Published April 6, 2026
There can be little doubt about the real darkness of the culture of death into which the West is intentionally descending. Euthanasia now accounts for approximately 1 in 20 deaths in Canada. The government has now killed almost as many Canadian citizens as were slaughtered by the forces of the Kaiser and then of Hitler in the First and Second World Wars combined. Then there is the recent example of Noelia Castillo, about which Bethel McGrew wrote for WORLD Opinions last week. At age 25 she won a longstanding legal battle with her own father to have the right to die by medically assisted suicide. Her case, while extreme in its details, reflects the routine moral logic that is now normative in Western societies. And then there is the transformation of abortion from something even its advocates wanted to be “safe, legal, and rare” to a basic human right and thus, one might say, essential to being human.
Each of these examples offers a microcosm of our current cultural moment. Society has decided that care and support for the weakest in this world, whether babies in the womb, somebody with terrible psychological and physical struggles, or simply the elderly who have become a burden to society, should take the form of a medically assisted death. And instead of seeing each increasingly tragic example, such as that of Castillo, as a moment to reflect on what kind of a society embodies such values and how they might be reversed, it presses on regardless, using the full force of the law to do so.
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Carl R. Trueman is a fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program. His work focuses on helping civic leaders and policymakers better understand the deep philosophical and cultural roots of our current social malaise. In addition to his scholarship on the intellectual foundations of expressive individualism and the sexual revolution, Trueman is also interested in the origins, rise, and use of critical theory by progressives and the current crisis in anthropology. He serves as a professor at Grove City College.
