When Did This Generation Lose Its Soul? A Christ-Centered Reflection on Moral Vacancy and Mimetic Violence

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"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts." (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

The question arrives not as rhetoric but as genuine bewilderment. Something has shifted in the collective atmosphere, something difficult to name but impossible to ignore. We have entered a season when cruelty presents itself as strength, when the capacity to feel another's suffering has become a liability rather than a virtue, and when the identification of enemies has replaced the harder work of self-examination. This is not merely political polarization, though it wears that costume. It is something deeper: a spiritual vacancy that has hollowed out our capacity for the kind of moral seriousness that democracy and simple human decency require.

Charles Taylor, in his magisterial work A Secular Age, identifies our condition as one of living within an "immanent frame," a closed world order in which transcendence has become problematic, and the soul itself has been reduced to a metaphor rather than a living reality. For those who confess Christ, this question carries particular urgency. The New Testament presents the human being as possessing not merely biological life (bios) but zoē, the very life of God that animates and integrates the whole person. Zoē, ζωή, is "life" in the sense of vital, animate existence, particularly the divine or spiritual life imparted by God. This is distinguished from bios, βίος, which denotes the course or manner of life (Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature). To lose one's soul, in the biblical understanding, is not simply to forfeit an afterlife but to become fragmented, dis-integrated, incapable of the wholeness that reflects the image of the Triune God.

The Celebration of Contempt

Watch the way we speak about one another now. This is not the ordinary friction of disagreement, which healthy societies can absorb, but something else entirely. It is a gleeful dehumanization that treats fellow citizens as problems to be eliminated rather than neighbors with whom we must somehow share a common life. The scapegoat mechanism, that ancient pattern by which communities discharge their anxiety onto designated victims, no longer operates in shadow. It has become entertainment. It fills arenas. It drives algorithms. It wins elections.

René Girard spent his career warning us about precisely this phenomenon. His fundamental insight concerns what he termed "mimetic desire," the observation that human beings learn what to want by imitating the desires of others. We do not desire objects or goals in isolation; we desire according to models, mediators who shape our wanting (René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel). When two or more people desire the same object through mutual imitation, they inevitably become rivals. As rivalry intensifies, the original object becomes secondary to the competition itself. The rivals become "doubles," increasingly alike even as they insist on their radical difference.

In Girard's analysis, human communities have historically managed the escalating violence that mimetic rivalry produces through the mechanism of the scapegoat. When internal tensions threaten to tear a community apart, unity is restored by identifying a victim who can bear the collective violence. What makes our present moment distinctive is not that scapegoating exists (it has always existed), but that it has lost all pretense of shame. We now celebrate what our grandparents would have hidden. The biblical revelation, Girard argued, has progressively unveiled the scapegoat mechanism, making it increasingly difficult to persecute with good conscience. The ancient persecutors truly believed their victims guilty; we know better and persecute anyway (René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).

James Alison, extending Girard's insights, describes this as a crisis of "knowing what we do." The Lukan Jesus prayed for his executioners, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." But we, living after the Cross has exposed the innocence of victims, cannot claim such ignorance. Our violence is increasingly self-conscious, which makes it both more culpable and more desperate (James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes).

The Strange Death of Empathy

Perhaps the most alarming symptom of our present condition is the explicit demonization of empathy. Compassion (literally, the capacity to suffer with another) has been reframed as weakness, as naïveté, as the sentimentality of those too soft for the hard realities of power. This represents a genuine anthropological crisis.

Taylor's analysis of the "buffered self" illuminates this development. The pre-modern person understood themselves as embedded in cosmic and social orders, vulnerable to forces beyond individual control. The modern turn has given us the "buffered" identity, a self, conceived as insulated, self-contained, bounded by skin and skull. When we understand ourselves this way, our connection to others becomes external and optional rather than constitutive. The sufferings of the stranger no longer touch us at the level of being; they become information to be processed, perhaps acted upon, but not felt as our own. The neighbor becomes a demographic category; the enemy becomes a hashtag.

Alexander Schmemann, writing from the Orthodox tradition, diagnosed a similar condition under the term "secularism." For Schmemann, secularism is not primarily atheism but a subtler spiritual disease: the inability to perceive the world as sacrament, as charged with divine presence and meaning. When the world loses its sacramental depth, so does the human face. We can no longer see in our neighbor the image of God; we see only a competitor, an obstacle, a threat (Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy).

The Authoritarian Temptation

Into this vacancy of soul steps the strongman, promising to restore order by force of will. The appeal is not mysterious. When a people no longer trust themselves to navigate complexity through deliberation, when the slow work of compromise feels like capitulation, the fantasy of the decisive leader who will simply fix things becomes intoxicating. But authoritarianism is not a solution to moral confusion. It is its apotheosis. It asks us to surrender the very capacities of judgment, conscience, and the willingness to say "no" that constitute our dignity as human beings.

Hannah Arendt, whose work on totalitarianism remains indispensable, understood that the appeal of the strongman lies precisely in the relief he offers from the burden of thinking. "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule," Arendt observed, "is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist" (The Origins of Totalitarianism). This destruction of thought is achieved through what Arendt called the "banality of evil," the reduction of moral questions to technical problems, the replacement of conscience with obedience.

From a theological perspective, the authoritarian temptation represents a failure of the first commandment. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" is not merely a prohibition of idol worship in the narrow sense but a declaration of human freedom from all absolutized earthly powers. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison under the Nazi regime, recognized that the church's complicity with National Socialism was not an accident but the fruit of a long tradition of cultural Christianity that had confused national identity with Christian faith. "We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds," Bonhoeffer wrote. "We have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence." This confession reads as though written for our present moment.

The Stupor of Moral Superiority

Here is the cruelest irony of our predicament: all of this unfolds under the banner of righteousness. Every faction believes itself the defender of what is good and true against the forces of darkness. The more vicious the rhetoric, the more it wraps itself in the language of justice. This is the stupor, a kind of collective hypnosis in which we have lost the capacity to see ourselves clearly. The beam in our own eye has become invisible precisely because we are so fixated on the speck in our neighbor's.

Genuine moral seriousness begins with suspicion of one's own motives. It asks, before all else: What if I am wrong? What if my certainty is the problem? What cruelty am I capable of justifying in the name of my convictions? Miroslav Volf, writing from the experience of the Balkan wars, argues that embrace of the enemy is the distinctive mark of Christian identity. This embrace does not condone evil or pretend that injustice does not matter. It begins with the recognition that we too are capable of evil, that the line between victim and perpetrator is less clear than we prefer to imagine, and that genuine justice requires more than the destruction of enemies. It requires their transformation.

The Path Back

If there is a path back, it will not be found in politics alone, though it will have political implications. It will be found in the recovery of practices that form us in ways our current culture cannot. It will require silence in a world of noise, attention in an age of distraction, and the discipline of loving people we are taught to despise. Alasdair MacIntyre argued that moral traditions are sustained not primarily by theories but by practices and communities that embody them. What our moment requires is the construction of "local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory).

For Christians, this means the recovery of distinctively Christian practices that form distinctively Christian character. Worship that reorients our desires toward God rather than the idols of the age. Confession that breaks the grip of self-justification. Service that draws us out of self-absorption into the needs of others. Girard understood that the way out of mimetic violence is not more violence but the imitation of a different model: the crucified Christ who absorbs violence rather than returning it, who forgives rather than avenges, who creates space for enemy to become neighbor (Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning).

The path back will require something almost unthinkable in our current climate: the willingness to be wrong, publicly and without excuse. It will require the willingness to say: I participated in this. I dehumanized. I looked away. I let convenience substitute for conscience. This is not a call for false equivalence or paralytic guilt. Real evils require real opposition. But opposition without self-examination becomes just another form of the disease it claims to cure.

The generation that has lost its soul will not find it through better arguments or more effective strategies. It will find it, if at all, through the slow and unglamorous work of becoming human again, one act of unexpected mercy at a time. Cor ad cor loquitur: heart speaks to heart. May we have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. May we have eyes to see Christ in the face of the stranger. May we have hearts soft enough to break and strong enough to love.

Mark Chironna is the Presiding Bishop of Engage, a network of bishops and pastors, and the founding pastor and Overseer of Church On The Living Edge in Longwood, Florida. He serves on Firebrand’s Editorial Board.