Once again, evil’s reality has overpowered the cultural nostrums that we can remake human nature with more laws and more empathy for those who would do us harm.
Recently in Minneapolis, Minnesota, evil took the form of a deranged 23-year-old man calling himself a woman. The shooter, identified as Robert Westman, changed his name to Robin five years ago and pronounced himself transgender. He then proceeded to murder two children, ages eight and ten, who were at morning prayers in the pews of Annunciation Church in south Minneapolis. Police reported that he used a pistol, rifle, and shotgun to shoot from outside through the church windows. In addition to the two children, 17 others were wounded as they rushed out of the building before Westman took his own life.
Westman was found dead in the parking lot behind the church. He is said to have uploaded a “sick video, manically laughing” minutes before the shooting, and displaying messages he had written on his weapons and magazines. The video has since been removed from the internet. FBI Director Kash Patel said the shooting would be investigated as an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime targeting Catholics.
Innocent Life
Evil’s ageless craving to destroy life – and especially Christians – by using deranged and psychotic minds is nothing new. But the trend of “transgender” murderers is. There have been four such shootings so far. The last was a so-called transgender-identifying woman who shot and killed six innocent children at a Christian school in Nashville in March 2023. She wrote in a manifesto that she had violent hatred of those “little crackers” [meaning children] with “white privilege.”
The horror of these events themselves is beyond the power of a normal mind to comprehend. In just seconds, two precious children were murdered, and on cue, the radical leftists, Marxists, and communists hijacked the attention and left no space for grief or even complete information. Hollywood has-beens and politicians like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) hit the microphones faster than bugs against a windshield.
Using the worn-out mantra about “finding the reasons” for the violence, virtually every tragic murder in the nation is now an occasion for a political scolding. There are interviews with “professionals” promoting more spending and programs, which of course they administer. And there is the endless shilling for gun control by the political class. New laws are always needed. The formula is hardly surprising anymore. The murders become merely another stage upon which the leftwing agenda dances.
Taking guns away from citizens is not only an official Democrat Party “cause,” but also a goal of the international left. Their trite and passionless comments after the shootings reiterated the claim that the US is “the most violent nation on Earth.” Of course, that’s nonsense and statistically untrue; and without inner-city gang and drug killings, even the murder rate is relatively low.
But the facts are irrelevant. What you won’t hear discussed is the fact that this type of violence is not a new phenomenon, either in this country or others, or in this century or those past.
What is new is the transformation of cultures and values over the past five decades.
New Standards
Nowhere is that change more evident than in our cultural concept of Evil. It is the one descriptor seldom used, or used only as an ambiguous behavioral trait. Evil is rarely used in its robust idiomatic description of Satan or in its historical role as the “force” that governs or gives impulse to wickedness and destruction.
In past decades, our Judeo-Christian educational, political, and religious perspective equipped Americans with some respect for the power of evil. We had general prayer in our schools and God was recognized, however modestly, as providing a filter through which events could be reasonably judged as right or wrong. The Ten Commandments were taught as our moral and legal foundation, promoting human dignity and worth, as well as liberty.
But as the decades pass, and as God and the Law are increasingly dismissed in our community life, the rules are simply whatever please us at the moment. Good and bad are positional; your good, my bad? Who is to say? What constitutes civil behavior now has little definition. There is official contempt for life, the family is marginalized, and self-responsibility is owned by the “culture,” making it an orphan.
The new standard is that there is no standard.
With the guardrails largely gone, more laws and programs are written to fill the vacuum left by the loss of ageless wisdom. Yet, the laws passed are often counterproductive or not effective, and at other times destructive. (Today, more than 30,000 laws govern firearms in our nation.) While the statutes fail, there is never a shortage of deranged minds and damaged souls available for the most horrific purposes that evil can devise.
Which brings us to the question: how do we stop the irrational violence, or control those who obviously have serious mental issues, from harming us or our children?
We can certainly harden schools and arm the good guys. But the truthful answer is that we can’t stop it all. Deranged and irrational men and women have walked with humanity since Cain murdered Abel. No amount of gun control, laws, or “people control” will stop evil.
But if we can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, we can at least name evil for what it is.
As conservatives and religious traditionalists, we can vigorously join the public discussion and reject political agendas driven by the emotions created by the evil deeds of madness.
Perhaps it is no more complicated than individual Americans taking a stand in the public square, reminding our society that the further we move into a post-Constitutional, post-Judeo-Christian era, the more dangerous the times will become, and the more self-vigilant and self-reliant we must be while evil is further empowered.
Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.
