Minneapolis and the Collapse of Moral Consensus
The catastrophe in Minneapolis has been narrated, predictably, as a failure of politics by the media and as a failure of love by Christian leadership. It is neither. It is something far more unsettling: a moral collapse.
“If we are going to figure out how to make it through the storm and the fog to safe harbor, we have to understand how we got here. Ideas . . . have consequences.”
The catastrophe in Minneapolis has been narrated, predictably, as a failure of politics by the media and as a failure of love by Christian leadership. It is neither.
It is something far more unsettling: a moral collapse.
A man is dead after an encounter that, under the strain and disorder of a few seconds, escalated into a fatal use of force that should never have occurred. Others have been injured and killed amidst similar circumstances. A major American city was thrown into turmoil while its leaders, both local and federal, appeared either unable or unwilling to restore order. Justice has been perverted for years, leading up to this recent flare. As always, innocent people are left to count the cost.
A civilization that cannot enforce the law without cruelty, or protest injustice without destroying itself, is not suffering from a policy problem. It is suffering from the loss of the moral framework that once made both law and liberty possible. This did not happen overnight. It is the fruit of a long civilizational unraveling.
More than two centuries ago, John Adams warned that the American Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people” and was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” This was not his personal opinion. Adams stated a political fact: free societies do not survive on rules alone. They depend on citizens self-governed by restraint, duty, and a shared understanding of right and wrong.
Alexis de Tocqueville agreed. In his famous work Democracy in America, he observed that democratic societies naturally drift toward equality, but not necessarily toward virtue. Democracy, he warned, favors majority rule and risks eroding the virtues that make self-rule possible. America, he believed, could not survive the loss of its religious inheritance—not because the state requires Christian religion, but because self-government requires a shared moral horizon.
For a long time, Western civilization lived in the Judeo-Christian worldview of its origins. It no longer does.
Over the last century, the West has steadily replaced duty with desire and tradition with self-expression. The sexual revolution that rose in the 1960’s did not merely change private behavior; it dealt a final blow to the idea that there is a given moral order to which human beings must conform. Family, gender, authority, and even human nature itself became matters of preference rather than binding features of civilization.
The result is not liberation, but moral bankruptcy. We have constructed a society that still demands rights but no longer knows where rights come from—or why anyone should accept them. We insist on dignity and equity, while rejecting any shared account of what makes human life dignified or equitable. We invoke justice while denying any stable definition of what is just. This is the world in which our institutions are now asked to function.
Minneapolis has forced longstanding questions into the open at devasting cost. How should law enforcement exercise authority? How ought citizens protest injustice? What limits should be placed on force, resistance, speech, guns, or assembly? What obligations do leaders owe the governed—and the governed one another? What is the responsibility of the media and of the those who consume it?
In a healthy society, these questions remain difficult but not paralyzing because they are argued within a shared moral language. Ours no longer has one.
Our laws and policies have not failed because they are inadequate, or because they are enforced by despicable people. They have failed because the people subject to those laws no longer share the moral assumptions those laws presuppose.
This is why politics cannot repair what is breaking. A society that has lost the virtues of moral formation and forfeited its moral authority will not be rescued by stronger men or progressive reforms. We are living through the consequences of a civilizational choice. Many want the fruits of a Christian moral order without the faith that produces them. Others want the authority of that order without the moral restraints that once gave it legitimacy. That experiment is ending exactly as history suggests it would: a strange and dangerous paradox.
We are richer, more comfortable, and freer than any people in history, yet we possess no shared understanding of what that freedom is intended for. We have succeeded not in creating a culture where everyone wins, but an anti-culture in which stability is impossible.
This has left much of the country trapped between two increasingly untenable options: following political leaders openly hostile to the basic Christian virtues and religious liberty that has long governed the West; or to follow a strongman of no particular religious commitment who will impose order—just or not—by force of sheer will.
Christians must come to understand that if a moral consensus is to be rebuilt, it will not begin in Washington. It must begin in households—where families are formed in the moral inheritance of our civilization and where daily life is ordered toward something higher than personal comfort and consumption. But it will also require the church and its leaders to recover the courage to teach moral substance, not merely moral sentiment—to move beyond vague appeals to “love” and recover the roots that gave those words meaning.
Jesus did not leave love undefined. He rooted it in a Torah-centric a way of life and a concrete vision of obedience. This is not a plea for nostalgia or some cultish withdrawal from modern life. But the future cannot be survived on moral fumes.
For years, Western Christianity has reduced moral formation to “Be kind.” “Love people.” It has too rarely explained what those commands require in practice. In a moment of cultural fracture, that vagueness has left the church unable to lead in the public square. Preaching “love God and love others” without moral specificity is no longer sufficient to form people capable of a faithful and virtuous life in the age now before us. If the church is to serve our culture in this time of upheaval, it will have to repent of its contribution to this vacuum and recover that clarity—without cruelty and without fear.
The American experiment has always depended on more than laws. Our Declaration of Independence grounds human rights not in government, but in a Creator. Severed from that moral vision, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” will not remain rights for long.
Minneapolis is not an anomaly. It is a preview.
As the moral consensus continues to dissolve, it will become harder to distinguish truth from lies, authority from domination, and to safeguard the image of God in any coherent way. We are not merely watching a system fail. We are watching a culture reap what it has spent generations sowing. I believe the church must now reckon honestly with its own contribution to the blood in our streets.
When I was fifteen, a stranger kindly gifted me a copy of Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law. I still have it. As a teenager, I underlined his closing words, written more than 175 years ago, still painfully relevant today:
“And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society...may they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.”
Bastiat understood that liberty must be stewarded by a people capable of acknowledging God. Minneapolis is another grim test result in a long civilizational diagnosis of a people no longer capable of doing so.
May God grant comfort to the families who have lost loved ones in this tragedy, and mercy to all who were caught up in it.