“Open War is Upon You”

In a recent blog post I wrote in closing about the violence inherent in the ideological Left.  In a piece entitled “The Pro-abortion Argument from Viability” I concluded by saying this: “The drive for access to unfettered abortion is part of a larger movement, one dedicated to the destruction of all past vestiges of Christian civilization (which includes a Christian understanding of gender and sexuality). This movement has violence at its center—a violence typified by the violent assault on the helpless unborn.  Violence is both its goal and its raison-d’etre. The old values and way of life must be demonized, swept away immediately and utterly banished from the earth.  This predilection to violence is why in debates with Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk the abortion advocates (along with their pro-gay and pro-trans comrades) are so often reduced to name-calling and insults.  They cannot win a reasonable and civil debate and so they resort to verbal violence.

       That violence is at the center of this movement also explains its consistent resort to riot, to the burning of cars and buildings, and attacks on officers of the law.  An old 1975 Monty Python sketch (in their movie The Holy Grail) invited us to “Come and see the violence inherent in the system”.  Here we may see the violence inherent in the ideology of the left.  Unlike Monty Python sketches, it is not funny.  And it seems that it is not going to go away any time soon.”

       At that time, I wrote that the opponents of people like Charlie Kirk respond by resorting to “verbal violence”.  This September 10, 2025, I was proven wrong— and perhaps a little optimistically naïve. The verbal violence has turned into physical violence as Charlie Kirk was shot dead at his “Turning Point USA” meeting at Utah Valley University.  He was thirty-one years old.  He leaves behind a wife and two young daughters.  And a nation in shock.

       What is significant is that a number of people are rejoicing at the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, including one man spotted in Seattle holding a sign which read, “Charlie Kirk Shot. Hell Yes!!” In a Seattle university someone spray painted the message, “Kill All Charlie Kirks”.  There are, admittedly, a number of people on the Left who have openly deplored the shooting. But the fact that quite of number of people applaud it reveals something fundamental about the current American divide.  Specifically, the divide is increasingly not between the Left and the Right, between people in favour of gun control and those opposed it, between people demanding publicly funded heath care and those against it.  Rather, it is the divide between good and evil, between light and darkness.

       Let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone on the Left or in the Democratic Party are evil or that there are no evil people on the political Right. Indeed, there has been violence committed those on the right as well.  I am saying that there are many evil people for whom traditional values and morality (such as the right to free speech and to openly disagree and argue in public discourse) are anathema.  These people are committed to the overthrow and complete eradication of everything which has built western civilization.  We are seeing unfold before our western eyes the growth of true evil.

       It is important to define what I mean by evil.  An evil person is not someone who is nothing but evil, someone with no redeeming features or virtues whatsoever.  An evil person is not a grinning psychopath who spends all his time pulling the wings off of flies and loves evil because he or she knows it is evil.  An evil person is someone who is bent, who has welcomed a fundamental deception into his life and allowed it to grow within him.  An evil person thinks of himself as good. A scary movie once contained the famous line, “I see dead people. They don’t even know they’re dead.”  Similarly, evil people don’t know that they’re evil. They are just people courageously following a vision.

       Take Hitler, for example.  (Forgive the choice of example, but it’s textbook and no one could credibly deny that he was evil.)  He had some redeeming features in that he was kind to his secretaries and loved his dog Blondi.  His evil came from allowing a bent vision of race hatred into his heart and following that vision regardless of the cost to himself or others.   

That is what I mean by an evil person— someone who has been radically deceived and chooses to follow the deception as if it were the truth.  It is a dogma of the Christian Faith that even evil people can repent and be saved and that no one living is beyond the possibility of redemption.  But it is also true that evil has its own spiritual and psychological momentum, rather like a toboggan picking up speed as it goes downhill.  After a while, it is almost impossible for the evil person to wake up and repent.  That is, though such repentance is technically possible, in practical terms it remains an impossibility—though with God all things remain possible.

       The growth of evil in the West explains things like the social cancellation of people espousing traditional values in the media, the entertainment industry, and the school system, the toleration of open blasphemy, the rioting and burning of cars and buildings, the burning of national flags (more an American affliction than a Canadian one), the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk.  These are not just tragedies and outrages.  They are things that happen in a war.

       Being someone who values peace, law, and order, I am naturally predisposed to try to find common middle ground, to bring opposing groups together, to invite rational argument (à la Turning Point USA) and to intone pleadingly “Why can’t we all just get along?”  In other words, to behave as if we were neighbours disagreeing in peace time. 

But such things, while making sense during peace time, are foolish and fatal during a war.  To quote one of JFK’s aphorisms, “You can’t negotiate with people who say, ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable’”.  If you are at war, your enemy doesn’t want to negotiate or reason or compromise. He is not interested in finding common ground.  He is only interested in killing you.  That’s why it’s called “war” and why peace is such a good thing.

       A generation or so ago, the divide between political and social groups in western society was not the divide between good and evil but only between the Left and the Right and there was much common ground between them.  The Left and the Right might disagree about welfare or gun control but they both agreed that we must all still somehow live together in peaceful coexistence.  The Left didn’t want to annihilate the Right, nor did the Right want to annihilate the Left; they both just wanted their own policies to be passed into law.  There was no hatred; just partisanship and disagreement.  It was politics, not war, and members of different political parties could still do lunch together after Parliament (or Congress) broke up for the day.

       Perhaps it is remembering those good old days that makes some good people deny that a war between good and evil is inevitable.  They still want to try to reason and find common ground and then go do lunch.  They don’t want war. But, as Aragorn said in the Lord of the Rings movie, “Open war is upon you whether you would risk it or not.”

       In the same way, an open war in the West is upon us whether we want it or not.  Some skirmishes are small, some large.  We have drag queen story hour for the kiddies at libraries, widespread determination to allow children to mutilate their bodies in transgender transitioning, an insistence that the abortion slaughter of the unborn continue.  We have violent reaction to those holding traditional values.  We have the murder of Charlie Kirk.  And we have a man holding aloft in sign in Seattle (and elsewhere?) celebrating it. Sorry, gang: open war is upon you whether you wish it or not.

       Not, I hasten to add, physical war, but a spiritual warfare. The first step in opposing this evil is the recognition that the enemy is not political in essence but spiritual, as St. Paul taught us long ago (Ephesians 6:12f). That means that we must speak the truth and fight the good fight of faith for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but spiritual and mighty in God for pulling down strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:4).

       This means, of course, that we must differentiate between the spiritual battle we wage as Christians from the political battles and culture wars raging in some place in the West, even though there will be some overlap.  We should do what we can to turn the cultural tide back to sanity and morality but at the end of the day Christians will remember that the Kingdom is not of this world and will not confuse political and cultural victory with the Kingdom of God.  Wonderful as Charlie Kirk was, our message to the world is not “Charlie Kirk and America” but “Jesus Christ” (as Charlie doubtless would’ve agreed).

Some have already begun to speak out.  In the Orthodox Church we have the response of Archbishop Elpidophoros who wrote on the day after the assassination, “We must also acknowledge what this act of violence could represent for our nation. To resort to the cowardice of a bullet rather than the power of the word is to inflict a wound upon the very soul of America… If political violence is allowed to become normalized, we imperil not only human lives but the very fabric of our democracy.”  Evil must be recognized for what it is and plainly named. 

The temptation, of course, is to respond to the demonic hatred with hatred of our own, for those on the Right to be radicalized into making a violent response to the violence of the Left. That, of course, is precisely the Enemy’s strategy:  to promote hatred in the name of ideology, each hateful side confident that they are on the side of the angels in their vitriolic hatred as they war against those they regard as the sons of darkness. That is not the way of the Lord—nor, come to that, was it the way of Charlie Kirk.  Recognition that spiritual warfare is upon us involves the recognition that we must be ever vigilant to keep hatred far from our hearts.

We must also pray hard for the turning of the tide and for evil’s defeat.  We cannot know whether this current slide into evil and moral inversion can be arrested and reversed or whether it is simply the next step downward in the long winding road leading to the coming of Antichrist.  But our duty remains the same regardless of the final outcome: to speak the truth in an evil day.

Like Charlie Kirk and others, we must refuse to let evil and insanity go unchallenged in society and in the public square but raise our voice, no matter what the cost, remembering that our crucified Lord is still the Lord of history.  He will do what pleases Him as we wait for His return. As we await His return, we must speak the truth and must do it in love.