Scripture Study

These questions have spiraled in our minds the last few days since the murder of beloved icon Charlie Kirk right before our eyes.  What is becoming of us as a society? How is it that some people could cheer Kirk’s death and say he brought it on himself or he deserved it? How can such evil be tolerated let alone celebrated? Have we moved into a world so hopelessly broken that we have lost our way, that people cannot speak their mind s without stirring danger? How could a 22-year-old foment so much hatred in himself that he could carefully plan and carry out an assassination to silence a human voice?

Many on both sides of the aisle, representing a variety of political views expressed their sorrow, but too many cheered this tragic death of a young father and husband. MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd lost his job for arguing that Kirk had encouraged the politically-motivated violence that took his life. A dean at the University of Tennessee said she had “zero sympathy” for this murder. An Office Depot employee in Michigan refused to print a poster for a local memorial service for Kirk, saying the event was “propaganda.” A moment of silence for Kirk in the U.S. House of Representatives devolved into a shouting match.

Charlie Kirk himself posted on X before his murder that the “assassination culture is spreading” and noted that “Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump. In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione.”

It is a spirit of violence that pervades our culture across the spectrum. Earlier this year, it was a conservative man who targeted and killed Minnesota House Democratic leader Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot Sen. John Hoffman and his wife multiple times, a tragedy the state is still reeling from.

What’s Happening? Can the Book of Mormon Shed Some Light?

Few books describe in such harrowing detail how a civilization and people stumble, lurch, crumble and finally die than does the Book of Mormon. If it is not enough to read about the destruction of the Nephites, we get the story again in the demise of the Jaredites, too. This is not subtle nor accidental that we should see a world breaking apart twice. It comes from a prophet who says: “I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing” (Mormon 8:35).

The Book of Mormon gives us the details of this destruction as a warning and a plea. Take note of who we were and what we did, and do not do the same, oh you future generations. “Oh be wise” as we were not.

One might wish the Book of Mormon had a happier ending than Mormon lamenting, “O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord! O ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you!” (Mormon 6:17).

When we look for the source of their corruption, it is in these words. They have rejected the Lord and all that gave them foundational bearings and have been left with nothing but barrenness instead. God and his laws are the framework and foundation of a civilization, and once that is lost, virtue and morality goes with it.

In his new book, “Rage against the Machine, The Unmaking of Humanity, author Paul Kingsnorth writes that “Every culture is built around a sacred order. For 1,500 years, the West’s sacred order has been its founding biblical story, which shaped the working week, our understanding of the universe, and the very notion of individuals with God-given rights.”

He says, “that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies, then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty. Everything will be up for grabs.”

Kingsnorth also notes in Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic work After Virtue,  “that the very notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no telos, or higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what ‘virtue’ means, or why it should mean anything.”

Kingsnorth said, “If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalize away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name—if that.” https://www.thefp.com/p/how-the-west-lost-its-soul-christendom-technology-progress

What happens when the pillars of society begin to crack or an earthquake rocks the foundation? Upheaval and chaos as sides compete to assign their own new meaning to the empty space left behind. As the Christian foundation, which is at the root of Western civilization, is retreating from our world, noisy and powerful groups have worked hard at its deconstruction, vying, sometimes with violence and threats, to put their new ideology in its place.

Ben Shapiro put it this way, “The thing that all these groups have in common is…a philosophical structure that says, ‘There is a system that is targeting me. That system is a system of power and it is deadly to me. Therefore, I am excused in using violence against the system.”

There we have it. An idealogy that is sometimes called leftist or Marxist or merely secular is seeking to establish itself against the old, retreating world based on a biblical foundation and suddenly everything is up for grabs. The meaning of morality. The structure of the family. How we earn and keep our money. The idea of a good life. What compassion looks like.

This ideology, fighting for dominance, makes certain demands that would be immediately considered unreasonable in a more sane time. Your gender is what you think it is. Getting married and having family is a jail sentence. Abortion is non-negotiable. History must be rewritten. The system must be overthrown because it has caused so much pain. Whatever wound I am carrying is the fault of my parents, the government, society at large and you must fix this for me by blasting everything apart and starting over.

New ideologies that would replace our Christian foundation make their way by demonizing those who don’t agree. There Is a ruthlessness about these replacement ideas and a drive to win at any cost. They are not live and let live ideas which can co-exist with traditional American values whose outlook has been so colored by the sense of the dignity and worth of the person, the need for agency, the freedom of speech and religion and a beneficient God who is over all.

Kirk talked about this on his podcast, the day before he came to Utah. He complained of a politician who suggested our rights are given to us by the government, and he reminded listeners of the Declaration of Independence which famously states that individuals are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

If God gave individuals their rights, government cannot give them or take them away. But these rights are maintained by a profound moral order.

It becomes more evident every day why there is a covenant blessing upon America of protection and prosperity—only and only if Jesus Christ is the head. It is only under his head that we can be united. The Lord gives a warning that these blessings can and will all be taken away if we “dwindle in unbelief” (2 Nephi 1:10)

Then warring ideologies will seek power at any cost. Name calling and disdain rule. Hatred arises. Cities burn and the arsonists are cheered. Children’s innocence is shattered. We become blind and cannot see our fellow humans. Enmity churns within us. Accusations abound.

The Book of Mormon paints this picture too.  The Lamanites, who have turned from the Lord, have an ideology based on resentment. They were robbed of power and cheated in the wilderness and their enmity is boundless.

Jacob says that the Nephites were “hated of their brethren”. Later, the Nephites become so depraved that Mormon cannot “write a perfect description of the horrible scene of blood and carnage” and “every heart was hardened so that they delighted in the shedding of blood continually” (Mormon 4:11) Hatred and violence become something to delight in.

The Jaredites become involved in an internecine war to the finish, and the last ones standing were “drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and they slept again upon their swords.”

It is a quick road to being threatened by a people or an idea, fearing for the way they want to redefine your world according to their ideology, and becoming violent. If you don’t like Samuel the Lamanite’s talk of repentance, the best way to handle it is to shoot arrows at him while he stands on the wall. Murder the chief judge upon his seat. The Book of Mormon has it all, with a flashing warning light for its modern-day readers. “Don’t go here.”

One of the most efficient ways to seize power is to shut down your enemies by stopping their voices. In our modern world, we have accomplished that by calling speech we don’t like just another form of violence.

In classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill noted that speech is fundamentally different from physical harm. Words might offend, but only force (weapons, imprisonment, beating) was seen as violence.

Now, words are seen as a form of violence, which is a troublesome shift on many counts, but let’s mention two.

First, as Jonathan Rauch notes in Kindly Inquisitors, “The belief that words are violence is itself dangerous; it licenses people to respond to speech with violence, because violence is how we normally respond to violence.” When Charlie Kirk was killed, it was this idea that allowed some people to say the reprehensible, he deserved it. Whoever believed that words and bullets equate has become sorely twisted, but the idea is accepted more broadly than we know.

Second, psychologist and author Jordan Peterson said, “If offensive speech is violence, then by definintion any disagreement can be shut down as an attack. That is tyranny—the end of dialogue.” It is also an arrow right into the heart of the democratic experiment which insists that we can talk to each other, be open and debate, and come to a higher, better place for all of us if we can work together.

Third, and particularly important for those of us who are religions, Carl Truman, the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, said “When words are treated as violence, biblical teaching on sex and morality is cast as oppression. What is really happening is the criminalization of Christian belief.”

So the untimely and tragic murder of Charlie Kirk is a time to think and re-examine how to be. It is a time to consider again the lessons of the Book of Mormon about what will keep this nation safe and help us navigate through rocky times. We were not given these Book of Mormon warnings to fail, but to learn from.

President Russell M. Nelson has reminded us to be peacemakers and now we must ask more deeply what that means. We have seen in the Book of Mormon what happens when a people succumb to divisions and hatred. We can now see even more clearly why we must be agents of peace.

At the same time, we can see that since Jesus Christ is the God of this land, we must bear witness of his teachings, not be embarrassed by them. Laxity is a luxury we cannot afford.

Silence is not golden when it comes to speaking of the pillars of our nation and western civilization. We must stand up for the Christian tradition and morality, speak out our faith and our convictions, and we must do it with generosity and kindness toward those who don’t agree with us.

We have learned that it is awkward to talk of these things. We hem and haw, avoid committing ourselves to speak the truth in public and private gatherings. Isn’t it ironic—to have so much and say so little?

Agree with him or not, we have just seen a man dedicate his life to what he believed, rally thousands with his convictions, and do that in the face of real danger and death threats. We have seen someone take his life for it.

It is so easy to become quiet just because we are worried to offend, but those days are past. We must learn to speak the truth with power and gentleness, with a strengthened ability to talk and to listen. We must be open about our deep allegiance to Jesus Christ.

Just maybe, it will give someone else the courage to do the same. If there are enough of us, we can make a difference.