cult of death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By: John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., originally published November 11, 2024, The Catholic World Report<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The threat to America comes not from so-called \u201cChristian nationalists\u201d but from a religion that wants to be a theocracy while hiding as a non-religion.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many people watching the post-election meltdown of the Left on social media view it with some measure of Schadenfreude<\/em> and I suspect the average American dismisses it as silly. In some sense, it is silly. But, in a deeper sense, it\u2019s serious, even deadly serious. It\u2019s a death cult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost 30 years ago, Pope St. John Paul II wrote about the fight between the \u201cculture of life\u201d and the \u201cculture of death.\u201d\u00a0Evangelium vitae\u00a0<\/em><\/a>talked about how these two \u201ccultures\u201d are contending for control in modern life. It was hardly a new insight for the Polish pope. As Karol Cardinal Wojty\u0142a, he said basically the same thing to Pope St. Paul VI during the Lenten retreat he preached for him in 1976 (subsequently published as\u00a0Sign of Contradiction<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider the fact that many of the reasons for the post-election hysteria are tied to the supposed suppression of \u201cwomen\u2019s rights\u201d by the election of politicians who at least won\u2019t codify abortion-on-demand-through-birth-for-any-reason-you-feel-like as national policy. Kamala Harris made abortion a centerpiece of her campaign, one of the few issues about which she managed to avoid a word salad and obfuscate. She \u201cmade history\u201d by visiting an abortuary. She picked a running mate who did his best to weaken Minnesota\u2019s pro-life protections, including legal presumptions about care requirements for newborns who survive the abortionist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Harris voters put their eggs in the Democratic basket and are now emoting about their loss. In the post-election aftermath, let\u2019s step back and look: we have a national party that believes, with radical fervor, that the extermination of prenatal life for any or no reason at any time prior to birth is a good <\/em>thing. Not something to be regretted, but something to be affirmed, \u201cshouted,\u201d and campaigned on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Biden-Harris Administration harped for four years about the alleged torrent of \u201cmis\/disinformation\u201d flooding America. But Harris trafficked in disinformation to capture the \u201cabortion vote.\u201d It is heartbreaking to watch otherwise normal women acting as if becoming a mother in 21st-century America is a life-threatening act for which, in the extremely rare situation something might become pathological, they will be met not with appropriate medical care but somebody dressed up in a Handmaiden\u2019s costume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As has always been the case, abortionists trade in extremely rare hard cases in order to hide and smuggle their real goal: unrestricted abortion without any justification at any time in pregnancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is most interesting to me, however, is the\u00a0\u201c4B reaction\u201d<\/a>\u00a0of this death cult. For those noninitiates who never heard of this movement (like me before this weekend), it is apparently a five-something-year-old South Korean\u00a0\u201cfeminist\u201d ideological import<\/a>. The four \u201cBs\u201d are words in Korean: no dating men, no marrying men, no having babies, no sex with men. Women are taking to TikTok and other social media outlets to announce they will boycott sex with men, especially men who voted for Trump. They are looking for ways to \u201cidentify\u201d with other women: bracelet making, tattoos, masks, and shaving heads seem to be currently in vogue. How to identify \u201csafe\u201d men poses a bigger philosophical conundrum: one segment is working on that problem while other Amazons have simply concluded that any penis-bearing human being (except,\u00a0maybe<\/em>, those who have gone over to the \u201ctrans-woman\u201d side) is irredeemably off limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kneejerk reactions to the 4Bers have ranged from \u201cit\u2019ll reduce your voting pool\u201d to \u201cif you had that much control, abortion wouldn\u2019t have been your #1 issue.\u201d Rather than dismiss this, however, we should take this phenomenon seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 4B movement synergizes with several already established anti-life trends. Young people\u2013especially young women\u2013are either not getting married or getting married at historically advanced ages. Marriage itself is fast becoming not the ordinary state of being for most adults but a mere optional \u201calternative\u201d among various other forms of concubinage of greater or lesser duration. Even when people finally tie the knot, childbearing becomes the next mountain to scale. Fertility rates in the Western world have dropped below replacement level, a phenomenon pronounced in 4B-origin South Korea and one lauded by its American proponents. Children as children (as opposed to children as desired product or as what former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit called \u201cparental projects\u201d) are devalued, if not despised. Animating all of this is a profoundly anti-life culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For millennia\u2013and not just in Christian circles\u2013human beings understood sexual intercourse to have two meanings: procreation and mutual support (procreatio et mutuum adiutorium<\/em>). The Church taught this clearly until the guerrilla warfare against Humanae vitae, <\/em>and the rank cowardice of many Catholic clergy\u2014especially bishops\u2014in failing to talk about these things.<\/em> Now is a \u201cteaching moment\u201d to be seized by \u201creading the signs of the times.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 4B movement is the cultural outcome of that dereliction, seeking to re-form American culture. It takes as a given that sex is primarily about pleasure, with contraception as an immediate backup and abortion as the ultimate backup form of post-conception contraception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just listen to the 4B argument: \u201cbecause you voted for a political candidate, we will not have sex with you.\u201d That statement is bereft of any <\/em>concept of intercourse as an act of love, an act of giving to a beloved, of a permanent bond that may extend into eternity through the \u201ctwo as one flesh\u201d in a third person. That statement treats sex as a momentary \u201creward,\u201d a compensation for doing something. Perhaps it\u2019s right that the 4B argument eschews marriage because such behavior is not conjugal. <\/em>Treating sex as a reward or compensation traditionally was associated with some other ancient profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of conjugality, Silvio Canto\u00a0raises a question<\/a>\u00a0that needs a more thorough analysis from the marriage think tank world: the relationship of how people voted to their marital status. Canto quotes\u00a0Conn Carroll<\/a>\u00a0that the real \u201cgap\u201d in the election was not gender but marriage: \u201cTrump won a majority of not just married white women, but a majority of\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0married women\u201d (emphasis added). Marital status, in short, is determined how most people voted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why the 4B movement is fundamentally not a reaction to a political outcome but a rejection of marriage and childbearing as normal goods of human life and flourishing. It declares \u201cblessed are the barren\u201d cat ladies with \u201cfurry babies\u201d (check out how many TikTokers self-identify by the latter). It essentially wants to say: getting outside of my \u201cautonomous self\u201d by sharing life with others (spouse, child) is inauthentic and evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It begrudges life. And, to extrapolate to a theological level, I add an observation once shared with me by the Rev. Paul Scalia. He pointed out that angels (including fallen angels) cannot procreate. There are no \u201cbaby angels.\u201d The angelic choirs are what and as many as God created them. And it is perhaps not accidental that Satan\u2019s first target for sin was the woman, not because she is supposedly weak or gullible, but because she could give more life, <\/em>something the Evil One hates. Is it not telling that, when Christ defines him, he speaks of the devil as \u201ca murderer from the beginning\u201d (Jn 8:44)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people can be \u201centertained\u201d by these displays, and the political class will certainly not dig into deeper, theological currents animating the anti-values these displays entail. But we Catholics should, because they have much deeper implications for the possibilities of our culture as it contends with life and death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hysterical emoting we see on social media is, as I have\u00a0elsewhere argued,<\/a>\u00a0not normal political discourse.\u00a0<\/em>Normal political wins or losses do\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>take this form. What we\u2019re seeing\u2013not J.D. Vance\u2019s argument for childbearing\u2013is truly \u201cweird.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is happening, I maintain, comes from a deeper and darker place: a sacralization, an idolization of politics into a false religion, so that a political loss becomes an act of faith and the\u00a0casus belli\u00a0<\/em>for a war of religion against one\u2019s opponents. And\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>is dangerous, because the threat to America comes not from so-called \u201cChristian nationalists\u201d but a religion that wants to be a theocracy while hiding as a non-religion, just as the Evil One wants people to believe he doesn\u2019t exist. And the intersection point of this religious struggle is life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham)\u00a0was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. He publishes regularly in the\u00a0National Catholic Register\u00a0and in theological journals.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., originally published November 11, 2024, The Catholic World Report The threat to America comes not from so-called \u201cChristian nationalists\u201d but from a religion that wants to be a theocracy while hiding as a non-religion. Many people watching the post-election meltdown of the Left on social media view it with some…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32837,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe 4B movement is a cult of death - Cincinnati Right to Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/the-4b-movement-is-a-cult-of-death\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The 4B movement is a cult of death - Cincinnati Right to Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By: John M. 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