Ah gits weary

An’ sick of tryin’;

Ah’m tired of livin’

An skeered of dyin’,

—“Ol’ Man River,” from Show Boat, 1927

And aren’t we all, some days, just like Joe and his dockside gang, in that wondrous classic bequeathed us by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II: worn out, beaten down, ready to get outta here? So ready are growing numbers of us, it seems, that the recent vogue for “assisted dying” possesses larger and larger shares of public discourse. Old religious beliefs and understandings about the sanctity of life only slightly obstruct the growing sense that life—being a marginal proposition: some bad things, some good—requires protection and encouragement.

Otherwise, well . . .

• The birth rate slumps throughout the West, stirring predictions. We produce too few babies now to replace ourselves down the line: meaning we won’t have enough workers in the future, sans increases in immigration.

• The practice, called abortion, of culling out putatively inconvenient members of the race commands political support, based, often as not, on the conviction that when the people say they want something you give it to them: as much as they want, consistent with what you can get by with giving or withholding. First Lady Melania Trump put her oar in during the presidential campaign, ruling out compromise “when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth.”

• Shooting a pharmaceutical executive in the back, out of personal pique, can turn the accused murderer into a kind of social media folk hero: Robin Hood with a silencer. Among the doleful ironies of the case: The same media sources that can’t talk enough about the alleged killer mention hardly at all the life and background and aspirations of the victim.

• Fewer and fewer religious figures, at any level, feel called on to portray life as divinely ordained, hence deserving, at tough moments, of the benefit of the doubt (the same doubt to which you would suppose the late Brian Thompson, of UnitedHealth, was entitled).

• There is abroad in the land, and in many lands besides ours, what you could call at the very mildest a carelessness about life: an indifference not just to its well-recorded divine origins but to its opportunities and capacities for fulfillment.

Fulfillment, in its manifold variations, is a matter, apparently, for individual judgment: the first-person singular; I, me, mine—characteristic, you might say, of any era widely uninvolved with the sacred. Bari Weiss, of The Free Press, recently interviewed one Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley type who has structured his whole life—scientifically, medically—around “not dying.” “Once you exist,” he told Ms. Weiss, “the most important goal is to still exist.” To which end he orders virtually everything.

That would be one approach to the business. A shall we say contrasting approach made international headlines around Thanksgiving last year. Britain’s Parliament voted in principle for a bill that, once implemented—which could be a year or two from now—would let doctors “terminate” the lives of the “terminally ill”: those with neither the hope nor the spirit to follow Bryan Johnson into unending existence.

As the bill’s chief proponent, Labour Party member Kim Leadbeater, expressed it to her colleagues: “I can’t even begin to tell you the number of stories, the number of emails, and people who have stopped me in the street to tell me of their really traumatic and harrowing stories, which clearly show that the law and legal framework at the moment doesn’t exist to really help people.” Help meaning, I guess, ending their engagements with the stimulations inherent in life—not all of them kindly, some of them likely quite awful. A war against life goes on—hardly for the first time in history—but more and more broadly directed, with old-fashioned murder less at the center than weariness and futility.

Frankly I’d thought better of the British, a rooted, non-trendy, show-me kind of folk. Maybe this thing won’t go as far as it looks like it’s going in Blighty; but cousins across the water are shuddering anyway, as many others must be also.

What apostles of the modern, such as Kim Leadbeater, demonstrate is the enshrining here and there and in far too many unlikely places of a perverse conviction; namely, the conviction of life as essentially worth neither the pain nor the sorrow nor the time nor, frankly, the money. Unless you’re Bryan Johnson, which you’re probably not.

Bend your knees

An’ bow your head,

An’ pull dat rope

Until you’ dead.

Well, yes, life’s tough: yours, mine, everybody’s, to one degree or another. Tougher, uglier by far are despair and surrender, howsoever appealing the prospect of release from misery and care, from futility and intimations of the sort that Joe and his Mississippi River crew longed to lay aside. Who listens to “Ol’ Man River” (or would want to) without the nod of personal identification that Oscar Hammerstein surely knew he was calling up from the depths of human experience? From the sense of life as a series of unending wonders: ups and downs, stall-outs and sideways motions? From the knowledge of life as bestowed by—by who else but God?

I am not going to preach a sermon here, for which I have no remit. I want to tie a few threads together, nothing more. The diminution of religious conviction is a topic that comes at us, often enough, in the form of studies—this or that percentage of males, of females, of old folks (like me), of college kids, whatever, unengaged, if they ever were engaged, in religious worship or pursuits. The last time I saw a Pew Research report on the topic—at the start of 2024—28 percent of Americans were “religiously unaffiliated,” styling themselves atheists, agnostics, or just plain not hooked up with a church: whereas G. K. Chesterton a century ago had called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” Another, hardly unrelated Pew finding: “[H]ighly religious Americans are much more likely to see society [in good vs. evil terms], while non-religious people tend to see more ambiguity. . .” Ambiguity on moral matters has, I would judge, numberless implications, centered on questions of should-I-or-shouldn’t-I? Such as how to view life. Useful? Useless? Somewhere in between? How to know? How to proceed on the knowledge?

Religious affiliation and belief, with all their complexities of understanding, are tricky measurements of belief. Fifty-nine percent of Catholics— communicants of an expressly pro-life church—believe abortion should be legal, according to Pew. The larger point, perhaps, is the relative likelihood of the duly affiliated buying into, at some level, religious teachings about life and the obligations thereunto appertaining.

Death? Better than life? At least some of the time? A soldier, amid the carnage of war, whose whole rationale is the taking of life, may in accordance with explicit religious principles view the deliberate discard of his own life, and possibly the lives of his comrades, as a higher obligation than life’s preservation. “Greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends,” was Jesus’ own directive (John 15:13), affording the handover of life a barely imaginable perspective.

None of which, for all the radiance that deliberate sacrifice can evoke, quite speaks to the growing indifference—maybe caused by moral confusion—to the whole point. Religious understanding should be considered the central—if not always, unfortunately, dispositive—point.

I know how dust-bedecked that sounds, how antiquated and dead-letterlike. I have just the suspicion that America’s religious commitment, prior to the fall-off many see as commencing in the go-go, let-it-all-hang-out 1960s, was less powerful than it seems from nostalgic glance-backs. Why, I have always wondered, if we were such a religiously faithful community in the 1960s and 1970s, did we let the Supreme Court for so many years get by with foisting on the whole nation the idea of abortion as a morally indifferent solution to personal problems? Because that was the meaning of Roe v. Wade: unborn life as not-very-much-of-anything, a fragment of experience; a blip; a sneeze.

That was no genuinely religious way of looking at things. A genuinely religious approach to the matter would have begun with the plans and vision of the author of life, known to most onlookers and participants as God: whose care for the new nation its founders had emphasized over and over. For instance, at the grassroots level, Surry County, Virginia’s leading citizens. These, in a petition to the state Assembly, declared forthrightly “That a conscientious regard to the approbation of Almighty God lays the most effective restraint on the vicious passions of Mankind, affords the most powerful incentive to the faithful Discharge of every sacred Duty. . . is a truth sanctioned by the reason and experience of ages.” As God had created life itself, arguments for legally extinguishing the lives of unborn children would not have been pleasantly received.

Roe v. Wade may be off the table at last, but its stench lingers in the atmosphere. An age more and more indifferent to the question of life’s religious origins is likely to let its imaginations roam. Maybe nothing’s the big deal we used to think, back when God was always roaming around, sticking his cosmic nose into people’s business, acting like it was all His show, or something close to that!

The abortion question dovetails with the easing—out of compassion, you understand—of resistance to the assisted death, or euthanasia, movement. We’re talking release from anticipated or already overwhelming burdens— the accidentally pregnant mom, the worn-out stevedore on the Mississippi, the cancer-ridden hospital patient, crying out in pain; likelier and likelier, it seems to me, the lost, experience-flattened office worker/laborer/retiree/wanderer, ready to be done with the whole thing. Just sick and tired, you know? Bend you knees an’ bow you head. . . as I was preparing this article, the media brought us news of malice or despondency as the causes—who can know with precision?—of two spectacular suicides on New Year’s Day, one in New Orleans, the other in Las Vegas; gestures of indifference to life, not least the lives of others. That the New Orleans catastrophe—an action rightly characterized as terrorism—deprived so many others of their lives is incidental, I suppose, to the purpose of the suicidal gesture.

No one would pretend that suicide, under a limitless list of pretexts, is anything new in human existence. (In Jainism it is called “the incomparable religious death.”) The domestication of those pretexts is the problem: the armchair comfort allowing many to nod agreeably at measures of abstract benefit to the downtrodden and suffering—those who can’t live with, whatever “live with” means, loneliness or “bodies all aching and racked with pain,” to cite another of Joe’s cries from the dock of Showboat. Our Mother Country’s move in the direction of allowing/promoting release gives assisted suicide that Masterpiece Theater taste of dry sherry and croquettes. The truth—one truth among a number demanding attention—is that Britain is a latecomer to the world of assisted suicide. Theoretically Christian nations such as Canada already give assent to the proposition. Likewise Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands; also 10 U.S. states. Plenty of people see no need for extensive conversation with the author of life as to treatment of his creations. We are past that point, it would seem.

The lingering effects of religious belief draw some notice. In England, as Parliament debated (with some passion, one is glad to note) the right-to-die legislation, the Archbishop of Canterbury observed with some cogency that “. . . once you can ask for assisted suicide, it soon becomes something that you feel you ought to do.” The old slippery-slope, one-thing-leads-to-another argument, on account of its experiential truth, deserves attention wherever radical change is on the table. Here, all the same, the table itself (if I may metaphorize) merits attention in the highest degree. I would put it thus: Messing around with the Lord’s handiwork—in the present case your life— is a bad idea. I am on the side of the Catholic Catechism: “We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.”

So what am I doing here—slinging around some ecclesiastical diktat, as binding and unrepealable? That is not how it goes with ecclesiastical “diktats,” which are not made-up rules on the same order as “No spiked shoes in the locker room.” They are distillations of Truth—of Actuality. Attention must be paid. Not to thick theological tomes propped up on the shelf but to the lives and the challenges to which theology ministers by the grace of God. Any pretense that the sufferer is obligated to quit whining and bothering others is falsehood. The Stoics, so closely identified with noble endurance, never put it so.

The civilized obligation, the God-loving obligation, is to the relief of misery—a different thing from its extinction, though we might not suppose so from listening to the spokesmen for assisted suicide, and enacting laws that in their minds will make everything fine and dandy. It is a great deal to count on—killing as remedy; the substitution of tubes and needles for folded hands, for the sacraments, for prayer to the creator of life.

The chief cause, as I see it, for the subordination of prayer in the world’s dealings (beyond, naturally, “our thoughts and prayers”) is the lapse of conviction in prayer’s efficacy and relevance. Well-meant words wafted through the atmosphere—what’s the good? “It can’t hoit,” maybe, on the order of chicken soup. As for easing pain and heartache, we shouldn’t expect too much, right? And how many of the religious are left around this place anyhow? Couldn’t be many, just from looking at all the churches turned into fancy digs for the urban upper classes.

The British debate over “assisted death,” a/k/a suicide, is a reminder of our civilization’s willing descent into self-will as the touchstone of truth: which, of course, it isn’t, but we need these reminders of what must be done in response to the great deceits under which our world has come to live. Our task: to re-envision and put once more into general effect the great truths of life, sadly muffled now and mud-caked. Jim himself, down Mississippi way, had some vivid sense of the relationship between sorrow and pain, relief and triumph.

Show me dat stream

called de river Jordan,

Dat’s de ol’ stream

dat I long to cross

Flowing, as designed, toward something far better than personal eradication; something akin to victory.

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Original Bio:

William Murchison, a former syndicated columnist, is a senior editor of the Human Life Review. He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time.