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. But it is something far more unsettling.
“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.
When Captives are Set Free
When captives are set free, we rejoice—but the silence that followed October 7 reveals how deeply the church needs repentance, courage, and faith.
Two years ago, in the final hours of the biblical holiday Sukkot—the Festival of Tabernacles—the nation of Israel was brutally attacked. More than 1,200 people were murdered, and 251 civilians were taken hostage.
One week ago, in the first hours of Sukkot this year, I gathered with a few others to pray for the peace of Jerusalem—and especially for the fate of those still held captive.
Today, in the final hours of Sukkot, all of the living hostages were released.
That is a miracle.
Praise be to the God who has not forgotten—and will never forget—his people.
“The whole company that had returned from exile built temporary shelters and lived in them. From the days of Joshua son of Nun until that day, the Israelites had not celebrated it like this. And their joy was very great.”
— Nehemiah 8:17–18
The Wounds That Remain
Two years of war have marred the land and the people who call it home. Though the gunfire may grow quiet, the wider war unleashed globally on October 7, 2023, remains unresolved.
Hamas’s attack left families shattered. Iran has attempted to annihilate Israel multiple times directly and through its proxies on every side. The entire civilian population has lived in-and-out of bomb shelters or displaced from their homes altogether, while the young soldiers of the IDF have faced unimaginable danger to bring the captives home.
While Hamas hid behind their own children—in schools, hospitals, and UN facilities—the IDF stood in front of them to defend their nation and innocent life. 891 Israeli soldiers have been killed. The grief is deep. And yet, in the midst of so much death, God has answered prayer.
When the war subsides, I pray that all who call Israel home—Israeli and Arab—can find some measure of rest. But the trauma will remain for a long time, and the ache of what was lost will not easily fade.
The Silence That Spoke Louder
It is the silence that will be most difficult for me to forget—the near-total absence of moral clarity from much of the Western world, and from mainstream Christianity, including Christian media and the voices of prominent leaders, both national and local. I wish it were not the case, but that silence only amplified the volume of death chants and calls for Israel’s annihilation, nourishing fertile soil for antisemitism’s resurgence across the world.
It grieves me to say that in the past two years, I have never been more ashamed to be connected with Christianity. At the same time, I have never been more committed to live faithfully within it.
I have prayed often for God’s forgiveness, that he would soften the church and draw us to corporate repentance. No one is beyond his mercy, but I fear many hearts have hardened against his word.
The Cost of Silence
In the past two years, Christianity has shown that it prefers private reflection to collective repentance, indifference to conviction, and solitary prayer to shared intercession. We are told to speak less, avoid controversy, and “focus on Jesus.” Yet to be the peacemakers our Lord blessed means stepping into places that are anything but peaceful.
I fear that much of Christian leadership has remained silent not out of a desire to lead well, but out of refusal to lead when it matters most. In the face of evil, many have stood speechless—some from ignorance, some from unbelief, and some from fear.
It has come at a devastating cost.
It has left Jewish believers feeling abandoned by the Body of Messiah that claims to be grafted into their story.
It has emboldened the wicked, convincing them that a weak-kneed Church will not contend for truth when truth is costly.
It has confused a watching world—people who do not know Jesus—who now see a faith unwilling to name evil unless it is fashionable or politically convenient.
And perhaps most tragically, it has profaned our witness to the God of Abraham—the God we worship—who hears the blood of Abel crying out from the ground.
On the matter of Israel, Christian leadership confused silence for virtue and neutrality for wisdom in the very place where God has spoken most clearly. The Prophets would weep. Like the complacent of Amos’s day, we were not “grieved over the ruin of Joseph” (Amos 6:6).
But taking a political or theological stance that has no place for Israel does not grant us license to avoid naming evil for what it is—especially when that evil wounds the very people through whom our faith first came, including many Jewish followers of Jesus.
Yet the silence of many has made the courage of a few all the more radiant. I am deeply encouraged by the pastors, leaders, and ordinary believers who have chosen to speak and act with both righteousness and compassion. They have endured opposition and public shame, yet have stood firm in calling the nations to bless Israel, pray for her peace, and intercede for her enemies and all innocents in the crossfire.
Faithful in the Face of Evil
As believers, we are not called to outrage, activism, or to turn our pulpits into political platforms. But we are called to condemn evil, to cling to what is good, and to take up the cause of the vulnerable as if it were our own.
Every generation faces the spirit of Amalek. In ours, it looks like Hamas. It looks like the attack on the Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur. It looks like the emboldened darkness that now calls good evil and evil good. Yet even as we name evil for what it is, we must guard our hearts from becoming what we condemn.
You can grieve loss on every side.
You can pray for the peace of Jerusalem without condoning every political or military action.
You can mourn innocent lives and still believe God’s covenant stands.
And while we wait for his justice, our call remains the same: to love what God loves, to stand where he stands, and to hope in what he has promised.
The Deliverer Who Will Come
Today, I rejoice in the release of the captives and the glimpse of relative stability, prayerfully, returning to the land. I also grieve the tragic witness the church has offered in these days.
But the story of captivity is not over.
Jesus echoed the prophets, who foresaw a final day when Israel would again be surrounded by the nations. Just as God raised up deliverers in Egypt, we hold a blessed hope that he will send his Messiah once more—not as the suffering servant, but as the king who brings justice and peace.
When that day comes, it won’t be a peace deal brokered by pompous and fallen diplomats. It will be Jesus Messiah who sets free the captives and brings the Lord’s favor, forever.
Until then, we rejoice greatly in the God who never forgets what he swore.
Psalm 126
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dreamed.
Our mouths were filled with laughter,
our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy.
Those who sow with tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with them.
All scripture quotations are ESV.