Martin Snigg recently put up a comment in response to an
article on abortion put up on the ABC Religion and Ethics Website by Anthony Kelly. The comment consisted of a passage attributed to
Gil Bailie, a disciple of the French literary theorist and anthropologist Rene Girard, who famously wrote on the necessity of sacrifice in social organisation in books like
Violence and the Sacred.
What is striking and most compelling is the link Bailie makes between such a "sacrificial regime" and abortion in the post-sexual revolution era. According to Snigg, Bailie is noted to have written that:
The efficacy of a sacrificial regime – understood in terms of the
anthropological analysis of René Girard – does not require that the sacrificial community hate
or revile the sacrificial victim. All that is required is the conviction
that the elimination of the victim is necessary to the preservation of
the community as presently constituted, and that the present
constitution of the community is worth the sacrificial costs required to
preserve it.
...Understood in this way, the existence of abortion
on demand qualifies as the greatest single sacrificial system of all
time. The killing of the unborn is – explicitly or implicitly –
considered to be indispensable to the continuance of the regime of the
sexual revolution, and the sheer number of those sacrificed to its
continuance exceeds that of any regime in history. Moreover, the unborn
undeniably constitute the most powerless and voiceless category of
victims imaginable.
Labels: blogs, bourgeois Christianity, Church and Culture, culture, Girard
