As President Donald Trump seeks to bolster law enforcement in America’s most crime-ridden cities, a shocking public transit murder caught on camera threatens to steer the conversation sideways.
On August 22, a young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, was minding her own business on a Charlotte commuter train, when a hooded man, who happened to be black — a complete stranger with a history of mental illness and a long rap sheet — stole up behind her and stabbed her to death. The coldblooded killing kickstarted a conflagration of commentary about not only the solution to crime, but also its root causes.
“We will never arrest our way out [of] issues such [as] homelessness and mental health,” insisted Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles (D). So, instead of “villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused,” she declared, Zarutska’s murder “should force us to look at what we are doing across our community to address root causes.”
These comments naturally produced fierce criticism from conservatives. By framing the issue as one of homelessness and mental health instead of crime, Lyles cast the true problem as an unavoidable side-effect of other social ills, refused to do anything about it, and vilified all homeless and mentally ill people in the process. “If, instead of being out on the streets, he had been in prison, this would not have happened,” argued National Review’s Charlie Cooke, in an exemplary critique. “Or, to put it another way: If the authorities had done their jobs, they could absolutely have ‘arrested their way out of’ this murder.”
Readers can find many such critiques online; this article proposes to engage with Lyles’ deeper allusion to the “root causes” of social ills. She deserves credit for raising the deeper question, even if it was only a political expedient, and even if diving deeper soon led her beyond her depth.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, the apostle James, writing by the Holy Spirit, asked and answered a substantively similar question, in Tuesday’s reading of the Stand on the Word Bible reading plan. “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (James 4:1).
Adherents of expressive individualism — the dominant cultural philosophy in the contemporary West — believe all meaning is derived with reference to the internal self (and particularly one’s internal feelings). Here is the rare opportunity where that instinct is correct. The search for a “root cause” to human strife and misery leads inevitably back to the sinful passions of the human heart.
A skeptic may wonder whether “passions at war within” a person can really provide a sufficient explanation for a senseless murder. In fact, that’s the first example James employs, “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:2).
It’s unlikely that James intends to state that members of Christian audience have committed literal murder. Instead, this is likely one of many allusions in James’s short letter to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus teaches that anger is the heart equivalent of murder (Matthew 5:22). The apostle John also echoed the Master’s teaching when he stated, “everyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15).
In other words, it doesn’t take an involved study of homelessness or mental illness to locate the “root causes” for crimes such as murder. Wherever anger and hatred are present — as in every human heart — then the key ingredients are already detectable.
The question is, how will people respond when stimulated to anger or hatred? Will they lash out violently? Or will they war against these passions of their flesh? The progressive solution erases human responsibility, while this question accentuates it.
These themes — sinful desire, hatred, and individual responsibility — were all present in the very first murder. No sooner had creation fallen under the curse than Adam and Eve’s firstborn son laid violent hands upon his brother. Cain was angry because he desired what Abel received — God’s favor (Genesis 4:5). The Lord warned Cain that “sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). In other words, sin would try to control Cain, but he must not let it control him. Alas, Cain ignored God’s warning and received God’s curse (Genesis 4:8, 11).
There is nowhere further to go in exploring the “root causes” of crimes such as murder. Though created good, mankind has fallen into a wretched, sinful state. The question then becomes what, if anything, government can do about it.
Given the Bible’s teaching that evil deeds flow out of sinful human hearts, a human government can do little to correct the problem. Human magistrates have neither authority nor power over the soul. The best they can do is “bear the sword” as “an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4). Thus, magistrates can deter and prevent crime by arresting and punishing criminals. But they cannot resolve the “root cause” of crime, which is the sinful nature of post-Fall mankind.
However, this is one point where the gulf between and biblical worldview and progressivism (and liberalism) is at its widest. The materialist, secular philosophy dominant in American culture today holds that people are basically good. According to worldview researcher George Barna, “only half of American adults believe that everyone has sinned,” he said on “Washington Watch.”
A corollary to this belief is that humans only turn to crime when their nature is warped by external factors such as homelessness or mental illness (as Lyles expressed above). In other words, crime is not the criminal’s fault. While this claim may consistently apply secularism’s unprovable claims about human nature, it fails to persuade because it fails to adequately explain the observable fallenness of creation.
Nevertheless, some progressive ideologues are persuaded by this incomplete view of human nature, and they are applying their worldview to criminal justice practices in America’s largest cities. Unsurprisingly, the result of not holding criminals responsible for their crime has been an increase in crime. “We have to begin to restore the fundamental value of law enforcement, actually support them in the court systems, [and] quit making them the enemy,” pleaded security expert Tim Miller on “Washington Watch.”
Miller warned that the ultimate alternative to public order enforced by cops is not a cop-free anarchy, but a totalitarian crackdown welcomed by beleaguered citizens desperate to see safety restored. “We do not want the U.S. military or the National Guard to be the foundation for peace and security in our country,” he said.
In terms of Trump’s urban cleanup initiatives, this means that “the National Guard is like a strong antibiotic that’s dealing with an infection, or at least the symptoms of that infection,” said FRC President Tony Perkins. “It’s not a long term solution, but to come in and get things cleaned up to a point where it’s safer — I would take it in a heartbeat,” argued Kyle Campbell, single mother to two young daughters on “Washington Watch.” “We don’t understand why this political leadership is failing to keep its residents and citizens safe. They seem to really be adamant about not doing that.”
But “the true underlying issue is the spiritual decay in our country, and that can’t be addressed by the government,” Perkins added. “It’s going to be incumbent upon the church and Christians to really deal with the spiritual malaise in this country if we want to address the law-and-order issue.”
“The bottom line is, without repentance and revival, our country is doomed,” Miller agreed. “We have to have a restoration that values human life — all human life — and protects them.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview.
