Accelerants and Tethers

Photo Credit: Chad Davis photography

Once more, on the murder of Charlie Kirk:

Some commenters objected to this line from my piece:

In this moment, I see myself in Charlie Kirk, not because our views were identical, but because I too sense the spiritual and social evil that Kirk gave his life trying to identify. And reader, I have to confess, I don’t think this kind of evil exists equally on both sides.

I’ve heard from some folks who thought I was saying political violence exists only on the Left. I’ve heard from other folks who thought I was saying that the Right doesn’t have any problems. Both of these are incorrect inferences from what I actually said, which was the spiritual and social evil Kirk was in the business of calling out does not exist equally on both sides.

Speaking in a Straight Line

In the last year, I have noticed that a core group of my regular readership appears to be more on the NeverTrump side of the political spectrum. I’m not quite sure why this is the case. I understand it to a degree: I have been (as I mentioned in the original Kirk piece) a consistent critic of Christian nationalism, and the secular Right. Still am, still going to be. Maybe my pieces about Trump, negative epistemology, Doug Wilson, or other topics have endeared this newsletter to a certain wing of the evangelical tribe. If so, that’s fine with me! I’m all-in on the conviction that no political or social group has a copyright on truthfulness, and that calling balls and strikes, in accordance with biblical wisdom and Christian common sense, is the way to go.

But I have to say this. Two things I have noticed about the anti-Christian nationalist/NeverTrump movement within evangelicalism are that 1) it tends to commit the experience-as-conviction fallacy that I pled against in this TGC piece, and 2) it tends to have trouble speaking in a straight line. For example, I have noticed it’s really, really difficult to get a prominent evangelical critic of Trump to talk about gender ideology without attempting to “balance” the perspective. Transgenderism is a dangerous error, they write, “and so is [racism/xenophobia/misogyny].” This can pop up even in places where racism/xenophobia/misogyny are not even relevant to the topic, or when those sins are quite old and the sin of gender ideology is quite current. It’s not that this statement is incorrect. Those are sins! It’s that bringing them up feels like an attempt to change the topic, like the woman at the well who, when confronted by Jesus about her adultery, suddenly gets very good at asking theology questions.

I want to try to speak in a straight line. I don’t want to always feel like I need to “balance” true statements with other true statements, in order to lessen the blow of the true statement that really needs to be said right now. So, in honor of that ambition, let me explain what I’m thinking about the coddling of evil within the American left and the American right.

Accelerants and Tethers

I won’t, and nobody I take seriously does, deny that the political right-wing of America can and does coddle some evil. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it, and there’s no honor in denying it. This is why I did not say in the piece that evil exists only on one side. I said it doesn’t exist equally on both.

The inequality I have in mind here could perhaps be illustrated with the ideas of accelerants and tethers. Put simply, I’m not interested in trying to figure out which side invented which sin. As a Christian, I don’t need to waste time doing that math. The world, the flesh, and the devil invented all of them, and distributed them in sundry places. So the question (to me) is not, “Which side does what evil,” but: “What are the evils plaguing our political moment right now, what are the accelerants and tethers, and where do the accelerants and tethers show up, or fail to show up, throughout the tribes?”

Definitions:

1. An accelerant is a psychological, moral, or social idea/condition that makes certain wickedness stronger, harder to contain, and more plausible.

2. A tether is a psychological, moral, or social idea/condition that makes certain wickedness weaker, easier to govern or suppress, and less plausible.

So, for obvious reasons, let’s take the issue of political violence. What are the accelerants to political violence? What are the tethers? Where do they show up? I offer the below chart as a shortcut to visualizing what I’m saying.

Isolation is where other human beings feel less real. It’s where people are cut off from each other in meaningful ways, left to their devices (in both a metaphorical and literal sense). The tether is meaningful membership. Being a part of a group that depends on you, while you depend on them, grounds people in ways that make destructive violence feel more implausible. Again, a tether is not a cure-all. It is not a magic elixir. It’s a friction, something that puts up a little bit of resistance.

Godlessness describes the loss of a fear of God. It makes more sense to harm or murder someone if you do not think a righteous God will judge you (of course, you might think your god will reward you for it, but that’s a different issue). Religiosity is the opposite of godlessness. Religious people tend to think more than their secular peers that their life will be held accountable. For example, while 50% of people who say their religious beliefs are “nothing in particular” believe in heaven, only 39% of that same group believes in hell.

Utopianism is the belief that everything can be fixed and that the reason things aren’t fixed is that bad people are, knowingly, stopping it from being fixed. Eschatology is the belief that things will be fixed but that such universal healing is a divine project. People who have an eschatology may disagree about the extent of their involvement, but their social and political opponents are not standing in the way of history. Heaven is coming.

A sense of meaninglessness makes suicide more logical, which in turn makes hurting others to achieve utopian more logical. If your life doesn’t count, why should theirs? And if you won’t be around to feel the consequences of your actions, all the better. Polarization is where people define themselves more and more in terms of not being the Wrong Kind of Person. “At least I’m not like those people,” they tell themselves. And this, of course, nourishes hatred. In this way, a relationship between purpose and humility takes shape. The sense of meaninglessness is Because the logic of secular liberalism points away from submission to a larger reality—such as religion, or family formation—much happiness depends on one’s ability to win at money, prestige, and politics—something most people won’t do. If you think your life matters beyond the material, your resilience and joy are less vulnerable.

How does secular progressivism score on these accelerants? Very poorly. Note that this is not about what ideologies are capable of doing, but what they tend, by their nature, to do. Secular progressivism tends to isolate by sacralizing the self-determining individual. Its emphasis on liberating the self by exiting the control mechanisms of tradition turns individuals into self-sufficient gurus.

Telling the Whole Truth

The autonomous philosophy of secular progressivism allows for maximal self-creation. Why would gender not be fluid, if everything else is? But baked into this worldview is a poison pill. Once you have thrown off the constraints of nature, spirituality, and community, you can only ever get out of life what you manage to put in. There is no divine care, no cosmic help, no story written for you. Your life is an American Idol audition, you get one shot, and that’s it.

In short, I submit that secular progressivism contains a number of accelerants to political violence. Its orientation toward the world is a plausibility structure for self-focused despair and anger. Its ideological package conspicuously lacks things like family connection and religious faith that make sense of a life we cannot control. This is not to say that every secular progressive is a killer in waiting. Of course not. It is to say that there is a texture to this box set of beliefs that makes it dangerous, especially the more any one individual lives out its logic.

It’s important to mention that a secularized right may very well surrender these tethers. A non-Christian right wing will absorb self-focused utopianism and spit out members who are striving for a sense of meaning through material victories. This is why preserving the American conservative movement’s Christian flavor is vital. And it’s one reason why Charlie Kirk, a man who took his chances to speak the name of Jesus and his gospel, has much to teach us.

The first piece I ever wrote for First Things was titled “America’s Lost Boys.” It was a short reflection about the plight of many young men, trapped in cycles of under-employment and purposelessness, who turn in their existential vacancy to video games. The more we learn about Charlie Kirk’s killer, the more it certainly looks like he was one of these lost boys. The reason for that is a mystery beyond my power to solve. He does not appear to be an ideologue. There is no obvious sign of family dysfunction we have discovered yet. But the emerging picture points to ideas absorbed from a gaming culture, defined by a jokey nihilism and sarcastic despair.

I don’t think Charlie Kirk died because of the Democratic Party. I agree with Ben Shapiro that the third person plural “they” is a false and dangerous word when talking about murder. But my mind goes back these days to that short First Things essay. Our technological amusements have made it easier than ever to be lost quietly. When the doors are closed, the screen is on, and the volume is up, hardly anyone can hear the sounds of dangerous despair. This is why accelerants and tethers matter so much right now. And it’s why telling the whole truth about them does too.