Penna Dexter

When protests turn violent, as in Charlottesville, Virginia, we need thoughtful answers. Radio host, Erick Erickson, operates the conservative website, Resurgent. There, in a post entitled, “What the Heck Is Happening in America?”, he writes that both the Left and Right “are trying to build moral responses” to the vacuum that is left as the West leaves God behind. They are competing to place their ideologies in charge. Mr. Erickson explains that, “With the collapse of shared Christian values in the West, the world is descending into natural law where survival of the fittest reigns supreme.” We should acknowledge that most of the violence at protests on campuses and elsewhere has been perpetrated by the left. But, in Charlottesville, James Fields’ white supremacist ideas motivated him to speed his car into a crowd causing a death and many injuries. Jeffrey Tucker at the Foundation for Economic Education says of the white supremacists: “Many of the young men and women involved in this movement were raised in good homes and, under normal conditions, would never hurt anyone. What this is about,” he writes, “is bad ideas. They crawl into the brain and cause people to imagine things that do not exist . . . . It causes people to seethe with hatred for no apparent reason, to long for the extermination of people who have never done anything wrong.” He says we must fight bad ideas with good ideas, clearly and lovingly communicated. Lutheran Pastor Hans Feine suggested at The Federalist that President Trump could have clarified the situation by saying something like: “Just like violence in the name of leftism, white supremacy is nothing other than hatred and idiocy masquerading as ideology and conviction. Those who espouse these views have not taken the principles of one political party and corrupted them. They have simply embraced the doctrine of demons — the belief that man can build utopia by aiming violence and hatred at his neighbor.” Every believer who has a platform must clearly and lovingly speak the truth — before it’s too late.