The Daughters of Herod

Someone greater than cruel Herod has arrived to fulfill the task.

By guest contributor Jack Milton.

“And behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me.”

When I was a boy, my father and I spent many weekend evenings watching late movie programs on television. We most enjoyed 1950s and ’60s science fiction B films. We had good times laughing at the poorly produced space operas and ponderous philosophical musings on aliens or technology run amuck. Many of these films were later featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Even as objects of Tom and Crow’s scorn, these films sometimes gained a whole new audience.

With that in mind, allow me to present my would-be film script regarding a dystopia that is nearer rather than farther away. It’s neither the speculative commentary of Bradbury nor the intellectual fantasy of Le Guin. Imagine the world as we know it a short time from now, wherein limitless abundance has been achieved. Earth is now a place of resources without end, where people can enjoy boundless leisure and perpetual entertainment. Personal liberty in this world is unrestrained. Not only is there ease and amusement, but everyone can do nearly anything he desires with any consenting party. Social norms permit all manner of hedonistic pursuits. People can do what they want, as much as they want. But the greatest accomplishment of this fictional world is the complete suspension of time. The clock has been successfully halted. It is always the present. It has never been yesterday, and it will never be tomorrow. Thus all people can pursue what is right in their own eyes, because with the cessation of time, all consequence has been removed from one’s actions. Since it is always now, the consequences of a person’s choices never materialize. The world has truly become Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where no one ever turns into a donkey and tomorrow does not arrive. In this act, they have beaten all of history.

There is one catch that makes this scenario possible, a single peculiar requirement. The technology that stops time is the darkest technology. The price that society must pay to sustain their way of life is this: no child may be born. Every infant must die. None may live. The day a baby is born alive, this world of pleasure ceases. Should a child come into the world, the timeless existence comes crashing down and liberation evaporates. Because of this, every measure must be taken to prevent children from being born under all circumstances.

This sounds familiar, no doubt. My fictional world is an allegory for our present world. In the comic strip Pogo, the namesake main character once said, “We have seen the enemy, and he is us.” Society has a strange hostility towards children, somewhere between mere distain and hatred. Do you think this is an exaggeration? Have a few too many of your own children, and you will experience this attitude firsthand. At your third child, you get smart remarks. With a fourth child, people think you are unsophisticated, a hayseed hick. If you have more than four children, you are an extremist.

The modern animus towards children may seem unique to our day. After all, throughout history Man has warred against tribes and nations, to the end of enslavement and genocide. Clans, castes, and kingdoms have fought to the complete destruction of the defeated parties. But does history reflect war being made on a particular age group? I maintain that it does in a way you may not expect. A Jungian psychologist may conclude that a prejudice against the very young springs from a shared primordial archetype, an impulse submerged in humanity. But I propose another source:

I will put enmity between thee [the serpent] and the woman, between thy seed and her seed; it shall crush thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

– Genesis 3:15

Her seed? A woman has no seed. But God speaks of the coming Christ who will crush the serpent’s head. They hate the kids because the child is the hope of the future. Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess the lordship of this particular child. He is the king of all kings.

“And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.”
– Revelation 12:4b

Consider these events from chapter 2 of Matthew’s Gospel: “In the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem saying ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’”

The person these wise men asked was the King of Judea, Herod the Great. He sought no replacement. Herod told the wise men, “Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.” But the wise men were warned by God in a dream to avoid Herod after they found the Christ child.

“Then Herod… was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.” The infant king slipped through Herod’s fingers.

But Christ’s followers continue to be born after Him, who carry on their master’s disruptions. To meet the challenge presented by their continued appearance requires all the ingenuity our superior minds can muster. Herod had his soldiers charge into homes to slash at infants. Pharoah before him had children tossed into the Nile River, resulting in a great cry from the people. Science has rendered such sloppy methods unnecessary. We who send men to the stars, we who can cross the world in an instant, can now seize the child when he is barely formed in the womb. We now harness our technological marvels, great energies, and intent onto one mighty objective. These powers are now successfully engaged in the greatest continuous bloodbath of all human history. And one marvels that despite the breath, length, and depth of this atrocity, how not one drop of blood can be publicly discerned. It is functionally invisible. Years and years of death successfully accomplished without a corpse to be seen. No evidence to condemn a single soul. Murder? What murder? Produce the body. There isn’t one because there never was a body. Just “cells” removed neatly, antiseptically, with no sins committed or wrong to be found. Slain without spot or wrinkle in the sacred bastion of unbelief.

The crown of this project, the greatest of its successes, is that no outside force is required to stop life in the womb. No hostile army invades to kill the child. There is no need to shed blood until it reaches the horse’s bridles to subjugate the foe. Someone greater than cruel Herod has arrived to fulfill the task. The Daughters of Herod multiply the infanticide of their father. They give their own child the death sentence and deliver themselves to the execution. Herod’s daughters make a laughingstock of the old boy, compared to the hatred of life residing in their own bodies. Through their acts, the misbegotten mothers make rivers of blood, all day, every day. They make the fruit of their bodies the choice cuts for a butcher called Science, whose blackened alchemy makes death out of life and an atheist out of Baal.

As for the rest of us, it is amazing what a person can become accustomed to. We fall under the spell of mute indifference in continuance. What witchcraft are we subject to? There are no magic trinkets, no amulets holding us at bay. No odes to horned gods scrawled in geometric symbols outside our homes. Yet we are all fixed in place with a dull stare towards our pursuits as if by incantation.

The Rulers of the Darkness of this World implement their campaigns against children as run-of-the-mill socio-political struggles. The entire world can ignore this mundanity as they go about their way. The barest public mention of halting this enlightened slaughter results in screeches worthy of the Gadarene madman. The only animating legislative issue for American women is the unrelenting demand that they kill their children in utero. The most blasé, milquetoast assertion that perhaps we should moderate the neonatal destruction yields rabid graveyard rallies of nocturnal laceration worthy of Baalim initiates. And when the call goes out, the demoniacs will cease their cries and mutilations, don expensive clothes, and present themselves before Congress to make an emotional plea to maintain their ghoulish liberties.

And whom do they kill, like a candle extinguished that’s barely lit? The dearth of Christian leaders since the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade should give us a clue. Abortion strikes at the hope of the future. Was it a young Luther or St. Augustine who was aborted? A St. Anthony or Calvin, Athanasius, Wesley? God explicitly called Jeremiah, Samson, and John the Baptist from the womb.

Whom have they struck down before they could prove their virtue, like the faith heroes of chapter 11 of Hebrews, “who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens”? Who have been executed inside their mothers’ bodies and deprived of their opportunity to conquer nations and realms with their faith, to be made strong to fight for their Lord? “[T]hey were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”

Who is it that was killed by his mother, a Daughter of Herod, and lost his chance to wander destitute across deserts and mountains, ill-clothed in skins, hiding in caves? If only he had had his chance, like that spiritual athlete John the Baptist, to put us all to shame. Who died in utero before he could convict the world like the two Apocalyptic witnesses? Does that hit the target? The world is killing those who will convict them of their sins before they can be born. “And [they] blasphemed the God of heaven… and repented not of their deeds.”

Lastly, where does that leave the rest of us? Will we watch Prince Prospero, insulated in a sealed abbey, to enjoy safety and pleasure arrogantly while the plague rages outside? Until Death itself intrudes on the party, where “darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all”? Or can we who seek to repair the breach in Christendom follow St. Jude’s advice, to “save with fear, pulling some out of the fire”? The answer is a resounding yes. As the enemy employs the feminine to diabolical ends, so we invoke the masculine, God the Eternal Father, who loved the Son before the foundations of the world were laid. It is His Son who wields the sword by which He judges the world. The Son who beneath His crown has eyes that burn as a flame of fire, whose army follows Him, an army of Joshuah, Josiah, and David with his mighty men of valor. These we follow to deliver generations to come and hold fast to the faith we have received. We cast down the idols, their priests, and their repulsive practices. As did Josiah, the idols are ground to powder and cast into the graveyard. Then, with the future calling, we can build something for our children, our children’s children, and to a thousand generations.

Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens, 1612