During a recent Sunday Eucharist, I shared an old proverb: “For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, a horse was lost.” We reflected together on how small choices shape great results, and how each day we face the choice set before Israel by Moses: life or death.
To choose life is to cling to God; to choose death is to turn away from him and drift into emptiness. In the film The Shawshank Redemption, the choice is stated simply as “Get busy living or get busy dying.” Jesus describes it in Luke 9:23-24 in terms of the cross: “Then he said to them all: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”
Two reflections I’ve read, and the assassination of the conservative political figure Charlie Kirk, brought this home with painful clarity for me.
Denmark is said by some to be one of the most secular nations in the world. As Denmark seeks to increase its military amid a more threatening environment in Europe, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has dared to acknowledge what most Western leaders will not: that many of her nation’s youth are unwilling to fight. Some openly admit they wouldn’t die for Denmark—not for democracy, not for the flag, and certainly not for a modern welfare state.
Frederiksen seems to acknowledge that people will only suffer and fight for what they hold sacred. Having hollowed out the church’s public role and reduced religion to private choice, Denmark now finds itself with young citizens unwilling to defend their nation. Denmark is not alone in this. The Prime Minister’s plea for the church to step back into public life is not a matter of religious conviction or romantic nostalgia—it looks very much like an admission that, without faith, meaning collapses, and with it the will to endure.
The shootings at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis may be described not only as a tragedy but as the symptom of a cultural pathology: nihilism, born of resentment and disillusionment. Today’s mass shooters no longer even act out of ideological hatred; instead, they embody what has been called “slop violence,” acts of chaos fueled by cynicism, despair, and a hatred of innocence as the ultimate rejection of life.
The killer idolized the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza. Online subcultures, detached from any transcendent moral vision, feed off irony and desecration, turning even childhood into material for perverse mockery. For a culture in which nothing is sacred, violence becomes both spectacle and statement: the destruction of meaning.
The killing of Charlie Kirk in front of 3,000 people is different and yet related. This was probably not just nihilism, though it may turn out to be so. The target suggests an ideological motive.
Kirk was a conservative, a strong supporter of President Trump, with conservative Christian perspectives on—among other things—abortion and sex. He was also someone who sought public debate in university contexts where he sought to engage people. His murder on the national stage, and that of other political public figures like Minnesota’s Speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark, are not lacking in historical precedent.
In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has the senior devil advising the junior devil that it doesn’t matter which side the patient (the man the junior devil is to destroy) is on politically from the perspective of corrupting his soul. Evil and darkness can find equally fruitful ground in very opposite ideologies.
Taken together, these perspectives suggest that the West has built systems of comfort, rights, and freedoms—but, cut loose from God, these systems offer no reason to sacrifice and no framework for hope. They cannot sustain courage in Denmark’s geopolitical peril, nor can they resist the descent into nihilistic violence in America’s heartland.
Politics alone—left or right—cannot replace the good that lies at the heart of things. Rights, liberties, and happiness are the fruit of a deeper tree, one rooted in transcendence. Severed from that root, societies drift into fragility, despair, and desecration.
The fundamental problem, then, is not the issues that are commonly talked about in relation to these terrible incidents. As these events indicate, it is the absence of God in public and private life that lies at the heart of the problem. In Denmark, it leaves the next generation with nothing worth defending. In Minnesota, it left one young person possessed by nothing but darkness and evil. On the wider public stage, we are drawn away from civilized argument and debate toward bloodshed and madness.
Our culture often tells us we can build life on comfort, progress, or personal freedom alone. But without God, they collapse under the strain. As the psalmist says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (127:1). That is why Moses’ call and Jesus’ command remain urgent: Choose life. Not comfort. Not ideology. Not mere survival. Choose the living God, who alone offers hope and gives strength to endure.
There is indeed a lot of toxic religion in our world that pulls people toward the darkness almost as much as rejecting God altogether, but the cure for toxic religion is not atheism. We can see where that is leading all around us now, and our forebears saw it in the unparalleled carnage wrought by the atheist ideologies of the 20th-century, fascism and communism. The cure is only to be found in a pure, authentic, and wholesome faith in which we can see reflected the person and life of Jesus Christ.
This is the choice before us as individuals, as families, as churches, and indeed as a nation in its 250th year. In a time when so many drift into anger, resentment, and disillusionment, we are called to be a people who bear witness that life is found in Christ alone.
The words of this hymn by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend express it well:
In Christ alone my hope is found;
He is my light, my strength, my song;
this Cornerstone, this solid ground,
firm through the fiercest drought and storm.
What heights of love, what depths of peace
When fears are stilled, when strivings cease
… From life’s first cry to final breath,
Jesus commands my destiny.
No pow’r of hell, no scheme of man
can ever pluck me from his hand;
’till he returns or calls me home,
here in the power of Christ I’ll stand!
So let us rise each day with the words of Deuteronomy on our lips: “I have set before you life and death … therefore choose life.” As Red Redding elected to do in The Shawshank Redemption, let us “get busy living” the life Christ has won for us and invite our neighbors into that life. It is not that we should all agree, but so that we should all have an allegiance that is higher than our politics with which to judge our words and actions.
The Rev. Timothy A.R. Cole is rector of Christ Church in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
