The news broke again this week. Another shooting, the latest and most tragic instance of a rising trend of political violence that has become a national ritual (and, sadly, norm) of moral self-immolation.1
But this time, the rot runs deeper.
The horrific debate that has followed the death of Charlie Kirk—the celebration of his sudden demise, the immediate political weaponization of his name, and the chilling act of leaders on the right silencing their opponents—was a moment of profound moral clarity. It exposed a truth many of us have suspected: we are no longer watching a political contest. We are watching a moral apocalypse of language, where human tragedy is converted into cheap ideological currency.
I’m not going to offer easy answers or tell you to “love your enemies.” The shallow pieties of Sunday morning have failed. What we need is to recognize that we are all, collectively, victims of a Systemic Lying Spirit, a spiritual force, if you will, that compels us toward comfort and certainty over truth and ethics.
The Conspiracy of the 400 Prophets
This systemic moral collapse is best understood not through a modern political scientist, but through an obscure, brutal story from the Old Testament: 1 Kings 22.
The account describes a collective delusion: 400 court prophets confirmed King Ahab’s desire for war with a booming, unified voice, channeling a “lying spirit” to ensure he marched toward his death.
This is not a literal claim about a demonic force. I am an agnostic; I do not believe in external forces telling us to murder. But I do believe in the terrifying reality of evil and that we are all capable of it. The Systemic Lying Spirit is the manufactured moral certainty—the self-imposed mass delusion that has captured every major political faction. It is the echo chamber that manufactures a collective lie: We are right, and the end justifies the means.
The political commentators, the partisan cable hosts, the self-righteous keyboard warriors—they are the 400 false prophets, speaking with certainty, channeling a systemic delusion that confirms our appetite for conflict. We willingly invite the Lying Spirit into our discourse, desperate for the validation that ensures we never have to question our own side’s ethical demands.
The Scapegoat Lie and the Futility of Blame
The most vile function of this Lying Spirit is the moral cleansing ritual that follows every tragedy.
When a killer’s motivations are revealed—whether it’s the political leanings of the Michigan church shooter or the background of Kirk’s attacker—the media does not report this as a neutral fact. They report it as a political affiliation. The immediate, petty rush to determine the killer’s political label is not news; it is a desperate attempt by each side to cast the blame onto the other and declare their own tribe morally safe.
This fixation is a lie. It completely ignores the universal, simple truth that evil is simply evil, and extremism exists on both sides of every political divide. I have as much disdain for the leadership (or lackthereof) of Trump as I do for that of Pelosi and Schumer. The American political binary is a manufactured distraction.
By obsessing over the killer’s party affiliation, we desperately seek a scapegoat to carry the burden of moral rot, allowing us to avoid the much deeper, more complex issues. We ignore the victims, ignore the question of where we go from here, and, most critically, perpetuate the stigma that conflates mental health struggles with political radicalism. It is a callous deflection that ensures the Systemic Lying Spirit remains comfortable and unchallenged.
The Futility and Isolation of Suffering
This collective delusion guarantees a cruel moral aftermath, a condition best captured by Qoheleth’s stark wisdom in Ecclesiastes.
When violence occurs, there is no genuine national lament. There is only the instantaneous, Pavlovian response to convert the blood into ammunition. We do not stop to mourn the suffering; we stop only to assign blame and extract political leverage.
This is the moral futility (hebel) that Qoheleth described. The endless, meaningless striving for political power is a chase after wind, and the only reliable product is a profound lack of decency.
The Lying Spirit ensures that there is no comfort, only the agenda. It leads us straight to Ecclesiastes’ darkest observation: “Again I saw all the oppression that takes place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed—and there was no one to comfort them.” (Ecclesiastes 4:1, NRSVue)
The political system, driven by the Lie, ensures that suffering is not comforted; it is weaponized.
The Prophetic Call: Beyond the Moral Cliff
The solution is not more politics; it is an immediate return to common decency, the ethics that exist far below the level of party platform. We have, as a species, gone too far.
The true cost of this ethical collapse lies with the innocent, the victims whose pain we dismiss in favor of political scoring. I do not know Charlie Kirk, and I am neutral in the debate surrounding his legacy, but I have seen the same graphic video that many have shared. It is both graphic and traumatizing.
Even more sobering is the fact that his children will grow up knowing a video of their father being murdered in cold blood exists on the internet. They will never be able to escape that digital documentation of their trauma.
Our moral response to this should BE silence, not the silencing of others through murder or the denial of free speech. It should be a profound silence of shame and self-reflection. The true prophetic act is to step out of the consensus, to assume the skeptical rigor of Qoheleth and Micaiah, and to declare that the political machinations on both sides are meaningless vanity compared to the cost borne by those children.
Only by rejecting the comforting delusion of partisan certainty can we begin the ethical work of providing comfort to the oppressed, instead of turning their tears into tomorrow’s talking points.
I am ashamed of this world we currently live in and our failure to perceive differences in opinion as basic humanity. My agnostic self prays (!) that we can choose to remain silent instead of silencing each other, be it through taking one’s right to free speech or, frighteningly, through murder. This is not the way we are supposed to live.
- Luke Tucker, “Mass shooting that left 3 dead, 5 hurt in North Carolina was ‘highly premeditated,’ officials say,” WBTV, https://www.wbtv.com/2025/09/29/mass-shooting-that-left-3-dead-5-hurt-north-carolina-was-highly-premeditated-officials-say/ ↩︎