Viewers of the four-day Democratic National Convention were treated to more than a political gathering.  They saw a spectacle that has been the equivalent of a four-day-long religious retreat.  The services proved that the religious impulse never dies.  It just takes on new shapes and forms reflecting the core values of devotees.

Observers saw a number of quasi-religious ceremonies, including a liturgical procession of pilgrims dressed in white costumes symbolizing abortion pills.

Potential converts also were invited to visit a small chapel in the form of a van placed by Planned Parenthood.  There, disciples of the religion/political cult could observe the initiation rites deemed necessary for entrance into the realm of the 144,000 chosen of the left.

The Planned Parenthood high priests offered initiates the modern-day equivalent of cults promoting castration and child sacrifice in the form of free vasectomies and abortion pills.  Women got on stage and offered testimonies about the salvation abortion had afforded them.  Many of the female congregants wore white, a symbol of purity of mind and heart.

History has seen thousands of cults appear and reappear.  Nearly every one reached an apogee characterized by absurdities and extremes so ridiculous that the cult lost momentum and stalled.  Disciples fled, looking for inspiration elsewhere.

It is fair to say the DNC reached the height of absurdity and extremism indicative of a dying religious cult.  How many voters in a party devoted to death rituals are going to retain loyalty?  How many are going to imitate the plastic joy of Kamala Harris, devoted as she is to the extinguishment of all that gives life to civilization?

It might be wise to think about the fate of death cults, both recent and from the past.

Most cults in the Christianized West have fallen into two categories: either they directly attempt to repudiate Christian doctrine and ethics entirely or they take one tenet, wildly distorting and overemphasizing it, thus attempting to make it nearly the entirety of the Christian religion.

For instance, the long-lasting flagellant cult took the scourging of Christ to mean that individuals should imitate the wounding of Christ by whipping themselves.  The disciples of the movement were known for wearing pointed hats and flowing robes and for carrying a flagellum.  The cult, vividly portrayed in Goya’s The Flagellants (1808-1812), persisted in various forms for centuries.  Followers still occasionally appear in some countries such as the Philippines during Holy Week.

During the Middle Ages, these roaming bands of penitents sought by self-flagellation to atone for and ameliorate what they saw as the wrath of God visited on Europe via the Black Death.  Personal and societal sins were seen as perhaps responsible for the plague, with scourging seen as an efficacious imitation of the salvific wounds of Christ.

But despite the bizarre excesses of the flagellant cult, followers were at least seeking to turn death aside, seeing death by plague as destructive of family and society.  They prayed for God’s mercy, asking that death be turned away.  They called on Christ to save lives.

The flagellants’ beliefs and motives, distorted as they have been, still represent a contrast to the political/religious procession at the beginning of the DNC, in which death was celebrated.  Not only was the extinguishment of human life promoted, but the prevention of even the seed to fertilize the beginning of life was seen as a sacramental means of regeneration and vivification of the Self.

Such a distorted idea of human salvation and well-being is why the left celebrates what Rush Limbaugh truthfully named its “sacrament” of abortion.  The abortion pill is a sacramental wafer offered by priests and priestesses devoted to death.  It is the means through which budding life is flushed from the body in order for a woman’s life to be saved from an unfulfilled destiny.  By taking and eating it, the body is rid of a toxic encumbrance.

The ritual promoting death is in direct contrast to the Christian sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, so recently mocked during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.  For Christians, receiving the eucharistic wafer mysteriously but truly imparts the life of Christ to the recipient.  It is taken in obedience to the words of Christ to his disciples recorded in Matthew 26.  For the believing Christian, it gives renewed life.

What a contrast between the eucharistic wafer and the abortion pill that ensures death, not life.

But those who will not permit the spiritual self-laceration that true introspection and repentance requires will turn instead to the laceration and death of human life as a sacrificial offering to the gods of Self.  Those gods are to be worshiped by the expulsion of innocence, not sin, from the body.  In this manner, women believe the ancient lie told Eve: “Ye shall be as gods.”  

But as St. Augustine pointed out in the City of God concerning the depravity of ancient Rome, worshiping and conciliating gods in degenerative fashion ultimately drives all virtue from the human spirit.

He doubtless would say to the DNC that a propitiation such as abortion is “so foul, so detestable,” that it erases every elevated feeling, including the religious impulse.  A dark, empty, and conscienceless shell is the result.

He also might well ask, “Are those representatives at the convention the best lights the Democrat party has to offer?  Is their advocacy of mutilation and death the way to personal and societal salvation?’

Thinking Democrats — as well as all other citizens — must ask themselves the same questions.

Fay Voshell has been a frequent contributor to American Thinker and other online publications.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.