The Christian Imperative to Oppose the War in Ukraine

Where is the clergy when the death porn no longer shocks the conscience?

I’m writing today as a Christian man that has witnessed the horrors of war and the worst of humanity on four continents.  I do believe there are sides to be taken on the war in Ukraine, but that is not the point of today’s letter.  Today’s letter is about a far more insidious and debasing danger to the soul that transcends any national debate on politics…the devaluation of human life to the point of celebratory idol worship.  This danger, left unchecked, poses a greater threat than any single war as it strikes at the heart of a civilization.  In fact, if left to metastasize across the public conscience, it will lead to a period of warfare, violence, death, and all types of criminality not witnessed in living memory, if ever. 

The West has paved its descent toward the dehumanization of life through partisan politics, propaganda, deception, greed, selfishness, and corruption with little real opposition from Christians.  Today, these vices have combined to create the conditions where people have gone beyond feeling little to no regard when another life is lost to one of fully embracing death to the point of demanding participation in its celebration.  From where I sit, this looks like a civilization that has devolved back into the darkest forms of paganism marked by the worship of the old idols that demanded the blood sacrifice of the young, innocent, and pure.  These elements are truly demonic in their inspiration and yet our churches and clergy appear to be disarmed if not outright paralyzed to stand against this collapse of human dignity and the moral imperatives to protect and value life as a Christian.  Disturbingly, deceived Christians are often the ones championing these idols.  Blinded and confused, the weak minded are led to believe supporting one’s government policies is the same as being “good” despite the very clear contradiction in their professed morality.  We saw this manifested during the COVID coup.  During the “pandemic” many Christians quickly suspended reason and caved without any resistance to arbitrary and illegal government decrees.  Without question, they complied when the government suspended services, isolated their fellow man and family members in need, and persecuted those that tried to speak the truth going so far as to “report” them to authorities.  Christians of weak fortitude and constitution, subject to only the mildest of threats, quickly complied and cheered when their own family, friends, and neighbors of good character were censored or fired or arrested for not wearing a mask, trying to get groceries, or not taking the injectable Mark.  This is the kind of stuff the Stasi could only have dreamed of.  Further, some churches have gone so far as to champion the utterly ignorant position of “total defeat of Russia” despite what horrors that ensures for the world.  The religious leaders are rallying their congregations from the pulpit to the aid of the Ukraine while speaking nothing of the religious oppression, organized crime, human trafficking, and battlefield atrocities occurring there.  You see, this is the nature of “war.”  You cannot celebrate war for long before the inherently ungodly aspects of war, which represent the worst in humanity being freely expressed, begin to taint everything around it.  As such, an entire generation of American warfare in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have desensitized the Western soul to the suffering, destruction, and death these conflicts breed.  These wars helped usher in this descent of humanity and have been accompanied by all forms of vice, crime, child sacrifice, sexual perversions, substance abuse, and suicide.  These things are all linked and do not occur societally in a vacuum.  Make no mistake, this bloodshed is not something that can be isolated, and a toll must be paid.  The evil of these wars has left scars that will haunt mankind for generations.  Only through a return to the celebration of all that is Godly…the good, the true, and the beautiful, can we arrest and reverse this descent into barbarism. 

Moving from generalities to specifics, every day new videos are uploaded across the internet showing scenes from the battlefield in Ukraine.  Moreso than even recent American disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, this war is being uploaded in real time for those so inclined to witness the carnage in a graphic way not possible in any previous war.  Many of the videos are drone feeds showing the destruction of armor vehicles, troop positions in trenches, and artillery locations.  These “kills” are cheered by a generation of netizens that have grown up with their reality and moral baseline blurred and distorted by increasingly violent games, movies, and society writ large that no longer places value on human life.  Now, to no surprise, these kills where real people violently lose their lives are treated and cheered no differently than a kill on the latest version of Call of Duty or other first person shooter games.  It’s now entertainment to watch the horrific combat deaths of hundreds of people daily.  I have to wonder if these cheerleaders of death would have a different perspective is it was more personalized.  The relative sterility of a drone hitting a vehicle and the follow-on explosion doesn’t capture the horrific pain of men being burned alive and their charred corpses or having body parts ripped away by high velocity trauma or even the cries of agony and regret as you stair at a man rapidly bleeding out and passing in front of you.  Each one of those men had families.  They were a father or brother or son to someone.  The losses and suffering for those left behind are incalculable.  To be clear, I’m not against these videos being posted and generally oppose censorship.  The public should see war’s full ugly form when viewed from a perspective of horror and detestation.  From that base of knowledge, good people of all ilks should reject a culture that extols war.  Christians in particular should demand an end to our support for the war in Ukraine, which has been a monstrous crime that has already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of precious lives while corrupting the souls of the West.      

This alone should be a call to arms amongst the clergy, which appear to have been muzzled as cowards or co-opted into waving blue and yellow flags condoning this evil under the camouflage of complying with programmed self-righteous social virtues. Without brakes applied, this moral descent has now created a dedicated fan following of first-person GoPro videos filmed by troops storming trenches and engaging in firefights that are anything but sterile like the drone videos of armor being destroyed.  These graphic videos show bodies in all states of death and often with dehumanizing commentary, which I call death porn.  As just one example while researching, I watched a video of a Ukrainian soldier filming an assault on a Russian position getting shot and dying.  The soldier suffered an arterial bleed that could be seen spurting as his heart rate increased trying to compensate as he cried out in agony and anger soaked in a panicked sweat.  As his life slipped away, he knelt and then collapsed before breathing his last breath as he unwittingly filmed his final moments and succumbed to his wounds as withering fire from a distant machine gun still impacted all around his corpse.  Anyone that has watched a man die knows a genuine video when they see it, and this was no staged scene despite a lot of staged propaganda videos also circulating on the web.  This was traumatic for me to watch, and it haunts me as it should haunt all of us.  Only a psychopath could derive pleasure from seeing this poor man die alone, needlessly, and under horrific conditions.  What all these videos have in common is the lack of any true moral outrage, disgust, and/or sadness that should naturally accompany the site of good men being violently murdered. 

Christians stand on the front line between humanity and barbarism.  When did we lose our morality and sense of good?  When did we start taking a knee and worshiping at the altar of woke politically correct idols to “protect” our measly secular possessions?  Perhaps, it was a slow decline, but now it is as they say, all at once.  Look around you.  Is this world trending better or worse?  This isn’t a pessimist or optimist type question.  It is one of perspective without bias on the reality of the world.  Do people care for one another more and value the sanctity of life?  I pray, but I don’t see it.  The sacrifice of infants are celebrated, random strangers are attacked and beaten to death for sport, the family is in shambles as fathers are derided and elders are shipped off to state sponsored concentration camps for the Soylent Green treatment, Western culture has been overrun and erased, those reveling in perversions of all types are protected as courageous, our leaders are openly corrupt lying perverts, and the church is in hiding or has been co-opted by these demonic forces.  This list is far from complete but suffices to highlight the downward trend line of society. 

Folks, this isn’t the end, but could be if we don’t recognize the consequences of the trajectory our civilization is on and actively course correct.  Are there signs of light; absolutely.  Is all hope lost; never.  It is never too late to turn away from evil.  This letter is meant to be an alarm…a call to action, not an epithet.  I challenge each and every one of you to make a difference and stand against this death porn and immorality.  Call on your church leaders to preach against the war and glamourization of human death.  We have a small window to wake up society to the fact that glorifying wars of convenience will undoubtedly exact a toll in the form of greater violence and bloodshed.  For those that don’t care or think they don’t need to act I have a premonition to convey to you.  The war in Ukraine is coming to visit us all soon.  Unlike most other places on earth, the US has been spared the terror of war on our soil beyond living memory.  This blessing was no accident but is about to be withdrawn.  The West, including the US, will not be spared this war if we do not stop it soon.  God forbid, should it escape the territorial bounds of the Ukraine, it will know no borders, I promise you.  If you value your life and the lives of others, you must take down the blue and yellow flags and condemn the wanton slaughter we have subsidized.  Please, for the benefit of all of us, step back from partisan politics, nationalism, selfishness, or outright apathy and nihilism to the world and stand in the arena as a force of good.  Our time is short folks if we don’t get this fixed. 

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Till next time…