Posted May 04, 2026
The FBI and prosecutors have released new footage of the man charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. If you’re like me, however, this news is not how you prefer to begin your week.
It would be more fun to discuss Golden Tempo’s come-from-last-place victory in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby, making Cherie DeVaux the first female trainer to win the most famous horse race in America. If you’re a basketball fan, you might want me to write about yesterday’s Game 7 wins by the 76ers, the Pistons, and the Cavaliers.
I’m with you. I have chosen in recent days not to focus on the latest assassination attempt, beyond the event itself, for two reasons. One is that the story makes me feel helpless. The other is that avoiding it makes me feel empowered.
Now I see that both sentiments, while understandable, are fallacious.
Let’s begin with the understandable part.
Three attempts in twenty-one months to kill the most protected person in America, the first of which would have succeeded if he had not turned his head at a precisely precise moment, cause me to despair that anyone is truly safe in these bitterly antagonistic times. And that there seems to be nothing I can do about it. I doubt that if anyone is planning another assassination attempt, they are reading my words right now.
But I can refuse to think about such things. I can try to empower myself by focusing on what I would rather think about and what I have some measure of control over.
I resonate with Caitlin Flanagan, who writes in the Free Press that when the news broke of the shooting, “I glanced at my phone, took in the essential facts, and didn’t really feel anything at all. It just seemed like one more event that hovered on the edge of the real and the unreal.” So she returned to her dinner party and “we went on to other things.”
Now to the fallacious part.
You might not have wanted to hear about cultural evolutionary theory today, which would make two of us, except for an article I read over the weekend that captured my attention.
Joseph Henrich directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and is the author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. In a brilliant analysis of his argument, Atlantic staff writer Judith Shulevitz summarizes: “Westerners are hyper-individualistic and hyper-mobile, whereas just about everyone else in the world was and still is enmeshed in family and more likely to stay put.”
To compress a very large subject: The Catholic Church came to insist on monogamy at a time when many societies were polygamous, and on vertical identity oriented toward the Church in an era when others were horizontally oriented toward clan and place. The result was that property began to spread beyond the extended family and people began to spread beyond their ancestral roots, collecting in towns and cities where they bonded with others of similar skills and interests.
Over time, cities wrote charters and guilds elected leaders, leading to representative democracy. Merchants learned to trade with strangers, fostering capitalistic economies based on consensual morality (you couldn’t cheat a stranger and make a living). Protestantism then gave the people a Bible they could read, democratizing literacy and education. A focus on personal salvation led to an insistence on personal rights.
All of this made us “WEIRD,” in Henrich’s acronym: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. This cultural evolution began with two principles the church championed that transformed society: monogamous marriage and Church-focused compassion.
Today, of course, our secularized society has largely abandoned both. We have rewritten the rules with regard to gender, sexuality, marriage, and the sanctity of life. And we have abandoned a Church-directed communal focus in our quest for self-directed success.
It is important to note that such secularization, with the “sexual revolution” and its accompanying embrace of personal “truth” and subjective morality, began to capture our culture at the same time political violence began to accelerate.
Flanagan points to the 1960s assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, and many others. Then, as she notes, “The ’60s dissolved into the ’70s and political violence rolled on, often in the form of acts committed by what seemed like endlessly proliferating radical groups who tied the possibility of enormous political change to limited acts of great violence.”
Now we are witnessing the rise of single-perpetrator radicalism, such as Charlie Kirk’s murderer and the would-be assassins of President Trump. As Flanagan writes, “an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility but of the unremarkable,” and we now understand such violence as “an aspect of the known world.”
Avoiding all of this is fallacious because such evasion merely ensures the continuing victimization of our society. As John Stuart Mill observed, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
The good news is that you and I are not helpless in the face of this cultural era. The movements Henrich and Shulevitz discuss were transforming not just because they were fostered by the church, but because God’s Spirit uses God’s word to change human hearts.
Jesus made clear God’s design for marriage: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5). He similarly taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:39).
Now he stands ready to empower our marriages and our ministries. When we seek an intimate, continuing relationship with the living Lord Jesus, he manifests his love in us and through us (cf. John 15:5; Galatians 5:22). When we are surrendered to him, we are the living expression of his continuing presence in our world (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:27) as we become catalysts for the change our culture so desperately needs.
But only then.
I am writing these words in the predawn morning. As I look out the window of my study, all is darkness. But soon the sun will rise, and a world I cannot presently see will come to life.
This fact calls to mind the words of our Lord:
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).
Will you “have the light of life” today?
“A day must come in our lives, as definite as the day of our conversion, when we give up all right to ourselves and submit to the absolute lordship of Jesus Christ.” —Watchman Nee
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