In the hours of confusion and chaos for the reason that assassination attempt at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, by which the previous president was injured and a number of other others killed or critically wounded, partisans of all sorts immediately began to take a position in regards to the motives of the shooter.
For many, this raised a weighty query about radicalization and what’s gone unsuitable in American democracy. Others’ musings got here from a hope to “own” the opposite side. Some noted that, regardless of the shooter’s political beliefs or lack thereof, this episode probably says as much in regards to the mental health crisis in American life because it does about our civic crisis. But what if these two crises will not be as unrelated as we imagine?
Most Americans recognize the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, together with presidents closer to our own time. Many would struggle, though, to recollect when James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce were inaugurated. Yet even those of us fuzzy on much of presidential history can probably discover immediately John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald—just as many who couldn’t name certainly one of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet secretaries know the name of John Hinckley, his would-be assassin. Household names of 1968 like Edmund Muskie or Curtis LeMay have faded out of our memories, but we still know James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan.
Psychologists tell us that folks who engage in terrorism of any sort are sometimes well aware of how lasting this type of notoriety might be. For many, it’s the purpose of their violence. When all is stable, that kind of perversion might be channeled into more benign vanities. But when—as now—the country appears to be teetering on the sting of something awful, those perversions can turn violent. Under certain conditions, they’ll tip a society right into a cycle of rage and horror.
How are Christians to grasp this?
A Christian vision of human depravity recognizes that God is just not the writer of evil and that evil itself is rooted in human longings and desires (James 1:12–18). The Serpent of Eden didn’t create a desire to see food nearly as good; it merely appealed to that longing in a way that drew humanity away from God (Gen. 3:1–6). Likewise, the need to worship, created good, might be perverted into idolatry. The desire for intimacy, created good, might be redirected toward lust.
From Scripture, the Christian tradition classifies evil as rooted on this planet, the flesh, and the Devil (Eph. 2:2–3). We recognize that human nature is itself corrupted. We understand that we live in a world that, because the apostle John put it, “lies in the facility of the evil one” (1 John 5:19, ESV throughout). And we recognize also that evil is oftentimes provoked by the context of the world around us. The woman caught in adultery was not threatened with being hit by one rock from one man; she was on the mercy of a mob, the function of which undoubtedly amplified and stirred the person sins of every mob member (John 8:1–11).
Human fallenness doesn’t change with the times, but certain conditions can direct that fallenness in other ways. Lust and idolatry, for example, are never absent this side of the apocalypse. But they might be present in a selected way within the ecosystem of temple prostitution, as was the case in much of the world of the early church. Likewise, the perversion of the need for meaning and recognition is all the time around us and inside us. But, during certain times of world history, this perversion gets expressed in political violence.
“You desire and shouldn’t have, so that you murder,” the apostle James wrote. “You covet and can’t obtain, so that you fight and quarrel” (4:2). What is desired in a murderous rage? Often, it’s the created but twisted eager for recognition—for notoriety—and meaning. Cain was incensed when his brother’s sacrifice was recognized and his own was not (Gen. 4:1–12), and the Bible tells us this darkness was not limited to a primeval moment of sibling rivalry (1 John 3:11–15).
We don’t know, yet, the particular motives or mindset of this killer. But we do know the inner violence of this time. We see it throughout us in broken relationships, screamed accusations, and a social media atmosphere that just about all of us recognize as toxic, but which only a few of us are willing to go away.
The overwhelming majority of Americans, even those most inflamed by partisan political passions, don’t resort to the form of violence we saw within the attempted assassination of Trump or through the insurrectionist riots of January 6, 2021, or within the threats to the lifetime of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Whatever their political beliefs, most individuals want the identical thing for somebody who would murder this fashion: justice. Most Americans, though, also recognize that something is awry with our time: the conflation of politics with a way of 1’s belonging, of 1’s identity, of 1’s purpose and mission in life.
We are created to want glory, which incorporates recognition and supreme purpose. But the glory for which we’re created is the glory that comes through the facility and wisdom of Christ. It cannot come from any of the substitutes on offer.
When we expect of politics what can only arise from worship, it’s all too easy to seek out ourselves speaking, whether explicitly or implicitly, within the language of spiritual warfare, making our political rivals not opponents to be persuaded but enemies to be vanquished. In that kind of cosplay apocalypse, one can feel “alive” and significant—for a moment—by hating the appropriate people enough. And after we add to that the proven fact that a major a part of our population is combating mental health, we should always not be surprised that the result includes bloodshed.
Experts tell us that shooters and other terrorists are likely to be lone wolves of a certain sort: those that are isolated in real life but discover a semblance of “community” online, often in radical and radicalizing spaces. The Bible tells us that sin often comes from the pursuit of a form of “glory” given by other human beings relatively than the glory that comes from God (John 12:43). That stands out as the glory of a selected community—whether real or virtual—or it could be a desire for glory within the minds of anonymous strangers in headlines and history books. We should see this pursuit for what it’s: a satanic pull into mutually assured destruction.
The state has an obligation to satisfy—to forestall these acts of terrorism and to carry accountable those that carry them out. Civil society has a responsibility too: to conserve the forms of norms that rule out political violence, even when “emergency” language may appear to justify it.
And the church has a mission here too. We must proclaim a unique kind of significance, a unique kind of meaning, a unique kind of belonging. We can remind ourselves that we want not clamor for our own glory, whether in heroic acts of goodness or in notorious acts of violence. We can find it by humbling ourselves before the long run glory that’s hidden now in Christ.
We can embody what it means to be a real community: one which sees the glory of God within the face of Jesus, not through the scope of a gun.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
