Over the past few days, a slew of violent events has erupted in our nation, including the senseless stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, another school shooting in Colorado, and Wednesday’s brutal assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk. News of Kirk’s death exploded not only due to his celebrity-like status but also because it appeared to be a clear act of political violence, which experts have long warned would result from the increasing polarization on both sides of the political divide.
For instance, a 2023 study found that 40 percent of both Biden and Trump supporters “at least somewhat believed the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.”
But what should be equally concerning to us is how our nation responds to violent incidents like these. Most Americans are in shock, grieving, and rightly concerned for the future of our nation. Yet there are outliers on both ends of the ideological spectrum who seem inclined to assign a deeper meaning to Kirk’s murder—one that instrumentalizes it to galvanize further support for their respective camps and causes.
On the far left, some talk as if Kirk deserved what happened to him for his past comments on subjects like race, sexuality, guns, and even empathy, which critics have deemed deeply dehumanizing. Kirk is someone who died on the hill he chose and whose death can thus be weaponized against his own rhetoric and ideology. By contrast, some on the far right speak of Kirk’s death as advancing a holy cause in enemy territory. Kirk is a slain saint and hero whose murder is a rallying cry and call to arms for conservatives and Christians like him. In short, in a mutual display of selective outrage and empathy, the far left blames Kirk’s death on the right and the far right blames his death on the left.
Ironically, these impulses draw from the same source and therefore cause the same effect by casting Kirk as a scapegoat. In each case, Kirk’s murder is assigned a kind of sacred significance that unites each faction around their respective ideologies—in such a way that his death becomes ammunition for further partisan violence.
Societies use scapegoats to avoid their deeper problems, which, Rene Girard says, stem from “mimetic contagion”—an escalating rivalry that spreads as people imitate one another’s desires. Instead of embracing true concern for victims “from the standpoint of the Christian faith,” which leads “the way into God’s new community of love and nonviolence,” Girard observed that pagan forms of “victimism” use victims to “gain political or economic or spiritual power.”
More to the point, by resorting to scapegoating, we wind up affirming that violence actually works as it is intended—a reality that Girard says stopped being true the moment Jesus gained victory over the power of death.
According to Girard’s anthropology, Jesus was the scapegoat to end all scapegoats—an innocent victim whom the political and religious establishment of the first century viewed as the culprit of their communal crisis, leading them to believe that killing him would restore the status quo. Yet because Jesus embodied true innocence—the only perfectly innocent person to walk this earth—he exposed the scapegoating mechanism for what it was, thereby defeating the devil and defanging death.
In Girard’s thinking, “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) disarmed violence itself, uncovering a hidden mystery which “none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8).
Ever since Jesus, violence lost the cohesive force it once exerted to unite communities around the deaths of their victims and thus relieve their tensions. Now, any positive effects that result from acts of violence—like the national unity after 9/11—will always be temporary and ultimately self-defeating. This also explains why, according to Girard, violence has grown increasingly chaotic in its nature, decentralized in its manifestation, and ineffectual in its aims.
In short, to instrumentalize Kirk’s murder, whether by painting him as a martyr or a miscreant, sanctions his status as a scapegoat and so affirms the essential function of violence—which in turn denies the reality that Jesus conquered death’s demonic power.
The scapegoating mechanism, which is at work in all forms of brutality, plays right into the hands of the enemy of both God and humanity. That is because, Girard argued, it is the primary operating system of Satan himself. As the accuser, Satan supplies the core impulse behind scapegoating, which is assigning blame. Thus, whenever we blame each other for the violence of our times, we end up aligning ourselves with the accuser (Rev. 12:10).
Christians across the political spectrum should be disturbed by the increasing violence that seems to be taking over our country. Yet as followers of Jesus, we also have a unique opportunity to direct our anger in the right direction—for only then can ours be a righteous rage. When we target and attack one another as the enemy, it distracts us from our real enemies: sin, death, and the devil.
In Scripture, Satan is called “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44) and the one who “holds the power of death” (Heb. 2:14). While Jesus broke the power of death by defeating the devil, the reality of death still exists and is thus “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26).
Too often, Christians aren’t mad enough at death, as my colleague Kate Shellnutt has pointed out. Perhaps that’s because we’re far too busy getting mad at one another. We forget the words of the apostle Paul, who writes that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).
As Christians, we are uniquely poised to combat the lie that violence still has its uses in our world. In fact, the more inevitable and inescapable violence seems to become in our culture, French theologian Jacques Ellul argued, the more important it is for Christ’s followers to prove otherwise: “The role of the Christian in society … is to shatter fatalities and necessities. And he cannot fulfill this role by using violent means.”
Not only is violence unnecessary, but it is also counterproductive—it creates a literal death loop that does nothing more than reinforce itself. This is why Girard said that the kingdom of darkness is a house divided against itself, for eradicating violence with violence is like Satan casting out Satan (Matt. 12:25).Instead, the Good News of the gospel is that Jesus now holds power over death, binding the work of the enemy and causing Satan to fall like lightning (Luke 10:18, John 12:31). As Christians, we have access to that same supernatural power through Christ’s sacrifice—who conquered not by being death’s instrument but by being its willing recipient for the sake of the world. That is, we overcome Satan’s schemes “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of [our] testimony” (Rev. 12:11).
As citizens of Christ’s now-and-coming kingdom, we must refuse to sacralize murder and thus return to death its scepter. Now is the time for every Christian, regardless of our political affiliation, to beat our swords into plowshares and do the hard work of uprooting the false necessity of violence in our nation. We must demonstrate that the new operating principle of Christ’s kingdom is a divine love that is even stronger than death (Song 8:6).
Christ’s “resurrection is the guarantee that God can cure every wrong and every hurt,” writes Catholic priest Jacques Philippe. “Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil.”
Now is the time to prove to the world that death has, in fact, lost its sting—and that only the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ prevails against the violent forces of hell.
By Stefani McDade, Christianity Today, September 12 - 2025
[Article shared slightly abridged.]