The 4B movement is a cult of death

By: John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., originally published November 11, 2024, The Catholic World Report

The threat to America comes not from so-called “Christian nationalists” but from a religion that wants to be a theocracy while hiding as a non-religion.

Many people watching the post-election meltdown of the Left on social media view it with some measure of Schadenfreude and I suspect the average American dismisses it as silly. In some sense, it is silly. But, in a deeper sense, it’s serious, even deadly serious. It’s a death cult.

Almost 30 years ago, Pope St. John Paul II wrote about the fight between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” Evangelium vitae talked about how these two “cultures” are contending for control in modern life. It was hardly a new insight for the Polish pope. As Karol Cardinal Wojtyła, he said basically the same thing to Pope St. Paul VI during the Lenten retreat he preached for him in 1976 (subsequently published as Sign of Contradiction).

Consider the fact that many of the reasons for the post-election hysteria are tied to the supposed suppression of “women’s rights” by the election of politicians who at least won’t codify abortion-on-demand-through-birth-for-any-reason-you-feel-like as national policy. Kamala Harris made abortion a centerpiece of her campaign, one of the few issues about which she managed to avoid a word salad and obfuscate. She “made history” by visiting an abortuary. She picked a running mate who did his best to weaken Minnesota’s pro-life protections, including legal presumptions about care requirements for newborns who survive the abortionist.

Many Harris voters put their eggs in the Democratic basket and are now emoting about their loss. In the post-election aftermath, let’s step back and look: we have a national party that believes, with radical fervor, that the extermination of prenatal life for any or no reason at any time prior to birth is a good thing. Not something to be regretted, but something to be affirmed, “shouted,” and campaigned on.

The Biden-Harris Administration harped for four years about the alleged torrent of “mis/disinformation” flooding America. But Harris trafficked in disinformation to capture the “abortion vote.” It is heartbreaking to watch otherwise normal women acting as if becoming a mother in 21st-century America is a life-threatening act for which, in the extremely rare situation something might become pathological, they will be met not with appropriate medical care but somebody dressed up in a Handmaiden’s costume.

As has always been the case, abortionists trade in extremely rare hard cases in order to hide and smuggle their real goal: unrestricted abortion without any justification at any time in pregnancy.

What is most interesting to me, however, is the “4B reaction” of this death cult. For those noninitiates who never heard of this movement (like me before this weekend), it is apparently a five-something-year-old South Korean “feminist” ideological import. The four “Bs” are words in Korean: no dating men, no marrying men, no having babies, no sex with men. Women are taking to TikTok and other social media outlets to announce they will boycott sex with men, especially men who voted for Trump. They are looking for ways to “identify” with other women: bracelet making, tattoos, masks, and shaving heads seem to be currently in vogue. How to identify “safe” men poses a bigger philosophical conundrum: one segment is working on that problem while other Amazons have simply concluded that any penis-bearing human being (except, maybe, those who have gone over to the “trans-woman” side) is irredeemably off limits.

Kneejerk reactions to the 4Bers have ranged from “it’ll reduce your voting pool” to “if you had that much control, abortion wouldn’t have been your #1 issue.” Rather than dismiss this, however, we should take this phenomenon seriously.

The 4B movement synergizes with several already established anti-life trends. Young people–especially young women–are either not getting married or getting married at historically advanced ages. Marriage itself is fast becoming not the ordinary state of being for most adults but a mere optional “alternative” among various other forms of concubinage of greater or lesser duration. Even when people finally tie the knot, childbearing becomes the next mountain to scale. Fertility rates in the Western world have dropped below replacement level, a phenomenon pronounced in 4B-origin South Korea and one lauded by its American proponents. Children as children (as opposed to children as desired product or as what former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit called “parental projects”) are devalued, if not despised. Animating all of this is a profoundly anti-life culture.

For millennia–and not just in Christian circles–human beings understood sexual intercourse to have two meanings: procreation and mutual support (procreatio et mutuum adiutorium). The Church taught this clearly until the guerrilla warfare against Humanae vitae, and the rank cowardice of many Catholic clergy—especially bishops—in failing to talk about these things. Now is a “teaching moment” to be seized by “reading the signs of the times.”

The 4B movement is the cultural outcome of that dereliction, seeking to re-form American culture. It takes as a given that sex is primarily about pleasure, with contraception as an immediate backup and abortion as the ultimate backup form of post-conception contraception.

Just listen to the 4B argument: “because you voted for a political candidate, we will not have sex with you.” That statement is bereft of any concept of intercourse as an act of love, an act of giving to a beloved, of a permanent bond that may extend into eternity through the “two as one flesh” in a third person. That statement treats sex as a momentary “reward,” a compensation for doing something. Perhaps it’s right that the 4B argument eschews marriage because such behavior is not conjugal. Treating sex as a reward or compensation traditionally was associated with some other ancient profession.

Speaking of conjugality, Silvio Canto raises a question that needs a more thorough analysis from the marriage think tank world: the relationship of how people voted to their marital status. Canto quotes Conn Carroll that the real “gap” in the election was not gender but marriage: “Trump won a majority of not just married white women, but a majority of all married women” (emphasis added). Marital status, in short, is determined how most people voted.

That is why the 4B movement is fundamentally not a reaction to a political outcome but a rejection of marriage and childbearing as normal goods of human life and flourishing. It declares “blessed are the barren” cat ladies with “furry babies” (check out how many TikTokers self-identify by the latter). It essentially wants to say: getting outside of my “autonomous self” by sharing life with others (spouse, child) is inauthentic and evil.

It begrudges life. And, to extrapolate to a theological level, I add an observation once shared with me by the Rev. Paul Scalia. He pointed out that angels (including fallen angels) cannot procreate. There are no “baby angels.” The angelic choirs are what and as many as God created them. And it is perhaps not accidental that Satan’s first target for sin was the woman, not because she is supposedly weak or gullible, but because she could give more life, something the Evil One hates. Is it not telling that, when Christ defines him, he speaks of the devil as “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8:44)?

Some people can be “entertained” by these displays, and the political class will certainly not dig into deeper, theological currents animating the anti-values these displays entail. But we Catholics should, because they have much deeper implications for the possibilities of our culture as it contends with life and death.

The hysterical emoting we see on social media is, as I have elsewhere argued, not normal political discourse. Normal political wins or losses do not take this form. What we’re seeing–not J.D. Vance’s argument for childbearing–is truly “weird.”

What is happening, I maintain, comes from a deeper and darker place: a sacralization, an idolization of politics into a false religion, so that a political loss becomes an act of faith and the casus belli for a war of religion against one’s opponents. And that is dangerous, because the threat to America comes not from so-called “Christian nationalists” but a religion that wants to be a theocracy while hiding as a non-religion, just as the Evil One wants people to believe he doesn’t exist. And the intersection point of this religious struggle is life.

John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. He publishes regularly in the National Catholic Register and in theological journals.