Evil. Again.

Evil is the absence of God. God does not cause evil. Evil is just that state wherein there is no God of all Creation. Mankind, left to his own devices, is evil. We, as a society, are sinners prone to sin and we call our political opponents evil not willing to recognize the evil within ourselves. We throw the word around as a weapon hurled at people who disagree with us politically.

Then we are reminded of the violence real evil unleashes during a Fourth of July parade.

Another young man, white, young, no real family life, lots of warning signs — another in the ongoing pattern of collapsed nuclear families and societal failures — takes a gun and fires into a crowd killing many and turning partisan against partisan as the nation further divides.

Read any handful of conservative sites and you’ll find he was an American-hating progressive. Read any handful of progressive sites and you’ll find he was an American-hating conservative. The solution is to take guns away, of course, or whatever fits the political agenda of the loudest voices on television — its always guns, never anything else.

We will, again, not have a conversation about these young men who all fit into common categories. We can’t because we are a nation that has lost the ability to deal with the truth. We can’t even define male and female anymore, we sure can’t talk about young men, fathers, nuclear families, and faith.

We are in a national spiritual crisis.

Conservative Christians put their faith in a multiply divorced serial philandering pagan to protect them from the left. Progressive Christians put their faith in the pagan world around them to protect them from Christ Himself. All the Christians have become transactional. The conservative ones got an end to Roe. So yay. Progressive Christians got their heads patted so much by the world that they can’t celebrate the end of child sacrifice without losing pagan fans.

But it is all transactional and neither side will admit it. Both the right and left within the church are wrapped up in this same spiritual crisis and so few of their voices can even address it.

The nation is in a spiritual crisis and the church is too distracted by politics to deal with the broken souls who need Jesus. Why make time for broken young men when there’s a Democrat who claims to be a Christian saying Democrat things on Twitter or, God forbid, someone labeled “Big Eva” not ripping open their shirt and with raw guttural strength screaming “Roe is dead, bitches!!” Why make time for broken young men, when what the world really needs is Christian affirmation of reparations, a book tour on NPR stations about the post-Trump Christian right, and the nodding agreement that the church is filled with white privilege and racists?

The lonely, young men in broken homes can wait. The tweets are more important.

O church arise. You’re missing your moment.

The nation has no answers for what is going on. An increasingly godless society cannot regulate and legislate its way out of this mess. Marriages and families are collapsing. Children are unneeded, unwanted, disposable, and inconvenient. Society is collapsing and the Christians are trying to out mean tweet each other.

Meanwhile, another family is collapsing. Another young man is drawing inward unsure of what to do with the growing anger. All the signs are there and those around him are so concerned they’re getting on their phones and tuning him out.