By JC
My friend David Gornoski posted this the other morning, and I’ve been chewing on it ever since, which is more than I can say for most of what I read on X before breakfast:
“Stop watching political collapse with terror. The unraveling of our political institutions is the ultimate proof that the Cross worked: it stripped the powers of their ability to maintain peace through violence. Darkness isn’t winning. The old world is just running out of lies.”
David Gornoski (@DavidGornoski)
Terror Is a Choice
Most of us watch the news the way I used to check my bank balance in the ’90s: through our fingers, hoping it’s not as bad as it looks. It usually was. Every week another institution coughs, wheezes, and asks for a glass of water. And everybody agrees on exactly one thing: the other side is the reason it’s all falling apart.
Fear sells. Cable news knows it. The algorithm knows it. Your uncle who forwards everything in red capital letters knows it. David’s point isn’t that nothing is unraveling. It’s that we’ve misread what the unraveling means.
What the Cross Actually Did
Paul says it plainly in Colossians 2:15: Christ disarmed the principalities and powers, made a public show of them, and triumphed over them by the Cross.
Think about what the powers did that Friday. Rome, the temple leadership, and the crowd did what power has always done. They found a disturbance, pinned it on one man, killed him, and called it peace. Caiaphas even said the quiet part out loud: better for one man to die than for the whole nation to perish (John 11:50). That’s the oldest political formula on earth.
René Girard spent his life showing that this is how human societies have kept order since the beginning. Unite against a victim. Call the violence sacred. Tell the story so the victim had it coming. The myths were written by the mob.
The Gospels flipped the camera around. For the first time, the story is told from the victim’s side, the victim is innocent, and on the third day he walks out of the tomb. Once you’ve seen that, you can’t unsee it. The scapegoat trick only works if everybody believes the scapegoat deserved it. The Cross ruined the magic.
Why It Feels Like Everything Is Falling Apart
If power has always held together by uniting people against an enemy, and the Gospel has spent two thousand years teaching the world to side with the victim, then the old machinery doesn’t run like it used to. Notice that today everybody claims to be the victim. That’s a strange compliment to Jesus. Even the powers have to dress their violence up as protecting the vulnerable.
So the lies have to get more elaborate. Elaborate lies are expensive to maintain. Eventually the budget runs out.
I spent enough years in sales to know what it looks like when a pitch runs out of material. And I’ve played enough bars at 1 a.m. to know the moment a crowd stops believing the band. It’s not loud. People just quietly stop clapping. That’s what “running out of lies” looks like. Not that everything is fine, but that the costume is wearing thin.
The Fair Objection
Somebody will say this is easy to believe from a comfortable porch. Collapse hurts real people, and the poor and vulnerable feel it first. Institutions, for all their faults, also keep the water running, the roads paved, and the courts open. History shows that the vacuum left by a collapse is often filled by something worse, not something kinder. And plenty of faithful Christians read Romans 13 as describing governing authorities as God’s servants for our good, not a dying beast.
All fair. Here’s my answer: hope is not the same thing as cheering. We’re not called to celebrate chaos. We’re called to refuse fear, and to be the people building the neighborly alternative while the old thing sputters. If the powers can’t keep the peace through violence anymore, somebody has to keep it through love. That’s us.
So What Do We Do?
- Turn off the panic. You don’t owe the algorithm your blood pressure.
- Love your actual neighbor, the one next door, not the one on your timeline.
- Refuse the scapegoat, especially when it’s somebody you’d really enjoy blaming.
- Build small things that don’t need violence to work: a church supper, a band, a phone call to somebody you quit talking to.
Darkness isn’t winning. It’s just tired. And the Light was never on the ballot.
“These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33
JC is a Birmingham-area musician and writer and the founder of We Rock Network.
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