The nation has crossed a great divide. We see it in our politics, in the redefinition marriage and family, in bathroom wars, and the redefinition of male and female. And surprisingly we see it in the attempt to redefine death.

“Most people understand the word ‘death’ to mean the end of biological life,” writes Wesley Smith at First Things. We have, he goes on, objective standards for determining the end of biological life. A person is legally dead once heart and breathing have stopped or brain waves have stopped and there is no hope that they will start up again.

That sounds pretty straightforward, but, writes Smith, a movement has developed to overturn this straightforward objective definition of death as “too constraining.”

Smith writes, “What also matters, they claim, is the exhibition of characteristics that they claim earn an individual the status of ‘person.’ Let’s call this ‘personhood theory’ — the belief that moral value, and even death, can be determined by the presence or permanent absence of mental capacities such as self-awareness. In this view, those who, through injury or illness, have lost the ability to express personhood should be considered dead or, at least, as good as dead.”

How then would we know that someone is dead? We’d know when an expert of some sort makes a subjective determination about personhood. If it’s determined that the human in question lacks self-awareness or some other capacity, she is no longer classified as a “person.” And regardless of whether her heart, lungs, and brain are functioning, she is, therefore, dead.

This can applies to infants who have not or possibly never will grow into “personhood” due to some mental handicap. And it applies to those who have lost “personhood” through accident, old age, or illness.

Why, you wonder, would anyone want to redefine death to include some people who are objectively still living? “[B]y making ‘death’ malleable,” says Smith, “they hope to open the door further to treating indisputably living human beings as if they were cadavers.”

This is the ugly and twisted thinking The Center for Medical Progress exposed in their undercover videos about Planned Parenthood’s market in fetal body parts. It’s the argument we’ve heard for years from those who want to destroy living human embryos to “harvest” stem cells. It’s what got Hillary Clinton in trouble with the pro-abortion movement when she referred to a fetus as “unborn person” and “child.”

Now the same arguments are now being applied to those in a persistent vegetative state who, if declared “dead” by the new definition of dead can be raided for their organs or used for medical experimentation.

“Changing the definition of death from the irreversible cessation of biological processes to a subjective determination that personhood has ceased would be morally catastrophic,” writes Smith. “Once we agree that human value should be judged on a sliding scale it won’t take long for us to discriminate against ‘persons’ based on the perceived quality of their personhood.”

And the key word is perceived. Once we substitute the subjective idea “personhood” for objective membership in the human family, it ends — it necessarily ends — with defining “person” in any way that those with power find convenient. Rather than claiming that some have lives not worth living, we could claim instead that, as non-persons, they were already dead. And the dead have no rights.

To borrow a phrase from George Weigel, this is the sort of thinking that “helped make an abattoir of the twentieth century.” It has the potential to help make an abattoir out of the twenty-first as well. Those targeted by ISIS include the disabled, slaughtered as non-persons.

Can the forces of dehumanization be pushed back once we’ve crossed the divide? I don’t know, but if it is possible it will be because the Church lives, defends, and proclaims what Pope St. John Paul II called “The Gospel of Life.”

After affirming the need to transform the culture, John Paul wrote that such transformation, “is also rooted in the Church’s mission of evangelization. The purpose of the Gospel, in fact, is ‘to transform humanity from within and to make it new’. Like the yeast which leavens the whole measure of dough (cf. Mt 13:33), the Gospel is meant to permeate all cultures and give them life from within, so that they may express the full truth about the human person and about human life.”

And that includes the truth stated most eloquently by Mad Max in Princess Bride that, “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”

The world is forgetting. As Christian people we’re called to send out reminders.