On a somber September 11—I went live to talk about something I wish I didn’t have to: the war we once fought “over there” is increasingly here, testing our communities, our churches, and our national character.
Two themes framed the conversation:
The date itself. Twenty-four years after 9/11, we remember the 3,000 lives taken and the millions changed forever. Terror reshaped policy, travel, and how we see risk. The ripple effects were enormous—wars abroad, costs at home, and a reshaped culture.
A country at a crossroads. When a prominent conservative Christian figure can be gunned down on an American campus in broad daylight (details still developing as authorities investigate), that should sober all of us. Half the nation mourns; too many on social media mock or celebrate. Whatever your politics, that’s a moral red flag.
Political violence isn’t hypothetical anymore. If we don’t face it and prepare—practically and spiritually—the chaos corroding our civilization will accelerate.
What’s really being attacked
The late Charlie Kirk often articulated the deeper conflict succinctly: a spiritual battle in which radical ideologies—Marxism and Islamism among them—seek to erode the American way of life that sprang from a Judeo-Christian worldview: family, local community, ordered liberty, public virtue, and the conviction that all people bear the image of God.
Why does that worldview cause such hatred? Consider five core claims of Christianity that run directly against the grain of anger-politics and power-religion:
The primacy of love.
“Love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself.” Love, forgiveness, reconciliation—even of enemies—cuts against our culture’s appetite for vengeance and perpetual outrage.Inherent human dignity.
Every person is made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). That truth resists all dehumanization—of political opponents, of the unborn, of the elderly, of the foreigner. Tyrants and opportunists hate it because you can’t easily control people you’re required to treat as image-bearers.
