The Presbyterian School Mass Murder and America’s Inchoate and Disintegrating Soul
By Douglas Wilson | March 29, 2023
There was a time, back in the olden days, when the aftermath of a horrific event like a school shooting was crowded with politicians making dubious policy pronouncements about things like gun control. Always in poor taste, they were usually on the case within hours, and yet, however bad they were, it was nothing compared to what we do now.
Back then, when terrible murders happened, the instantaneous debates about murder weapons were in bad taste, but at least most people could see a connection. That is why the camera hogs could usually get away with it.
But we are way beyond that. Speaking out in terrible taste now seems like the good old days to us.
Tennessee had recently outlawed trans-surgery on minors, and so the hot takes after the Nashville shootings were running along the lines of “straight Tennessee had it coming.” This is not politics anymore—this is something else entirely.This is not a misguided political vision. It is a warp spasm of wickedness.
This is what damnation tastes like. It is not the full damnation itself, but rather just one drop from the bottle, applied to the tip of the tongue. That acrid taste seems like it could never go away, and yet there is a full bottle of it left. There will always be a full bottle left.
It tastes like spitting loss, biting regret, venomous hatred, curdled resentment, dishonest blame-shifting, and devouring lust, and all of it curved back on itself. To use Augustine’s phrase—incurvatus in se—it is like a snake biting its tail. Actually, it is not like a snake biting its tail; it is a snake biting its tail.
Instead of the soul turned outward toward God, the twisted soul bends back in upon itself. The idea is to believe in oneself, to reach deep down within one’s own heart, and there to discover a treasury of infinite riches. So goes the lie.
But what we have discovered instead is that we have become a vacuous people with hollow souls, empty minds, and grasping hands.
Thinking ourselves to be urbane sophisticates, cosmopolitan, savvy in the ways of the world, we have discovered instead that the human souls that we once had are coming apart in our hands. They are in tatters, and pieces are all over the floor. When we try to pick up one piece, we drop other pieces, and all of them continue to tear and come apart.
Not only so, but just as we buy our jeans pre-ripped these days, so also we try to treat our souls the same way—we try to introduce the artificial destruction early on. Christian parents send their fresh little girls off to a government school so that some bureaucratic flunky can start grooming her into taking hormone blockers, and then cutting off her breasts.
If you are reading this, and you are one of those who has been surgically torn apart by such lies, and you are still miserable, that misery has to do with your relationship to the God you are still rejecting. Your misery has nothing to do with the fact that some people in the red states disapprove of what you have done.
They cut off your breasts in San Francisco, and you are not spiritually empty because somebody in Tulsa disapproves. You feel spiritually empty because you are spiritually empty, and Oklahoma has little or nothing to do with it.
Not only so, but the surgeon who did this awful thing to you is spiritually empty as well, and the medical profession certified him is as hollow as a jug. Looking to them for answers is like drinking from the dry and broken cisterns of ancient Israel, the ones that were dry in Jeremiah’s day.
Definitions in Free Fall
We are not to be faulted because we are a society with mentally disturbed people in it. We live in a fallen world, and every society has had mentally disturbed people in it, not to mention certain other people so given over to sin that we call them monsters or sociopaths.
Our current problem is not with those disturbed people, but rather with all the responsible people who are no longer capable of defining anything, including what it means to be disturbed. Every society has had insane people in it. Our problem today is that our sane people are insane. Our sane people no longer know what sanity is.
When asked to define a woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson famously replied that she “was not a biologist.” Now she was not being interviewed to determine whether she might be eligible for early release from an asylum, but was rather being questioned in Congress because she had been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States.
She was nominated to a position of extraordinarily high responsibility, and she was sworn in despite the unbelievable lameness of that answer. And a society that appoints people like that to the highest court in the land is a society that deserves everything it is going to get—good and hard.
Please allow me to walk you through this. Someone who doesn’t know what a woman is has to be someone who also doesn’t know what a girl is. And if someone doesn’t know what a girl is, such a person also doesn’t know what boys and girls are. If they don’t know what boys and girls are, this means they don’t know what the image of God in man is—because the Word defines that image for us. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27). God created us in His image, male and female. Someone who doesn’t understand that doesn’t know what a human being is.
So why is the image of God in humanity so important? “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” Genesis 9:6 (KJV)
And so this is why we currently live in a society that doesn’t know what murder is. The people who said that straight Tennessee had it coming are people who don’t know what a girl is, and so they also must not know what it is to murder a girl. They don’t know what it is to murder a girl because they are “not biologists”…
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