The Cults of the Indefensible

Something has broken loose in the modern soul. Not apathy. Apathy at least stays home. This is restless, roaming devotion hunting for altars.

Over the past few years, and accelerating hard these last few months, ordinary people have organized themselves into cults of the indefensible. Congregations of the fervent gathered around causes, figures, and practices that a moral people still guided by faith would have called repugnant prima facie.

The pink-clad hundreds praying outside a Plymouth courthouse for a mother who strangled her three children. The green-shirted admirers of an accused assassin in Manhattan. Baby murder celebrated as a life-affirming good. A nation quietly euthanizing its poor and calling it dignity. Students chanting for the glory of a massacre. And yes, a movement on the right building an alternate reality around the man accused of murdering Charlie Kirk.

These are not six separate stories. They are one story with six faces. Scripture told us it was coming. Jesus, describing the generation that would precede His return, did not stop at wars and earthquakes. He predicted a psychological condition.

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.

Distress. Perplexity. Hearts failing for fear. That is anguish. And anguish does not stay neutral. It turns ravenous. It grabs for any narrative that will organize the pain, name the enemies, and hand it saints to venerate.

Strip a civilization of the love of the truth and its anguish will be fed by counterfeits every single time. What follows is a look at the ones doing the briskest business right now.

The Sympathetic Killers

I have written about the first cult at length already, so a short version will do. In Massachusetts, hundreds of women in pink rallied last week for Lindsay Clancy. Her attorney does not dispute that she killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan. In New York, the judge in Luigi Mangione’s murder trial ordered an anonymous jury because the accused killer’s fan base has been menacing the process itself.

Before them came the secular canonizations of George Floyd and Michael Brown, men whose records were airbrushed into hagiography while the facts of their cases were treated as blasphemy. The common thread is empathy severed from truth. It always flows toward the transgressor and away from the victims whose names the crowds somehow cannot remember. Isaiah called this putting darkness for light. It was the first symptom. It was not the last.

From Rare to Sacrament

Thirty years ago the Democratic Party’s official line, spoken by Bill Clinton, was that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” The word “rare” was a tell. It was a moral concession. An admission that the thing being defended was a tragedy to be minimized, not a good to be maximized. That concession is gone. The word was scrubbed from the platform years ago. The trajectory since then has been steady: from tolerance to endorsement to open celebration.

Look where the ratchet sits today. Massachusetts this month became the tenth state to abolish gestational limits entirely. Governor Maura Healey signed the bill on August 10. The previous 24-week restriction is gone. Timing is now left to the judgment of the patient and the physician. Full stop.

Researchers are already warning that late-term abortions could surge in the blue states that have ended their limits. Pro-life researchers have long challenged the comforting story that most later abortions involve life-threatening emergencies. Studies keep showing financial strain and delayed awareness of pregnancy as leading reasons. Abortion as birth control. The thing we were assured would never happen, defended by people who now deny it is happening while they pass laws to make sure it can.

The culture has kept perfect pace with the law. “Shout Your Abortion” is a movement, a hashtag, a book, a merchandise line. Women are told to speak of their abortions not with grief, not even with sober resolve, but with pride. Cakes are baked. Parties are thrown. What began as a plea for mercy in hard cases has matured into a liturgy. And liturgy is the right word. A practice defended this fiercely, celebrated this ritually, and shielded from moral examination this completely is no longer a policy position. It is a devotion.

Death as Healthcare

If you want to see where the logic of compassionate death goes when it is allowed to finish its journey, look north. Canada legalized medical assistance in dying in 2016 as a narrow mercy for the terminally ill in unbearable pain. Ten years later the country has carried out tens of thousands of MAiD deaths. Assisted suicide has become one of the leading causes of death. In 2024 alone, 16,499 Canadians died by MAiD. That is one in every twenty deaths in the country. In Quebec the figure hit 7.9 percent of all deaths, the highest rate of assisted dying in the world.

The detail that should stop every reader cold is this one. Roughly half of those who died by MAiD reported that they asked for death because they felt like a burden to their families, friends, or caregivers. Not agony. Burden. A wealthy Western nation is dispatching thousands of people every year who primarily needed to be told they were still wanted, and it is doing so under the banner of dignity.

The expansion to those whose sole condition is mental illness is scheduled for March 2027. At that point the depressed will be eligible for the needle. Even the United Nations has called on Canada to pull back. When the UN is to your moral right on the sanctity of life, you have not progressed. You have been given over. Question MAiD in polite Canadian company and you will be treated not as a dissenter but as a heretic interfering with something sacred. The cult dynamics are identical to the others.

The Patsy Gospel

Now the part some will not want to hear, because this disease does not check voter registration. For nearly a year Candace Owens has built an audience of millions around the claim that Tyler Robinson, the man accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk, is a “total patsy,” framed by federal agents, with Israeli operatives behind the actual killing.

She claimed Robinson was never on the Utah Valley University campus the day Kirk was murdered. That claim was directly contradicted in July when prosecutors presented security footage at the preliminary hearing showing Robinson on campus four times that day. Even sympathetic observers had to acknowledge it. Video testimony from Robinson’s former roommate has him saying, the day after the shooting, that “he wishes he hadn’t done it.”

Let me be clear. Distrust of federal agencies is not a character flaw. It is earned, documented, and often the beginning of wisdom. But there is a line where healthy skepticism curdles into something else, and the line is easy to see. It is the moment your theory requires you to call verified evidence fabricated, to recast the accused killer of your friend as the true victim, and to smear the widow and colleagues of the murdered man as participants in a cover-up.

At that point you are no longer questioning a narrative. You are running a cult of the indefensible. It functions exactly like the Mangione cult across the aisle, right down to the merchandise-ready martyrdom of the accused. Paul warned Timothy about the market for this.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

Turned unto fables. The verse does not say the audience was passively deceived. It describes an appetite. Anguished, betrayed, grieving people wanted a story in which Charlie Kirk’s murder meant something bigger and darker than one radicalized young man with a rifle. Where there is a want, a teacher will appear to supply it.

The tragedy is that the fable does not honor Kirk. It dishonors him. It makes his actual killer the object of sympathy and his actual widow the object of suspicion.

Terror as Liberation

The fifth cult announced itself within hours of October 7, 2023, while the bodies of the murdered were still being identified. On elite campuses across America, students and professors did not mourn the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. They celebrated it as “resistance” and “decolonization.” They chanted for intifada. They tore down posters of kidnapped children with the serene confidence of people performing a moral duty.

The movement’s perfect distillation is the slogan “Queers for Palestine,” a phrase that manages to endorse, in three words, a regime that would execute its own members. This is not a failure of information. These are the most credentialed people in American history. It is a failure of moral polarity. The Isaiah 5:20 inversion executed at institutional scale. Atrocity relabeled as liberation. The victims relabeled as oppressors whose deaths require an asterisk.

Strong Delusion

So what is actually happening? The secular analyst can describe each cult individually. Social contagion here, institutional distrust there, therapeutic culture everywhere. What he cannot explain is the convergence. Across politics, religion, class, and continent, mass movements keep forming around exactly the things a sane moral order exists to forbid. And they keep directing their fiercest hostility at whoever declines to join. For that pattern, Scripture offers not a metaphor but a mechanism.

And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.

Read the sequence carefully. The order matters. The delusion is not the first move. It is the judgment. First comes the rejection of the love of the truth, a phrase far stronger than mere disbelief. It describes a settled preference against truth. A civilization that has decided truth is oppressive, binary, hateful, and violent. Then, and only then, comes the strong delusion. Notice that it is sent. A people that will not have the truth is not left in neutral. It is handed over to its appetites. Its anguish, the Luke 21 perplexity that now saturates every screen and every heart, becomes the current that carries it into the arms of whichever counterfeit arrives first.

The cults of the indefensible are not random cultural debris. They are rehearsals. A world being conditioned to extend worshipful sympathy toward the indefensible, to canonize by grievance, to treat evidence as oppression and moral clarity as violence, is a world in training to receive the ultimate indefensible figure, the man of sin himself, and to call him savior.

Expect more of them, arriving faster. Expect the cults to begin merging their vocabularies, as the Mangione and Robinson movements already have, each teaching its followers that the accused killer is the real victim and the system is the real murderer. Expect participation to become mandatory in polite society, because counterfeit religions are far less tolerant of dissent than the faith they replaced. And expect the believer’s refusal to bow to be treated as the one unforgivable transgression in an age that forgives everything else.

The inoculation is stated right there in the passage. Not intelligence. The campuses have that in surplus. Not skepticism. Owens’ audience has that in surplus. The love of the truth. Loving truth enough to accept it when it convicts your tribe, your heroes, your own heart.

The Church’s assignment in this hour is not to out-shout the cults. It is to be the one community left on earth where truth and mercy are still married, where evil is named without hatred and sinners are loved without lies. Anguished people are going to keep looking for altars. Make sure the one you tend points to the only One worthy of it.