For much of human history and in many of the great civilisations—in Egypt, China, India, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome and in Medieval and Modern Europe—religion has been a constituent and fundamental feature of daily life. Our present-day Western society is perhaps the first to attempt the experiment of trying to exist, with religion firmly pushed to the margins of society and excluded altogether from politics.
“The modern world,” writes Hilaire Belloc, “imagines that it has outgrown religion. It has done nothing of the kind. It has merely forgotten it. And because it has forgotten it, it no longer understands itself. Men do not realize that the whole framework of their moral judgments, their political habits, and even their intellectual methods were formed within a Christian society and cannot exist long outside it. When that framework breaks, they will not find themselves enlightened, but bewildered; not free, but enslaved; not rational, but confused.”
Christianity, with its checks on self-indulgence and its injunctions to love others (that would be ‘love’ as caritas, not eros!) has always been a target for social and political revolutionaries. Rob Dreher remarks that “Western society is post-Christian and…absent a miracle, there is no hope of reversing this condition in the foreseeable future.” I believe that in saying this, Dreher doesn’t go far enough! I would say that at this stage in our culture, we are not only living in a post-Christian society; we are living in a post-post-Christian society.
If a post-Christian society is one in which the transcendent elements of Christian belief are jettisoned but the basics of Christian morality are retained, however intellectually unjustifiable that may be, a post-post-Christian society is one in which not only are Christianity’s transcendent elements discarded, but the basic elements of Christian morality, now discovered to be groundless, are junked.
As Belloc notes, Western civilisation has been living off Christian moral capital for quite some time, the depletion of that capital increasing exponentially as the years go by. Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out that having killed the Christian God, it was more than a little odd that Western society should continue to live in accord with Christian morals as if nothing special had happened. The rate of moral capital expenditure has not been the same in all places—the USA is a particular exception—whereas Europe, effectively post-Christian in many countries since the eighteenth century, has, in the twenty-first century, become robustly post-post-Christian, finally catching up with Nietzsche.
The West is on a journey, where to, who can say with assurance? Our new thought leaders began their long march through our cultural institutions in the 1960s and have now come to positions of social and, increasingly, political dominance. As in Orwell’s 1984, our new leaders don’t just want our tolerance or even our resigned acceptance of the new moral norms, whatever these may be, they want us to valorise and celebrate them, and they are inclined to become upset with the peasantry when such validation and celebration is not readily forthcoming.
A society detached from its religious and moral roots is on its way to cultural, social and, eventually, political disintegration. We have seen evidence of this disintegration at work already in parts of the West, not least in the normalisation of abortion in the last 50 years, and currently, with the widespread push to legalise euthanasia/assisted suicide, such legalisation having already been achieved in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Australia, and in more than ten US States.
When the legalisation of euthanasia/assisted suicide is initially argued for, people are usually assured that this will be only for the most extreme cases but, predicably, as soon as legalisation is achieved, the push is on for its extension to less extreme cases. Terminal illness, often incurable cancer, is the lever used to get legislation passed but before long, people suffering non-terminal illnesses, even mental health conditions are considered to be suitable candidates. In 2024 in the Netherlands, Zoraya ter Beek, aged 29 and physically fit, was approved for assisted dying on the grounds of unbearable mental suffering. While there were only 2 such cases in 2010, by 2023 there were 138.
Once the principle of euthanasia/assisted suicide is accepted, the dividing line between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia becomes difficult to maintain. Some years ago, once again in the Netherlands, a doctor sedated a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and asked her family to hold her down while the lethal drug was administered. The 74-year-old woman had expressed a wish to be euthanised but had also indicated that she wanted to determine the right time for this to happen. This distasteful incident gave rise to a law case in which the doctor was judged to have acted lawfully. Not so very long ago, this act would have been described bluntly as murder; now it is merely an administrative matter of termination by a state-licensed terminator.
With the installation of a legal regime of euthanasia/assisted suicide, people with a variety of problems, some medical, some social, are made to feel as if their lives are not only a burden to themselves, but a burden to others. The BBC noted in 2024 that “A report released in October by Ontario – Canada’s most populous province – has since shed some light on controversial cases where people were granted assisted dying when they were not nearing their natural death. One example included a woman in her 50s with a history of depression and suicidal thoughts who had a severe sensitivity to chemicals. Her request for euthanasia was granted after she failed to secure housing that could have met her medical needs [my italics]. Another case made headlines in recent months of a Nova Scotia cancer patient who said she was asked if she was aware of assisted dying as an option twice as she underwent mastectomy surgeries. The question ‘came up in completely inappropriate places’, she told the National Post.”
In 2013, the Irish Supreme Court upheld the prohibition of assisted suicide but concluded that the Oireachtas had the right to legislate on this matter. A Joint Committee on Assisted Dying published its final report in 2024, recommending the introduction of legislation to permit assisted dying in specific circumstances.
Following on from this, a private member’s Bill, the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2024, was introduced but its progress was stalled by the dissolution of the Dáil. The key section of that Bill read: “5. (1) Subject to the provisions and conditions set out in this Act, a registered medical practitioner is authorised to provide assistance to a qualifying person…to end his or her own life in accordance with the procedures and safeguards established under this Act.” The history of euthanasia in countries such as Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands demonstrates that the safeguards that accompany the legalisation of euthanasia, even if they are operationally effective (and that’s a contentious matter), are subject to progressive emendations and extensions.
So much for the law. What of those medical personnel who will be expected to participate in assisted suicide and euthanasia?
In the ‘End of life care’ section of the 8th edition (2016) of the Medical Council’s Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics, the principle, “You must not take part in the deliberate killing of a patient” is clearly and unambiguously stated. (46.9) This sentence is still present in the amended version of the 8th edition of the Guide (2019) produced following the enactment of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. However, in the 9th edition (2024) of the Guide, it no longer appears in the ‘End of life care’ section.
One needs no great philosophical expertise to see the injunction that doctors not participate in the direct killing of patients as an instantiation of the fundamental principle of medical care: primum non nocere—first, do no harm! If one cannot do any good as a physician, one should at least do no harm, and participating in the direct killing of a patient is clearly a violation of this principle of non-maleficence. It cannot be doubted that the introduction of abortion has considerably weakened the commitment of the medical profession to that principle but, regrettable as that is, it should not be used to justify the further weakening of the principle or, as in the present case, its deletion.
The deletion of the principle “You must not take part in the deliberate killing of a patient” corrodes the relationship of trust that should exist between doctors and their patients and has the potential to profoundly alter the way physicians manage end of life issues in every hospital or, indeed, in any other medical situation.
The deletion of these twelve words from the Medical Council’s Guide, a deletion that the Council has failed to explain, is small in size but arguably hugely significant in its potential effect. One does not have to be paranoid to surmise that the deletion of these words, coincident with the recommendations of the Joint Committee, is intended to pave the way for medical cooperation in the event of the introduction of a euthanasia/assisted suicide legal regime.
Western democracies are constructed on the radically unstable foundation of post-post-Christianity, and their citizens are living off a radically depleted storehouse of moral capital. Cultural critics are right to be worried about current crises in democracy, but they seriously underestimate the gravity of the situation. There are crises in democracy, but these crises in Western democracies are only symptoms of a much deeper and much more dangerous crisis of culture.
Unless we re-found and re-invigorate our culture, it will collapse, and other, stronger and more vigorous ones will build upon the ruins.
[I came across a YouTube video discussion between Mike Graham and Gavin Ashenden just after I had finished writing my piece: see: