In Dorothy Sayer's cycle of plays about the life of Christ, she depicts the scene when Herod sends troops to Bethlehem to kill every male child, hoping to end the threat of the newborn King:
HEROD: Good. Here's another order. Take a band of Thracians. Go to Bethlehem. Search out every male child in the cradle ---
PROCLUS: Children, sir?
HEROD: From twelve days old --- No. I don't trust them. No. Take all the male children from two years old and under and put the lot to death. All of them. The whole brood of adders. Do you hear? Let none escape. Kill them all.
PROCLUS: Sir, I am a soldier, not a butcher.
HEROD: You will obey orders.
PROCLUS: I won't, and that's flat. I am a Roman, and Romans do not kill children. Send one of your own barbarians. (Sayers, The Man Born to be King, 65)
Other research on ancient civilizations would suggest that this is being overly generous to the Romans. All sorts of ancient civilizations killed their children. George Grant writes:
"Virtually every culture in antiquity was stained with the blood of innocent children. Unwanted infants in ancient Rome were abandoned outside the city walls to die from exposure to the elements or from the attacks of wild foraging beasts. Greeks often gave their pregnant women harsh doses of herbal or medicinal abortifacients." (Grant, The Christian Almanac, 758)
Grant goes on in ways that are so disturbing that I am troubled to quote them. That something so terrible to us should have seemed so normal to the ancients is extremely disorienting.
Adam C. English speaks to how normal this was:
"As if disease, malnutrition, unhygienic conditions, and poor medical treatment were not dangerous enough, children were regularly threatened by infanticide. It is almost impossible to know with certainty how frequently infanticide was practiced, mainly because it was a matter for the paterfamilias, the father, to decide. Because it was not a state matter, it was not reported. The head of the house, not the government, decided the fate of the child. Roman law did not regulate or in any way prohibit fathers from exposing their children to death. Acceptable reasons for abandoning children included the following: the child was "maimed or monstrous from birth," not the preferred gender, or physically uminpressive, or the family was simply unable to feed one more mouth." (English, The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, 41)
The Christian revolution was ultimately good news for women and by extension, for babies. Church historian Rodney Stark writes: "Widespread female infanticide had reduced the number of women in society. "If you are delivered of a child," wrote a man named Hilarion to his pregnant wife, "if it is a boy, keep it, if it is a girl discard it." Frequent abortions "entailing great risk" (in the words of Celsus) killed many women and left even more barren. The Christian community, however, practiced neither abortion nor infanticide and thus drew to itself women. More importantly, within the Christian community women enjoyed higher status and security than they did among their pagan neighbors. Pagan women typically were married at a young age (often before puberty) to much older men. But Christian women were older when they married and had more choice in whom, and even if, they would marry." (Rodney Stark, "Live Longer, Healthier, and Better: The Untold Benefits of Becoming a Christian in the Ancient World", from Christian History, 1998)
This continued into the Middle Ages. In a cycle of plays that were put on by various guilds in medieval Great Britain, the story of the birth of Christ was told. One of the few surviving songs from this cycle is called "The Coventry Carol." In it, the story of the massacre of the infants is told through the perspective of mothers who sing their children to sleep lest the soldiers of Herod locate them by their crying:
Lully, lulla, thow littel tyne child,
By, by, lully, lulla, thow littel child,
By, by lully, lullay.
O sisters too, How may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor yongling For whom we do sing:
"By, by, lully, lullay"?
Herod the King In his raging
Chargid he hath this day
His men of might In his owne sight
All yonge children to slay.
That wo is me, Pore child, for thee,
And ever morne and say
For thi parting Nether say nor singe:
"By, by, lully, lullay." (Grant, Christmas Spirit, 172-173)
The event recounted here in this way is, of course, unfathomably sad. This, being the artistic expression of it, is also the way that societies are transformed. The stories of Scripture, such as that of the murderous, raging Herod sabotaging his peoples' own heritage by destroying an entire village of youth, had so clearly shaped the people of this British city of Coventry by the year 1300 that they expressed in music all the fear, lament, tenderness, and horror of what Herod had done. This is a song, and to that extent, a society (which produces and sings the song) that has a new vision of what it means to be pro-child.
In Dorothy Sayers' play, the Roman soldier protests that Romans aren't butchers and that Romans don't kill children. But of course they did. On the surface, no culture seems as child-affirming as the United States. But it is important not to be ignorant as the Roman soldier is in the presence of Herod. Is there a dark underside to our ways? To be sure. Richard John Neuhaus was a young priest whose activist heart was set on opposition to the Vietnam War and to racial discrimination. He spoke at Democratic conventions in the 1960s. But, as his political tribe came to embrace freedom to abort children in the early 1970s, Neuhaus was stunned. Though his life is the story of a man who transcended political typecasting, he was always the sort of person who could be counted on to speak his mind, whoever it would offend. Though in the 1970s, he offended his friends on the left, he would offend his friends on the right in the mid-1990s when he threatened that the generation to come would find "the government that rules them is morally illegitimate." Harshly rebuked by friends at the time, Matthew Schmitz writes that the twenty years since then have proven Neuhaus to be right, especially in light of new research from the World Values Survey, which shows that belief in democracy is in decline:
"Today, even those undisturbed by the fact that sixty million Americans have been aborted since 1973 should be able to see that all is not well. Real average hourly wages have not increased for fifty years. A national increase in deaths from suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse has caused overall life expectancy to decline for the first time since the AIDS epidemic.
"We are told that these outcomes are simply the result of individual choice; to stop them would be an intolerable infringement on the rights of privacy and private property. This is the logic that has done so much to discredit liberal democracy. Economics is now treated as less a question of justice than a narrow and technical science. Politics is confined to policy questions rather than competing visions of right and wrong. Our regime hopes to maximize happiness by encouraging individual choice. It accepts abortion and overdose as the price for free love and free trade. It offers us every personal satisfaction, but nothing we can share. Even if our regime did maximize individual preference, that would not be enough. It is not good for man to be alone. Our good is necessarily common rather than merely personal and private." (Matthew Schmitz, "Neuhaus was Right", published in First Things, January 2018)
When questioned by Herod, the Roman soldier said "Romans don't kill children." But we know better. All societies have been caught up in this cruelest of cruel tendencies to sabotage their own heritage. So have we. In our complicity with this most broken quality of human life, we allow the Christmas story to re-orient us in the plight to lift up human life, no matter what the cost. I close with George Grant's paragraph on the contemporary meaning of the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents:
"It has always been the focus of the Christian's commitment to protect and preserve the sanctity of human life - thus serving as a prophetic warning against the practitioners of abandonment and infanticide in the age of antiquity, oblacy, and pessiary in the medieval epoch, and abortion and euthanasia in these modern times. Generally set aside as a day of prayer, it culminates with a declaration of the covenant community's unflinching commitment to the innocents who are unable to protect themselves." (Grant, The Christian Almanac, 758)
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