This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
After the shocking assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, I described the violence not merely as immoral and un-American but also as satanic. A friend objected to that word. I stand by it—and here’s why.
The Bible explicitly defines murder as the way of the Devil (1 John 3:10–12). But when it comes to political violence in particular, satanic is the only word I know that can describe the combination of calculated self-idolatry with senseless self-sabotage.
When a health-care executive was murdered, some, mostly on the left, cheered and wrote songs and memes of devotion about the alleged killer. When a former speaker of the House’s husband was attacked with a hammer, some, mostly on the right, laughed and castigated the victim.
Now here we are, at the end of a summer in which we’ve seen the murders of some of the highest elected officials in Minnesota, as well as the murder—on video before the eyes of countless watchers—of one of the most recognizable political activists in the country.
For some of us, this brings a sense of foreboding that goes beyond the deaths of these human beings made in the image of God. It portends a country seemingly on the brink of something unspeakably dark.
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On one level, this push toward violence seems coldly intentional. Over the past week, many have cited Amanda Ripley’s apt designation of “conflict entrepreneurs,” those in whose interest it is to tip disagreement over into what Ripley calls “high conflict.” We are in an atmosphere charged with revenge—to the point of having algorithms and online subcultures whose entire business model is to activate the most primal depths of the limbic system.
Within a Christian vision of reality, the ways that our fallenness can be exploited should be of no surprise, including the fact that we are vulnerable to invisible forces that take advantage of our brokenness and propel our own destruction. Even the most convinced materialist must at least recognize the analogy behind what the apostle Paul called “the prince of the power of the air,” who drives people along invisibly by appealing to what is already in them—the passions and desires of the flesh and of the mind (Eph. 2:2–3).
Some of the conflict entrepreneurs actually want civil war—and sell it to a people so deadened by affluence and spiritual alienation that the feeling of hate is the closest imitation they can find to life and purpose. Some of them want an enemy to blame that’s big enough to justify the crushing of their enemies. And many know that, in this sort of global moment, the thirst for retribution sells.
This would seem to have a logic to it. What could seem more reasonable, from the standpoint of evolutionary survival and tribal loyalty, than to say that one would fight for one’s friend to the point of shedding the blood of one’s enemies?
At Caesarea Philippi, the apostle Peter believed just that when he said, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you,” after he learned what Jesus’ enemies would do to the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus responded, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matt. 16:23, ESV throughout).
When Peter would later enact his previous vow by attacking the one coming to arrest Jesus, our Lord spoke not only to the immorality of the attempt but to its senselessness: “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (26:52). Jesus spoke there to the kind of high conflict of which Paul later warned the church at Galatia: “If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Gal. 5:15).
Political violence is morally wrong. No authority is granted the rightness of vigilantism. That’s true of people with whom one agrees as well as of those with whom one strongly disagrees.
But political violence is also self-defeating. History has proven this over and over. Hate gives way to hate, retribution to more retribution. If one believes a cause to be furthered by murder and terror, then whether that cause is good or evil, it will harm itself in the process.
In that way, political violence is satanic. After all, Scripture tells us that spiritual beings opposed to the ways of God know the outcome of history as well as, or better than, any human religion or philosophy—and they shudder before it (James 2:19). And yet the same Scriptures tell us that the Devil rages all the more “because he knows that his time is short” (Rev. 12:12).
Evil—even cold, rationalistic evil—is crazed and self-destructive. It relies on the kind of passion that is driven by jealousy, selfish ambition, and disorder—the kind of “wisdom” our Lord’s brother described as earthly, unspiritual, and, yes, demonic (James 3:15–16).
We are in great danger here. When we surrender the question of how for merely the question of what we want and who we support, violence is no longer unthinkable but instead inevitable. And after a while, we are conformed to that pattern of being. We start to accept it as normal.
We must not. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you will be pulled at some time or other to think the stakes are so high, the enemies so irredeemable, that moral norms must yield to animalistic cruelty and revenge, even to the point of shedding blood.
When that moment comes to your mind, there is only one thing to say: “Get behind me, Satan.”
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
